The Undiscovered Pages of Kazakh History: A Campaign to Purge Educational Institutions of Socially Alien Elements

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Communists aimed to create a new Soviet man and fought intensively against “socially alien elements”. Party purges were carried out in universities, institutes, academies, technical colleges and schools, and the social background of teachers, employees and stu-dents was checked. Those who were categorised as “socially alien elements” were excluded from Party ranks, positions and studies.The study examines the impact of Goloschekin’s major revolutionary campaigns (village councils, distribution of agricultural and pasture land, confiscation of the rich and the semi-feudal), intensified in the period after his arrival in the Kazakh Obkom in the autumn of 1925, on the sphere of education, the fate of Kazakh youth studying not only in their own country, but also in other educational institutions such as Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Saratov, Orynbor, Ombi. How was the campaign to purge edu-cational institutions of children and close relatives of wealthy people, merchants, priests, people who worked in tsarist institutions before the revolution, who was the expelled and exiled people? Their names were identified and new data were introduced into the scientific turnover.