00:03Every year, on 31st May, people in Kazakhstan remember millions killed in the famine and political persecutions of the early
00:12Soviet era.
00:13A solemn ceremony mourns the loss of innocent lives and a nation that could be.
00:21By the 1930s, having stabilized their authority, the Bolsheviks decided it was time to accelerate the country's industrialization.
00:30Their policy of collective farms forced nomadic Kazakhs to give up their lifestyle and surrender their livestock.
00:45The Red Army slaughtered the other half of cattle, unable to feed it.
00:5140 million turned to five.
00:53For a nation whose primary source of food was cattle, this meant a gruesome hungry death.
00:58As a result, out of six million Kazakhs, approximately two million died of starvation and 600,000 more relocated to
01:05China, Iran and Afghanistan, hoping to avoid a similar fate.
01:11Kazakh intelligentsia criticized the government for excessive policies that led to famine and mass deaths.
01:17For this outright rebellion, they were arrested, exiled and executed.
01:22This is Karlaq, one of the largest labor camps in the USSR, located in the middle of the Kazakh steppe.
01:29Its vast territory was once compared to the size of France.
01:32From 1931 till 1959, about a million people passed through the camp.
01:37For others, the outcome was even more immediate.
01:40They were executed.
01:41Among them was Rahat Amanbaev's grandfather, Amanbaev Kaspakbaev.
01:45In October 1937, just at the dinner table, the NKVD members came to the NKVD,
01:52they called him and took him.
01:55This was an era of big terror.
01:57According to the documents, which Rahat was able to get only after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
02:02Amanbaev was accused of being a fascist, atroskiist and helping suspected dissidents.
02:07On February 27, 1938, he was arrested for the punishment of Kashmir.
02:15He was arrested.
02:16My grandmother, Opa, as a wife of his family's family, was also arrested.
02:25He was sent to the punishment of Kashmir's family's family's family, Aljira.
02:31After spending their eight years enduring hardship and abuse, she took her kids from their uncle
02:37and moved away to avoid discrimination and harassment.
02:44One of the prominent figures who faced such a fate was Seken Sifulin, a Kazakh poet,
02:49a promoter of the Kazakh language and once the head of the Kazakh government.
02:54He was championing Kazakh identity and attributes, for which he was accused of being a nationalist
03:00and an anti-Soviet.
03:01The irony was that he was a revolutionary and a Bolshevik.
03:05It was on February 24th.
03:08The two of them came to the house.
03:11The two of them came to the house.
03:13And they said,
03:15You are Seken Sifulin?
03:16I said,
03:17We will show you the paper.
03:19And Seken Sifulin immediately dried up and then dried up.
03:24Sifulin's little son died on a train when he and his mother were deported.
03:28His father and older brother were also executed.
03:31His younger brother survived by a miracle.
03:34From 1937 till 1957, the Sifulin family lived under the label of the enemy of the people.
03:41I still remember my mother that she was wearing hair in school.
03:45And then the fear that in some day, let's not give it to someone,
03:50something could happen, has always been there.
03:54No university wanted to admit an enemy of the people.
03:57When she finally got admitted to the Zoological Institute,
04:00someone denounced her and she had to finish her education in secret.
04:04Her father, Seken's little brother, couldn't hold a job for 20 years.
04:08Each time someone found out he was an enemy of the people and he was fired.
04:14When Stalin died in 1953, many people were amnestied and rehabilitated.
04:20There was a test to prove the methods that were illegal for my father's arrest.
04:27He was completely rehabilitated.
04:29Both Sifulin and Kaspakpaev were rehabilitated in 1957.
04:33In 1993, independent Kazakhstan adopted a law on rehabilitation of victims of political repressions,
04:39restoring their good names and compensating the families.
04:42Kazakhstan is continuing to examine archival documents of the Soviet era.
04:47Just three years ago, a special commission rehabilitated 300,000 people.
04:52The country makes every effort to commemorate those who fell victim to the Red Terror.
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