This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
With a death toll of 1.5 million people, the Kazakh famine of 1930-1933 was one of the most devastating episodes of the Stalinist regime, leading to the death of over one third of the Kazakh people. Yet, the history of this catastrophe remains largely untold both in the West and Kazakhstan.
The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018) by Sarah Cameron is the first comprehensive English-language analysis of the Kazakh famine and has since been translated into Russian and Kazakh. Drawing on extensive research in Kazakh and Russian archives, Cameron links the famine to Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, which attempted to transform Kazakhs, a nomadic people, into a “modern, Soviet ‘nation,” by ending nomadism and centralizing agricultural production under state control.
Several fellowships and foundations supported Cameron’s book, including a Kluge fellowship from January to July 2015. While at the Library of Congress, she explored materials from the African and Middle Eastern Division and the European Division, uncovering several sources she had not found in Russia or Kazakhstan. Notably, Cameron discovered oral history accounts that allowed her to include Kazakh voices, a difficult task due to the nomadic features of Kazakh culture, which meant most histories were oral and only later assembled when famine survivors could talk openly after the Soviet Union collapsed.
One such source is Qïzïldar Qïrghïnï, or “Red Terror,” a 1991 collection of oral histories compiled after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I was still a child but I could not forget this,” and “Surviving a famine is not less than surviving a war” said Zh. Äbĭshŭlï, a survivor of the Kazakh famine who later fought for the Red Army in World War II. Through voices like Äbĭshŭlï’s, Cameron provides perspective on the daily lives of famine victims and the difficult decisions they faced in order to survive.
Cameron’s book brings awareness to this overlooked tragedy and improves understanding of Soviet history. She describes how, by including the Kazakh famine in Soviet history, we can see the broader picture of the Soviet “modernization” project and the widespread devastation caused by Stalin’s high-priority goal of nation-building.
The Hungry Steppe received numerous awards, including Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History and the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The book also received the Harriman Rothschild Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities and the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies Book Award (formerly Richard Sites Award).
You can read more about Cameron’s research here or hear from Cameron directly here.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.