Atabay Ishanov

Atabay Ishanov was born in 1916 in Tashkent into a poor peasant family. In 1936 he graduated from the Soviet-law faculty of the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law under the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek SSR, and from 1936 to 1939 he did postgraduate work at the Tashkent Law Institute.

He then taught at the same institute, as an assistant and senior lecturer from 1939 and as a docent from 1943. In 1941 he defended a candidate’s dissertation on the social order of the Emirate of Bukhara in the second half of the 19th century. His doctoral thesis on the state system of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was prepared in Moscow, in the postgraduate programme of the Institute of Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1950–1951); he became a professor in 1951.

From 1946 to 1950 Ishanov headed the department of the history of state and law at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences, and then the law department at the Institute of Economics. In 1953–1954 he led the science and culture department of the republic’s Council of Ministers, and in 1955–1958 he chaired a department at Central Asian State University. From 1958 to 1961 he ran the Institute of Philosophy and Law, first as deputy director and then as director, and from 1961 he headed a sector there.

In 1960 he was elected a corresponding member of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences. From 1964 he held a part-time professorship at the Tashkent Higher School of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and from 1969 at its law faculty. In 1966 he was named Honoured Scientist of the Uzbek SSR.

His research dealt with the theory and history of state and law: the Emirate of Bukhara and the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, the formation of Uzbek national statehood and the constitutional development of the Uzbek SSR. He wrote several monographs and pamphlets, was one of the responsible editors of the multi-volume history of Soviet state and law in Uzbekistan, and led the preparation of the three-volume selected works of Faizulla Khodjaev (1976–1980). He chaired the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Political Science Association and supervised more than thirty candidates of science and three doctors of science.

Ishanov died on 2 October 1990. A street in Bukhara bears his name.