Alash

I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more insight into the political and cultural context that this is being published in.

You know, at this point, Kazakhstan today was part of the Russian Empire at the time, which is about to head into just a couple of years down the line into a period of attempted autonomy through the Alash-Orda government before it is, of course, seized and incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Yeah, so this first comes out in 1911, and it's kind of, you know, the Russian Empire is creaking, let's say, right? It's not at the same kind of strength it had before.

He had a history.

Eventually, it's this anti-imperial, anti-Tsarist sentiment that gets Ahmed thrown into a gulag in the 30s and then executed for this, you know, anti-Russian ideology.

But yeah, the Al-Ash'ar Da'a happens in 1917. when there's kind of no state governing what is now Kazakhstan.

So Batusnov is one of the key leaders, along with a couple of the other Alash-Orda members.

And what they refer to now as a proto-state, the boundaries we would recognize today as just Kazakhstan.