First Congress of Iradi Soviets

The First Congress of Iradi Soviets was the assembly that proclaimed the Iradi Soviet Socialist Republic and adopted its first constitution in early 1925. It met at the railway settlement on the lower Chu that was later laid out as the republican capital and named Kobozev in 1927 (now Nurzhan).^[1]

The congress was convened during the national delimitation of Central Asia, after Soviet ethnographers had identified the Iradis as a distinct nationality on the basis of their Kipchak Turkic language and East Syriac Christian tradition.^[2] Its delegates came from workers' committees in the railway settlements, from demobilized Red Army cavalrymen who had fought against the Basmachi, and from rural soviets in the Talas, Chu and Chatkal valleys. Besides adopting the constitution, it drew up the republic's first administrative districts, elected a Central Executive Committee and asked for admission to the Soviet Union as a union republic. Admission followed later in 1925, after the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs, which had been created in 1924. Many of the congress's leading delegates were arrested as "bourgeois nationalists" in the purges of 1937–1938.^[1]

References

1. ^ Talas State University Press (2011). Iradistan: A History of the Iradi SSR, 1925–1991. Talas, pp. 23–311.
2. ^ Hirsch, Francine (2005). Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.