A club of researchers of historical personalities, created on the basis of the Department of History of Kazakhstan, was opened at Pavlodar State University.

Organizers pursued their goal of personal, worldview and civic education of the younger generation.

The club of researchers began its work with a discussion of the role in the world history of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985-1991), the first and last president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. The event coincided with the date of signing by the heads of eleven sovereign states (Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, etc.) of the Declaration of Alma-Ata on CIS establishment, which became landmark in world history. 

“With the collapse of the USSR, the society instantly became differentiated for those who were unable to orient themselves in new conditions with an alien ideology and those who had waited for this event for many years, considering the Soviet era as time for restraining market initiatives. Our task is to objectively analyze historical facts. We must build a picture of the development of national history, its impact on domestic and world development,”, said Aslan Azerbayev, club chairman.

The opinions of the participants were different, some tended to believe that   Gorbachev M.S. contributed to the collapse of the USSR and emergence of the West in the dominant position in world politics, others believed that, taking into account the methodology of cycles in the historical process, the USSR went through all phases of development from formation to destruction. Gorbachev acted in the conditions of the inevitable stage of the crisis and the extinction of the “Soviet civilization”.