On this date in 1938, Kyrgyz intellectual and statesman Kasym Tynystanov was executed during Stalin’s Great Purge.

Kasym Tynystanov, on modern Kyrgyzstan’s 10-som bill.

Born in tsarist Russia’s mountainous frontier with Qing China, Tynystanov (English Wikipedia entry | Russian | Kyrgyz) was blessed by the exertions of his father and a local mullah with literacy — a gift shared by only about one in 40 of his countrymen.

He graduated from the Kazakh-Kyrgyz Institute of Education in Tashkent in 1924 and went on to a career in letters — literal letters, as he’s credited with being the first to regularize the Kyrgyz tongue in Latin characters. He would publish several works on the Kyrgyz language; he also compiled the oral folklore of his people, and wrote verse of his own.

Tynystanov served as People’s Commissariat of Education and chaired the language and literature organ of the Kyrgyz Research Institute of Culture.

In 1938 he received Stalinism’s customary reward for the conscientious public servant and was accused as a counterrevolutionary nationalist and shot. The Soviet Union officially rehabilitated him in the post-Stalin era.

On this day..

• 1837: Luis Candelas, urban bandit
• 1941: Shura Chekalin, Hero of the Soviet Union
• 1717: Three spared en route to Tyburn, thanks to Jack Ketch's debts
• 1922: Ali Kemal
• 1863: James Murphy, after a reunion
• 1964: Vuyisile Mini, Zinakile Mkaba and Wilson Khayingo
• 1918: Roman Malinovsky, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy
• 1944: Boy Ecury, Aruban Dutch Resistance hero
• 1600: Ishida Mitsunari, Konishi Yukinaga and Ankokuji Ekei for the Tokugawa Shogunate
• 1793: Philippe Egalite, hoisted on his own petard
• 2003: Four for the oil of Chad
• 1730: Hans Hermann von Katte, Frederick the Great's lover
• 1914: Carl Hans Lody