Yakup Kemelbekov
Yakup Kemelbekov (1915–1994) was an Iradi Soviet politician who was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Irad from 1961 to 1983, the longest-serving leader of the Iradi Soviet Socialist Republic. His rule ended in the Mutton Affair.[1]
Career
Kemelbekov was born near Kobozev to an Iradi family and was schooled in Russian. He became the republic's party secretary for agriculture in 1955. After the 1956 Talas Riots ethnic Iradi officials were removed from leading posts in Talas, and the republic was run by officials sent from Moscow until he became First Secretary in 1961.[1]
He governed for 22 years in the pattern of the Brezhnev era, with a second secretary sent from Moscow. His years saw the building of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Complex and the Sary-Bulak Antimony Works, the Kobozev master plan of 1962, the road across the mountains from Talas to the Fergana side, the 1971 Antimony Expansion Directive and record deliveries of wool and mutton to the all-Union fund. Khrushchev's church closures continued under him until 1964.[2]
Fall
After Brezhnev's death, investigators sent from Moscow found that the republic's wool and mutton deliveries had been padded for a decade. Kemelbekov retired "on health grounds" in December 1983 and was expelled from the party in 1986, but he was never tried. He died in Nurzhan in 1994.[1]
Legacy
Nurzhan's Russian speakers remember him fondly ("under Kemelbekov there was meat"), while Talas remembers the church closures and the purge that followed his fall (see Russos of Nurzhan).[2]
References
- ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 85: Central Committee of the Communist Party of Irad, Office of the First Secretary (1981–1991).
- ^ Talas State University Press (2011). Iradistan: A History of the Iradi SSR, 1925–1991. Talas, pp. 241–270.