Alikhan Bukeikhanov was a descendant of the Kazakh Chingizids (Torah). He graduated from the Omsk Technical School and the Faculty of Economics of the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute (1894). He claimed to be an adherent of the “Westernizing trend” of the social movement of the Kazakh intelligentsia, which saw “the future of the Kyrgyz steppe in the conscious implementation of Western culture, in an extended sense of the word”. Bukeikhanov was an active fighter against the Russian colonization of the Turgai (Kazakh) steppe. In 1905, he joined the Constitutional Democratic Party, and since 1906, he became a member of its Central Committee. He was an MP of the First State Duma representing the Semipalatinsk region. He worked as a journalist and editor of the Party’s newspapers and was arrested more than once for political activities.

In 1917, he was appointed as the Commissar of the Turgai region by the Provisional Government. A founder of the Alash party, established by the First All-Kirgiz (All-Kazakh) Congress held in Orenburg in July 1917, the Chairman of Alash Regional Committee of Turgai. Bukeikhanov collaborated with Siberian oblast movement (a political movement for the autonomy Siberia). In October 1917, he participated in the First Siberian Regional Congress in Tomsk. He did not accept the October coup.

He was the organizer of the Second All-Kirgiz (All-Kazakh) Congress in Orenburg in December 1917, which elected him as Chairman of the Provisional People’s Council (government) of Alash-Orda (Alash autonomy). In September 1918, he headed the delegation of Alash-Orda at the Ufa State Conference. He became a member of the office of the Chief plenipotentiary for the Administration of the Alash Territory, established by the Russian government. He was briefly arrested after Kolchak’s November coup. Upon his release, Bukeikhanov returned to Semipalatinsk, where he launched the process of negotiations with the Bolsheviks.

After the defeat of Russian State’s Eastern Front, he recognized the Soviet power and was employed in Soviet political and economic work, translated Russian classical literature. In the 1920s – 1930s, he was arrested three times. In 1937, he was convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR over belonging to a terrorist organization and shot in Moscow. He was rehabilitated in 1989.