The permanent forum "Historical and cultural heritage of the peoples of Eurasia" has been established in Moscow. The first scientific session was held at the Russian Academy of Sciences in late November. The conference on the ethnogenesis, history, language and culture of the Karachai-Balkar people was attended by 300 scientists from 16 countries, who tried to confront increasing attempts to falsify the historical past of the peoples of Russia, their relationships with each other, undermining their ideological and moral values, as well as the usage of well-known names of Russian and foreign scientists to promote nationalistic and chauvinistic views on history, culture and the lives of the peoples.
The Karachai and Balkars are so close in their origin, language, material and spiritual culture, that they are often treated as a single nation. However, the history of the Karachai-Balkar people is not fully understood, and the number of remaining questions is still great. The conference, along with the history and culture of Karachai-Balkar people, was devoted to the problems of ethnogenesis, area of habitation, the social and political history, anthropology of the ancient Turkic peoples, the genesis of their languages and their contribution to the formation of the historical and ethnographic aspect of the political and legal systems of the Eurasian continent.
Ethnologists, linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians and folklorists have discussed the history, culture and the origin of the people living not only in Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria, but also in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Syria.
Doctor Murat Karaketov explains that "anthropologically, the Karachay-Balkar Caucasians are the Caucasian type. The Turkic and Iranian peoples are very diverse in their physical type, but they normally differ from the Caucasian version of it. In addition, the North Caucasian peoples speak the languages of the North Caucasian language family, and the Karachai and Balkars are included in the Kipchak group of Turkic languages along with languages of the earlier formation, including Bulgarian."
According to the historian, writing in many Caucasian peoples appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought during the Soviet era, and the problem is the definition of the beginning of the written tradition in Karachay-Balkaria, as well as all the way from Dagestan to Adygea. Linguists continue to say that these people have found writing "thanks to the policy of the party and the government," and hundreds of epistolary writing documented genealogical traditions, religious and didactic works, translations of the classics of world literature were not taken into account. "Such a pernicious tradition should be revised, because it was founded not on a scientific, but on an ideological basis, which dates back to 1920," Karaketov says.
Despite the presence of a significant amount of information, allowing a more or less complete picture of the ethnogenesis and linguistic history of the Karachay-Balkar people, from the physical and anthropological point of view, this ethnic group is still underexplored. "In the field of anthropology, the Karachai and Balkars have been studied only on the example of 10 skulls of the Late Middle Ages. There is no comparison between the preserved skulls and no comprehensive studies on the origin of the Caucasian anthropological type, which includes both the Karachai and Balkars," Murat Karaketov underlines.
However, the chairman of the Russian Congress of the Peoples of the Caucasus, Alia Totorkulova, is pleased by the very fact that these problems are being discussed. "Never in the history of Karachai-Balkar people such a representative international forum has been held. There are few forums both in the Caucasus and in Russia in general that are attended by experts from several dozen countries. The previous similar session was held in 1959 and after that there were no scientific forums devoted to the Karachai and Balkarian people. The academic science, being conservative, was still based on the results of the 1959 session. But since then 55 years have passed and historical science is much more advanced. We were going to discuss those issues and to formulate the main achievements."
Zaur Hasanov from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan said that the forum "is important not only for the Karachay-Balkar people, but also in general for many peoples of the Caucasus, both Northern and Southern. Tragically, the long history of the many nations of the Caucasus suffered from governmental pressure, particularly in the Soviet period. But today we face new opportunities for discussions, new opinions, new ideas, and we must use these opportunities."
A member of the Writers' Union of Russia, Doctor Vladimir Zakharov, said that such a conference was to be held for a long time. "It finally took place under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Ethnology, the Institute of Humanitarian Studies of the North Caucasus, the Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia Universities. The situation surrounding the Karachai-Balkar people is not easy. The people suffered during the Second World War. The people were deported and for a long time they were far away, in exile. The old men, who have been forced to leave their native land, have preserved their language. When we returned, it was possible to begin the study not only of the language but also the history," he said.
