Warm Greetings to Working Women and Female Laborers!
Stalin’s Greetings on International Women’s Day
Soviet poster /From open sources
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a great wave of awakening surged through Kazakh intellectuals, sparking a passionate quest for knowledge. This outpouring of intellectual zeal led to an explosion of new magazines and newspapers being published in Kazakh, heralding the dawn of a new era in sharing culture.
However, what these intellectuals wrote went beyond only spreading knowledge. Soon, a variety of publications emerged, covering topics like business, society, politics, art, and humor. Qalam invites you to explore snippets from Kazakh publishing culture and history, offering a glimpse into the important issues of the past.
The year 1926 marked the adoption of a new criminal code in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which included a separate chapter titled ‘Crimes Representing Vestiges of Tribal Life’. Article 199 of this chapter stipulated punishment for bigamy or polygamy in the form of corrective labor for up to one year or a fine of up to 1,000 rubles, although the law did not apply to cohabitation in marriages concluded before its enactment.
In the same year, Joseph Stalin himself congratulated women workers and laboring women in the Kazakh language on the front page of the newspaper Enbekshi Qazaq (№ 52):
Warm greetings to the women workers and laboring women of the entire world, uniting into one labor family around the socialist proletariat. I wish them complete success:
1. in strengthening international ties between workers of all countries and securing the victory of the proletarian revolution;
2. in liberating the backward strata of laboring women from the spiritual and economic bondage of the bourgeoisie;
3. in uniting peasant women around the proletariat—the leader of the revolution and the director of socialist construction;
4. in transforming the two unequal parts of the oppressed masses into a single army of fighters for the elimination of all inequality, for the abolition of all oppression, for the victory of the proletariat, for the building of a new socialist society in our country.
Long live International Communist Women's Day!
I. Stalin
«Еңбекші қазақ»/From open sources
The Enbekshi Qazaq was a regional Kazakh-language paper launched in 1921 by the regional committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. Since then, the newspaper has changed its name several times, from Sotsialdy Qazaqstan (Social Kazakhstan) to Sotsialistik Qazaqstan (Socialist Kazakhstan). It is currently published under the name Egemen Qazaqstan (Sovereign Kazakhstan).