Mankurts are unthinking slaves in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years . After the novel, in the Soviet Union the word came to refer to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship. [1] This meaning was retained in Russia and many other post-Soviet states.
According to Aitmatov's fictional [2] legend, mankurts were prisoners of war who were turned into non-autonomous docile servants by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun. These skins dried tight, causing brain damage and figurative zombification. Mankurts did not recognise their name, family, or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being". [3]
Aitmatov stated that he did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself. [2]
In the later years of the Soviet Union mankurt entered everyday speech as a metaphor for the Soviet people affected by the distortions and omissions in the history by the official teachings. [4]
In the figurative sense, the word "mankurt" refers to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship. In this sense, it has become a term in common parlance [1] and journalism. [5] In Russian, there have appeared neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya (meaning "mankurtization"), and demankurtizatsiya (meaning "demankurtization"). [6] In some former Soviet republics, the term has come to represent those non-Russians who have lost their ethnic heritage by the effects of the Soviet system. [7]
In 1990, the film Mankurt was released in the Soviet Union, [8] based on the legend abut the mankurt from Aitmatov's novel. [9] [10]
A homeland is a place where a national or ethnic identity has formed. The definition can also mean simply one's country of birth. When used as a proper noun, the Homeland, as well as its equivalents in other languages, often has ethnic nationalist connotations. A homeland may also be referred to as a fatherland, a motherland, or a mother country, depending on the culture and language of the nationality in question.
From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.
The republics are one type of federal subject of the Russian Federation. 21 republics are internationally recognized as part of Russia; another is under its de facto control. The original republics were created as nation states for ethnic minorities. The indigenous ethnicity that gives its name to the republic is called the titular nationality. However, due to centuries of Russian migration, a titular nationality may not be a majority of its republic's population. By 2017, the autonomous status of all republics was formally abolished, making the republics politically equivalent to the other federal subjects of Russia.
Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz author who wrote mainly in Russian, but also in Kyrgyz. He is one of the best known figures in Kyrgyzstan's literature.
Mankurt is a 1990 Soviet film written by Mariya Urmadova and directed by Hojaguly Narliyev. The main cast were the Turkish actors Tarık Tarcan and Yılmaz Duru and the Turkmen actors Maya-Gozel Aymedova and Hojadurdy Narliyev.
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group and nation indigenous to Crimea. The formation and ethnogenesis of Crimean Tatars occurred during the 13th–17th centuries, uniting Cumans with other peoples who had inhabited Crimea since ancient times and gradually underwent Tatarization, including Ukrainian Greeks, Italians, Ottoman Turks, Goths, Sarmatians, and many others.
The Karakalpaks or Qaraqalpaqs, are a Kipchak-Nogai Turkic ethnic group native to Karakalpakstan in Northwestern Uzbekistan. During the 18th century, they settled in the lower reaches of the Amu Darya and in the (former) delta of Amu Darya on the southern shore of the Aral Sea. The name Karakalpak comes from two words: qara meaning 'black' and qalpaq meaning 'hat'. The Karakalpaks number nearly 871,970 worldwide, out of which about 726,000 live in the Karakalpakstan region of Uzbekistan.
Larisa Yefimovna Shepitko was a Soviet film director and screenwriter of Ukrainian origin. She is considered one of the best female directors of all time, with her film The Ascent being the second film directed by a woman to win a Golden Bear and the third film directed by a woman to win a top award at a major European film festival.
Pan-nationalism is a specific term, used mainly in social sciences as a designation for those forms of nationalism that aim to transcend traditional boundaries of basic or historical national identities in order to create a "higher" pan-national (all-inclusive) identity, based on various common denominators. Pan-nationalism can occur as a specific variant of all common forms of nationalism. In relation to classical state nationalism, pan-nationalism manifests itself through various political movements that advocate the formation of "higher" (pan-national) forms of political identity, based on a regional or continental grouping of national states. In terms of ethnic nationalism, pan-nationalism can also manifest itself through specific ethnic movements that advocate setting up "higher" (pan-national) forms of common identity that are based on ethnic grouping. Other forms of nationalism also have their pan-national variants.
Komzet was the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land in the Soviet Union. The primary goal of the Komzet was to help impoverished and persecuted Jewish population of the former Pale of Settlement to adopt agricultural labor. Other goals were getting financial assistance from the Jewish diaspora and providing the Soviet Jews an alternative to Zionism.
Fazil Abdulovich Iskander was a Soviet and Russian writer and poet known in the former Soviet Union for his descriptions of Caucasian life. He authored various stories, including "Zashita Chika", which features a crafty and likeable young boy named "Chik", but is probably best known for the picaresque novel Sandro of Chegem and its sequel The Gospel According to Chegem.
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, originally published in Russian in the Novy Mir literary magazine in 1980, is a novel written by the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov.
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars that was carried out by Soviet Union authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet state security and the secret police, and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, even Soviet Communist Party members and Red Army members, from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of several ethnicities that were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.
The deportation of the Chechens and Ingush, or Ardakhar Genocide, and also known as Operation Lentil, was the Soviet forced transfer of the whole of the Vainakh populations of the North Caucasus to Central Asia on 23 February 1944, during World War II. The expulsion was ordered by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria after approval by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Anastas Mikoyan, as a part of a Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and the 1950s.
Abkhazia, officially the Republic of Abkhazia, is a partially recognised state in the South Caucasus, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, at the intersection of Eastern Europe and West Asia. It covers 8,665 square kilometres (3,346 sq mi) and has a population of around 245,000. Its capital and largest city is Sukhumi.
The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, was an administrative subunit of the former Soviet Union (USSR), covering the occupied and annexed territory of Estonia in 1940–1941 and 1944–1991. The Estonian SSR was nominally established to replace the until then independent Republic of Estonia on 21 July 1940, a month after the 16–17 June 1940 Soviet military invasion and occupation of the country during World War II. After the installation of a Stalinist government which, backed by the occupying Soviet Red Army, declared Estonia a Soviet constituency, the Estonian SSR was subsequently incorporated into the Soviet Union as a union republic on 6 August 1940. Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, and administered as a part of Reichskommissariat Ostland until it was reconquered by the USSR in 1944.
Seryozha is a short novel by Soviet writer Vera Panova. Seryozha has also been translated as Time Walked and A Summer to Remember. Seryozha is a diminutive form of the name Sergey.
Soviet patriotism is the socialist patriotism involving emotional and cultural attachment of the Soviet people to the Soviet Union as their homeland. It is also referred to as Soviet nationalism.
Anastasianism or the Ringing Cedars falls into the category of (right-wing) esotericism and considers itself to be a new religious movement, often classified as New Age, that started in central Russia in 1997 and has since spread across the world. Ringing Cedars' Anastasians are sometimes categorised by scholars as part of Rodnovery, and often as a modern Pagan movement of their own. The Anastasians also define their life conception as Russian Vedism and themselves as Vedrussians (ведруссы), and Anastasianism has therefore often been classified among the various self-styled "Vedic" religions arising in post-Soviet Russia. The movement is closely linked to right-wing extremists and antisemitic conspiracy theorists in some countries: German constitutional protection authorities classify the movement as a right-wing extremist suspect; the State Security Service in Austria also observes it.
The Gromyko Commission, officially titled the State Commission for Consideration of Issues Raised in Applications of Citizens of the USSR from Among the Crimean Tatars was the first state commission on the subject of addressing what the dubbed "the Tatar problem". Formed in July 1987 and led by Andrey Gromyko, it issued a conclusion in June 1988 rejecting all major demands of Crimean Tatar civil rights activists ranging from right of return to restoration of the Crimean ASSR.