A Kyrgyz party leader at the Soviet Union's end
In April 1991, he joined the Soviet Union's final Politburo as Kyrgyzstan's representative.
Amanbayev was an agricultural specialist who rose through the Kyrgyz Communist Party's regional and central apparatus. In 1991, as the Soviet Union moved toward dissolution, he became first secretary of the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan and a member of the CPSU Politburo, but both positions ended within months as the Union collapsed. He later served in the government of independent Kyrgyzstan, embodying institutional continuity between the late Soviet party apparatus and the new state.
Also known as: Dzhumgalbek Beksultanovich Amanbayev · Djumgalbek Amanbaev
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1966Graduated from the Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute
- 1971–1973Director of the Osh state breeding station; first secretary of the Alay district party committee
- 1981–1985Secretary of the Osh regional committee of the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan
- 1985–1988Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan
- 1988–1991First secretary of the Issyk-Kul regional committee
- 1990–1991Chair of the Issyk-Kul regional Soviet; People's Deputy of the USSR
- 1991First secretary of the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan; member of the CPSU Politburo
- 1993–1995Deputy prime minister of the Kyrgyz Republic
The Soviet Politburo
- Full member 1991.04–1991.08
served until the party ban of 1991.11
Related historical events
Political Survival in Independent Kyrgyzstan
After his 1991 posts as a member of the CPSU Politburo and first secretary of the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan ended with the Union's collapse, Amanbayev continued to act in the politics of independent Kyrgyzstan. In 1992 he served as an adviser to the general director of the Kyrgyz republican "Agrobusiness" center, and from 1993 to 1995 he was a deputy prime minister of the Kyrgyz Republic. His tenure as the deputy premier responsible for agriculture produced a direct confrontation with the president: in 1995 he turned his seventh-floor office in the government building into a headquarters for the opposition's political hunger strike, which centred on candidates whose registration had been annulled ahead of the December 1995 presidential election.
He had stood in Kyrgyzstan's first presidential election, held at a session of the Supreme Soviet on 25 October 1990, but did not put his candidacy forward in the second round, and Askar Akayev was elected. In the 24 December 1995 election he was registered as a candidate, but the procurator-general sought the annulment of his registration on suspicion of forged signatures and the Supreme Court granted it; he and the other disqualified candidates appealed to the Constitutional Court, which declined to hear them. The candidates went on hunger strike on 19 December 1995 and ended it two days later; Amanbayev explained that their action had been pointless because the government ignored it and it drew no public attention. After leaving the deputy premiership he headed the "Buudai" enterprise, and in his later years he shifted position and spoke out in support of Kyrgyzstan's president. He died of a heart attack at his Issyk-Kul home on 11 February 2005, while preparing to run for the Jogorku Kenesh in his native Jeti-Oguz constituency.