Olzhas Suleimenov (b. 1936) is one of Kazakhstan’s most prominent poet-intellectuals and political advocates, whose influence extends far beyond literature.
Internationally, he is best known for his 1975 book Az i Ya, a bold philological reinterpretation of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign that challenged official Soviet historiography and triggered a major political scandal, positioning him as an early voice for decolonizing knowledge within the USSR.
In the late Soviet period, Suleimenov became a leading civic activist: He founded Nevada–Semipalatinsk, the first mass anti-nuclear movement in the Soviet Union, which played a decisive role in closing the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and inspired parallel anti-nuclear campaigns in Japan and the U.S.
As a diplomat, he represented Kazakhstan abroad in the early independence years, serving as Kazakhstan’s ambassador to Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and UNESCO. Today he continues this work as the founder of the UNESCO Center for the Rapprochement of Cultures, where he promotes global cultural cooperation and the philosophy of “conscious interdependence” as a framework for a more interconnected and less violent world.
The interview below appears as part of my master’s research into the Asia-Africa Writers Conferences, focusing on how Soviet Central Asian writers used these spaces of internationalism to critique the Soviet state. The original Russian-language version of the interview was published in Novaya Gazeta Kazakhstan.
Alice Volfson: At Harvard I study the mutual influence between the Asia-Africa Writers’ Conferences and the Central Asian intelligentsia who took part in them. You attended those meetings. What did you discuss there?
Olzhas Suleimenov: For many years I was indeed a member of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, and later one of its leaders. It existed until the late 1970s. It was headed by the Egyptian writer Yusef el-Sebai. One day he apparently angered Islamic extremists. And how can a poet anger anyone? Only with the honest word. He spoke out against terrorism. At a meeting of the association held in Cyprus, men who were not poets entered the meeting hall and shot the secretary-general. And that was the end of the association; we never convened again.
Before that, we held several conferences — in Egypt, India, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Angola... What was discussed at these meetings? The purpose of literature; and the hungry, striving, newly liberated societies of Asia and Africa.
At the 1973 Almaty conference, one African leader said: “Africa resembles a huge question mark, where the dot is the island of Madagascar. Her tomorrow is a question addressed to all the other continents: What awaits Africa? A land of former slaves rising like a shoot under the hands of a spring rain. The future is on the threshold! What will it bring to our Earth?”
...Africa did not achieve independence, as our newspapers liked to tell us. It was granted independence by the United States of America, which after 1945 remembered the principles of its Founding Fathers — that all peoples and races are equal. They convinced their allies — Great Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium — to leave their colonies.
In 1982 I flew to Rwanda for the celebration of the country’s 20th anniversary of independence. Two main ethnic groups lived there — Tutsi and Hutu. We filmed a movie, visited the famous mountain where mountain gorillas live. There were about 200 left in the world. We shot footage later shown on the Soviet TV program “Travelers’ Club.” We filmed beautiful farms, well-fed working peasants. We showed the rough cut to the local authorities. They liked seeing their own country on film. The president invited us to return in 10 years for the next jubilee and make a new film: “You won’t recognize Rwanda then. It will be a different place!”
Ten years later Rwanda truly had become a different place; a civil war was raging. A massacre. In one week more than a million people were killed. Why? Hutu believed Tutsi had sat too long on the presidential throne — it was now their turn. Thus they marked the 30th anniversary of independence.
And was it only Rwanda? Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia... all of Africa convulsed in the 1990s. And not only Africa. Power struggles between clans took place in Europe, such as the Yugoslav tragedy, and in Eurasia, in the newly independent CIS states — the most common early symptom of independence.
A few years after the Almaty conference, another Asia-Africa Writers’ Conference was held in sunny Tashkent, organized by the USSR Writers’ Union. The first stage of global decolonization, initiated by the U.S. in victorious 1945, was coming to an end. The British started withdrawing from India, Iraq, Arab countries, East Africa. The French, reluctantly, from West and North Africa, which sparked the first national liberation movements. The USSR supported decolonization ideologically and materially through the Committee for Relations with the Countries of Asia and Africa.
I was one of the leaders of that committee. Over two decades I visited nearly 60 countries across those continents. Probably for that reason, the leadership of the Soviet Writers’ Union instructed me to prepare and deliver the keynote address at the start of the conference.
I dedicated much of that address to describing my impressions from visiting several former colonies. Well-maintained, rich plantations. Locals working. Problems existed, of course, but they didn’t strike the eye. Then, a few years after decolonization, I would return and see different scenes: tribes fighting for power; burned homes, devastated plantations, starving populations. And nearby, other countries embittered by independence. Liberation from colonial oppression had predictably strengthened the class of their own exploiters. And we became witnesses to a political paradox: The struggle for national liberation united the people; victory divided them, exposing class and social contradictions.
These stories depressed the conference audience. The Soviet leadership exchanged glances. Then, I announced my conclusion: “The main mistake of national liberation movements is that independence was seen as the sole and final goal of decolonization. What would come after victory did not concern the fighters and this fatally affected their programs.”
At the end of my report, I proposed a formula for the path to the future, a different strategic goal for liberation movements: “From centuries of dependence, through a period of independence, toward an era of conscious interdependence.”
This was not the intuition of a few intellectuals. History itself led nations to such a formula.
A.V.: Was your political activity based on understanding the USSR as a colonial system, or rather as a modernizing but destructive force for the national republics and cultures?
O.S.: We divided the USSR into two parts: before Stalin’s death and after. My father perished in Stalin’s camps a month after I was born. Our fathers began the 20th century. And they died early, full of plans that we were meant to realize and embody. And we tried — our generation, whose fathers were shot by that era — we had to express the truth they had understood. Our generation acted first when the country made a sharp turn from decades of Stalinism to a new era. It was the spring of an entire epoch.
Therefore, when people today speak of the “damned Soviet period,” I cannot agree. The Stalinist period — until the mid-50s — was a time when the entire intelligentsia was destroyed and everything was directed by the jealous, spiteful character of the leader. After that began a rebirth.
We have, unfortunately, not yet studied or understood the phenomenon of the cultural rise of Kazakhstan in the second half of the 20th century. In everything that happened in the republic, one sensed the leading role of a true leader – Dinmukhamed Kunaev.
A man of great inner culture, Kunaev loved creative people and was loved by them. Never before or after his era did artists, writers, directors, architects feel so needed and valued by the people. Literature in Kazakh and other languages was published in multi-million-copy print runs. New theaters opened in every region. The best film studio in Central Asia was built, along with new libraries, exhibition halls, workshops...
His memoir was titled From Stalin to Gorbachev, but it would have been better titled Without Stalin and Gorbachev, about the 60s and 70s — a time when conscious interdependence between peoples and cultures became an objective reality.
In the 20th century Kazakhs managed to journey from listeners and spectators to great readers and great authors. But in recent decades the process has reversed, and now book culture has flattened into a cracked clay desert. Instead of Homo sapiens we have begun to cultivate Homo erectus, climbing the peaks of political power.
Such are the results of independence.
A.V.: I’ve been reflecting on critiques of Soviet modernization — its impact on land and on Central Asian traditions — and yet in Kazakh literature I find very few mentions of the great tragedy of the 1930s famine (Asharshylyk). I understand that in Soviet times it was difficult to write about it. But after independence, did this theme appear in the reflections of the Kazakh intelligentsia?
O.S.: There’s the book by Valery Mikhailov, written and published, I think, in the late 1980s or early 1990s — the first book entirely devoted to this topic, or rather to one aspect of it: the terrible role of [Filipp] Goloshchyokin, Kazakhstan’s party leader at the time. But I wanted to speak to the Kazakh writers themselves, who did not speak out collectively about the tragedy of their people with the same fury as that one Mikhailov. Smagul Yelubaev’s A Lonely House in the Steppe comes close to the topic.
...As a young man, I began reconstructing the history of the Kazakhs for myself. I started with the recent past, searching for unknown pages. According to the 1926 census: “Kazakhs — the largest Turkic-speaking nationality of the Soviet Union — 6,200,000 people.” By 1939 only about 2 million remained. Those numbers froze my soul. Is there another people who paid such a price for the “happiness” of being called a minority? What sheep-like submissiveness must one possess to allow this to be done to oneself!...
The entire steppe was covered with the bodies of those dead from hunger, while the Kazakh newspapers of that time choked on poems about the dawn of the bright future rising over the awakened land. The stigma of meekness, ingratiating, cowardly silence is burned onto the forehead of our writing, which it would be a sin even to call literature. The strong were destroyed; the weak multiplied. Their submissiveness provoked new waves of violence.
But neither modern scholars nor politicians have understood that lesson. Extensive pastoralism continued to remain the leading national sector of the economy and still does. We still have not passed through the stage of active agriculture.
A nation cannot consist only of herders and office workers. At best that is an ethnos. A modern nation is a people with a developed class structure that replaces clan-tribal structures.
After 1991, we did not create processing industries, places where a working class is formed. All enterprises were destroyed. Without a working class there is no nation, only a nationality. The policy of “sell, receive a percentage” continues. It is a miserable and dangerous economy that could lead to another “30s.” And this must be spoken about honestly.
And so, having passed through a 20th century broken by revolutions, wars, famine, repression, we enter a bewildered 21st, whose first 30 years have already been lost.
A.V.: On Feb. 24, 2025, the Council of Teips of Ingushetia published an address to the Kazakh people, marking the 81st anniversary of the deportation of Chechens and Ingush to Kazakhstan. The council leader said: “I remember everything! The Kazakhs treated us like brothers. And today we send a fraternal greeting to the Kazakh people. Thank you! Remember at least one man, Olzhas Suleimenov, who even back then wrote about the Chechens and Ingush... May Allah grant you health, and may Kazakhstan prosper!” Does this mean that in Soviet times you raised these themes? Did you speak about Stalinist repressions and deportations in your works?
O.S.: When I was eight years old, I first saw Chechens, Ingush, Karachays in Kazakhstan. Peoples whose homeland had been taken away were walking through our streets.
When we filmed Land of the Fathers (1966) with Shaken Aimanov, we wanted, for the first time in Soviet cinema, to show scenes of the deportation of North Caucasian peoples. We fought for it as hard as we could; censorship did not allow it. Only scraps of that storyline remained, featuring an old Chechen man on the roof of a train car returning home to die.
After I was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, I proposed and achieved the adoption of several necessary laws. Among them: the Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples.
When I put forward this proposal, a jurist stood up in the hall and said: “What you propose is legally void. One can rehabilitate a single individual, but not entire peoples!”
I answered: “So entire peoples can be repressed but not rehabilitated? History repeats itself senselessly if its lessons are not absorbed. We must finally publish a ‘white’ or rather ‘black’ book of Stalinist lawlessness with data on all republics. I pass all telegrams and letters to the Supreme Soviet commission, where I am ready to give a report. And I call on my compatriots — the people of Kazakhstan who have endured everything — to believe that justice is possible if we preserve restraint and understand the value of our common interests. So much pain has accumulated in the country, such a powerful resonance! There is not a single people without bleeding wounds in its [collective] consciousness. In many of our hands there are screaming appeals from the Meskhetian Turks, Crimean Tatars, Abkhazians, Ingush, Chechens, Gagauz...”
The law was passed. We need to tell such stories to today’s deputies.
A.V.: Could you tell us about one of your most memorable trips abroad?
O.S.: In 1968 I discovered India for the first time. The Foreign Commission worked in the USSR Writers’ Union and translators there accompanied writers around the world. The specialist on India was Mirra Salganik. One day she approached me and proposed a trip to India. I agreed. Rimma Kazakova joined us.
When we arrived in Delhi, local journalists immediately surrounded us and began photographing. Soon the Times of India published our joint photo with Rimma on the front page, with the headline: “Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov arrives in India with his wife, Rimma.”
During those days we were discovering India. It is, of course, a land of striking contrasts. There was more cheerful poverty than visible wealth. But I would not call India an unhappy country.
We traveled to many places: west, east, and south. In the south we were accompanied by the Indian poet Chatterjee.1 In early April we visited Gandhi’s tomb. He was struck by five bullets: five bloody spots on a white shirt, five bloody circles.
I asked Chatterjee: “Who shot Gandhi?” He waved it off: “Some bastard.” That’s how Mirra translated his words.
That same day, in America, violence occurred: Martin Luther King, the leader of the Black movement, was killed. On television they showed millions of people marching in his funeral procession. India considered him Gandhian. He truly was! Otherwise, he would have turned those crowds against the white population and sparked a civil war. Everyone understood that. India honored him with a minute of silence. We all participated. Five hundred million minutes of silence. Exactly one millennium. For every shot fired by “some bastard” — centuries of silence.
Later I wrote the poem “A Minute of Silence at the Edge of the World,” which I read from many platforms around the world.
I traveled to India another seven times. I saw how the country changed. Desperate poverty gradually receded. Indira Gandhi, and later her son, made great efforts and they, too, were killed. Such was India’s path into the community of independent states. The country grew not only in population; later it acquired nuclear weapons, gradually moving away from the image I captured in 1968.
And the world also changed after Martin Luther King’s death. Forty years later a Black president entered the White House for the first time.
But this hardly soothed or healed all historical traumas, hardly smoothed all contradictions laid down by America’s Founding Fathers. In the U.S., Black people are 15-20% [sic] of the population but active, combative percentages. The movement Black Lives Matter is remembered worldwide: when Black protesters placed white people, not only police officers but civilians, on their knees. I think contradictions, multiplied by the exploitation of memories of real historical traumas, will only intensify.
The formula of the path into the future can help all of us, not only Americans, but all humanity: “from centuries of dependence, through a period of independence, toward the epoch of conscious interdependence.”
The end of the world, which incompetent politicians are bringing closer, does not suit us, the people living on this Earth. No people, no humanity deserves such an end. We deserve years and centuries of long, creative life.
I wish humanity to follow this path — toward the epoch of conscious interdependence. And it will surely come...
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We have not been able to find a first name for the poet referenced here.
A.M. Candidate in Regional Studies—REECA
