Mankurts are unthinking slaves in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980). 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 the word mankurt (Russian : манкурт) entered everyday speech as a metaphor for a Soviet citizen affected by the distortions and omissions in history propagated by official teachings. [4]
In the figurative sense, the word "mankurt" refers to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland or who have forgotten their kinship. In this sense, it has become a term in common parlance [1] and journalism in the former Soviet Union. [5] The Russian language has coined neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya (meaning "mankurtization"), and demankurtizatsiya (meaning "demankurtization"). [6] In some former Soviet republics, the term has come to refer to those non-Russians who have lost their ethnic heritage due to the Soviet political system. [7]
In 1990, the film Mankurt was released in the Soviet Union, [8] based on the legend about the mankurt from Aitmatov's novel. [9] [10]