Beimbet Maylin

In 1933-1936, the famous Kazakh poet, prose writer, playwright Beimbet Maylin published a four-volume collection of his works. This edition proved fatal to him. Sabit Mukanov, in connection with this four-volume edition, published an article “On the mistakes of the writer B. Mailin” in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda. The chairman of the board of the writers’ union accused Mailin of reprinting “counter-revolutionary nonsense.”

The four-volume edition included the play “Aul School”, written in 1925 and, as Mukanov wrote, praising Trotsky’s “enemy of the people, agent of Japanese-German fascism, executioner” Trotsky.

In this article, Sabit Mukanov subjected other Mailin’s works of the past to a “class” analysis. In 1937, Mailin was arrested. On November 10, 1938, he was shot by order of the NKVD troika. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.