Forty Years On: Survivors Recall the June Days

TALAS — Forty years ago this morning, a soldier at a vehicle checkpoint on the road into Talas fired at a cart that had not stopped and killed the horse of an elderly widow on her way to the collective-farm market. By 18 June, after troops had entered the city under martial law, the June days were over. For more than thirty years the Soviet press called them "hooligan disorders" and the official histories of the republic left them out.

Today a bronze statue of a riderless horse will be unveiled near the site of the old market, in keeping with the Fallen Rider tradition,.

Joldoshbek Mamasaliev was eighteen and an apprentice fitter at the railway maintenance yard. On 15 June he marched with the yard's workers to the city soviet building. "We went to ask for the soldier to be tried," he said. "By night it was something else, and I am not proud of all of it." Three weeks later he was arrested. He was one of more than a thousand Iradis detained that summer, and he spent four years in a labor camp.

Nina Gorbunova, whose family lived in one of the new apartment blocks near the boulevard, remembers the other side of those nights. Crowds attacked Russian-owned shops, flats and cars. Her family hid for two days in the home of an Iradi neighbor. "People ask me which side I was on," she said. "I was on the side of the woman who hid us." The internal security files opened after 1992 list 14 dead. Researchers comparing them with church burial registers say the true figure was higher.