Eighty years after the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Central Asia are still reported missing. While their fate was a taboo topic during the Soviet era, it is now drawing renewed interest from younger generations. Thirty-five years after Central Asian states became independent, the memory of the “Great Patriotic War” is being questioned in the wake of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
On Victory Day, last May 9 in Almaty — the economic capital of Kazakhstan — 30,000 people marched to Panfilov Park to honor the memory of their ancestors who went to the front with the Red Army. Accompanied by children often dressed in Soviet military uniforms, families brought the “Immortal Regiment” march to a close, a parade where people carry portraits of grandfathers and great-grandfathers who went to war, whether they returned or not, all the way to the imposing memorial to the “Great Patriotic War.”
Some, like Assel Sorombayeva, have no photo of their veteran. The young woman does not carry the portrait of her own medal-covered ancestor, but rather a picture of her husband’s great-grandfather. He is among the 241,000 missing soldiers from Kazakhstan, whose place and circumstances of death remain unknown. “Vassili Ivanovich Vorobyov lived in Shymkent [a major city in southern Kazakhstan – Editor’s note],” explains Assel Sorombayeva. “He went to the front, but we’ve been unable to find out exactly where he was sent for training. Every year, for the past seven years, I’ve been regularly checking databases and portals dedicated to soldiers missing in the Great Patriotic War. That’s how I easily found information on my own great-grandfather and where he is buried. But my husband’s great-grandfather remains untraceable. There’s not even any information on his conscription,” she laments.
The fate of an estimated 78,000 missing soldiers from Kyrgyzstan, 158,000 from Uzbekistan, and 40,000 from Tajikistan remains unknown — eighty years after the war’s end. This historical vagueness haunts the collective memory of these former Soviet republics.
“I want our children to know and honor the memory of their great-great-grandfathers,” says Assel Sorombayeva at Panfilov Park in Almaty. The name refers to the legendary battalion of 28 Central Asians said to have fought heroically in the Battle of Moscow between 1941 and 1942, sacrificing their lives to save the Soviet capital from the fascist enemy.
An anecdote later proven false by historians — but one that memorials across Central Asia were nonetheless meant to commemorate, paying tribute to the courage of the 3.5 million soldiers from these five satellite republics of the USSR (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) who were enlisted in the Red Army against Nazi Germany.
And it serves as a reminder of the region’s crucial role in the war: though located thousands of kilometers from the front lines, Central Asia not only provided millions of men — over one million of whom were killed in action — but also between 20 and 30% of the horses used by the Soviet army. Not to mention that factories were relocated there to support industrial efforts, and millions of refugees from Nazi-occupied territories found shelter in these former socialist republics.
Repression and “Traitors”
Across the entire USSR, there were nearly 4 million soldiers listed as missing out of an estimated 26 million total war losses — men who were never found on the battlefield or after being repatriated to the Soviet Union [referring to those who had been prisoners of war or forced laborers under the Germans – Editor’s note].
“Among the displaced members of the Soviet army abroad, it’s important to know that only 18% of the 1.5 million soldiers repatriated from outside the USSR’s borders were actually allowed to return home,” notes Amine Laggoune, a historian and research associate at CERCEC (French Center for Russian, Caucasian, East European and Central Asican Studies), and a specialist in World War II and the repatriation of Soviets at the end of the war. “The majority were re-integrated into the Soviet army immediately upon their return, because the country desperately needed soldiers. Others — including those who had been POWs under the Germans — were isolated from society and sent to ‘special camps’ where, in addition to being used as forced labor, they underwent intense vetting procedures. Soviet leadership feared that uncontrolled repatriation might facilitate the infiltration of spies.”
More than a million Soviet citizens had served in German military units during the war across all occupied territories, and some had also come into contact with American forces at the time of liberation. “This issue of repression upon soldiers’ return is still very difficult to discuss in most former Soviet countries even today,” the historian emphasizes.
“Stalin used to say that we had no prisoners of war, only traitors,” explains Elmira Abylbek, the chair of Esimde, a research platform based in Bishkek that studies the memory and history of Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries. “He would cite the example of the ‘Turkestan Legion,’” she adds.
This “Turkestan Legion” refers to military units comprised of Turkic peoples from Central Asia who served in the Wehrmacht during World War II. These troops were made up of Red Army POWs, some of whom joined the Germans ideologically — while others enlisted simply to avoid starving to death in German POW camps (Editor’s note). The Nazi regime used them to support the war effort on western fronts, including in France and Italy.
“The fate of the missing has remained taboo ever since,” says Elmira Abylbek. “It had a huge impact on descendants, who didn’t try to investigate at the time, because no one wanted to discover they were related to a ‘traitor.’ But in recent years, people want to know what happened to their relatives.”
Few Investigations into the “Missing” in Central Asia — and Closed Archives
To date, relatively little research has been conducted into the hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers from Central Asia, especially compared with those from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia—countries where the fighting actually took place. But the fate of these ancestors is coming back into focus, especially in societies that are distancing themselves from their tsarist and Soviet colonial past — particularly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The victims of Asharshylyq, the great famine in Kazakhstan in the 1930s, or of Urkun, the 1916 uprising bloodily suppressed by the imperial Russian army in Kyrgyzstan, are now being revisited by Central Asian researchers. The scholars are no longer content with the blanket rehabilitation declared in 1990 by Mikhail Gorbachev of all victims of Soviet repression from 1920 to 1950.
In Kyrgyzstan — a mountainous republic in Central Asia with 8 million inhabitants — the Esimde platform connects citizens with researchers working on political prisoners and victims of repression, although lack of access to archives makes this work difficult.
“The KGB archives have remained closed in all former Soviet republics,” explains Amine Laggoune, “except in the Baltic states — and also in Ukraine. That’s why it’s so hard to locate the records of the missing outside those countries,” in cases where soldiers died after being repatriated.
To support research in Kazakhstan, Alia Saguimbayeva, a certified psychogenealogy consultant based in Astana, co-founded the organization Atamnym Amanaty in 2019. The name means “what you must fulfill” in Kazakh — a sort of promise made to the ancestors.
Working alongside a professor who has been conducting excavations for 50 years to recover the bodies of Kazakh fighters and give them proper burials, the foundation explores mass graves and archives to trace the missing from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and some Russian regions.
Atamnym Amanaty regularly requests access to the Russian Ministry of Defense archives in Podolsk, about 40 kilometers from Moscow, and also contacts the embassies of European countries where battles took place in a bid to locate individuals from Kazakhstan and Central Asia who were buried in mass graves or died in concentration camps.
Thanks to this long and painstaking effort — over months, sometimes years — the association has managed to locate the burial sites of 3,000 soldiers out of 9,000 cases submitted, and continues to fight to bring back the remains of Kazakh soldiers found buried abroad.
Misspelled Names
“As a Muslim population, it is important in our culture to be buried according to Islamic rites. For Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples of Central Asia, it is all the more sacred to be buried in our ancestral lands,” explains Alia Saguimbayeva, who laments the often difficult cooperation with Russian authorities. Delving into the archives also reveals the Russo-centric nature of Soviet administration: Turkic-sounding names in conscription documents are frequently misspelled, as are the names of the soldiers’ home villages.
“Most of our men didn’t understand Russian well. I think many didn’t even understand what they were fighting for,” says Alia Saguimbayeva. This calls into question the patriotic framing of Central Asian soldiers’ participation in the war — a framing the younger generation increasingly challenges, referring to the conflict as the “Second World War” rather than the “Great Patriotic War,” the term commonly used in Russia.
During commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the Third Reich’s surrender, however, the phrase “Great Patriotic War” was still used in the official speeches of Central Asian countries, though the symbols associated with it are now approached with more caution — especially in Kazakhstan. In an effort to distance itself from the Russian narrative of the war, ideologically reappropriated by the Kremlin (with the war in Ukraine portrayed as its continuation), Astana this year sought to replace the traditional orange-and-black Saint George ribbon — a military symbol now claimed by Russian nationalists — with ribbons bearing the yellow and blue colors of the Kazakh flag.
Emma Collet is a freelance journalist based in Kazakhstan. Specializing in Central Asia and the rest of the post-Soviet region, she is the editor-in-chief of Novastan, the only European media outlet dedicated to Central Asian news. She also covers the Eurasian region for French media outlets such as Le Monde, L'Express, and Ouest-France, as well as several English-language outlets.
