Zhumabay Shayakhmetov

Who was Zhumabay Shayakhmetov?

Zhumabay Shayakhmetovich Shayakhmetov, was a Kazakh Soviet Communist political figure. From 1946 through 1954, he was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR.

He was born to a poor peasant family in a small village in Borisov County, which in 1924 was incorporated as one of the nine rural areas in the Sherbakulsky District of the Omsk Oblast. In 1915, he went to the two-year Kazakh-Russian school in what is now the Poltava Raion, graduating in 1917. He attended the Narimanov Institute in Moscow, but did not complete his first year. In 1919, he got a job as a school teacher in a rural school, but the school closed due to the civil war and he returned to his home.

From 1919 to 1926, Shayakhmetov was the secretary of the Turkoman Rural District executive committee of the GPU. By 1923, he was already a first-rate agent, solving crimes in the Cherlaksky District, Omsk Oblast. From 1926 to 1928, Shayakhmetov taught office management as the political instructor in a rural organization called "Koschi" in the Petropavl Okrug. From 1928 to 1938, he worked for the NKVD, first as Deputy Department Chief for the North Kazakhstan Oblast, then as the Deputy Department Chief for the Alma Ata Oblast.