Forging a New Soviet East: Mass Violence and the Kazakh Famine, 1930–33

The Kazakh famine of 1930-33 transformed Central Asia.  More than 1.5 million people perished in the disaster, and the newly created Soviet republic of Kazakhstan lost a quarter of its population.  Though Kazakhstan was a multi-ethnic society on the eve of the famine, Kazakhs suffered disproportionately from the crisis: approximately forty percent of all Kazakhs (1.3 million people) died during the famine.

            This crisis was triggered by brutal short-term policy changes, or the Soviet regime’s efforts to collect large amounts of grain from the republic.  Yet this brutality was supported and often exacerbated by the regime’s collaboration with local cadres, many of whom were Kazakhs.  The actions of these local bureaucrats form the subject of this paper. I show how local cadres used the considerable flexibility given to them by the regime to carry out the regime’s directives in accordance with their own interests.  The violent actions of these cadres created new alliances in Kazakh society, at the same time as they reforged existing networks.  At times, this local-level brutality actually served to strengthen the very ties that that the regime sought to eliminate, particularly Kazakhs’ allegiances to different clans or to Islam. Thus, while the famine devastated Kazakhstan, central planners in Moscow found that they could not entirely transform Kazakh society in the manner that they wished.