Culture of Remembrance in Kazakhstan at the Turn of the Twentieth to Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

This chapter will consider different narratives of the oblivion, dismantlement, and transfer of Soviet monuments and traumatic and postcolonial syndromes of collective memory. It will also discuss the difference between urban and rural memory formats and analyze memory as a tool for mythologizing historical events. The empirical material for the chapter is grouped around the stories of the displacement of the Soviet monuments, the construction of the post-Soviet monuments, and the simultaneous building and restoration of mazars as original places of memory and important precolonial landmarks. The theoretical framework for the reassembly will be the concept of an inclusive, equitable right to memory in which both the state and grassroots actors participate. In this chapter, we do not consider memory practices as right or wrong; instead, we discuss balancing various memory strategies in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.