in the city of Temir-Khan-Shura (now called Buynaksk). In 1926, he participated as a delegate from Dagestan in the All-Union Turcological Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the replacement of Arabic script in Turkic-Islamic lands by Latin alphabet was adopted. In addition, the adoption of a common grammar by the Turkic Soviet Republics was discussed. For a short period he was a teacher in the town of Batalpasha in Karachay-Cherkessia. In 1927 he moved to Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, where he taught at the Turkmen Teachers School. On 25 March 1932 he was arrested by the State Political Directorate, or GPU, of the NKVD (the precursor of KGB) on charge of "belonging to the secret Turkmen Nationalist Organization." He was sentenced to 10 years and imprisoned in the agricultural labor camps in Uzbekistan, first in Zarafshan and later in Zengi-Ata near Tashkent. Hoping to join them after his release in 1943, he convinced his wife Hamide, then living in Tashkent, to take their three children and move to her relatives in Istanbul. But he was released only after the war in 1948. He settled in Yangiyul, Uzbekistan and he started to write letters to the authorities requesting a passport. On 17 December 1948, he was rearrested on charge of "being a dangerous person" and exiled for life to the town of Bolshaya Murta on the Yenisey river north of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. In Bolshaya Murta, he worked as watchman in a brick cooperative. Later, he herded horses and cows and became a basket weaver. Some years after Stalin's death in 1953, he was released by Nikita Khrushchev and in October 1956 he was able to join his family in Turkey, after a confinement and exile for 24 years. In 1960, he was elected as head of the Crimean Tatar National Center in Turkey. Bektöre died on 18 December 1961 in Istanbul. He was buried at Adrianopole Gate, outside of the western walls of old Constantinople. His memoirs were recorded by Saadet Bektöre and published by Eroğlu Matbaası in 1965, under the title Red Flows the Volga (). Writings Citations 1888 births 1961 deaths Romanian people of Crimean Tatar descent Crimean Tatar academics Crimean Tatar poets Crimean Tatar writers People from Constanța County Romanian activists Romanian people of World War I Romanian schoolteachers Romanian writers Crimean Tatar activists