Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific. While Bishkek remained their temporary home, the theater company conducted shows in Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. The theater was evacuated to Bishkek until it returned to Europe after the war ended. Kyrgyzstan was also host to the Jewish Theater Company of Warsaw, which included the renowned actress Ida Kaminska. In future decades, the majority of these European Jewish refugees would immigrate to the newly created state of Israel. A synagogue was opened in Bishkek in 1941 to accommodate the refugees and they were put to work like the rest of the Kyrgyz population, working in agriculture to supply food to the Red Army. This included an estimated 45,000 Jews of varying nationalities fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe and the Nazi-occupied European regions of the Soviet Union. The Kyrgyz cities not only became indispensable to the Soviet war effort due to their industrial output they remain the backbone of Kyrgyz industry to this day, with Bishkek in particular developing an extensive machine-building and metalwork industry.Ĭontinued hostilities on the frontline also resulted in thousands of refugees seeking safer pastures, fleeing the Soviet Union’s embattled western regions. Dozens of key factories and military-related industrial plants were moved to the Kyrgyz cities of Bishkek (named Frunze from 1926 to 1991) and Tokmak after being evacuated from regions threatened by the advancing Germans. ![]() It was a time of enormous economic and social change for the country, which underwent a mini industrial revolution of sorts to accommodate the demands of the Soviet war effort. Owing to its comparatively isolated geographical position - a safe distance from the German front - Kyrgyzstan was also chosen by the Soviet authorities as the ideal location to support the USSR’s industrial base during the war years. The number of deaths was considerable, because local people used to operating in a nomadic or semi-nomadic economy were often forcefully deprived of their livestock. Thousands of Kyrgyz people starved to death as a result of the subsequent famine. ![]() The early war years also saw unsustainable levels of grain and livestock requisition. While Soviet propaganda would later tell an overarching war story of heroic voluntary recruitment, in reality most Kyrgyz men could only be drafted via brute force and intimidation. ![]() In the first few years of the war, Kyrgyz men had to be coerced into the Soviet army by draft earlier, in 1916, there had been an anti-Russian revolt among Kyrgyz in response to World War I conscription. Such common ground in Kyrgyzstan was not easy to establish, however. In the years following the war’s end, the Soviet propaganda machine painted a picture of common patriotism and heroism across its territory, creating grounds for identifying with the wider Soviet state and its leadership. By the time the war ended, it had claimed the lives of 70,000 Kyrgyz soldiers and 50,000 civilians – roughly 8 percent of the entire local population. Tucked away in the mountains of Central Asia, located 3,000 kilometers southeast of Moscow, the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic – modern-day Kyrgyzstan - was just one of the many Soviet republics that contributed to the war effort. While the better-known battles of the Great Patriotic War, including the Battle of Stalingrad and the Siege of Leningrad, took place in Russia’s western sphere, the tragedy of war and the scale of its devastation was undoubtedly felt all over the vast Soviet Union. Despite emerging victorious in their fight over Nazi Germany and Hitler’s fascist ideology, World War II ravaged the Soviet Union, claiming the lives of tens of millions of soldiers and civilians – 26 million by some estimates.
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