THE PARTICIPATION OF KAZAKHS IN THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENT IN FRANCE AND ITALY DURING THE WORLD WAR II: PROBLEM POSING

Abstract

The study of archival documents shedding light on the participation of Kazakhs in the fight against fascism, on the fate of people caught in fascist captivity, participating in the European Resistance Movement in France, Italy and other European countries, finding the burials of the deceased heroes, restoring the names of the heroes officially believed to be missing, is an important task for the formation and preservation of the historical memory of the Kazakh people, for the restoration of a real, true history of the Great Patriotic War. Comprehensive studies on the topic with extensive use of European archival materials have not been carried out, despite social and scientific demand. The sources of these new data should become foreign archival documents.
A complex, interdisciplinary investigation of problems of Kazakhs’ participation in the World War II based on new documents extracted from the archives of France, Belgium, Italy, Russia and Norway is a priority task of the international research project «Kazakhs in the World War II: new documents from foreign archives», in which scholars – historians from Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Italy, Israel take part.