The Great Famine of Kazakhstan
The Kazakh famine is known by variety of different names, including aqtaban shŭbïrïndï (The Barefooted Flight), ŭlï asharshïlïq (The Great Famine), velikii dzhut (The Great Zhŭt), “Goloshchekin’s genocide,” and “Kazakhstan’s Holodomor.”
Although the name is contested, there is growing historical consensus that from 1930 to 1933 an estimated 1,500,000 people starved to death in Kazakhstan. A quarter of the population of Kazakhstan. Of these 1,300,000 were ethnic Kazakhs. Approximately one in three of all Kazakhs starved to death. An additional 1,100,000 people fled the Kazakh republic, many to China, so in 1934 half of Kazakhs had disappeared from the region. Some estimates put the number of deaths at above two million. For some perspective, the lower estimate amounts to roughly the same number of deaths (military and civilian) of France, Britain, United States, Australia, and Canada combined in WW2.
These estimates, far from being “cold war hysteria” and “bad faith propaganda” are more recent figures. Robert Conquest, in his Harvest of Sorrow estimates at least 1,000,000 deaths. The 1981 article The Collectivization Drive in Kazakhstan frames the issue as a miscalculation on the behalf of Stalin. It is following the Cold War that scholars such as Isabelle Ohayon, Niccolo Pianciola, Matthew Payne, Robert Kindler and Sarah Cameron began to validate estimates of 1,500,000 deaths and the full extent of violence that occurred. Sarah Cameron outlines that this “new wave” of scholarship, utilising rich records now available, illustrate “the violent nature of the regime’s assault on Kazakh society” and that “these findings puncture the long-standing misconception that the Kazakh famine was primarily a “natural” process” or a “mistake” or “miscalculation”.
There is a common trend in some of those article names: “Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan”, “An Encyclopedia of Mass Violence”, “Violence de masse et Résistance”, because violent this famine was. Throughout the 1920s, the Bolsheviks had viewed nomadism as economically backwards and against the modernity of socialism. However, there were no major initiatives and the majority of Kazakhstan’s population seasonally migrated as late as 1927. Some early experiments occurred in 1927–1928, but with the release of the Five Year Plan the “process of violent, forced sedentarisation became a systemic republic-wide campaign in 1930”.
Insurrectionist movements (and even guerrilla activities in the Mangyshlak region) evolved into episodic rioting involving several thousand people as organized protests flared across Kazakhstan during the early years of collectivization.
Some of the methods used in this period were more intense, more coercive variations on the kind of techniques used in the preceding years; some Red Yurts (basically Russian Bolshevik missionaries travelling to spread modernity), for example, began withholding their services from nomads who refused to settle. Tax, more specifically arbitrary confiscation, was used to penalise nomads and exhaust their reserves. However, Alun Thomas notes that “the sedentarisation campaign was novel and distinct in its systematic and widespread use of violence to force nomads to settle” and that “uniquely sedentarisation systematically and widely used violence to settle nomads and terminate their habitual migratory customs, an enormous cultural as well as spatial change.”
During the sedentarisation campaign, the Soviet state employed large numbers of armed militia to approach each migrating Kazakh aul and force the nomads present to a prearranged ‘point of settlement’. Often the community’s livestock were rounded up, some confiscated, and the rest moved into new pens. Their owners were told that releasing the animals was a criminal offence, earning immediate and severe punishment. In a sense then the state did not so much settle nomads but settle nomadic livestock, leaving Kazakhs no other option but to pitch their tents within walking distance of their most important resource.
Thomas suggests that “This whole process was more uncompromising and coercive even than that described by Sheila Fitzpatrick with regard to collectivisation in European Russia.” It is hardly inappropriate to say that the Soviets corralled people into camps, forced them to work (there were attempts to turn the steppe into productive grain fields, which largely failed. Crops that were grown were requisitioned en masse), until hundreds of thousands starved. These camps have been described as “death traps” and at the time, some Kazakh officials supposedly in charge of sedentarisation instead told their people to flee Kazakhstan entirely.
Sarah Cameron describes the regime’s broader to transform Kazakhs and Kazakhstan radically, “with little regard for the tremendous loss of life incurred in the process.” Moscow pushed ahead with sedentarisation against the warnings of Soviet agricultural experts, many of whom would later be imprisoned or shot. Stalin personally received news of the Kazakhs’ suffering, in 1930, in 1931 and 1932. Despite this, increasingly repressive steps were taken: including imposing devastating meat and grain procurements, expelling starving Kazakhs from cities, slaughtering thousands of Kazakh refugees as they attempted to flee across the border to China, and “blacklisting” districts in the republic (a severe penalty that included a total ban on trade and deliveries of food), similar to what occurred in Ukraine.
When the famine was in full swing, in 1931, Soviet bureaucrats planned on requisitioning 68.5% of livestock with two thirds of that to be sent out of Kazakhstan. Between 1928 and 1933, the number of cattle in Kazakhstan fell by 79% and the number of sheep and goats by 90%. Only in the 1960s did the republic’s sheep and cattle numbers finally reach their prefamine levels. However, the full destruction of the Kazakh culture and way of life did not ever fully recover, not even on independence.
