Alash Party
알라시당
A Kazakh national party formed by the Kazakh intelligentsia in the revolutionary year 1917 and the ruling party of the Alash Autonomy. Led by Alikhan Bukeikhanov, it demanded equal treatment of Kazakhs and Russians and an end to Russian settlement on Kazakh lands. It ceased to exist on 26 August 1920, when the Bolsheviks took the region and formed the Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic.
In depth
The party grew out of a group of ethnic Kazakh members of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) formed around 1905. After the February Revolution it took organisational shape at the First All-Kazakh Congress in Orenburg on 21–28 July 1917, which resolved that Russia should become a federal parliamentary republic. Its leaders were Bukeikhanov, the linguist Akhmet Baitursynov and the writer Mirzhakip Dulatov, and its organ was the newspaper Qazaq.
The party's draft programme called for universal suffrage, a democratic Russian federal republic, equality of the republics within Russia, separation of church and state and equality of languages. In the elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly in November 1917 it won 43 seats. In December 1917 the Second All-Kazakh Congress proclaimed the Alash Autonomy and its provisional People's Council, the Alash Orda.
After the party ended in 1920, some former members joined the Communist Party and worked on translating school textbooks. During the Great Purge of the 1930s most of its former figures were arrested for alleged nationalism, and many were shot in 1935–1938. They were rehabilitated after Kazakhstan's independence.