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The Kazakh Famine of the 1930s

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As a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, historian Sarah Cameron researched a book project on famine in Kazakhstan, 1930-33. She sat down with Jason Steinhauer to discuss this understudied chapter in Soviet history.

Hi, Sarah. Tell us briefly about the Kazakh famine of 1930-33.

The Kazakh famine was the defining event in the formation of Soviet Kazakhstan, what is today the Republic of Kazakhstan. The famine led to the death of 1.5 million people, approximately a quarter of the population. More than a third of all Kazakhs perished.

Prior to the famine, most Kazakhs practiced pastoral nomadism, carrying out seasonal migrations along pre-defined routes. But due to the death of their animal herds—some ninety percent of the animal population perished during the famine—most Kazakhs were forced to take up settled life in the disaster’s aftermath, a dramatic reorientation of Kazakh identity.

I use the term “formation” quite consciously, as throughout the 1920s and 1930s the Soviets tried to form Kazakhs, a group of nomads, into a modern, Soviet “nation”: giving them their own national territory, promoting Kazakhs into the republic’s bureaucracy and “modernizing” Kazakh society by eliminating backward practices. Ultimately, the famine made nationality into the most important marker of Kazakh identity, a goal of the Soviet regime’s “nation-building” project. Soviet Kazakhstan became a republic with stable, defined borders and an integral part of the Soviet economic system.

What had Kazakhstan been prior to the 1920s and who lived there?

Prior to 1917, the territories that would come to constitute Soviet Kazakhstan were under Russian imperial rule.   They had a significant population of Kazakhs, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking group, which had dominated the steppe since the 15th century. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 1.5 million migrants from European Russia, primarily Russians and Ukrainians, settled the region, dramatically transforming the environment of the steppe and the lives of the nomadic peoples who lived there.

I argue that the legacies of Russian imperial rule intensified the effects of Soviet policies. Changes in the diet and migration patterns of Kazakh nomads and ecological changes in the steppe itself made Kazakhs more susceptible to hunger. In other words, the Kazakh famine was not purely a Soviet creation. In the Kazakh steppe, the Soviets contended with a range of ecological, political and social changes put in motion by the state that preceded it, the Russian empire.

You’ve written that the famine was a consequence of an effort by Josef Stalin, then secretary general of the Communist Party Soviet Union, to “collectivize” the Soviet countryside. What was “collectivization”?

Collectivization was a form of social, political, cultural and economic transformation. Through it, Moscow hoped both to “modernize” agriculture (making Soviet agriculture more productive and efficient) and to break apart existing social structures. If you were a peasant, what this generally meant was that you were stripped of your land and your livestock and shunted into a collective farm, where a set portion of the production of that farm was given over to the state.

In the Kazakh case what is different about collectivization is that rather than being an assault on peasants it was an assault on nomads: “depeasantization” vs “denomadization,” if you will. Through collectivization and whole host of other changes that accompanied Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, Moscow sought to eliminate pre-existing markers of Kazakh identity, such as nomadism, and form Kazakhs into a Soviet nation.

Can you describe the features of the Kazakh famine and what was distinct to Kazakhstan as opposed to nearby republics such as Ukraine?

In the Soviet Union, the death toll from collectivization was somewhere between 5.5 to 6.5 million people. These deaths were unevenly distributed: Ukraine, the Volga Basin, the Don and Kuban areas of the North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan suffered acutely. But while other ethnic groups suffered, famine affected Kazakhs with striking intensity. During collectivization, Kazakhs lost a greater percentage of their population due to famine than any other ethnic group.

Roughly 3.5 million people died in Ukraine during the Ukrainian famine of 1931-33, and there are a number of striking similarities between the two disasters. In both cases, the regime deployed very brutal tactics, such as the closure of borders so that the starving could not flee. And in each case, famine disproportionately affected one particular ethnic group. There are many differences, too: The Kazakh famine began in the summer of 1930, a full year before famine began in Ukraine. Population flight was much bigger in the Kazakh case, as Kazakh nomads used their knowledge of seasonal migration routes to evade repression. And the environment of the Kazakh steppe was quite different from that of Ukraine: It was arid and drought-prone, with poor soils in parts.

What did Stalin and his officials know about what occurred and what were their reactions.

Stalin knew about the Kazakh famine more or less as soon as it began, but did very little until 1933 to alleviate the human suffering. Indeed, many of Moscow’s interventions intensified the death toll.

During the famine, livestock numbers throughout the republic plummeted, and it is striking that the party was so slow to react to this. Previously, Kazakhstan had been the Soviet Union’s most important livestock base, but during the famine some ninety percent of the republic’s herds perished. I am still working towards an answer on this, but I think some of it has to do with Stalin’s fixation with grain procurements (he was less concerned about livestock levels). Many officials in Moscow also seemed to imagine that Kazakh nomads had limitless numbers of animals, despite reports to the contrary.

What were some of the consequences of the famine for Kazakhstan, its people and the USSR?

The effects of the famine are immense: the horrifying death toll, the fact that Kazakhs became a minority in their own republic, and the fact that the disaster forced Kazakhs to abandon nomadism. During the disaster, over a million Kazakhs fled their own republic. Today, there are significant numbers of Kazakhs in neighboring countries such as Russia, China and Uzbekistan as a result, in part, of the famine’s course. In effect, the Kazakh famine changed the demographic map of the entire region.

It should be noted that Moscow could not transform Kazakh society entirely as it wished: various features of Kazakhs’ pastoral nomadic way of life survived the famine. In an effort to bring up the republic’s livestock numbers in the disaster’s aftermath, the regime actually revived pastoral nomadism in limited areas.

You’ve mentioned that, until recently, the famine has been understudied by historians—and that large gaps in scholarship remain. Why this and what is it that your work hopes to contribute?

There are many reasons why we have heard little about the Kazakh famine and why the topic has been understudied.

In the West the study of the Ukrainian famine has been supported by a very active Ukrainian diaspora community. They have endowed institutes across North America, and in the 1980s the Ukrainian famine was the subject of a US congressional investigation. There was no similar movement among the Kazakh diaspora–I’m not aware of a single Kazakh studies chair or Kazakh studies institute in the West. The Kazakh famine did not become incorporated into the US Cold War narrative about the Soviet Union.

It is also important to reiterate the fact that the vast majority of the people who died in this disaster were nomads, and they are a group that a) has often been seen as less worthy of study b) is trickier for scholars to study as they leave less written records. When the Kazakh famine is mentioned in scholarly works, it is often implied that the famine was part of a natural or inevitable process, as a mobile society became transformed into a settled one. The disaster is dismissed as a “mistake” or a “miscalculation” by Moscow. But as I stress in my work there was absolutely nothing “natural” about it.

I think my work has important implications for how we understand Soviet history. Soviet historians have tended to concentrate on the Soviet Union’s west, to the neglect of the Soviet Union’s east. It is only through examples such as the Kazakh famine that we can understand the full extent of the Soviet “modernization” project, both the extraordinary reach of their ambitions and the devastating consequences that such efforts had.

Through my work I also hope to challenge existing understandings of what Soviet “nation-building” actually was. In contrast to other works which frame it as a low-priority policy, I argue that it is fundamental to understanding both the Soviet system and the peculiarly destructive nature of the Kazakh famine. Soviet “nation-building” was a violent process, one which created new opportunities but also destroyed other pathways. In my book, I explore what it meant to be a Soviet nation, as well as how the project of constructing a Soviet nation changed over time.

Sarah Cameron is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. As a 2016 Kluge Fellow she researched a book project titled, “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan.”

Comments (7)

  1. This is great and interesting. I focus on the colonel areas of Africa in 19th century and my father was a colonel leader in the British colony. I would like to come one day and share this story, I have always attended your events and I really like what you do.

    God bless you, God bless America.

    Rosemary Segero

  2. I am very appreciative of the fact that finally more attention is being focused on the famine in Kazakhstan 1932-34. I have traveled to Kazakhstan (from North America) for years with my husband who consulted/taught there on short term contracts. So little was known about the famine that killed as you said a million and a half of the population. I believe another three million (rough figure) migrated to neighbouring countries to escape the catastrophe. I am a novelist and at present working on a novel set in Kazakhstan. I feel after 20-25 trips to that republic over 13+ years since 2000, I owe them a story. Needless to say, the Great Famine of 1932-33 would figure in it. I have just recently made a research trip there. In a sense, it is heartbreaking to see the old nomadic life forever gone, initially destroyed by Stalin’s collectivization measures, and has not revived since, as the country enters a new world order in the 21st. century. Thank you for the work you are doing to call the world’s attention to this hitherto little known and understudied tragedy of immense proportions a nation and a people faced in the last century under Stalin’s regime.

  3. Congratulations, Sarah,
    As someone who has written about the media history of the Holodomor, especially the Western journalists who covered it, I’m relieved to see that someone has finally undertaken a study of the disaster that unfolded in the Kazahk SSR. It’s instructive to see what happened in Kazahkstan in 1930-31 as distinct from what happened in Ukraine, the Kuban, and Volga regions in 1932-33. Your point about the deleterious effect of Stalin’s “nation building” in KSSR is well taken, and policies enacted around the forced collectivization of (un)arable land, the socialization of livestock, and the denomadization of these people is well taken. While Stalin and the Soviet Politburo may not have been totally to blame for this disaster, given the markers of Kazahk identity forged during the reign of the tsars, there is little doubt that much more could have, and should have been done to alleviate the suffering of these people. I hope that your research can ignite discussions and begin the long-overdue road to recognition of this genocide, which meets the criteria set forth by Raphael Lemkin for the United Nations in 1947.

  4. Thank very much Sara for your great work, there is little research done by Kazakhstan authorities on this subject, It seems they are still afraid of Moscow. I am grateful for your work and wish you all the best from Kazakh people.

  5. no mention here of the possibility stalin wanted to replace Kazakhs with russians to make it a more reliable piece of the empire. no mention of detonating nuclear bombs in Kazakhstan and then encouraging Kazakhs to swim in the artificial lakes made by the craters. no mention here of cancer and birth defects caused by this type of genocide.

  6. In the 1930s about 3 million people died of hunger in Kazakhstan! I am a doctoral student with a degree in Philosophy. My scientific topic: “Existential experiences in the Kazakh worldview in the 20th century”. [email protected]

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