Mankurts are unthinking slaves in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. After the novel, in the Soviet Union the word has become the reference to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship.[1] This meaning was retained in Russia and many other post-Soviet states.
According to Aitmatov's fictional legend, mankurts were prisoners of war who were turned into non-autonomous docile servants by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun. These skins dried tight, like a steel band, causing brain damage and figurative zombification. Mankurts did not recognise their name, family, or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being".[2] In Aitmatov's novel, a young man turned into a mankurt kills his mother when she attempts to rescue him from captivity.
Aitmatov stated that he did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself.[3]
In the later years of the Soviet Union mankurt entered everyday speech as a metaphor for the Soviet people affected by the distortions and omissions in the history by the official teachings.[4]
In the figurative sense, the word "mankurt" refers to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship. In this sense, it has become a term in common parlance[1] and journalism.[5] In Russian, there have appeared neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya (meaning "mankurtization"), and demankurtizatsiya (meaning "demankurtization").[6] In some former Soviet republics, the term has come to represent those non-Russians who have lost their ethnic heritage by the effects of the Soviet system.[7]
In 1990, the film Mankurt was released in the Soviet Union.[8] Written by Mariya Urmadova, the film is based on one narrative strand from Aitmatov's novel.[9] [10]