associates), but left them alive in order to further propaganda in their favor, sending all three to Moscow, to be raised in an orphanage for orphans of dead Bolsheviks and soldiers of the Red Army. Seyid Alim Khan appealed to the Bolsheviks and the world community to let his children and other family members who remained in Bukhara be released to join him in Afghanistan. But the Bolsheviks refused him and in fact kept them as a hostage for personal political and ideological purposes. The eldest of the three sons of Seyid Alim Khan remaining in the USSR, Sultanmurad, was disabled and lame from birth. He graduated from the Faculty of Workers and after his studies began working at a factory for the disabled. According to some reports, he spoke English. Some time later, Sultanmurad was arrested by the NKVD and declared an " enemy of the people ". Among other charges, he was accused of collaborating with British intelligence. After his arrest, Sultanmurad announced a hunger strike and soon died, most likely from exhaustion. Sultanmurad was married. His wife at that time worked at a soap factory and, according to some reports, upon learning of the death of her husband, she threw herself into a cauldron of boiling soap. Before the outbreak of World War II, during the "Great Terror", the youngest of the remaining sons of Seyid Alim Khan, Rakhimkhan, who remained in the USSR, tried to flee the country, but he was detained by Soviet border guards right on the Soviet-Afghan border. According to some sources, he was detained on the territory of the Uzbek SSR, right on the Amu Darya River, which separated the USSR and Afghanistan; according to other sources, he was detained on the territory of the Turkmen SSR, where the border between the USSR and Afghanistan runs through the steppes and hills. After that, a sentence of execution was read to him, and he was shot by the NKVD.The middle of the three, Shakhmurad, was also with his brothers in a Moscow orphanage, but in 1922, together with several Bukhara youths, he was sent by the authorities of the Bukhara People's Soviet Republic to study in Germany as part of the training of new young personnel for the young republic. Due to ideological considerations, he was given a new full name - "Alimov Shah Muratovich" (according to other sources, his full name was