Paper long abstract:

The Kazakh repatriation from China in the soviet times has been one of the most understudied and poorly reflected in the literature topics. The problems in understanding the situation of ethnic Kazakhs in modernizing and globalizing China and search of the ways to handle their repartition to the historical homeland stem for many reasons from a growing gap between the official discourses on the divided Kazakh world, the type of disseminated information on the Kazakh ethno-political history via mass media and educational institutions, corrupted collective memory that ignores many problematic spots, and intentional silenced voices on the nature of their problems inside China. Qabdesh Zhumadilov is one few writers who dared to raise the Kazakhs' fate in China in the turbulent Maoist era in series of his novels. His works proved to be a breakthrough in the wall of silence erected by the soviet and Maoist regimes on the topics of the fate of Kazakhs that were subjected to the painful processes of socialist modernizations. Works on Zhumagulov were warmly accepted by the generation of the Kazakhs soviet writers who witnessed the negative effects of the totalitarian regime on the lives of soviet people. The general public positively reacted to the return of their co-ethnics, as divided families kept memories and cared of their lost relatives. But as time passed by, memories of the repatriation faded away as new generations of general public and intellectuals concentrated on other topics, mostly raised by the conflicting processes of state and nation building. Present day ethnic repatriation, especially from China, has been not handled in due way, as many aspects of the earlier state-controlled repatriation waves were not studies and brought to the public attention.

The paper would study the differences in the state and literary discourses on the Kazakh repatriation from China in soviet times and its effects on the public awareness in post-soviet Kazakhstan. The sources for paper are archival materials, official documents, accounts of repatriates of 1960s, scholarly research materials, interviews with Qabdesh Zhumadilov and his literary works. Theoretical -methodological basis comes from post-colonial concepts.