Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression

On May 31, 2020, the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Institute of Philology and Multilingual Education held an educational event «There are times - iron - for everyone», dedicated to the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. The moderator of the meeting was Dr. PhD Dina Sabirova.

In the 1990s, at the Department of Russian Literature of Abai KazNPU worked as a man who was one of the first in Kazakhstan to fight for the rehabilitation and return of the names and creative heritage of repressed Kazakh writers to the people. Professor Alexander Lazarevich Zhovtis in the 1970s translated and tried to publish poems by Makzhan Zhumabaev. In the years of Kazakhstan`s independence, he was able to do much more to return to the Kazakh culture a memory of her innocently ruined sons.

This was told at a meeting with students by the son of Alexander Lazarevich, a well-known human rights activist and public figure Eugeniy Zhovtis.

In a conversation with students, teachers of the department also participated. Dr. PhD Samal Serikova spoke about the tragic fate of the Kazakh enlightenment in the 1930s and the fate of their loved ones - wives and children, prisoners of the camp «ALZHIR». Mehirnisa Khavaidarova, Ph.D. in Philology, a specialist in the work of Yuri Dombrovsky, shared her thoughts on the role of Kazakhstan in the fate of this repressed writer. The topic of the speech of Associate Professor Zinaida Polyak was her small investigation - a search for information about a relative who died in Stalin`s camps.

The head of the department, Saule Abisheva, told future language teachers how the topic of confronting a person with a totalitarian regime is revealed in a new textbook of Russian literature for grade 11. The authors of the textbook - teachers of the department - reflected in the book for schoolchildren the roll call of destinies and creative searches of Russian and Kazakh writers. Now this knowledge about the general tests of the «iron» of the twentieth century will be brought to their students by current students.

In her final address to students, Saule Abisheva emphasized how important it is for the new generation to preserve the memory of the tragic pages of history. Understanding the past is necessary for building the future.