Mankurt

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. This meaning was retained in Russia and many other post-Soviet states.

Origin
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". 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.

Usage
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.

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 and journalism. In Russian, there have appeared neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya (meaning "mankurtization"), and demankurtizatsiya (meaning "demankurtization"). 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.

In 1990, the film Mankurt was released in the Soviet Union. Written by Mariya Urmadova, the film is based on one narrative strand from Aitmatov's novel.