Sheltoksan riots

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Memorial to the events of December 1986 in Almaty

The Sheltoqsan Riots (derived from the Kazakh word Sheltoqsan / Желтоқсан for the month of December ) were violent unrest from December 17 to 19, 1986 in Alma-Ata , the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Republic . The protests were triggered by the appointment of party functionary Gennady Kolbin as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Kazakh Soviet Republic and the previous dismissal of Dinmuchamed Kunayev .

Starting position

In December 1986, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, the long-time First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan and also a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , was dismissed from his office due to irregularities in the Kazakh Soviet Republic. The following month he also resigned from the Politburo in Moscow. Kunayev was Kazakh and popular with the people. He was replaced by a Russian , the party functionary Gennadi Kolbin.

Protests

In protest about the deposition of Kunayev, spontaneous protests arose in Alma-Ata from December 17 to 19, 1986, which resulted in injuries, deaths and numerous arrests.

In Karaganda, 80 to 120 students gathered on December 19, and another 300 the following day, to protest against the deposition of Kunayev. As a result, five students were arrested and 54 were suspended from studies.

The events of December 1986 are now considered to be the origin of Kazakhstan's independence.

In his later memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev , who dismissed the Kazakh party leader after the 27th Communist Party Congress in December 1986, recalls that Kunayev was against the appointment of the future President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev as his successor. The reasons for this are unclear. Kunayev would have promoted Nazarbayev as a party official for years. In his book, Kunayev later claimed that Gorbachev had not given him advance notice of his dismissal.

consequences

The fact that the Soviet authorities did not publish any data on the events and that official documents have been kept under lock and key in archives to this day mean that there are no precise figures on the number of victims. Various sources speak of 150 to 200 fatalities and several thousand injured today. An official involved in the investigation said several years later that a KGB officer had told him that 168 people had died in the protests. Some estimates put around 8500 injuries. Between 5,000 and 8,000 people were arrested following the protests.

Around 900 people were sentenced to administrative fines, around 300 students were expelled from their universities, and 319 people lost their jobs. In addition, 52 party members were expelled from the Communist Party and 758 people had to leave the Komsomol , the communist youth organization. 99 people were sentenced to varying terms and two people received the maximum sentence; they were sentenced to death by shooting. One of them was the then 20-year-old student Qairat Rysqulbekow , who was pardoned a little later by the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union and his sentence was commuted to a life sentence. He died in a prison two years later under unknown circumstances.

See also

literature

  • Tolganaj Umbetalieva: The “snow storm” in Alma-Ata from December 1986 . In: Religion and Society in East and West . tape 2014 , no. 8 , 2014, p. 18–19 ( hpica.pz.nl [PDF; accessed September 4, 2018]).
  • Didar Kassymova, Zhanat Kundakbayeva, Ustina Markus: Historical Dictionary of Kazakhstan (=  Historical Dictionaries of Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East ). Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2012, ISBN 0-8108-6782-6 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mikhael Gorbachev: Memoirs . Doubleday, New-York 1996, ISBN 978-0-385-48019-2 , pp. 330 .
  2. ↑ Высокинский Григорий: Механизм изменений в политической элите России (в ходе смены. 991) . Пол–г в 1982 . “Новости”, Москва 1998.
  3. ↑ Кунаев, Динмухамед: О моём времени . Дэуiр, Алма-Ата 1992, ISBN 5-86228-015-4 , pp. 8 .
  4. ↑ See Tolganaj Umbetalieva 2014, p. 18.
  5. ↑ Cf. Didar Kassymova, Zhanat Kundakbayeva, Ustina Markus 2012, p. 123.
  6. ↑ Bagila Bukharbayeva: Kazakhs Remembering Uprising of 1986 . The Associated Press, December 16, 2006.
  7. ↑ See Tolganaj Umbetalieva 2014, p. 18.