The Soviet study of the Barefooted Flight of the Kazakhs

The defeat, devastation and exile of the Kazakhs in the early eighteenth century, commonly known as the Barefooted Flight, was the nation's most distressing pre-Soviet calamity. Kazakh nation-building and official remembrance projects – commemorated in state ceremonies, public education and popular culture – portray an uninterrupted, centuries-old practice of tribute to local heroes who challenged the foreign aggressors. Twentieth-century Kazakh and Russian intellectuals in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras studied and enshrined these events based on published, secondary sources, rarely giving attention to the thin trail of documents preserved in state archives. The historiography of the Barefooted Flight exposed a trend in how politically convenient historical lessons shaped the interpretation of events. By the end of the Soviet Union, some archival material was introduced, it was but misquoted so as not to challenge the current interpretation.