Tokash Bokin

Born Apr. 25 (May 7), 1890; died Sept. 19, 1918. Participant in the struggle for Soviet power in Kazakhstan. Born into a nomad family in Vernyi District, Semirech’e Region.

Bokin studied at the secondary school in the city of Vernyi (Alma-Ata) from 1898 to 1906 and worked as a translator from 1906 to 1914. Between 1914 and 1916 he lived and worked in St. Petersburg, where he joined the revolutionary movement without joining a party. In 1916 he was an active participant in the Kazakhs’ national liberation uprising in Semirech’e. Arrested, he was freed by the February Revolution of 1917. In March 1918, Bokin was elected a member of the first Semirech’e revolutionary committee and deputy commissar of the commissariat for the regulation of relations between Russians and natives in Semirech’e Oblast. As an agent of the oblast executive committee, he carried out the requisition of cattle from the rich and the redistribution to the poor. Bokin, who fought against the bourgeois nationalist organization of Alasharov, was villainously murdered by members of the Alashorda organization and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.