>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Daniele Turello: Good afternoon.
I am Dan Turello.
I'm on the staff of
the Kluge Center.
Welcome to our program today.
Before we begin I want to remind you
to please turn off any cellphones
or other electronic devices that
might interfere with the program.
I also want to remind you that
we're filming today's lecture
for presentation on our website and
our YouTube and iTunes channels.
This afternoon's program
is being presented
by the John W. Kluge Center.
The Kluge Center is
a vibrant community
of scholars on Capitol Hill.
We bring together researchers
from around the world
to energize one another, to use
the Library's rich collections
and to interact with
policymakers and the public.
The Center offers opportunities
for scholars at every level,
from the senior scholars,
to our post-doctoral
fellows, to PhD candidates.
And we are grateful for this
rich and enlightening community.
We're happy to have Sarah
Cameron back with us today.
Dr. Cameron was a Kluge
Fellow earlier in the year.
And the title of her lecture today
will be "The Hungry Steppe, Famine,
Violence, and the Making
of Soviet Kazakhstan."
While she was here at the Library,
Dr. Cameron analyzed
a little-known episode
of Stalinist social engineering.
It was a tragic event, the Kazakh
famine of 1930 to 1933 which led
to the death of more than 1 1/2
million people, which was close
to a quarter of Soviet
Kazakhstan's population.
And today Dr. Cameron will be using
memoirs, oral history account,
archival documents to explore
the stories of those who lived
through the famine, asking how this
crisis reshaped Soviet Kazakhstan,
and what it meant to be
Kazakh, and how the case
of the Kazakh famine alters
understanding of development
and nation-building under Stalin.
Dr. Cameron is Assistant
Professor of History
at the University of Maryland.
She's a historian of
Russia and the Soviet Union,
has a particular interest
in the societies
and cultures of Central Asia.
In addition to her Kluge Center
Fellowship, she's been a Fellow
at the Rachel Carson Center for the
Environment and Society in Munich
and the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars.
Her research has been supported
by the Harry Frank
Guggenheim Foundation,
ACLS Mellon, Fulbright, and others.
She received her PhD
from Yale University
where her dissertation won
the John Addison Porter Prize
for the best dissertation
in the Arts and Sciences
and the Turner Prize for the
most outstanding dissertation
in European History.
So please join me in
welcoming Dr. Sarah Cameron.
She'll speak for --
[ Applause ]
-- will speak for about 40 minutes,
and then we'll have
a time of Q and A.
>> Sarah Cameron: Okay, thank you.
Thank you very much for
that kind introduction.
Can all of you hear me okay?
Okay, excellent.
It's a great pleasure
to speak here today.
And it was a great pleasure to
be a Fellow at the Kluge Center
from January through
July of this past year.
I have many thank yous.
I'd like to -- before I start,
I'd like to thank you --
thank the other Fellows
that I met along the way
for very lively conversations, for
making my time here so enjoyable.
And in particular, I'd like
to thank the entire staff
of the Kluge Center, particular
Mary Lou Reker, Travis Hensley,
Jason Steinhauer, and Dan Turello
who were just absolutely wonderful
and made my stay here so enjoyable.
Finally, I'd like to thank the
subject area librarians who went
out of their way to track down
hard-to-find books and materials
in Russian and in Kazakh.
I'd particularly like to thank Harry
Leich in the European Reading Room
and Joan Weeks in the African and
in the Middle East Reading Room.
As I'll detail in my talk today, the
books that I found during my stay
as a Kluge Fellow greatly
enriched my research.
And I found actually a number of
materials here that I had not found
in either Russia or in Kazakhstan.
In the early 1990s, Zhe
Abashuli [assumed spelling] spoke
about his memories of the
Kazakh famine of 1930 to '33,
a crisis which transformed the
new Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan.
"I was still a child, but I could
not forget this," Abashuli recalled.
"My bones are shaking as these
memories come into my mind."
During the famine, activists
with the Soviet regime had stripped
Abashuli's family of their livestock
and grain, and starving people
fled in every direction.
His father's relatives
had fled to Soviet --
had fled Soviet Kazakhstan entirely,
escaping across the border to China.
"For those who remained,"
Abashuli concluded,
"hunger was, quote, a silent enemy."
He remembered the arba,
or horse-drawn cart
that collected the bodies
of the dead and dumped them
in mass burial grounds on
the outskirts of settlements.
Later, during World War II,
Abashuli would go on to fight
on the front lines for the Red Army.
Nonetheless, he concluded, quote,
"surviving a famine is not
less than surviving a war."
Another survivor of the
Kazakh famine of 1930 to '33,
Nersha Tan Abdahanuli
[assumed spelling],
then a seven-year-old boy, recalled
that he had seen several
family members die
of hunger before his
eyes in the fall of 1932.
Other relatives, he heard, perished
in a mountain valley as they fled
across the border from
Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan.
"In early 1933," he recalled, "the
real black clouds of hunger came."
Abdahanuli's family moved south
to Uzanarash [assumed spelling]
where his father took
a position as a head
of district inspectorate commission.
Though Adbahanuli's grandmother
had warned him to stay hidden
under blankets during the journey
-- children could be kidnapped
and eaten by the starving --
Abdahanuli peeked out
from underneath,
and he saw corpses
scattered across the ground,
hints of the horrors
that lay beyond.
As the recollections of these famine
survivors reveal, the period 1930
to '33 was a time of almost
unimaginable suffering
in the Soviet Republic
of Kazakhstan.
In 1929 Josef Stalin had
launched the first five-year plan,
a radical scheme to help the Soviet
Union industrialize, secure control
over the food supply, and catch
up to the capitalist West.
Via collectivization, Moscow
sought to bring the food supply,
including the production
of meat and grain,
firmly into the grasp of the state.
In the Soviet Union's West, and
particularly in places like Ukraine
and in the Volga, Don,
and Kuban areas of Russia
which had large numbers of peasants,
devastating famines broke out,
taking millions of lives.
But if in the Soviet Union's west
collectivization took the form
of a war on peasant life, in
Kazakhstan it took the form
of a war on nomadic life.
Through this project Moscow
sought to eliminate the economic
and cultural hallmarks of nomadism,
permanently settle the Kazakhs,
and integrate them into
the collectivist whole.
The resultant crisis in Kazakhstan
upended lives and families,
and it left a devastating
trail of sorrow in its wake.
Ultimately by the famine's
end in 1934, Moscow succeeded
in eliminating nomadism,
a goal of the campaign.
With their livelihood in
ruins, Kazakhs were forced
to abandon their nomadic way
of nomadism for a settled one.
This marked a really
profound rupture
in this region, the Kazakh Steppe.
Pastoral nomadism had
been the predominant way
of life actually for
over 4 millennia.
It's difficult to determine an exact
death toll for the Kazakh famine
of 1930 to '33, yet it
is clear by any measure
that the loss of life
was staggering.
Out of the total population
of 6.5 million people,
perhaps 1 1/2 million people,
roughly 1/4 of the republic's
population, perish in this famine.
Decimated by the crisis, Kazakhs
actually become a minority
in their own Soviet republic.
For the remainder of
the Soviet period,
Kazakhs occupied a
very curious status.
There were at once the
titular nationality,
and at the same time
actually an ethnic minority.
Only in 1999, eight years
after the Soviet collapse,
did Kazakhs regain the demographic
majority in what is now known
as the Republic of Kazakhstan,
an independent country.
Today I'll be speaking about this
disaster, which is the subject
of a book project that
I'm working on.
I'll provide an overview of
the disaster, its major events,
and its consequences
for Kazakh society.
More generally, the
Kazakh famine is a topic
that is little-known in the West.
It's almost entirely missing
from major scholarly
overviews of the Soviet period.
And though the disaster
has major bearing
on how we understand the
nature of Stalin's rule,
and arguably even the violent
course of the 20th century itself,
the disaster's major events
and causal factors are
not well-understood.
Indeed, as I discuss in an
epilogue to my book the case
of the Kazakh famine in fact raises
broad questions about why it is
that we remember or we forget
certain episodes of mass violence,
and how it is that this particular
episode came to be excluded
from our understanding of Stalinism.
When it is published, I hope that
my book will remedy this gap,
becoming one of the
first complete accounts
of the Kazakh famine in the West.
The major thrust of the book as I
see it is bringing this story --
long-neglected story to light.
But it's also to ask how this
disaster, once it's reinserted back
into our understanding of Soviet
history, alters our understanding
of Soviet modernization
and nation-building.
In my research I explore the
elements of these two projects,
Soviet nation-building
and Soviet modernity,
as they unfolded in Kazakhstan.
I probe the frequent tensions
that occurred as the Soviets tried
to realize these two at
times contradictory aims.
The project of Soviet modernity
was, of course, universal,
the attempt to make a --
all societies communist.
While the project of
Soviet nation-making,
on the other hand,
was particularistic.
It held that each nation, whether
Kazakhs, Uzbeks, or Ukrainians,
had a particular culture, language,
territory, and history that needed
to be supported and promoted.
I argue that the Kazakh famine
was the result of Moscow's attempt
to make Kazakhs into a
modern Soviet nation.
Like several other recent
works, I challenge the idea
that Soviet nation-making
was progressive.
Rather, I show that this process
of nation-making was a very
violent one, one which often served
to reinforce rather than
contradict the regime's aims
of economic transformation.
I illustrated its participatory
nature,
showing how many Kazakhs became
involved in this violent campaign
to transform their own society.
But not all of the regime's efforts
at nation-building were anticipated.
As I'll show in my talk today,
the language of nationality
was a powerful tool,
one which Moscow could not
always control as it wished.
On the subject of modernity I
try to provide a counterweight
to a literature that is focused
largely in the Soviet Union's West.
Not only were the peoples
and cultures
of this region quite different,
but the physical environment
was also distinct,
as I'll highlight in my talk today.
It is only in places such as
Soviet Kazakhstan, I argue,
that we can understand
the full extent
of what Soviet modernization
actually was.
Here the distance to
modernize, so to speak,
this effort to transform not just
peasants but nomads was greater
than in the Soviet Union's West.
And the consequences of these
attempts would be more dramatic.
As I'll illustrate in my talk,
collectivization was a policy
that was a policy that
was repressive,
both of the human toll it
exacted, as well as self-defeating.
In the aftermath of the famine,
the republic underwent a
total economic collapse.
My findings are based upon
extensive field work in both Russian
and in Kazakhstan [inaudible] state
and in Communist Party archives.
It's also based upon some
exciting discoveries that I made
at the Library of Congress here,
and I'll show you some examples.
One of the challenges I faced
in telling this story is getting
at the voices of Kazakhs themselves.
As I've hinted, Kazakhs were a
nomadic society in this period.
They were largely an oral
rather than a literary culture,
and it's very difficult
to find sources written
by Kazakhs themselves.
The sources about Kazakh life
that do exist are largely
ethnographic accounts,
Communist Party documents.
They are settled people's
observations of the nomadic world,
and thus they have to be
read with some caution.
Many officials looked
at nomadic light
through the lens of
evolutionary theory.
The oral history accounts that
I quoted at the beginning come
from the volume in the center,
"Quzildar Qorqinis" [assumed
spelling], "Red Terror,"
a volume that I've
actually only ever seen
at the Library of Congress.
It's pictured in the center.
And these oral history accounts
were actually collected in 1991,
right after the Soviet Union
collapsed, when survivors
of the famine were finally able
to talk about the disaster openly.
These materials offer a
really invaluable insight
into the human side of the story,
and I'll weave some excerpts
from them into my talk today.
So turning to the beginning of
my story, what was Kazakhstan
as a place and society like, and how
did these conditions lead to famine?
So when it was created,
the Soviet Republic
of Kazakhstan -- it
was created in 1924.
It was a really immense territory.
All of these parts had been
under Russian Imperial rule,
but they'd never before been
ruled as a unified whole.
It bordered several
other Soviet republics,
and it also had a large border with
China, as you can see from the map.
It was enormous.
It was approximately -- Kazakhstan
was approximately, and still is,
the size of continental Europe,
or to use another measurement,
four times the size
of the state of Texas.
It had a sharp continental climate,
with hot summers and
very cold winters.
It was very arid and
also prone to drought.
As you can see from the
map, the yellow areas are
where the steppe is classified
as desert or semi-desert.
So that's really much
of the republic.
And there's more fertile zones in
the north and in the southeast.
The climate in what --
in the central area,
which is nicknamed the Hungry
Steppe, and where I take the title
of my talk, is a vast plateau,
and the climate there was
particularly prone to drought.
Not only was the amount of
rainfall low, but rainfall patterns
in the Kazakh Steppe
were more unstable
than in the steppes
in European Russia.
There was a great deal of
volatility from year to year.
And a good rainfall year could be
followed by a poor rainfall year.
Kazakhs' practice of pastoral
nomadism was an adaptation
to these feature, the
distinctive features of the steppe,
particularly the lack of
good pasture land and water.
As pastoral nomads -- and you --
I'll show you some examples --
they carried out seasonal
migrations along predefined routes
to pasture their animal herds.
And here you get a sense --
and in these other photos --
you get a sense of the
isolation of the landscape,
how important animals are
to their everyday existence.
You can see the yurts,
the mobile dwellings
which are actually made
out of animal products.
These migratory encampments
are referred to --
a migratory encampment is referred
to as an aul [assumed spelling],
and another example of
nomadic life from this period.
But pastoral nomadism,
as I'll stress,
is not just an economic strategy,
a way of using the
steppe's scarce resources,
it's also a crucial
source of identity.
Historically when a
Kazakh sedentarized
and abandoned nomadic life, he
was no longer seen as Kazakh.
In the late 19th century
the Kazakh steppe comes
under Russian imperial rule, over
a million settlers from Russia --
European Russia settled
the Kazakh steppe.
They settled more fertile
regions, particularly in the north.
Their arrival makes the Kazakh
steppe into a multi-ethnic society,
but it also provokes important
changes in nomadic life,
changes to Kazakh's diet and
to their migration routes.
I explore these changes in
greater detail in my book,
showing how the legacies of Russian
imperial rule became a contributing
factor, actually, in
the famine itself.
By the onset of Soviet rule,
Kazakhs are the largest group
of nomads in the Soviet Union.
They constitute about
80% of the total.
And for the vast majority
of Kazakhs,
being Kazakh is still very closely
intertwined with being a nomad.
The term Kazakh we might think of
actually as a type of mixed social
and ethnic category, one which
denotes a way of life, but also --
pastoral nomadism,
but also an ethnicity.
In the initial years of Soviet
rule, the period '21 to 1928,
Moscow took a contradictory
approach to ruling the republic.
Some programs worked to undermine
pastoralism while other programs
actually worked to support it.
In general, Party experts and
bureaucrats really struggled
to understand what
approach they should take.
This was a landscape
and a population
that did not have clear
parallels in the categories
that Party members brought
with them from European Russia.
Karl Marx, for instance,
had predicted that socialist
revolutions might occur
among workers.
Lenin then radically modifies
Marx's ideas, and he predicts
that a socialist-style revolution
might occur amongst peasants.
But neither of the two men
had given much thought to how
and if a socialist-style revolution
might occur amongst an entirely
different social group,
pastoral nomads.
Party experts began to
ponder a series of questions.
Did nomads actually have
classes in the same way
that settled societies did?
And if so, how did
these classes function?
Economically could
pastoral nomads speed
through the Marxist/Leninist
timeline of history
and be transformed into
productive factory workers?
Indeed, the seeming absurdity of
bringing socialist-style revolution
to this republic dotted with nomads
led one prominent Kazakh cadre,
Sultanbek Khodzhanov -- you can see
him here -- to circulate a joke,
"You can't get to socialism
by camel."
[Laughter] At the heart of
Khodzhanov's joke was a question
which Party experts themselves
tried to resolve in this period,
could you get to socialism by camel?
I.e., was nomadism backward?
Or was it, in fact,
a modern way of life,
something compatible with socialism?
Entangled, of course, with all of
these questions was the question
of the issue of the
republic's environment.
Could a specifically socialist
state overcome the difficulties
that Kazakhstan's arid
landscape, which was so different
from Western Europe, seem
to place on human activity?
Or rather, was nomadism the only
possible use of the landscape
in particularly arid
areas of the republic?
Indeed, many Party
experts associated
with the republic's Commissariat
of Agriculture concurred
that nomadism was the most
productive use of the Kazakh steppe.
One ethnographer and Party expert,
Sergey Shvetzov [assumed spelling],
went so far as to warn
of the extreme dangers
of nomadic settlement.
Shvetzov, who had been
allied with the right faction
of the Socialist Revolutionary
Party said, quote, "The destruction
of the nomadic way of life
in Kazakhstan would
represent not only the death
of steppe livestock raising
and the Kazakh economy,
but the transformation
of the dry steppe
into an unpopulated
desert," unquote.
But by 1928, the tenor of these
discussions in Kazakhstan,
and across the Soviet Union
more generally, began to shift.
A severe shortage of grain
across the Soviet Union
triggers a shift in policy.
This leads Stalin to introduce
the first five-year plan,
this radical modernization scheme
that I mentioned at the outset.
Experts such as Shvetzov
became vulnerable both
for their non-Bolshevik background,
as I mentioned, and for their ideas.
And he is denounced.
A separate group of experts
now belittled the assertion
that the Kazakh steppe's
environment places certain limits
on human activity.
They argue that under socialism
swamps might be desert --
might emptied, entire
desert irrigated,
and even the lowest-quality
soil brought under cultivation.
Settled life rather than
pastoralism, they argue,
is the most productive
use of the landscape.
They argue that settling the Kazakhs
is going to lead I dramatic gains
in the republic's productivity,
freeing up resources
such as land, labor, and livestock.
The language of Soviet
nationalities policy which sought
to consolidate groups
such as the Kazakhs
into modern socialist nations
served to further legitimize
and reinforce the importance
of the shift to settled life.
Experts declared nomadism to be
incompatible with the development
of so-called contemporary culture
such as schools, hospitals,
and telegraph connections.
Leading Party member declared
that Kazakhs national development,
what they euphemistically referred
to as the reconstruction of the aul,
or nomadic encampment,
is not in opposition
to the republic's economic
development but, as they phrased it,
one flows from the other.
Thus the language of Soviet
nationalities, policies serves
to reinforce the Party's war
on a social category, nomad.
As we will see, the category
of Kazakh and the category
of nomad served overlapping
and usually reinforcing goals
for the Party's assault
on nomadic life.
In 1928 the Party's war on nomadic
life began, and it would escalate
by the winter of 1929 to
1930 with collectivization.
This assault was led by Kazakhstan's
leader and Party secretary,
a man named Filipp Goloshchekin.
Goloshchekin himself
is actually someone
who had originally been trained
as a dentist but then picked
up another career,
making a revolution.
He joins the Bolsheviks
early, prior to 1917.
He goes on to gain fame for his
revolutionary zeal and toughness.
And he's actually renowned
in Bolshevik circles.
He plays a role in the
murder of the czar's family.
Later on in 1933 -- it's getting
a little bit ahead of the story,
but he is removed from his position.
He's actually scapegoated
with causing the Kazakh
famine at the time.
Famine today in Kazakhstan
is often still referred
to as Goloshchekin's genocide.
As you can see and you might
guess from his death dates,
he's actually executed like many
others who had old Bolshevik ties
in '41 as part of the
Party purchase.
With the launch of collectivization
in 1929, Moscow declares the onset
of a program entitled
sedentarization on the basis
of full collectivization.
This meant that nomads
are going to be sped
through the Marxist/Leninist
timeline of history,
that they would be sedentarized and
also collectivized simultaneously.
It was underpinned by the idea
that you needed extraordinary speed
to help [inaudible] help the Kazakhs
catch up to more advanced peoples.
So I'm sure you have never seen
a photograph of a camel hooked
up to a plow before,
but there you go.
Like depeasantization, its corollary
in the Soviet Union's West,
nomadic settlement was an attack
on the culture, and identities,
and economic practices of
this particular social group.
Activists began to
collectivize nomadic regions.
They led the dizzying grain
and meat procurements.
At times they used the
republic's environment
to exact maximum damage, actually.
They settled Kazakhs in areas of
the republic that had no water
or were particularly
susceptible to drought.
The republic's Party Committee
begins to pursue also denomadization
through other routes, criminalizing
a range of practices essential
to the maintenance of nomadic
life such as Kazakh's slaughter
of animals during the
wintertime or their ability
to migrate across seasonal borders.
Efforts at local-level
implementation hinge heavily
on Moscow's partnership with local
cadres, many of whom are Kazakh.
And as I discuss in
greater detail in my book,
the promotion of native cadres
actually forms a crucial element
of this nation-building policy.
The upper ranks of the Party and
state bureaucracy are largely filled
with bureaucrats from
European Russia,
some of them like Goloshchekin.
But the lower ranks of the
bureaucracy are primarily Kazakh.
And in a strategy purposely
designed to shatter old allegiances
and settle violent conflict, Moscow
actually empowers Kazakhs themselves
to make some of the most crucial
choices such as, you know,
who would be considered an exploiter
and how much grain to
confiscate from them.
And as I found in my research,
the efforts of these local
cadres were actually crucial.
They often shaped the scale of
the violence, its intensity,
but also its character,
including which groups won
out and which groups lost.
Ultimately, the result
of this assault,
this campaign of denomadization,
were both anticipated
and unanticipated.
In the winter of 1930 famine began.
In Kazakhstan, like in other
places, Moscow anticipated
that this offensive would result
in considerable loss of life.
And this was seen as a necessary
byproduct of this effort
to incorporate the region.
But Moscow did not anticipate
the scale of the famine,
and a number of unintended
consequences soon emerged.
Animal numbers began to plummet
rapidly as the Party struggled
to develop a form of
animal husbandry
to take pastoral nomadism's place.
Animals that are socialized in
large pens for the first time,
they begin to contract various
diseases, and they parish.
Muhammed Shaek Mietov [assumed
spelling], a famine survivor,
recalled, quote, "An eerie
silence hung over the aul.
There was no mooing,
bleating, or neighing."
As the situation inside Kazakhstan
became increasingly desperate,
many nomads entered into flight.
This was a strategy
that nomads often used
when political conditions
became difficult
or when environmental
conditions changed.
And they use it again
now during the famine.
With their herd numbers in ruins,
those who remained behind
faced an almost certain death.
Zayten Akuchv [assumed
spelling] who works as a --
who worked as a teacher on the
outskirts of Semipalatinsk,
a city in the republic's north,
remembered touring abandoned
settlements on the city's outskirts.
Most were empty, but in one hut he
found two skeletons intertwined,
two lovers trapped in an embrace.
The republic itself in this
period begins to empty out.
Ultimately more than 20%
of the republic's population
would actually flee Kazakhstan.
That's over a million people.
This created a regional crisis
of unprecedented proportions.
And here you can see some
people fleeing the famine.
I -- my guess is actually
they're first-wave refugees.
You can see they're actually dressed
a little bit better than most
of the descriptions of the refugees
I encounter in my documents.
Moscow framed this
tremendous human suffering
as a sign of success and progress.
Kazakh refugees were referred to
as otkochevniki [assumed spelling],
and literally that term means
-- this is an invented term --
it means nomads who are moving away.
And their appearance was
actually depicted as part
of a necessary transition
in Kazakh's development
into a socialist nation.
This transitional stage demanded
extra vigilance, officials warned,
and the Party intensified
its assault on nomadism,
declaring fantastical plans
to settle the Kazakhs even
more quickly than before.
In neighboring Soviet republics,
where starving Kazakhs fled,
the tensions between Soviet
nationalities, policy,
and Soviet economic policy
come into sharp relief.
Waves of violence broke
out as locals seek
to expel so-called foreign
Kazakhs from their republics,
such as Uzbekistan and Russia.
And this was particularly
striking given that the division
of these republics into national
territories had been imposed
by Moscow on this region
just a few years before.
Kazakhs in neighboring republics
were often lynched or beaten.
In Russia, activists round
up Kazakhs in railcars
and send them back to Kazakhstan,
dumping them just across the border.
As the crisis inside
the republic deepened,
Moscow tried to institute
proposals to settle Kazakhs actually
where the fled in these
neighboring republics.
But officials in these
republics harnessed the language
of nationality to object.
They protested that
proposals to settle Kazakhs
where the fled represented
a violation
of their republic's
so-called national rights.
Inside the republic a desperate
struggle for survival continued.
Muhammed Shaek Mietov, the
famine survivor, remembered,
"Everyone was now preoccupied
by getting something to eat
for the following day, or that
same day, or that very moment
to relieve their hunger pangs.
Even the kindest-hearted
people, and closest friends,
and relatives could no
longer help one another out."
Along the republic's railway
lines travelers encountered scene
of horror.
They reported seeing living
skeletons with tiny child skeletons
in their hands, begging for food.
Many peoples turned to
substitute foods to survive.
Famine survivors remember
eating wild grasses or combing
through fields to collect the
rotting remains of the harvest.
Others turned to cannibalism.
One of the most pressing problems
became the burial of the dead.
When activists had the strength
to do it, corpses are dumped
on the outskirts of cities.
And for those who survived the
famine, seeing loved ones buried
in this famine was deeply traumatic.
These mass burials
violated Muslim tradition,
which caused for the faces of
the dead to be wrapped in cloth
and their bodies turned
toward Mecca before burial.
Remembering the desperation of
the final -- famine's final phase,
Tussen Asabaev [assumed spelling],
a famine survivor, wrote,
"Suffering was not
leaving our heads.
Our eyes were full of tears."
Ultimately Moscow would
finally succeed
in bringing the famine
to an end in 1934.
Due to the death of more than 90%
of the republic's livestock herds,
pastoral nomadism as a
way of life had all --
been all but extinguished.
Moscow had succeeded in doing this,
and this would trigger a profound
transformation of Kazakh identity.
More than a million and a half
people had perished, as I mentioned.
Though Kazakhstan was
a multi-ethnic society,
the burden of the suffering fell
disproportionately on Kazakhs.
And they constituted
actually 1.3 million
of this death toll of 1.5 million.
It's clear that the regime's broader
goal was to transform Kazakhs
and Kazakhstan radically with little
regard for the tremendous loss
of life incurred in the process.
Moscow's policies, for instance,
anticipate the cultural
destruction of Kazakh societies.
But I cannot find any evidence
to indicate that these plans
for a violent transformation of
Kazakhstan ever became transformed
into a desire to eliminate
Kazakhs as a group.
But it's clear also that the regime
could not transform Kazakh society
as it wished.
Some features of Kazakhs'
pastoral nomadic way of life,
such as their reliance on kinship,
actually survived the famine.
Though the Party had sought
to consolidate Kazakh society
into a nation defined by territory,
as I mentioned, large numbers --
over a million Kazakhs
are displaced outside
of the republic during the famine.
Many of them never
returned to Kazakhstan,
and this profoundly
reshapes the demographic
and the ethnic balance
of the broader region.
And while the regime
actually sought to carry
out Soviet-style modernization,
they had actually engineered
the republic's total collapse --
economic collapse.
Though the republic had
previously been Moscow
and Leningrad's major meat supplier,
some 90% of the republic's
animal herds,
as I mentioned, perish
in this disaster.
It would take more than
two decades for them
to bring the republic's
livestock numbers
to reach their pre-famine levels.
Due to the lack of work
animals in the republic
in the disaster's aftermath,
collective farmers now sewed --
were forced actually to
sew the fields by hand.
Officials are even forced to
purchase livestock from China
to build up the republic's
livestock base.
To conclude my talk, I'd like
to return to the questions
of Soviet modernization
and nation-building,
two issues that I raised
at the beginning.
On the subject of Soviet
modernization we see
that the challenges of transforming
this region were distinct.
And I've called -- along the way
in my talk I've called
particular attention to the issues
that they faced in transforming
the republic's arid environment,
which differed sharply from the
landscapes of European Russia.
Ultimately the issue of
transforming the landscape continues
to bedevil the regime, and we can
see echoes of it, for instance,
in later periods, such
as the attempt
to transform the Kazakh steppe
under the virgin lands
program through Khrushchev.
But on the subject of
Soviet development,
I've also stressed the
extent to which the project
of collectivization in
Kazakhstan was a failure.
These policies were cruel, but
they were also counterproductive.
They were repressive, but
they were also self-defeating.
Soviet modernization was supposed
to build a stronger state,
but in reality it would take the
republic several decades to recover
from this economic devastation.
As I've shown, the language of
Soviet nation-building often served
to reinforce rather than
contradict the regime's goals
of Soviet economic transformation.
Categories such as Kazakh and nomad
were not necessarily in opposition
to each other, but they might
serve mutually-reinforcing goals.
This helps us shed new light on how
to understand the devastating toll
of the Soviet collectivization
famines,
which as I previously
mentioned, took --
hit a broad swath of the Soviet
Union, but in particular Ukraine,
and the Volga, Don, and Kuban areas.
Previously much of the
scholarship on collectivization
and these famines has
been highly contested,
and it's been divided
into two schools.
And the case of the Kazakh
famine has been largely left out.
The first school raises
the issue of nationality.
They argue that this is the
moment in collectivization
when the regime abandoned its
commitment to the promotion
of nationality and carried
out an orchestrated attack
against Ukrainians
as a national group.
Alternately, others have
taken a different view.
They've argued that the Ukrainian
famine was part of a broader assault
by the regime against a
social category, peasants.
In Ukraine, like in
Kazakhstan, a national
and a social category
actually overlap.
Most Ukrainians are peasants.
And to bolster their claims, these
scholars point to the existence
of famine amongst the peasantry in
other parts of the Soviet Union,
such as the Don, Kuban,
and Volga areas of Russia.
But my research shows -- and more
broadly, I think the reassertion
of the Kazakh famine
into this debate --
that neither the explanation of
nationality or peasantry holds.
As the case of the Kazakh famine
and the Party's denomadization
campaign reveals,
collectivization was
an assault actually
on social categories more broadly,
not just an assault on peasants.
The categories of national and
social were not necessarily
in opposition to each other
or mutually exclusive,
as this debate might imply,
but they often served mutually
reinforcing aims.
While many scholars imply
that the regime's treatment
of Ukrainians was unique,
my work shows that there
was a far broader swath
of terror in this period.
Many of the brutal tactics used
in Ukraine, such as the closure
of borders so that the starving
peasants could not flee,
were actually used
first in Kazakhstan.
Ultimately my research reveals
the centrality of the project
of nation-building to
the Soviet project.
In Kazakhstan we most
clearly see, I think,
the Soviets' mobilizational aims.
The extraordinary efforts
that they took
to form a group of
nomads into a nation.
But the unresolved tensions between
the project of Soviet modernity
and Soviet nation-making were
unresolved, and they would continue
to plague the Soviet Union
up through the collapse.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
I look forward to your questions.
I'm just getting --
Yeah, Anya?
>> Thank you very much.
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah.
[ Inaudible Audience Comment ]
No one does, don't worry.
[ Inaudible Audience Comment ]
Yeah.
>> [Inaudible] silence
throughout the Soviet [inaudible].
Can you say a little bit --
I mean, there must have been
some sort of oral tradition,
passing on [inaudible]
Kazakhs were in exile.
So would you -- can you
talk a little bit sort of
where this [inaudible] how
it was actually shared,
transferred, passed on --
[ Inaudible ]
So -- because there are some
of these stories can sort
of shed light on this --
[ Inaudible ]
>> Sarah Cameron: I think the
whole question of the memory
of the Kazakh famine, it's a
really, really interesting topic,
and whenever I speak, I
encourage someone else to go out
and write a book on
it, because it's an --
I make some stabs at trying
to say something about it,
but it's actually a really important
and a very interesting topic.
So yes, as far as I've been able
to determine, the -- it is --
memories of the famine
are preserved orally.
It also -- you know, during --
for the '30s through up until the
collapse, you couldn't really talk
about this subject, but I found
actually examples of that woven,
for instance, into
Kazakh literature.
That's one way that it appears,
in Kazakh-language literary
journals in this period.
But I haven't -- I
haven't done the research
or found much evidence beyond that.
That is sort of my only
instance of it appearing
from the '30s to the '90s.
In the 1990s what is quite
interesting -- and here the --
for instance, the memory
of the Kazakh famine has taken
a completely different track
than say the memory of the Ukrainian
famine, which has really kind
of assumed a central role in the
making of Ukrainian identity.
So in the early 1990s
the Kazakh famine is,
quote, unquote, discovered.
And it is talked about all over
scholarly and popular media.
There is an -- it's actually
even ruled a genocide
by people in Kazakhstan.
There's a government
commission that looks into it.
And often some of that literature
at the time also takes
a kind of nastier edge.
Goloshchekin, who I highlighted
in my talk, is Jewish.
This is repeated again and again
as Goloshchekin's genocide in some
of the -- there are some
very good scholarly accounts,
but some others take a
kind of either implicitly
or explicitly anti-Semitic tone.
Then the other interesting thing
is that after this explosion
of interest in it, the
topic begins to die down.
And that has more or less,
with some exceptions,
remained the state up until today.
Even when I was researching this
in Kazakhstan I had a couple
of people come up to me.
They said, "Great.
It's great you're telling that story
to an American audience,
but we've solved that."
And I was really struck by this.
And I couldn't -- you know, I began
to probe further, and I talked to --
you know, I talked to some
Kazakh scholars about it.
And I think there's probably
a couple explanations for it.
One is, of course, Kazakhstan's
close relationship with Russia.
There is a fear by
bringing up this topic
that they might hurt their
relationship with Russia
or hurt the relationship
with Kazakhstan's large
ethnic Russian population.
Another explanation for the topic,
I think, is -- you know, I've had --
talked with some Kazakh
scholars who have said,
"Look, we were nomads before.
Now we are a modern society."
And so I think in Kazakhstan what
you see to a certain extent is kind
of a greater ambivalence about what
Soviet modernization actually meant
and what it brought to Kazakhstan.
But it's very complicated.
It's a complicated
issue, and someone needs
to write a book on it, I would say.
Yes?
>> So this isn't -- I mean,
possibly this is also,
but not entirely a
question of memory,
that [inaudible] should
be [inaudible]
but you talked about the fact
that the lower-level bureaucrats
[inaudible] to be ethnically --
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah, yeah.
>> How are they thought of --
well, part of [inaudible]
is in the Warsaw Ghettos,
some of the different
ghettos where you have Jewish
committees [inaudible] in the ghetto
and [inaudible] people communicating
where they didn't have
the same regime.
[Inaudible] question, right?
Who [inaudible] protecting
the population?
And how bad is --
>> Sarah Cameron: Not
very much, I would say.
I think that is also -- you know,
like any difficult topic and,
you know, returning to your
question, too, I think that's --
I mean, famines are
complicated, right?
The notion -- the whole
notion of kind of a victim
or a perpetrator is really difficult
when you're talking about a famine
and talking about survival
in this period.
So there is a certain willingness to
-- there were some Kazakhs who were
in the upper levels of the
bureaucracy, much less, though,
than there is from European Russia.
And there was a certain
willingness to say, "Look, you know,
these guys didn't do a good thing."
So some of them have sort of
been identified and talked about.
But on the lower level,
I think that's --
that is still not very
much recognized
or -- you know, or discussed.
I mean, another point that
that -- your questions, too,
bring up is that Kazakhstan,
to this day there's sort of --
it's a big country territorially,
but it's also a small country
in that networks and circles
are often inter-tangled.
And I've heard things
said like, "Oh,
I was reading an archival document,
and I saw that that guy did
something bad to someone else --
that Kazakh did something bad
to someone else, but you know,
I know his uncle, so you know,
I don't think I'm going
to write about that.
So I think that -- the sort of --
the tininess of sort of the
elite may also play a role
into this as well
>> Is there a sense
in which there is sort
of people who had somewhere --
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah.
>> Are they able to shield their
most immediate kinship networks
from the effects of
dislocation and --
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah,
some of them are.
So I definitely see
this in the documents,
and this is an interesting
-- because the Party itself,
for instance, one of the
goals of this campaign
against nomadism is they wanted to
eliminate markers such as kinship.
But in actuality we -- I certainly
on the ground see it playing a role,
that people alternately they
tried to, you know, shield --
for instance, shield some kin
members from confiscation,
use it to punish members
of a rival clan.
But you also see some
instances, too,
of maybe what I would argue
even is belief, right,
that belief in the project
that they were doing.
Yes, Colleen?
>> Thanks for such
an interesting talk.
I was wondering about these
low-level Kazakh bureaucrats.
Were they educated in
Moscow, or were they --
>> Sarah Cameron: Very few of them
-- so at least on the local level,
most of these -- most of
the Kazakhs probably --
maybe they have some kind
of Islamic education,
but most of them are not literate.
And that's the problem that
I was sort of referring
to in the beginning with sources.
But on the higher level,
most of those who are serving
in the higher levels of the
Party, they speak Russian.
And if -- only a very,
very few of them --
I can actually only think of
one of the top of my head,
Rashan Dosev [assumed spelling],
who's educated in Moscow.
The rest of them either --
a few have a traditional
confessional education,
but some of them are educated in
so-called Russo-native schools,
which were set up by the Russian
Empire in the 19th century, so yeah.
Yes?
>> Hi, so thank you so much for
this really interesting talk.
I wanted to ask you about your
comments [inaudible] comparison
to --
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah.
>> And it's --
>> Sarah Cameron: I was wondering
why I hadn't gotten a question
about the Ukrainian famine yet.
It's always -- usually it's like
the second or third question.
>> [Inaudible] I was thinking when
you were describing that as the --
sort of the [inaudible] of the
empires and colonial [inaudible]
where frontiers and colonies
serves as kind of laboratories
for population control, or forms of
[inaudible] violence, or other kinds
of [inaudible] of ways
that [inaudible]
regimes ended up refining
their mechanisms of form
and [inaudible] and lasting effects.
Or if you're taking -- if
you were looking at some
of the lasting effects
of the experiments
in Kazakhstan [inaudible]
Soviet Union's operations --
>> Sarah Cameron: This is
a very tricky question.
It's a very good one.
I've had a lot of -- I can
point to some hints, but I'm --
I think one of the
difficulties also is
in tracing the transmission
techniques, right?
One of the interesting things,
for instance, is that if we look
at the Ukrainian famine,
a lot of scholars
of the Ukrainian famine
have argued that a lot
of these very brutal techniques,
you know, such as the closure
of borders, the blacklisting of
villages, and so on, in Ukraine,
that these were unique to
Ukraine, and they were introduced
at a certain moment in
the fall of 1932 to '33.
However, the Kazakh
famine begins earlier.
A lot of these techniques are
introduced in Kazakhstan first.
So I cannot -- you know, it's hard.
I've not been able to
trace the transmission,
you know, through Moscow.
But that itself I think
is interesting to see
that there is a broader
kind of spectrum of terror.
I mean, I think more
broadly maybe there's also --
you might trace it a little it
in terms of personnel as well.
So in the early 1920s -- actually
when Goloshchekin first
comes along the [inaudible],
he is sent to Kazakhstan.
But one of the people who's
in Kazakhstan with him
who is posted there is Yezhov
who becomes very famous.
Yezhov, sort of his nickname
later becomes the Bloody Dwarf.
He's the person that --
basically the main architect
of the Great Terror.
And he spends some of his
formative years in Kazakhstan.
So I think that's another kind
of interesting example of that.
Yes?
>> The thing that strikes
me as a reason possibly
that the famine has not be treated
to the extensive [inaudible]
in recent years is not only
the [inaudible] about Russia,
but the fact that if you
[inaudible] there were a
lot of Kazakhs who were connected
with [inaudible] Kazakhstan
seems to have been [inaudible]
disproportionately affected
in the purges of '36 to '38.
I remember going through
the museums in [inaudible],
and they had pictures of all the
great [inaudible] every single
one of them [inaudible] 1938.
Is that 1938 [inaudible] somehow
heightened power [inaudible]
Kazakhstan became the dumping
ground for all of the --
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah, yeah.
>> -- which is [inaudible] it's
another thing that's multi-ethnic --
>> Sarah Cameron: Of course, yeah.
>> It's [inaudible].
And then we have [inaudible]
in the '80s
of the Kazakhs versus the Russians,
even the communist [inaudible]
all of that history means that for
[inaudible] you couldn't
[inaudible] I guess
in the strategic [inaudible]
of enemies --
>> Sarah Cameron: Well, yeah.
I mean, I agree and
sort of disagree.
I mean, we've seen -- you
know, we've seen other examples
where states -- where in
actuality these incidences
of mass violence are
actually quite complicated,
but various states have tried
to promote a very simplified
history of it.
So I think that would have been --
you know, that would have been
possible to do in the Kazakh case.
I wish I had brought it today.
I forgot to include it
on my list of images.
People always like to see it.
But when I was there
living in Kazakhstan,
I heard that there was a memorial
to the victims of the famine.
I thought, you know, I'm
working on this topic.
I've got to see it.
Where is this memorial?
So I went to all the scholars who
were working on the Kazakh famine.
And I said, "Where
is this memorial?"
And they were, "Oh,"
scratching their heads.
"Oh, you know, somewhere down
in al-Matin [assumed spelling].
Oh, I don't remember."
And so I spent, you know, several
weekends walking around al-Matin,
hunting in parks, looking
for this memorial,
which no one seemed
to know where it was.
And I found it.
And it was in a corner of a park.
There is a plaque that said -- this
was done I think in, you know, 1995.
A plaque that -- which was sort
of covered with weeds, and so on.
And it said, "In this place,
a memorial to the victims
of the Kazakh famine will be built.
So it's very interesting.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah?
>> Hello. Actually,
I am from Kazakhstan.
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah.
>> And my grandparents [inaudible]
they went from Kazakhstan to Russia.
And they had [inaudible] thank
you so much for this research,
and I know how it's
difficult to do research.
Especially I know in the former
Soviet Union when there's no data,
no [inaudible] and a lot of
this stuff is [inaudible].
And a lot of things [inaudible]
told, it does make sense to me,
because I'm coming
from that country.
I totally understand.
And what's interesting is that we
don't talk much about the famine
in Kazakhstan, and we
[inaudible] because yeah,
there's [inaudible] a history and
[inaudible] that time,
it was very [inaudible].
And the reason [inaudible] I
was always thinking why would
you [inaudible]?
And I think it's because
a lot of people
in the world have [inaudible]
people,
they have very closer
relationship with Russia [inaudible]
and against the U.S. and [inaudible]
anyway, [inaudible] my question is.
The research, how long did it
take you to do this research?
And since Kazakhstan is such a
new country [inaudible] years,
there are so many challenges,
so many things
that have not been discovered yet.
How did you choose this topic?
>> Sarah Cameron: Oh, wow.
So -- yeah, interesting
question so in --
just a comment on your first point,
I think -- and again, why it's --
I stress that I'm not
providing by any means a sort
of definitive answer in
the question of memory.
One sort of point I've also
thought about is that in thinking
about this question in Kazakhstan,
one also needs to think that --
I think many Kazakhs don't adhere
to say standard Western
practices of commemoration, right.
I've heard some Kazakhs
say to me, "You know,
if we wanted to commemorate
something,
we don't put up a monument," right.
There's other different
practices of commemoration.
And I think that may
be part of the story.
So you're asking as to
how I came to the topic
and how I was able to research it?
Oh, and how long I -- so I spent a
lot of time in Kazakhstan, maybe --
I don't know -- two
years on and off.
And then I spent many -- too many
years researching it, actually.
The way I first got
into the topic, I think,
is I got quite interested
in Central Asia.
I was doing a PhD in Soviet
history, and Kazakhstan
from a pragmatic standpoint seemed
to be a really interesting region
to study because it had been
so little written about it.
And then furthermore, archival
access was actually a lot better
than some of the other
republics like Uzbekistan
in that both the state and the
Communist Party archives were open.
So -- and also I really
felt that a lot
of people generalized
about Central Asia.
Most of the books have been
written about Uzbekistan.
They said Uzbekistan stands
for all of Central Asia.
Whereas -- yeah, I
see your face, right?
That in reality a lot of these
republics are quite different
from the -- each other, and their --
and you know, the divide
between the nomadic
and sedentary peoples
is really huge.
And so that's what sort of
interested me in Kazakhstan.
When I went there and I
started to learn some Kazakh,
I then started looking just
at school history textbooks,
and I saw it -- you know, they're
all talking about this famine,
and I have never even
heard of this, right,
in my Soviet history textbooks.
And it's not even there.
So that's what sort
of pushed me into it.
And I think I was lucky
in the end in my topic
in that it was also a topic
that every Kazakh could understand
why it was important for me
to explain this to
an American audience.
So I -- you know, just when I
was taking like taxicab rides,
taxicab drivers would
tell me stories, right.
"What are you doing here?"
And so that -- for me that was
also a really interesting part
of the topic.
Yeah?
>> Daniele Turello: Time
for one final question.
>> Sarah Cameron: Oh, okay, yeah.
Well, you're it.
>> [Inaudible] thank you so
much for your fascinating talk.
[Inaudible]
I had a couple of [inaudible]
questions.
One has to do with [inaudible]
there is kind of a saying
[inaudible] Kazakh, when one ceases
to be a nomad, one
ceases to be a Kazakh.
>> Sarah Cameron: Yeah.
>> So I was fascinated
by how [inaudible] Russian
nationalist [inaudible] definition
as Kazakh in the wake of the last --
[ Inaudible ]
And then my second
question, this has to do
with [inaudible] the Soviet
[inaudible] seems to
rest so much [inaudible]
in particular [inaudible]
[ Inaudible ]
>> Sarah Cameron: Great, thank you.
So the first question
about this question
of national self-definition,
I think that's --
it's still very much a
question in Kazakhstan.
The interesting thing is
in Kazakhstan right now
there is enormous effort
to revive Kazakhs nomadic past.
To -- in contrast to the
sort of standard line
that nomads are very backward
and this was not an
advanced civilization,
there's enormous emphasis on
reviving the ancient roots
of nomadism in Kazakhstan.
So they trace the history of Kazakhs
-- this is sort of a stretch,
if you ask me -- all the
way back to the Scythians.
And you know, trace the sort
of -- well, some scholars do.
And so there's a lot of attempts
to try and stress the roots
of nomadic culture in
Kazakh society today.
For instance, hospitality, this is
always seen as something that was,
you know, important to
nomadic -- in nomadic culture.
So there is an attempt, actually, to
in some way revive the nomadic past.
There is also an increasing
interest, for instance,
in a lot of Kazakhs -- genealogy is
something that's really important
to nomads.
It's both -- you know,
it's both an economic tie,
something that's really
important to nomadism,
but also a source of
identity and kinship.
And there's been a new emphasis on
trying to trace one's genealogy.
They've constructed
genealogical registers,
which are very sort
of popular to buy.
You can learn about your own
particular clan and its history.
So to a certain extent,
yeah, that is being revived.
So in terms of your second question,
why so much energy to nomadism?
Why is it seen as so threatening?
Well, I think in its --
it's something that I have actually
also sort of struggled with,
because it is interesting --
I've always found it interesting
that there was this sort of
pro-nomadism strain in the '20s,
right, which then disappears.
But ultimately, I think nomadism
is in conflict with a couple ideas
that the Soviets are
putting forward.
And you also raised the point
that these nomadic societies
are actually collect --
themselves, right, communal,
collective societies.
This is a point raised by Kazakh
communists in the '20s, "Look,
we already have communism.
You know, we're already doing
everything collectively."
So they actually raised -- right,
right, they raised that point.
Yeah, but I think on a -- on the
level of say nation-building,
if you have already decided that
nations correspond to territories,
right -- Soviet nations
correspond to the -- to boundaries.
Nomads actually do not
adhere to boundaries.
They do not adhere to
international boundaries, right.
They cross -- there's a huge
Kazakh population in Xinjiang.
There was even before the
famine, this province of China.
So this is a problem, right,
trying to put in a conception
of nationality that is rooted
in territory, if you're a nomad.
I think another thing is that the
idea of the first five-year plan
as it was developed was predicated
on actually getting
surpluses, right.
Collectivization was
supposed to produce surpluses
of meat, and of grain, and so on.
And nomads, their -- the
kind of productive cycles
of nomadism do not go
in that way, right.
This is not something
that's going to adhere
to this vision of development.
So I think that's possibly
sort of two --
kind of two answers to
your question, right.
Okay, thank you all.
[ Applause ]
>> Daniele Turello: Thanks so
much, Sarah, for that thorough
and thought-provoking presentation.
I have one announcement
before we disperse,
and that's that we will be back in
this space next Friday, October 28.
The Kluge Center has a McGuire Chair
in ethics and American history.
And next Friday, McGuire -- a
past McGuire chair will be here,
and the lecture will be "The Economy
of Promises, Trust and Credit
in America," and that's
by Bruce Caruthers
from Northwestern University.
And it's 3 o'clock on Friday.
So we hope to see you then.
Thank you [applause].
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
