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Zh.S.Yelyubayev Ж.С.Елюбаев
Decades Later, We Are Saying a Thankyou to You
I would like to devote this brief essay to the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Yerzhan Kenzhegariev. Yerzhan Aga was a prominent personality in Atyrau Oblast and he was well known among the older generation of Kazakh lawyers and in the telecommunications community in this country. I am not one of those lucky enough to have known Yerzhan Aga personally in his own time. Nor could I have known him given that, when he lived and worked in Kazakhstan, I lived and studied in Russia. Besides, our difference in age could not have helped us make our acquaintance. However, having read once the papers describing his colorful, but unfortunately short-lived life, I felt it was my moral duty to devote the following words to the memory of this admirable person. One further reason why I decided to write this essay was the fact that Yerzhan Aga spent a large part of his adult life serving the cause of administration of justice and, what is even more significant, did that during the harshest war-time period in the life of the Soviet Union, our once-common great country that, alas, is no longer to be found on the world’s map. I have a special kind of reverence for members of the legal profession and a special kind of respect and deference, particularly, to the members of the older generation judiciary, those honest and unbiased, courageous and independent people. This, because, in my own time, as a younger person I spent some of my best years working in the judiciary field. Yerzhan Aga was born into an ordinary Kazakh family of the Sherkesh Clan in Village Twenty-Four, Sokolovsky District, Guriev County in 1906, far from the major centers of the vast Russian empire embroiled, as it was at the time, in revolutionary turmoil. He grew up learning about the world around him, while the country, into which he was born, was engulfed in the revolutionary flames destroying forever a large segment of Russian history connected with the rule of the Romanov dynasty. A new history was beginning in the life of Yerzhan Aga, the history of a nascent new country, which he would serve for the rest of his life. He received good school education and went on to attend co-operative training courses, signalmen’s courses, Moscow Telecommunications Academy and, later, Almaty Law School. Yerzhan Aga grew up and matured together with the country as a whole, typically he joined the Young Communist League and, later, the Communist Party. He was a small part of the larger state organism, directly participating in all of the major political and social events that were part of his own life, too. He served with honor his Motherland, his people, and society, and, honestly and unselfishly, he performed his duty in all of the government and public positions, to which he was appointed or to which he was elected. He raised his children believing in his own better future and in the brighter future for his own children and for his grandchildren. Yerzhan Aga’s generation were special kind of people, such as my own parents, too, a generation of men courageous, devoted, and ready for sacrifices for the greater common good. These people put the interests of the State and those of society before their own personal interests. Still, they were able to raise the fine present generation of people who, today, work for the good of a different kind of country and different society, something that might be what Yerzhan Aga also dreamed of and yet could hardly imagine that his children and grandchildren would once live in a sovereign and independent Kazakhstan. Yerzhan Aga started his working life as a manual worker and then worked as statistician at a statistics bureau from 1922. He then went on to acquire the quite rare, at the time, trade of a Morse code operator at a district postal and telegraph office. Today, the younger generation who know all about computer programs and email may not have heard at all about people in the past communicating through the Morse code. Well, Yerzhan Aga was one of the first people in the vast Kazakh steppes to have mastered that marvel of the then-latest in telecommunications technology and then worked in that sector of economy for many years to come. He then went on to work as a deputy director, and then director, of a municipal telecommunications department. He was then in due time appointed Deputy Director, Uralsk Oblast City Telecommunications Department; and then Director, Tengiz and Mangistau District Telecommunications Departments. For some time, he served as Director of the Guriev City Telegraph Office (now in Atyrau). During the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), Yerzhan Aga’s life took a sharp turn when he was called upon to serve the cause of administration of justice. From 1941 through 1944, he served as a Member of the Guriev Oblast Court and then, for eleven years, as Deputy President of the Guriev Oblast Court. In those years of great war-time hardship, for the country and the people as a whole, though far from the battlefield, Yerzhan Aga and his fellow-judges helped forge the great victory in the rear helping to ensure law and order, justice, and the rule of law in the land. After working in the judiciary line, Yerzhan Aga returned to his much-loved telecommunications trade and, for the next decade or so, he worked as the Director of the Zhylyoi District Postal Office. After that, until his retirement, he worked as an attorney and was a Member of the Guriev Oblast Bar Association. When the time finally came for him to retire, Yerzhan Aga was working as a lawyer, while the telecommunications industry remained his first love. His way was the great way of a worker, state official, and public figure. He raised his children and helped them gain good education, forever remaining in the memory of his people as a Man with a capital M and a bearer of high moral standards. According to his son Serik, himself a prominent Kazakh petroleum geologist, his father was «intolerant of lies or falsehoods» and «taught them to recognize the irrelevance of empty words or rash judgments and solutions». Serik Kenzhegariev further remembers that «conscience and moral rectitude had always been the cornerstone of Yerzhan Aga’s life and he succeeded in imbuing his children and grandchildren with the notion of the supreme value of humanity». I am convinced that the name of this Man with a capital M will forever remain in the memory of his descendants who will forever be proud of what he had stood for. He will remain to be held up as an example and will have a pride of place in the ranks of the great and the prominent among the renowned Western Kazakhstan Sherkesh Clan. He will forever be warmly remembered in the Kazakh lawyering and telecommunications communities that today work, just as he once did, for the good of the Motherland. The memory of people like Yerzhan Aga never fades because his own grateful children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have followed in his path.
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