The Young Guard publishing house has published two books about the Tokayevs. A new cult of personality?
At my request, three sales consultants of one of the Meloman chain stores are looking for the book "Kemel Tokayev" - a biography of the father of the current president of Kazakhstan.
Even after a superficial study of his page in Wikipedia, it becomes clear that his life was very eventful, there is something to write about - he lost his parents during the famine of the 30s, grew up in an orphanage, fought near Stalingrad and edited the Vedomosti of the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh SSR. But earlier, the publishing house "Young Guard" did not pay attention to Kemel Tokayev. His biography in the legendary series "The Life of Remarkable People" (ZHZL) in the Moscow publishing house was published only this year.
Prior to that, the book "Nursultan Nazarbayev" was published in ZhZL.
"We cannot answer these questions"
On the "History" shelf in the bookstore, from which Konayev and Nazarbayev are optimistically looking at me, I do not see the book "Kemel Tokayev".
One of the three booksellers looking for the book, a polite young man with glasses who vaguely resembles the president, even takes a ladder to check the top shelf, but the book I was interested in is not there either.
In the end, it is found on the shelf of "Novinka". The search took at least half an hour. Only four copies remained. Handing me mine, the seller takes the remaining "History" on the shelf to Konaev and Nazarbayev.
Interestingly, the biography of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev himself, also published by the Young Guard, is not here. It was released in another series, it is called "Biography Continues", as I was informed in the press service of the publishing house, where I applied on March 25.
I also asked the press service of the Young Guard: how much did it cost to publish books about the Tokayevs and who exactly was the initiator from the Kazakh side - some government agency, a public foundation, a private company?
"Sorry, but the questions you ask relate to the internal side of the publishing house’s work or touch on commercial secrets ("how much did their publication cost?") – we cannot answer these questions," the press secretary of the publishing house, Sergei Korostelev, wrote to me.
From an orphanage to a powerful Olympus
Last year, the Department of Social Development of the Abay region published a lot about the purchase of almost 3 thousand books about President Tokayev from the series "The Life of Remarkable People: Biography Continues".
As the Protenge telegram channel reported, they wanted to spend 20 million tenge.
Later, the akimat of the Abay region said that they did not plan this purchase, calling the publication about the tender a technical error of their employee.
Nevertheless, the book "Kassym-Jomart Tokayev" in the series "The Life of Remarkable People: Biography Continues" was nevertheless published. It was published by the Moscow publishing house "Young Guard".
Photo by Protenge
A biography of Kemel Tokayev was also published there, the press secretary of the publishing house, Sergei Korostelev, confirmed to me.
"Both books (Kemel Tokayev and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev) were published by the Young Guard. The first is in the episode "ZhZL", the second is in the episode "ZhZL: Biography Continues...". The initiative is joint, it is a fruitful creative process that has been going on for a long time. This is not the first time we have raised the Kazakh issue. Previously, we published the books "Kanysh Satpayev", "Valikhanov", "Kenesary", "Nazir Tyuryakulov", "Mukhtar Auezov", "Evney Buketov", "Abai", "Bekmakhanov", "Shakarim", "Nursultan Nazarbayev", "Tair Mansurov", "Olzhas Suleimenov", Korostelev said.
The authors of the president’s biography are Sergey Seliverstov and Yerlan Sadykov. In 2010, the latter headed the initiative group for holding a referendum on the extension of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s powers until 2020. Nazarbayev’s powers can no longer be extended and, apparently, the rector of ENU Sadykov is looking for new forms of self-expression...
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Yerlan Sadykov. Photo by Akorda
The annotation states that the book "Kassym-Jomart Tokayev" "is dedicated to the life and work of a prominent politician, statesman and diplomat, President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich Tokayev" and "is based on a set of facts extracted and reconstructed from the works, speeches, interviews and memoirs of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, as well as the testimonies of other persons."
"The biography of the politician is revealed in dynamics, in connection with the main milestones in the life of his father Kemel Tokayev, through internal and external events in the country and the world in the context of a changing era. The book covers the period from the 1920s to the present. The reader is presented with a panorama of significant events: the pre-war period and the Great Patriotic War, the family factor, school studies and Almaty in the 1960s-1970s, MGIMO and the diplomatic service (Moscow, Singapore, Beijing), work in high positions in Kazakhstan (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government, Senate) and the UN (Geneva), the period of presidency in the Republic of Kazakhstan (since 2019), the January events of 2022 and geopolitical turbulence, a new course in domestic policy is "Fair Kazakhstan," the annotation says.
The book "Kemel Tokayev" is dedicated to the president’s father. He was born near the Karatal River in the current Zhetysu region, in the South-East of the country, and was orphaned during the famine of the 30s.
The author of the book is Associate Professor of the Department of History of the Kazakh National Pedagogical University named after Abai Svetlana Smagulova.
Svetlana Smagulova. Photo from her Facebook page
Her text is expectedly more dry than juicy, in some places it is more like a monograph (by the way, one of Smagulova’s monographs is also dedicated to Kemel Tokayev), rather than a fascinating story of the life of an orphan and war veteran who reached the post of editor-in-chief of Vedomosti of the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh SSR.
But the first part of Kemel Tokayev’s life is tragic – he lost his parents and sister (Kemel’s mother, stricken with paralysis, was forced to watch helplessly as her little daughter burned in the stove, where she accidentally fell), so even Smagulova, accustomed to monographs and didactic manuals, managed to squeeze a tear out of me a couple of times.
Here, for example, in three sentences, the author gives a very touching picture:
"Kemel’s mother was a skilled seamstress. She knew how to sew in such a way that the seams on her clothes went unnoticed. She made little Kemel a yellow fitted fur coat with brass buttons with her own hands - he was wearing it when he got to the orphanage."
After the orphanage - the Battle of Stalingrad (Kemel Tokayev was a machine gunner, apparently, he was good at shooting to kill), university, journalism, literature and editor-in-chief in the newspaper of the Supreme Soviet.
What did Kemel Tokayev write about?
"The heroes of these works," says Smagulova, "are valiant police officers who stand guard over the law, protect the peace and peaceful sleep of citizens, bravely enter the fight against the criminal world."
Obviously, Kemel Tokayev has come a long way - from orphanhood to the Supreme Soviet - and his biography is really interesting, no matter how you treat the policy of his son. However, earlier in Kazakhstan, it was customary to notice only one personality - Nursultan Nazarbayev.
After Kantar, when Tokayev began to concentrate power in his hands and returned the capital to its former name (which in 2019 was renamed Nur-Sultan on his own initiative), the country suddenly remembered that the president had a father with a rather eventful life.
In September 2023, in the city of Ushtobe, in Kemel Tokayev’s native Karatal district, a new square was opened in his honor, and then they also wanted to order carpets and medals with his image, but the lot was canceled after the media drew attention to this.
And in October last year, an auditorium in honor of Kemel Tokayev was opened at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. When asked by an Azattyk correspondent whether the university would have honored Kemel Tokayev if his son had not been president, the rector of KazNU, Zhanseit Tuimebayev, replied irritably: "What is your goal?"
A new cult of personality?
Andrei Chebotarev, director of the Alternative Center for Contemporary Studies, political scientist and participant in the Third Kurultay under the President, believes that now "such a trend [manifestation of the cult of personality] is observed, but it is clear that this does not come from the head of state Kassym-Jomart Tokayev."
"If there is any trend, it does not come from the president himself. As far as I can see from communicating with representatives of the presidential administration, his administration is not dealing with this case either," Chebotarev said in an interview with Respublika.
Chebotarev believes that "the fact that the book [Kassym-Jomart Tokayev] has not been published in mass circulation and is not sold in Kazakhstan is an indicator that the state is not involved here."
"If we take a book about the president’s father, then in principle I do not see anything so critical here, because he is really one of the leading Kazakh writers of the Soviet period. I myself read his books. This is a genre of detective with the participation of the then Soviet special services. In addition, the publication of a book about Kemel Tokayev gives an understanding of the atmosphere in which our current president was born and raised," the political scientist says.
Shalkar Nurseitov, a political scientist and expert on political communications, believes that Akorda is using the legacy of Kemel Tokayev for political purposes.
"No one denies the fact that Kemel Tokayev is one of the founders of the detective genre in the Kazakh language," Nurseitov said. - The problem lies in the desire to use the legacy of Kemel Tokayev by his son, the current president of Kazakhstan, to legitimize his own authoritarian power. "Kemelization" or the use of Kemel Tokayev’s legacy by Akordoy for political purposes is the most convenient form of creating a cult of the current government for the president himself and his entourage in the post-Nazarbayev era.
According to Nurseitov, the authorities are using the image of a polyglot, a diplomat and the writer’s son to convey "the message that by his origin Tokayev is part of the elite and he deservedly occupies the post of the owner of Akorda."
"An authoritarian regime that extends its term by holding unfair elections," Nurseitov said, "is forced to practice this format of self-assertion and legitimization of presidential power in the eyes of civil society."
