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Although much attention has been paid to national construction in Soviet and post- Soviet Central Asia, the field of literary and cultural analysis of the origins of current national symbols and texts in this region is yet not fully acknowledged and discovered. This article tries to shed light onto the literary construction of an ethnic identity and its historical background in Soviet Kazakhstan and its influence on the post-Soviet ideology in this multicultural country. In doing so it investigates the ways and the time when most of the important historical epics were "re-written," brought back by the Kazakh writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century. The importance of investigating this period and this phenomenon is twofold. First, it provides further contribution to the Soviet creation of binary approaches to the formation of ethnic identities and the continuous attack on local nationalisms. Following the arguments of some scholars in the field (e.g. [Adams, Laura. 1999. "Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan's National Culture." European Journal of Cultural Studies 2; Dave, Bhavna. 2007. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity and Power. London: Routledge]) this asserts that the local cultural elites found ways of bargaining and re-structuring such identity contributing to its "localization" through the usage of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian historical symbols. In a way, they were able to construct their own "imagined community" and resistance to the past and existing (according to them) colonialism within the given framework of Kazakh- Soviet literature. Secondly, the historicity that became a leitmotif of most important literary works and later on a main focus of national ideology in post-Soviet Kazakhstan must be viewed not just as an instrument of legitimation in this post- colonial state but also as a strong continuity of cultural and ethnic identity lines. The very fact that a detailed and continued genealogy of Kazakh medieval tribes and rulers was the main focus of major works by such famous Kazakh writers as Mukhtar Auezov or Ilyas Yessenberlin demonstrates the importance of the "continuity" and kinship and family lines for Kazakhs. The paper raises the questions of how national and elitist these movements were before the independence and how the further post-independent projects of using and re-establishing these links and continuity formed more questions than answers for the nation-builders in independent Kazakhstan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of this article, some consequences of telling truth about history in the Soviet Union and Russia are briefly described: crises of history teaching in schools, and ongoing ‘‘history wars’’ with the neighboring countries that have regained independence. In both cases, the problem is how to use historical knowledge in constructing identity narratives when the knowledge is contradictory. In this context, some issues analyzed in Carretero and Kriger’s and Tileagã’s work are discussed. Carretero and Kriger (2011) demonstrate that students in Argentina are largely unable to present a logically coherent story of the origins of their country. The difficulties the students experienced were related to the fact that the task they had to solve was highly artificial. They had to offer a high-level rational analysis of ideological texts which is not needed for the successful functioning of these texts. Tileagã’s (2011) paper is about how a former secret informer of the KGB-like organization in Communist Romania copes with the fact that his disgusting secret becomes public. In the coping process, the person makes use not only of his own memory, but also of his diaries as well as of the Securitate documents in the archives. All the three sources provide tools for reshaping identity and self-esteem, which can never be totally negative. Elaborating a typology of statements that people use in situations like this one would present further interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]