AKHMETOV, Adil (#296)

Alan Pollock’s Rough Notes:

A work in progress – the fuller biographies will emerge in due course: please sign up to the Newsletter (bottom of the page) and we’ll let you know when we’ve done more justice in writing up our extraordinary signatories.

His Excellency Dr Adil AKHMETOV and in 2001 KAZAKH Ambassador to the Court of St James, through his particular family circumstances, truly represents the massive contribution to final victory and sacrifice of military and civilian lives of those other NON-RUSSIAN SOVIET REPUBLICS but here in particular that of KAZAKHSTAN. Adil was born in 1941 only six months before his father had to journey 200 miles on foot to enlist in Alma Ata for his training and was lost almost certainly at STALINGRAD.

Like so many families in the Soviet Union the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR took a savage toll of their relatives. 350,000 Kazakhs would not return from WW2 and approximately two million Kazakhs had been lost during Stalin’s collectivization and purges already even before Germany invaded. Adil speaks virtually a dozen languages, many related to Kazakh and thus feels close to many other of the ex-Soviet states. Because only one of his five relatives who went to war returned, he symbolises well those wider totals of SOVIET LIVES LOST, whether that true total amounted to 20, 26 or 29 MILLION PEOPLE who DIED.  Only Adil’s eldest uncle returned safely of those four brothers and it was he who helped bring him up, all four having been in the Soviet infantry. One uncle, wounded and weakened from his war service, would die on the return journey to his home and another relative, his much older cousin, would be killed as a pilot.