The Kazakh Famine of the 1930s

The Kazakh famine of 1930-33 ranks as one of the great crimes of the
Stalinist regime and one of the defining events in modern Kazakh
history. The crisis, which was sparked by Josef Stalin’s program of
forced collectivization, led to the death of roughly a third of all
Kazakhs. Other regions of the Soviet Union also suffered grievously from
famine during the Stalinist regime’s assault on the countryside,
including Ukraine and parts of the Russian heartland. But the Kazakhs
are believed to have the highest death ratio due to collectivization of
any people in the Soviet Union.1 More than 1.5 million people perished
in the Kazakh famine, out of a total population of around six million.
Kazakhs became a minority in their own republic, and they would not
constitute more than fifty percent of the population in Kazakhstan again
until after the Soviet collapse. The famine profoundly shaped modern
Kazakhstan. But for many Kazakhs, particularly those who lost loved ones
during the disaster, it remains a deeply painful episode in their
society’s past. As Kamal, a famine survivor, recalled, “it seems that it
was easier to survive all the horrors than it is to remember them
now.”2

The Kazakh famine is little known in the West, and, at first glance, the
disaster canbe difficult for contemporary observers to comprehend. For
one, it deals with a subject, hunger, that might seem remote to those of
us fortunate enough to live in circumstances where food is available in
abundance. We forget the major role that hunger played in shaping the
fortunes of the preceding century: protests over bread shortages helped
spark the Russian empire’s collapse;millions died of malnutrition and
associated diseases during World War II; and control of the food supply
became a crucial front during the Cold War. For both liberal and
authoritarian states, food could be a weapon. For Stalin, it was this, as
well as a crucial tool to transform the Soviet Union into a modernized
state. By forcing rural dwellers into collective farms, he sought to
bring the countryside firmly under Soviet control and boost the supply
of meat and grain.

Starvation is often portrayed as a passive act, something far less
violent than armed conflict. And, for this reason, too, it can be
difficult to fathom the horrors that Kazakhs endured. But in the Kazakh
case, like other famines, hunger and violence were intimately
intertwined. Zh. Äbĭshŭlï, a survivor of the famine who later fought on
the front lines for the Red Army during World War II, recalled:
“Surviving a famine, is not less than surviving a war.”3 As
collectivization began, armed brigades seized meat and grain from the
countryside. Rebellions, many involving thousands of
participants, erupted as hunger spread. Communal bonds began to fray, and
incidents of crime and theft rose. Hungry Kazakhs seeking relief
thronged the republic’s borders. And in an act that must be considered
one of the famine’s most astonishing acts of cruelty, Soviet border
guards shot and killed thousands of starving Kazakhs who sought to flee
across the border to China. Some Kazakhs managed to escape. But most were
unable to return for their relatives. Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, a famine
survivor, remembers the “terrible tragedy when brothers, spouses,
children or parents ended up on opposite side of the border.”4

Finally, there is yet another reason why outsiders may have difficulty
understanding the scope of the Kazakh disaster, namely, that the
majority of those who suffered were nomads. Prior to the crisis, most
Kazakhs practiced pastoral nomadism. They carried out seasonal migrations
along pre-defined routes to pasture their animal herds, including
horses, sheep and camels. This practice had been the predominant way of
life in the steppe for more than four millennia, and it served as an
adaptation to the scarcity of good pastureland and water. But the famine
sparked dramatic change: due to the death of their animal herds, most
Kazakhs who survived the crisis were forced to sedentarize, or abandon
nomadic life and settle. Overall, the Kazakh crisis constitutes one of
the largest pastoral famines in modern history.

Writing about another mobile group, Native Americans, the historian
Richard White remarked that early colonists and administrators in
America didn’t wonder why the peoples that they conquered starved: “The
answer, to them, seemed all too apparent. They starved because they had
always starved; starvation was simply the natural result of their
dependence on the hunt or on primitive and inefficient agriculture.”5
We see some of the same biasesat work in the Kazakh case. By the late
1920s, Soviet experts regularly depicted Kazakh nomads as lazy and their
methods of animal herding as unproductive. Hunger, they argued, was
something endemic to nomadic life. Once famine began, Moscow delayed
sending aid, in part because officials were influenced by another
stereotype, that nomads possessed immense numbers of animals.

Such views have continued to affect how we see the famine. The Kazakh
case has been described as stemming from “neglect” or “a
misunderstanding of cultures,” phrases that would seem to suggest that
there was something inevitable about what happened.6 But there was
nothing “natural” about the Kazakh disaster. Nomadism was not a backward
way of life, but a highly flexible and adaptive system. It was also a
crucial source of identity, one that had often determined who was
“Kazakh” and who was not in the steppe region. To understand the full
scope of Kazakhs’ loss, we also need to look at the famine’s far-reaching
effects on Kazakh culture. Families were torn apart; nomadism ceased to
be the defining feature of Kazakh identity. Many of those who survived
did not even know where their loved ones were buried. As Kamal, a famine
survivor, recalled, “How could we grieve and mourn those who were lost?
We could not cast a handful of soil onto their graves because they did
not have graves—no one knew where they laid their bodies to rest.”7

But there is also reason to hope. Research on the Kazakh famine has
accelerated in recent years, and a wealth of new documents, memoirs and
other sources have come to light. With time, we may reach a better
understanding of some of the famine’s most intractable problems, such as
precisely how many people died (current estimates range from 1.3 million
to well over 2 million) or what role to accord to Stalin, republic-level
officials and local bureaucrats in the making of the disaster. Famine
memorials have begun to begun to spring up across Kazakhstan, and
Kazakhs seek to honor and commemorate their loved ones’ legacies.

Dr. Sarah Cameron’s book, “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan” (Cornell University Press, 2018), examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. As part of a radical social engineering scheme, Josef Stalin sought to settle the Kazakh nomads and force them into collective farms.

Bibliography of English-language Sources on the Kazakh Famine:

Cameron, Sarah. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of
Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca, 2018.

Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the
Terror-Famine. New York, 1986.

Kindler, Robert. Stalin’s Nomads: Power and Famine in
Kazakhstan. Translated byCynthia Klohr. Pittsburgh, 2018.

Nurtazina, Nazira, ed. “Great Famine of 1931–1933 in Kazakhstan: A
Contemporary’s Reminiscences,”Acta SlavicaIaponica32 (2012), 105–29.

Olcott, Martha Brill.”The Collectivization Drive in Kazakhstan,”Russian
Review 40, no. 2 (1981), 122–42.

Payne, Matthew J. “Seeing Like a Soviet State: Settlement of Nomadic
Kazakhs, 1928–1934,”In Writing the Stalin Era: Shelia Fitzpatrick and
Soviet Historiography, ed. Golfo Alexopoulous, Julie Hessler, and
KirilTomoff (New York, 2011), 59–86.

Pianciola,Niccolò. “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of
Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen, 1928–1934.” Cahiers du monde russe
45, no. 1-2 (2004): 137–92.

Shayakhmetov,Mukhamet. Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad under
Stalin. Translated byJan Butler. New York, 2007.

Wheatcroft, Stephen G., and R. W. Davies. The Years of Hunger: Soviet
Agriculture, 1931-1933. New York, 2009.