Abstract

            The educational policy of the tsarist administration in the Kazakh lands developed in parallel with the economic and political expansion carried out over the centuries. In this regard, the Semipalatinsk Teachers’ Seminary, established at the beginning of the twentieth century, aimed to train professional teaching staff in the region who would implement the general imperial idea. However, the Kazakh youth who entered the seminary, having received education, developed into patriotic citizens capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood and understanding the interests of their country.

            The purpose of the article is to determine the nature of the activities of the Semipalatinsk Teachers’ Seminary, one of the first secondary educational institutions opened on Kazakh soil, to identify its goals and objectives, to analyze the activities and pedagogical legacy of the generation of Alash-oriented teachers who studied there, and to show the importance of transmitting their historical experience to today’s youth through continuity.

            Based on new archival documents, the article analyzes the student years of these pedagogical figures at the seminary in 1903–1920, as well as their subsequent activities related to the Alash movement in the 1920s–1930s. For the first time, the article provides a scientific and theoretical analysis, from the perspective of historical science, of the activities of a number of Alash-oriented teacher-graduates of the Semipalatinsk Teachers’ Seminary.

            The documents from secret archival collections presented in the twelve-volume collection The Alashorda Case, published in recent years, made it possible to reveal the socio-political activities of seminary graduates that had not previously been introduced into scholarly circulation. In particular, the article analyzes the personal case materials of Kasymkhan Bekenayev, a graduate of the seminary in 1910–1914, related to the “Tarbagatai case.” In addition, the article uses documents that reveal new historical portraits of Biakhmet Sarsenov, who studied at the seminary in 1905–1909, Zhusupbek Aimautov, who studied there in 1914–1919, and Mukhtar Auezov, who studied there in 1915–1920. The new documentary evidence increases the scientific novelty and value of the article. The article also demonstrates the importance and specific features of teaching the experience of the above-mentioned figures at school.