Abstract

This study analyzes the role of Kazakh Muslim poetic traditions from the Zar Zaman period—commonly translated as “The Era of Sorrow” or “The Era of Lamentation”—in shaping anti-Soviet dissent during the 1950s. It concentrates on the lives and legacies of two key individuals: Shortanbay Qanaiuly (1818–1881), a prominent Kazakh anti-colonial poet and singer (aqïn), and Kämel Zhu̇nīstegī (1939–2023), a Soviet-era Kazakh dissident, writer, and former political prisoner.

The article argues that the pre-Soviet Islamic poetic tradition of Zar Zaman, particularly Shortanbay’s work, exerted a lasting influence on the post–Second World War generation of Kazakh rural intellectuals. This cultural inheritance was transmitted to and reinterpreted by young Kazakh nationalists, including Kämel Zhu̇nīstegī, who later played a central role in establishing the clandestine anti-Soviet organization ESEP (also known as Zhas Qazaq), active from 1958 to 1962. Shortanbay’s figure and poetry served as an ethical and artistic reference point for Kämel, whose own literary output helped inspire the movement’s ideological foundations.

Growing up, Kämel experienced firsthand the rapid Sovietization of Kazakh society, marked by the expansion of Soviet cultural norms and the increasing predominance of the Russian language. The immediate impetus for the formation of ESEP stemmed from the consequences of Nikita Khrushchev’s agricultural policies of the 1950s, most notably the Virgin Lands Campaign (Tselina).