“Кazakh people should bow low to her”: Irina Viktorovna Erofeeva (1953 – 2020)

Irina Erofeeva won a universal recognition as the best expert in the political history of Kazakhstan of late 15th – early 19th centuries. The President of Kazakhstan responded to her death with a telegram of condolences. Kazakh journalists called her a female batyr, whom Kazakhs should bow deeply to. Her own books and her perfectly adjusted, commented and supplied with notes and indexes publications of sources on the history of Kazakhs, appeared to become in a great demand at the time when the former Soviet Kazakhstan has been transforming itself into an independent state. What is most impressive, in none of her oeuvres did she deviate from the principle of verifying her conclusions with a critically tested empirical evidence. In the focus of her interest were also the history of Russians and Germans in Kazakhstan and the monuments of Buddhism dating back to the Dzungarian expansion in the Kazakh steppe. She became one of the initiators of a comprehensive study on the remnants of the Buddhist monastery Ablai-Hit and one of the authors for a corresponding collective monograph. Yet, the masterpiece of her scholarly career is two-volume edition of the letters of the Kazakh ruling elite in the period from year 1675 to year 1821. She came up with the very idea of a unique collection that absorbed 811 messages, of which four-fifths were never published; wrote biographies of the authors of the letters and several research articles for the supplement; prepared the introduction and comments; edited 1,800 pages, and, found generous sponsors and sophisticated publishers.