Alexey Smirnov

Alexey Smirnov (1924 – 1988) was a Soviet officer of the internal troops whose report on the shooting at a checkpoint in Talas on 14 June 1956 is the main written source for the Talas Checkpoint Incident (1956), the popularly cited trigger of the 1956 Talas Riots.^[1]

As a captain, Smirnov commanded the detachment that manned vehicle checkpoints on the roads into Talas. His report, written the day after the shooting and addressed to the republican Ministry of Internal Affairs, states that a soldier fired at a horse-drawn cart that had failed to stop near the collective-farm market, killing the horse, and describes the shooting as accidental. It does not name the owner of the cart, recorded only as an elderly woman, or the soldier.^[1] Popular accounts describe the shooting as deliberate and stress that the owner was a war widow.

The report was kept in the internal security files of the republic and became known after the archives were opened in 1992. It was published in full in 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the riots.^[2] Historians have used it to question details of the popular story, while others argue that a report written by the commander responsible had reason to present the shooting as an accident.^[3] Smirnov was transferred out of the republic later in 1956 and died in Russia.

References

1. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 85: Internal Security Reports on the 1956 Talas Unrest.
2. ^ Talas State University Press (2006). The June Days: The 1956 Talas Riots in Archival Perspective. Talas, pp. 41–118.
3. ^ Central Asian Geopolitical Review (2016). "Horse, Widow and Party: Memory Politics and the 1956 Talas Riots." Vol. 22, pp. 63–84.