Botu

Mahmud Khodiev, who wrote under the pen name Botu (Russian spelling Batu), was born on 15 May 1904 in Tashkent. He attended a Russian-native school in 1914–1917 and teacher-training courses in 1918–1920, and began to publish in 1919. From 1921 to 1927 he studied economics in Moscow.

As a young man he was among the initiators of replacing the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet for Uzbek (1920). In 1922 he founded the newspaper “Farg‘ona” and led it until 1930; from 1924 he worked with the journal “Maorif va o‘qituvchi”, and in the late 1920s he was editor-in-chief of “Alanga” (“Flame”), the organ of the Central Committee of the New Turkic Alphabet in Uzbekistan. He was also secretary of the Anti-Religious Commission and of the commission for the emancipation of women (the “Hujum”).

In 1928–1930 Botu served as deputy People’s Commissar of Education of the Uzbek SSR, and by 1930 he also headed the agitation, propaganda and press department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan.

His poems celebrate new life, youth and the liberation of women. His first collection, “Umid uchqunlari” (“Sparks of Hope”), appeared in 1925 and the second, “To‘lqin tovushlari” (“Sounds of Waves”), in 1929; in “Yangi qishloq”, “Hoshimjon”, “Tursun” and in stories for children he portrayed the new social relations. According to the National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan, his early poems show the influence of Munavvar Qori’s ideas of national independence, and the Literary Encyclopedia of 1929–1930 called him the largest and most popular Uzbek poet of the day. He also wrote articles on linguistics and literary studies.

In August 1930 the OGPU arrested Botu as a “bourgeois nationalist” in the case of the “Milliy Ittihod” organization; he was sentenced to death, the sentence was commuted to ten years, and he was held in the Solovki camp. He was shot on 9 May 1938. His family was not told: letters to his wife stopped in 1936, and his daughter Naima learned of the sentence from the KGB archive many years later. He was rehabilitated in 1958.

His wife, the writer Valentina Petrovna Vasilyeva, was arrested in June 1941 and sentenced to ten years; their son Erkli was arrested in 1942 and later became a professor and children’s surgeon; their daughter Naima Mahmudova became a doctor of medical sciences and Deputy Minister of Health of the Uzbek SSR. A street and a school in Tashkent bear Botu’s name, and his centenary was marked in 2004.