The Hungry Steppe

Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan

Sarah Cameron

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501730450
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

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.

1

THE STEPPE AND THE SOWN

Peasants, Nomads, and the Transformation of the Kazakh Steppe, 1896–1921

During the late nineteenth century, more than 1.5 million peasants from European Russia settled the Kazakh steppe, dramatically altering this region and the lives of the pastoral nomadic peoples who lived there.¹ In the span of just twenty years—the peak of peasant settlement was the period 1896–1916—the Kazakh steppe, dominated by Muslim, Turkic-speaking peoples since the fifteenth century, became transformed into a multiethnic, multiconfessional society. Parts of the Kazakh steppe were no longer predominately Kazakh, at least in terms of their ethnic makeup: by 1916, in Akmolinsk province, Slavic settlers constituted 59 percent of the population; Kazakhs, 34 percent. In certain northern uezdy of Akmolinsk province, such as Omsk, the change was even more striking: there Slavic settlers composed 72 percent of the population; Kazakhs, 21 percent.²

In addition to these demographic changes, the arrival of these settlers altered the steppe’s environmental profile. Most settlers were grain farmers, and they brought large swaths of the steppe under cultivation. By 1916, the northern section of the Kazakh steppe had become one of the Russian empire’s key grain-producing regions, and many pastoral nomads had been displaced from their traditional pasturelands. In a historic shift, this territory, a place long synonymous with pastoralism, a practice defined by the herding and management of animals, was now a mixed economic region, one populated by large numbers of settled, agrarian peoples in addition to pastoralists.

The settlement of the Kazakh steppe by Slavic peasants was part of a broader migration of Slavic peoples to Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Central Asia during the late nineteenth century.³ In the aftermath of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, many peasants, known as samovol′tsy, or “self-settlers,” came illegally, seeking fertile lands to farm and relief from the poverty and land hunger that characterized peasant life in parts of European Russia. By 1889, St. Petersburg, seeking to regulate this flow of migrants and convinced of the civilizing role that Slavic settlers could play in these regions, issued the Resettlement Act. This act, which marked the first central government effort to coordinate this migration, codified settlement as official state policy, setting up settlement programs in European Russia, Western Siberia, and the provinces of Akmolinsk, Semi-palatinsk, and Semirech′e. In 1893, construction on the Trans-Siberian railroad began, and one of the last remaining obstacles to large-scale peasant colonization of these regions, the arduous trip across European Russia by oxen and cart, was erased.

Russian imperial officials anticipated that peasant settlement would encourage Kazakhs to abandon their nomadic way of life for a settled one, a goal that St. Petersburg had pursued to varying degrees since the rule of Catherine the Great.⁴ The spread of agriculture, it was believed, would “civilize” native peoples and make the lands in these regions more “productive.”

But as this chapter reveals, though Kazakhs’ pastoral nomadic practices began to shift in response to this wave of peasant settlement, it was not always in the ways that St. Petersburg might have hoped. Though most nomads began to reduce their mobility, they also adopted other strategies, such as trade and the rental of their pasture lands, to maintain their nomadic way of life and adapt to the changing social, political, and environmental circumstances of life on the steppe. World War I and the destruction brought by the Russian Civil War dealt a particularly devastating blow to nomadic life, but the predictions of many Russian imperial officials that nomadism, an “anachronism,” would soon give way to settled life did not come to pass.⁵ In 1924, as the new Soviet state began to divide the region up into national republics, pastoral nomadism remained the predominant way of life for most Kazakhs.⁶

In a pattern that foreshadowed elements of the Soviet state’s battle to make the Kazakh steppe into an agrarian region, settlers endured devastating droughts, frosts, and hunger. They struggled to adapt their agricultural practices to the steppe’s environmental conditions. Though there was a lot of land in the Kazakh steppe, much of it was very arid, salinated, or otherwise unsuitable for farming. A focus on quantity—the overall amount of “surplus” land in the Kazakh steppe— concealed the complexity of this landscape and the ways that fertile lands were regularly interspersed with poor quality soils. After several years of poor harvests, the Governor-Generalship of the Steppe temporarily closed the steppe to further colonization in 1891.⁷ Though many settlers chose to remain, ultimately some 20 percent of all settlers who came during this period of intense peasant colonization would return to European Russia.⁸

The legacies of this period and the particular imprint that it left on pastoral nomads, Slavic settlers and the steppe itself help explain the scale of the Kazakh famine of 1930–33, which led to the death of 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Kazakhs. Though the available data do not allow a full investigation of ecological change in this period—the systematic collection of temperature and precipitation data in the Kazakh steppe began only in the late nineteenth century—other materials, including archival sources and ethnographic accounts, illustrate important shifts in the relationship among humans, animals, climate, and environment.⁹ Due to this intense period of human and animal growth, observers note that some water sources were drying up and the fertility of various soils had become exhausted. As both nomads and Slavic settlers adapted to the changing circumstances of life on the steppe, these two ways of life developed close economic linkages, particularly a grain and livestock trade. Kazakhs began to change their diet, shifting away from a diet based on meat and milk products to one in which grain played a larger role. It is likely that they began to consume less food overall, increasing their vulnerability to famine.¹⁰

As researchers have shown, both abrupt change and slower-moving structural processes can combine to produce a famine.¹¹ The Soviet regime’s sweeping program of state-driven transformation was the most important cause of the Kazakh famine of 1930–33, and it is doubtful that famine would have broken out anywhere in Kazakhstan without the regime’s violent assault on nomadic life. But the legacies of Russian imperial rule—principally changes induced by massive peasant colonization of the Kazakh steppe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—were an important contributing factor.¹² These changes, which were both seen and unseen by Soviet officials, contributed to a general sense by the early Soviet era that the steppe’s economy was in state of crisis, and that only a radical fix, forced settlement of the Kazakh nomads, could make the area economically productive. Ultimately the changes that began under Russian imperial rule would intensify the scale of the Kazakh famine, amplifying the effects of the Soviet regime’s brutal policy changes.

This chapter begins by situating pastoral nomadism in the broader sweep of Central Eurasian history.¹³ It explains the basic features of this way of life and the ways that nomads regularly adapted to political and ecological shifts. It then traces how the Kazakhs and the Russian empire first came to interact, a process that culminated in the Russian empire’s conquest of the Kazakh steppe in the nineteenth century. It examines pastoral nomadic life on the eve of peasant settlement, revealing the close relationship between pastoral nomads’ practices and the environment of the steppe. Finally, it analyzes how the arrival of peasant settlers then began to alter various features of this relationship.

Pastoral Nomadism and Central Eurasia

The practice of pastoral nomadism has a long history in the steppe zone of Central Eurasia, dating back at least four millennia.¹⁴ In the middle of the first millennium BCE, the Scythians, a northern Iranian people, migrated into the western steppe, becoming the region’s first known nomadic empire. The Greek historian Herodotus famously documented the inner workings of this empire, focusing on the Scythians’ mastery of mounted warfare and their development of systems of trade.¹⁵ Later, Islamic geographers named the steppe for the nomadic peoples who lived there: in the beginning of the eighth century AD, the steppe was known as “The Steppe of the Ghuzz,” in reference to the Oghuz Turks. By the eleventh century, the territory was referred to by a Persian name, “Dashti-i Qïpchaq,” or the Steppe of the Qïpchaqs. Though the Qïpchaqs ceased to be the dominant ethnic group in the steppe after the Mongol conquest, this name remained in use until the nineteenth century, when the territory became known as “the Kirgiz steppe” (Kirgizskaia step′).¹⁶ It was during the Soviet period that the territory became known as “the Kazakh steppe,” a name it retains today. As these naming practices suggest, the history of the steppe is, in many eyes, synonymous with nomadism, and it conjures up images of mounted, raiding warriors who wandered free from the trappings of settled life.

But as researchers have shown, the history of pastoral nomadism in Central Eurasia is far more complex than an image of wandering, raiding warriors would seem to suggest. Throughout the centuries, nomadism did tend to be the predominant economic activity in the steppe zone, with sedentary populations concentrated in oases or irrigated river valleys. But archeologists have found evidence dating from the Bronze Age (3000–1000 BCE) to indicate that there were significant variations in economic activities across the steppe zone, with some pastoral nomadic communities intensifying their focus on herding, while others placed more emphasis on hunting.¹⁷ Scholars have shown that some farming, including the cultivation of drought-resistant crops such as spring wheat, millet, and oats, was practiced as a supplementary activity in economic zones dominated by nomads, from the Neolithic Age to the modern era.¹⁸ These studies have challenged the idea that the steppe could support only long-distance animal herding. By contrast, they have proven that the environmental constraints on settled agriculture in this region were neither precise nor immutable.¹⁹ These findings and others have prompted a rethinking of what pastoral nomadism in Central Eurasia actually was and how it changed over time.²⁰

The term “pastoral nomadism” can be challenging to define. Pastoralism refers to an economic practice, the herding and supervision of animals. Pastoral-ists raise their animals on the open range, in contrast to ranchers who generally provide hay or fodder for their animals and stable them in pens or sheds.²¹ Nomadism might be defined roughly as a strategy, or the regular movement of people from place to place in a deliberate, rather than an aimless, manner.²² Thus, pastoral nomads were those groups of people who carried out repeated, purposeful migrations to pasture their animal herds, such as sheep, camels, and horses. Most regularly incorporated other activities, including trade, hunting, and seasonal agriculture, to supplement their practice of pastoralism. Due to the need to migrate with their animal herds, pastoral nomads generally lived in a dwelling that could be collapsed and transported easily, such as a tent or a yurt (kiĭz uy).²³

It is important to note that pastoral nomads’ strategies were not timeless and unchanging.²⁴ As researchers have shown, pastoral nomads regularly altered their practices according to opportunities and risks.²⁵ Environmental changes, such as shifts in temperature or precipitation, might cause some pastoral nomads to migrate seasonally, rather than year-round. Social and political changes, such as the intrusion of new peoples or shifts in political structures, might prompt them to increase or decrease their reliance on other economic strategies, such as agriculture or hunting.²⁶ Moreover, pastoral nomadism was not solely an ecological adaptation; it could also serve as a political strategy. During times of crisis, threatened groups could retreat to utilize marginal environments.²⁷

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the steppe came under intense Slavic peasant colonization, Russian imperial officials witnessed important shifts in pastoral nomadic life, changes that seemed to confirm their idea that they were in a unique historical moment, whereby pastoral nomadism would disappear under the onward march of modernity. The settlement of the Kazakh nomads was a phenomenon that many Russian imperial officials believed to be evoluti...

Table of contents

• 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
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Precipitation Levels for the Kazakh Steppe, 1921–33
• Glossary
• List of Abbreviations Used in the Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index