Zhumabay Shayakhmetovich Shayakhmetov

When the war began in 1941, Shayakhmetov was appointed State Defense Committee (GKO) plenipotentiary for the Kazakh SSR. He took charge of resettling evacuees and factories arriving from the western USSR, and also handled the housing and everyday needs of deported peoples. On 22 June 1941 he addressed about 25,000 people gathered in Almaty's Gorky Park, calling for a full mobilization of the republic's resources for victory; the crowd answered with applause. By the end of 1941, 366,400 evacuees had arrived, and over 532,000 by the summer of 1943, along with many plants and workshops relocated from Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia. Construction of the Aktobe ferroalloy plant accelerated, a mining-equipment works rose in Karaganda, heavy-machinery equipment from Voroshilovgrad (Luhansk) was installed in Almaty, and a Melitopol machine-building shop in Akmolinsk began turning out shells, mines, and grenades by year's end. The Chimkent lead plant took on cast-iron shell casings and bismuth output. He personally oversaw thirty military schools and recruited young, educated Kazakhs from across the country to fill the labor gap left by the draft. As a result, by 1942 the Kazakh SSR had become the USSR's second coal, industrial, grain, and livestock base after the RSFSR, and military hospitals grew from two before the war to seventy-eight by spring 1942, treating some 24,000 patients at once. In 1944, on his initiative, four higher-education institutions were founded: the Kurmangazy Conservatory, the Kazakh Women's Pedagogical University, the Institute of Physical Culture, and the Chemical-Technological Institute.

At the September 1953 CPSU plenum, Nikita Khrushchev publicly criticized the Kazakh SSR's agricultural performance and demanded a massive expansion of sown area. Shayakhmetov openly opposed Khrushchev's Virgin Lands vision. In a personal meeting, he warned that the Kazakh steppe's humus layer was only a few centimeters thick, and that large-scale plowing would cause wind erosion, permanently destroying fertile soil. He argued instead for a livestock-centered strategy suited to Kazakhstan's natural conditions. Khrushchev suspected that Shayakhmetov was deliberately understating the land suitable for cultivation, fearing that a massive influx of settlers from other republics would further reduce the ethnic Kazakh share of the population. The alternative program submitted by Shayakhmetov's team was rejected, and on February 5–6, 1954, the 9th Plenum of the Kazakh Communist Party removed him as First Secretary. He was replaced by Panteleimon Ponomarenko, with Leonid Brezhnev entering as Second Secretary. This was a watershed moment in Khrushchev's subordination of republic leaderships to his agricultural agenda.