Mustafa Chokayev's articles showcased in London
"The Policy of the Soviet Union towards Turkic World" book was unveiled last weekend at the Yunus Emre Institute in London, with coverage provided by Kazinform Agency's correspondent.
The event, which gathered representatives of the Kazakh diaspora in the UK, British experts, and journalists, was organized by the UK Kazakh-Turk Association.
The book, authored by Abdulvahap Kara, Professor at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, is a collection of 41 articles written by Mustafa Chokayev in French between 1922 and 1939.
"Chokayev's views and analyses in his writings are very influential and remain important today. For this reason, we collected and published 41 of his articles in French, written a century ago, in a book in 2022," Professor Abdulvahap Kara said during his lecture preceding the book launch.
"Later, we translated and published them into Kazakh, Turkish and Russian languages. The English book, which will be launched here today, is the fourth translation," he added.
Having been forced to leave his country after the Bolsheviks seized power, Mustafa Chokayev continued his intellectual struggle for two decades from 1921 until his death in 1941 from Paris.
"He published books and articles in languages such as German, French, English, Polish, Russian and Turkish. These articles were effective in explaining the illegitimacy of Soviet rule in Turkestan to the peoples of the world, because Chokayev took his arguments as the basis of anti-Soviet ideas from the Soviet press," Professor Kara said.
Historians have established historical justice by revealing the groundlessness of the unfair accusations made against Chokayev by the Soviet propaganda with the documents in the archives of countries such as Germany, France and Poland regarding the Turkestan Legions.
"There is not a single document in these archives about Chokayev's collaboration with the Nazis, while there are hundreds of documents about his refraining from collaborating with them," Abdulvahap Kara emphasized.
