Here's an extract from Joanna Lillis's interview in the independent Kazakh-language weekly newspaper Zhas Alash where she talks about some of the themes raised in her book Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan (if your Kazakh is up to it, you can read the full text here!).
The scope of the book is very wide. In a nutshell, it’s about Kazakhstan and its people. My goal in the book was for Kazakhstan’s people to explain their own experiences in their own words and share their thoughts. I wanted to let people speak for themselves…
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| Teachers in Krasnaya Polyana, a village in northern Kazakhstan populated almost entirely by Chechens, the descendants of Stalin-era deportees. |
One part of the book is devoted to politics, media and human rights. Generally, I wrote about events that have happened in Kazakhstan since I have been living here, but events before and after independence are also discussed.Another topic raised in the book is Kazakhstan’s history and the identity of this country…
I tried to tell Western readers who know very little about Kazakhstan the history of this country through the stories of individual people. For example, Dark Shadows features a 90-year-old woman who talks about the famine of the 1930s. In those tragic years, she was forced to leave eastern Kazakhstan and she walked all the way to China.
There is also a woman who talked about the Gulag and the Terror; her grandfather was a member of the Kazakh intelligentsia at the time, and he was shot and her grandmother was sent to the Gulag.
Then, when it comes to Kazakhstan’s history, it is impossible not to talk about the deportations. The history of the deportations was told by people directly affected by it, in this case by a Chechen woman from the village of Krasnaya Polyana in northern Kazakhstan, who was deported with her family when she was an infant.
Another event in Kazakhstan’s history that’s not well-known in the West is Zheltoksan. People who took part in the Zheltoksan protests of 1986 talked about why and how it started and how this affected their lives. Of course, I’m not a historian and this is a complicated period from the point of view of history. Moreover, the history of the Soviet Union is very politicised, which is one reason why it’s hard to explain Zheltoksan. That’s why I let people tell their stories themselves.
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| Concentration camp HQ at Dolinka, near Karaganda - whose current benign appearance belies its sinister past at the heart of the Gulag system in Kazakhstan |
There is also a woman who talked about the Gulag and the Terror; her grandfather was a member of the Kazakh intelligentsia at the time, and he was shot and her grandmother was sent to the Gulag.
Then, when it comes to Kazakhstan’s history, it is impossible not to talk about the deportations. The history of the deportations was told by people directly affected by it, in this case by a Chechen woman from the village of Krasnaya Polyana in northern Kazakhstan, who was deported with her family when she was an infant.
Another event in Kazakhstan’s history that’s not well-known in the West is Zheltoksan. People who took part in the Zheltoksan protests of 1986 talked about why and how it started and how this affected their lives. Of course, I’m not a historian and this is a complicated period from the point of view of history. Moreover, the history of the Soviet Union is very politicised, which is one reason why it’s hard to explain Zheltoksan. That’s why I let people tell their stories themselves.
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