I also immediately recognized Kazakhstan, where I am from. We were part of Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, so the extremely corrupt, dictatorial and plutocratic government struggles with a coherent ideology to legitimize itself. Therefore you have some interest to make Kazakhstan and Kazakh history look big, impressive, and most importantly, prove how great the incumbent president is.

So in Kazakhstan the whole field of "History of Kazakhstan" is made fun of by people daily, because there are either paid propagandists who paint Nazarbayev's 17th century ancestors as really important, or miserable crackpots, who in hopes of getting money and love from the government, churn books after books how Nazarbayev descends from Genghis Khan himself. Then there are people who write books about their own ancestors, trying to paint them as more important for Kazakh history, than they actually are. Then there are even crazier people, writing newspaper articles and books about how Kazakhs were the first people on the planet, and how the whole history of Asia is indebted to Kazakhs one way or another.

There's also the problem of a completely incoherent ideology. Communism is used as a bugaboo, government tries to present itself as a spiritual successor of Alash Orda, the national discourse is framed in terms of irrelevant historical events or people. But then in school history textbooks you read about a national-liberation movement leader and later Bolshevik Amangeldy Imanov in the same paragraph with Mirzhakip Dulatov, an anti-Bolshevik, both described as very good noble men. The problem is, they were both enemies, and the latter executed the former during Russian Civil War.

Now I love my country and I love Kazakh culture. I really want to sit one day and devote lots of time learning the history of my people. But I have an intense disgust spot for the whole field, because I know that 99% of it ideologically or personally motivated worst type of political dishonest crap. And all of this crap is written in either Russian or Kazakh, so no Western historian would ever come and publicly debunk it.

But then, I heard the same thing about current situation with Ukrainian academic history and specifically history textbooks. I suspect it's the same absolutely for every “small nation” on the planet. (But then again, Russia systematically revisions history for years now, and the bookstores are inundated with amazing “theories”, so maybe the small nation bit is irrelevant?)