Ethnic Hierarchies in Soviet Industry: Resource Extraction and Labor Recruitment in Kazakhstan’s Karaganda Coal Basin

Soviet industrialization was the twentieth century’s most ambitious developmental project, yet it was full of paradoxes. On the one hand, the Soviet regime was committed to providing economic equality to all ethnic groups and integrating previously underrepresented ethnicities into the country’s working class. On the other hand, the geography of industrialization essentially recreated a colonial pattern, concentrating manufacturing and processing industries in the Russian heartland and compelling most non-Russian peripheries to specialize in commodity production. Rather than recruiting native workers, industry often brought Russian migrant workers to national republics, causing a decrease in the republics’ native population share.

This paper explores these tensions by examining the Karaganda coal basin in Kazakhstan. The region’s rich coal, copper, and iron ore deposits fueled republican aspirations to build up a diversified industry, which ultimately resulted in the construction of the Soviet Union’s only integrated steel mill in Central Asia. Still, the local economy remained concentrated in the extraction of raw materials—primarily coal—shipped to the Urals and Siberia. Despite dedicated state efforts to increase their share, Kazakh workers remained a small minority in mining and metallurgy. At the same time, those Kazakhs who were successful in these industries could go on to high-profile careers in the Soviet Party-state, as exemplified by Dinmukhamed Kunaev, Kazakhstan’s Communist Party boss for a quarter century, and Nursultan Nazarbaev, independent Kazakhstan’s first president. Using archived government documents, Soviet press articles, novels, and memoirs, this paper reviews the Soviet Union’s struggle to balance its emancipatory promise to its ethnic minorities with the imperatives of establishing a centralized, efficient metallurgical complex.