(First published on IU Press’s blog in November 2018)

Shortly after my book Have the Mountains Fallen?  was published in 2018, I got some feedback at a book party in Washington, DC.  The non-fiction book tells a Cold War story featuring Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov and journalist and exile Azamat Altay, who both paid a high price fighting for freedom against Soviet totalitarianism. A Kyrgyz journalist said that I had written the country’s history that no Kyrgyz could write. With her comment, I believe the journalist meant that Kyrgyz historians and journalists weren’t ready or capable to write their young country’s history. Another woman quoted to me a Russian saying that there is no prophet in one’s own country, meaning it often falls to an outsider to reveal the truth. Both Kyrgyz women, who had traveled widely and connected with democratic values, represented a new generation that came of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of independent Kyrgyzstan in 1991.

Medetkhan Sherimkulov, however, was a different story. Born in 1939 in Soviet Kirgizia, he had been a true believer in the Soviet system. As secretary of ideology of the Kyrgyz Communist Party, his job had been to make sure that communist ideology was followed in all that was printed, discussed and debated in society. He wasn’t the kind of person who’d I expect to hail my book. 

Jeff Lilley with Medetkhan Sherimkulov in May 2018 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

The first time I met Sherimkulov in 2016 I had gotten a taste of his approach: as we downed eight shots of vodka over dinner, the 79-year old Sherimkulov eyed me cautiously to see if I could handle my liquor. He was taking my measure. 

I invited him to my book talk in Kyrgyzstan in May 2018. After my talk, instead of asking a question, he walked to the front of the room and faced the audience. “I lived in both worlds: Soviet and post-Soviet,” he said. He talked about his complicated relationship with the writer Aitmatov, whose cleverly crafted works skewering communism no doubt had created headaches for Sherimkulov, but also about their mutual respect.

 And then, as if shedding a burden, Sherimkulov addressed the terrible secret of 20^th century Kyrgyzstan – the secret execution in 1938 of the Kyrgyz elite by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s henchmen. The mass grave holding the remains of 137 people had been excavated in 1991, more than 50 years after the victims’ families had last heard from them. One of those victims was Torekul Aitmatov, Chingiz’s father, who had been arrested in August 1937. 

 At the time of the excavation in 1991, Soviet society was changing rapidly under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost or openness. Because of his high position in Soviet Kyrgyzia, Sherimkulov played an important role in breaking the silence about the 1937 murders. 

Standing in front of the room, Sherimkulov recalled being called in by the Kyrgyz KGB chief in the summer of 1991 to deliver the news of the discovery of the mass grave to the Aitmatov family. He described the moment when they told the family that their father’s remains had been found at the bottom of the mass grave. 

At this point, the aging ideological secretary started to speak haltingly. Then he stopped altogether and asked for a tissue. He apologized, and then he dabbed his eyes. Gone was any wariness, parsing of words or attempt to control. Sherimkulov’s tears were a sign that the Kyrgyz people are coming to terms with their history.