The Silent Steppe by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov

These policies included a campaign to eliminate the national elites from political bodies and confiscate property belonging to bay(livestock owners) and deport them. These new collective farms were theoretically intended to operate as part of an agro-pastoral economy, combining livestock raising and agriculture.This project, which was only very partially realized, constituted a central element of a cluster of measures taken to control and repress nomadic Kazakh society. The Kazakhstan ASSR played a key role in this program for two reasons:1) Its grain-producing lands, situated in northern regions near the Russian borders, were considered priorities for collectivization, and 2) It possessed “inhospitable” and sparsely populated regions to serve, as did the Urals and Siberia, as a “zone of special settlement” for “dekulakized” inhabitants.Īt the local level, the end of the 1920sand the launching of collectivization corresponded to a policy of deliberate sedentarization that involved efforts to entice the more fragile nomadic populations to settle in kolkhozesin zones surrounding the steppes that were considered unsuitable for any kind of agricultural production. The acceleration of the effort to industrialize the USSR introducedby the first Five Year Plan inApril 1929 at the 15th conference of the Communist Party were followed several months later by the collectivization of rural areas and its repressive corollary, dekulakization. Seventy percent of the Kazakhs were nomadic livestock farmers who ranged throughout the arid, semi-arid, and steppe regions of this vast territory.The sedentary farming activities of other nationalities were concentrated in the richer, arable lands in the northern and southeastern(Alma-Ata) regions of the republic. The Soviet census of 1926 estimated the population of the Kazakhstan ASSR at 6.2 million, with approximately four million Kazakhs and the remainder comprised of comprising European colonial populations and local minorities, including Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles.

This famine was among the deadliest in the USSR and directly led to the deaths of approximately one third of the Kazakh population, while also triggering the emigration of several hundred thousand survivors and the rapid and irreversible decline of the nomadic way of life of the inhabitants of the region’s steppes. The famine that struck the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR)of Kazakhstan between 19 belongs to the wider history of collectivization in the USSR and, more specifically, the campaign to sedentarize the Kazakhs undertaken during the same period.

The Silent Steppe by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov