The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society.
Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991.
Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.
Daftar Isi
Explanatory Note
List of Maps
Introduction
1. The Steppe and the Sown: Peasants, Nomads, and the Transformation of the Kazakh Steppe, 1896–1921
2. Can You Get to Socialism by Camel? The Fate of Pastoral Nomadism in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1921–28
3. Kazakhstan’s ‘Little October’: The Campaign against Kazakh Elites, 1928
4. Nomads under Siege: Kazakhstan and the Launch of Forced Collectivization
5. Violence, Flight, and Hunger: The Sino-Kazakh Border and the Kazakh Famine
6. Kazakhstan and the Politics of Hunger, 1931–34
Conclusion
Epilogue
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Precipitation Levels for the Kazakh Steppe, 1921–33
List of Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Tentang Penulis
Sarah Cameron is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland.
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