Alikhan Bökeyhan (1866–1937) was a statesman, a scholar and the founder of the Alash autonomy. In 1906 he became the first Kazakh known to have entered Freemasonry.
The first Kazakh Freemason
In July 1906 Bökeyhan was elected to the First State Duma of the Russian Empire for the Kazakh population of the Semipalatinsk region. In the same year he was initiated into Freemasonry at Saint Petersburg. His initiation is the first documented entry of a Kazakh into the Craft, and the Grand Lodge of Kazakhstan therefore dates the first light of Freemasonry in Kazakhstan to 1906.
Qazaq and Alash
In 1913, at Orenburg, Bökeyhan, Akhmet Baitursynuly and Mirzhaqyp Dulatuly published the first issue of the newspaper Qazaq. Bökeyhan later led the Alash Orda government in its pursuit of national self-determination and served as the first Prime Minister of the autonomy.
Memory
Bökeyhan perished in the purges of 1937. Freemasonry had been dissolved on Soviet territory by 1922, and the Craft would not be lawfully at labour in Kazakhstan for another seventy-eight years. The mother Lodge of Kazakh Freemasonry, consecrated at Almaty on 19 September 2015, bears his name. The Grand Lodge of Kazakhstan honours his initiation of 1906 as a matter of cultural and patriotic memory; its regularity rests on its own chain of consecration.
