Uraz Dzhanzakovich Isayev

Isayev was born on 28 May 1899 into a Kazakh family in aul No. 4, Karasu volost, Lbishchensk district, Ural Region. He finished a two-year Russian-Kazakh primary school and until 1918 worked as a clerk at the Shalkar zemstvo board. In 1919 he served in the Ural district and town workers' and peasants' militia and as an instructor of the Lbishchensk district revolutionary committee, then as secretary of an aul soviet and deputy chairman of the Shalkar volost executive committee, and organized the Lbishchensk volost Komsomol committee. He joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1920 (the Kazakh-language source says 1921), and in 1921–1922 was a plenipotentiary of the Dzhambeyty political bureau of the Cheka and an operational plenipotentiary of the Ural gubernia Cheka.

In 1924–1925 he was secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the Kazakh ASSR, and twice served as deputy chairman of the regional control commission and deputy people's commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection. He then headed the organization department of the Kazakh Regional Committee, sat on its secretariat, and in 1928–1929 was its second secretary (the Kazakh-language source gives his term as second secretary as 1925–1929). According to the Kazakh-language source he also edited the Kazakh newspaper Engbekshi Qazaq in July–August 1926. From 1929 to 1938 he was Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Kazakh ASSR and then of the Kazakh SSR. Under his direction the republic's capital moved from Kyzyl-Orda to Alma-Ata.

In August 1932 he openly wrote to Stalin protesting that the reckless collectivization led by Goloshchyokin had brought famine and terrible disaster on the Kazakh people. Together with a letter from Turar Ryskulov, deputy chairman of the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars, the appeal led to a change of policy towards the Kazakhs, and on 17 September 1932 Stalin signed the Central Committee resolution "On the Development of Livestock Farming in Kazakhstan." He attended the 17th Party Congress in 1934 as a delegate of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, was a candidate member of the Central Committee from 1930 (or 1934) to 1937, and was promoted to full member at the plenum of 12 October 1937. On 20 December 1935 he became one of the first Kazakhs to receive the Order of Lenin, for overfulfilling the agricultural plans. A decree of the Council of People's Commissars he signed on 5 February 1936 changed the Russian name of the Kazak ASSR and of the nation from kazak to kazakh. Since 1925 the Kazakhs had been written in Russian with the same word as the Cossacks, and the decree made the change "in accordance with the Kazakh pronunciation of the word 'qazaq'."

During his tenure the Embaneft enterprise, the Karaganda coal basin and the Balkhash, Karpaksai, Zhezkazgan, Leninogorsk and Zyryanovsk smelters were built, laying the foundation of Kazakhstan's industry, and illiteracy was tackled with new primary and secondary schools. He was also a patron of culture. Braving his superiors' anger, he helped Mukhtar Auezov, whose plays had been banned after his release from prison in 1930 on the grounds that he was "a leader of the Alash Orda"; he gave the illiterate akyn Zhambyl Zhabayev five salaried literary secretaries; and he sent the self-taught painter Abylkhan Kasteyev to study in Moscow at the republic's expense. At the first Ten-Day Festival of Kazakh Literature and Art, held in Moscow under his direction in 1936, Kulyash Baiseitova won ovations in the opera Kyz Zhibek.

At the same time he sat on the special troika created under NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 and took an active part in Stalin's repressions. On 11 November 1932 he and Goloshchyokin had also ordered the mass arrest and deportation of peasants accused of obstructing grain procurement.

In May 1938 he was summoned to Moscow and on 31 May arrested by the GUGB. He was placed in the first category on Stalin's execution list No. 1 of 20 August 1938, which Stalin and Molotov signed in approval. On 29 August the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death for "participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization," and he was shot the same day together with others on the list, including Stanislav Kosior. He was buried at the NKVD special site Kommunarka. On 19 May 1956 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court rehabilitated him.

His wife, Sara Yesova (1903–1984), chaired the central board of the education workers' union in 1929–1932 and, after his rehabilitation, became director of the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan. Streets in Almaty and Uralsk bear his name.