Autumn of the lists
The autumn of the lists is the name given to the reprisals of August to December 1992, after the fall of Kobozev at the end of the First Iradi Civil War. Self-appointed people's committees (el komitetteri) and returning militia men in Kobozev, Aulie-Ata and the towns of the Chu valley detained officials of the Socialist Republic of Irad (SRI), interior ministry men and alleged informers whose names appeared on lists copied from the SRI files opened in Talas. Summary shootings, beatings and lynchings killed an estimated 300 people, with estimates from 150 to 600; no official count was made. The worst single act was the Militia Yard killings of 14 September 1992, when 23 interior ministry men were taken from the yard of the Kobozev city militia and shot.[1][2]
In October the Provisional President Amanbek Alimbekov and the US High Commissioner, Ashby, disbanded the committees. Nobody was ever tried. The reprisals started the first and largest wave of Russian-speaking emigration from Irad and finished emptying Aulie-Ata. The dead are counted within the war's total of about 14,000.[1]
Background
Kobozev, the SRI's capital, fell on 12 August 1992, and the last main SRI forces surrendered on 18 August. Vasily Chernov and his senior officials and officers left for Russia under safe conduct, but most of the party and interior ministry staff of the Chu valley stayed. In Talas the Provisional Government had opened the files of the SRI interior ministry, and copies of their lists of informers and officials passed from hand to hand. Many in the committees had lost relatives in the siege of Talas, in the shootings of 3 February 1992 or among the seven Ene-Til members shot in custody in Talas in January (see Winter Uprising of 1992).[2][3]
The committees
The committees formed in the weeks after the surrender in factory districts, railway settlements and villages, usually around men returning from the militias with their rifles. They detained people at home or at work and held them in schools, depots and police stations. Some prisoners were released after questioning or beatings; others were shot at night or killed by crowds. Most of the dead were Russian or Ukrainian men, but Iradi party officials and informers were also killed.[2]
The Militia Yard killings
On the night of 14 September 1992, 23 interior ministry men held in the yard of the Kobozev city militia were taken out and shot on the railway embankment. The city was renamed Nurzhan that month. Russian-language writers pair the Militia Yard with the January custody killings in Talas as the two great crimes of the year.[1][4]
Suppression
Alimbekov condemned "justice by lists" on Talas radio. In October he and High Commissioner Ashby disbanded the committees, put Nurzhan and Aulie-Ata under curfew and had US military police patrol Nurzhan until Christmas.[1] The disarmament of the militias by US forces that autumn ended most of the killings.
Nobody was tried for the September killings, as nobody was tried for the January killings in Talas. The territorial authorities opened no cases, and the Commission on the Events of 1991–1992 of the Territorial Legislature dealt with the shootings of the Winter Uprising, not with the reprisals.[2]
Emigration
The fear that followed started the first and largest wave of the emigration of Russian speakers. Demographers estimate that about 250,000 people left for Russia between 1992 and 2000, most of them ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, among them former SRI officials and many doctors and teachers (see Iradis in Russia). The reprisals also finished emptying Aulie-Ata, whose Russian and Ukrainian districts had grown around the superphosphate works.[5]
Memory
The Russian-language press, the Labor Party of Irad until its dissolution in 2011, and Russian television documentaries of 2007 and 2022 kept the memory alive. DPI histories of the war give the reprisals a line, and the Talas State University history department's The War of 1992 (2017) gives them a chapter. Historians generally present them as the most neglected part of the war, and their memory is one source of the ambivalence about 1992 in Nurzhan.[1][4]
See also
References
- ^ Department of History, Talas State University (2017). The War of 1992: A Documentary History. Talas State University Press.
- ^ Central Asian Geopolitical Review (2012). 'Counting the Dead: Casualty Estimates for the Iradi Civil War of 1992.' Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 77–104.
- ^ Territorial Legislature of Irad, Commission on the Events of 1991–1992 (2002). Report on the Shootings of 3 February 1992. Talas.
- ^ ITAR-TASS (16 September 1992). «В Нуржане расстреляны 23 сотрудника милиции» [23 militia officers shot in Nurzhan] (in Russian). Moscow.
- ^ Talas State University, Institute of Sociology (2024). Iradis in Russia: Emigrants and Labor Migrants. Talas State University Press.