Soviet religious policies in Kazakhstan during the Stalin period

The Kazakhs, who have preserved their traditions and religion for centuries, were subjected to assimilation policies against the Kazakhs during the Russian Tsarist and later Soviet rule. One of these policies was based on destroying the Kazakhs' devotion to religion. In order to make the Kazakh people adopt the atheist ideology of the Soviet Union, cruel practices were implemented against both the Muslim and Christian people in the region. They aimed to create a non-religious Kazakh society by eliminating the clergymen respected by the people from society, eliminating the religious orders that had influence over the people, closing down mosques and madrasahs, prohibiting visiting shrines, and establishing anti-religious institutions for all of these, and to turn them into a single nation. In our master's thesis titled "Soviet Religious Policies in Kazakhstan During the Stalin Period", many local and foreign sources directly related to the subject were used. In this study, we tried to reveal the religious problems that the people of the region were exposed to as a result of the soft and harsh religious policies implemented by the Soviet Union during the Stalin period in the first half of the 20th century in Kazakhstan. Key Words: Ateizm, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union.