Frameworks for Genocide in Communist Studies
From 1930 to 1933, the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan suffered a horrific yet understudied episode of famine, violence, and displacement that claimed the lives of roughly 1.5 million people, including a third of the republic’s ethnic Kazakh population.1 Part of the greater Soviet collectivization famine that also devastated areas of Russia and Ukraine under the First Five-Year Plan, the Kazakh famine is unique in that it predominantly affected a nomadic society, whose forced sedentarization was a key aim of Soviet policy. The multi-year crisis uprooted the social foundations of steppe society and led to the near-elimination of traditional Kazakh pastoral nomadism, paving the way for Soviet political hegemony on the steppe. The tremendous suffering of ethnic Kazakhs and the deliberate targeting of their way of life prompt an investigation as to whether Soviet actions during the Kazakh famine constitute genocide. This two-part essay attempts to answer this question.
In Part I, I will examine the motivations behind the Soviet collectivization policy in Kazakhstan and its dramatic impact on the Kazakh economy and society, as well as the disproportionate suffering of ethnic Kazakhs. Although meant to redirect the vast economic potential of the Kazakh steppe towards more efficient state use, the forced collectivization of grain and livestock precipitated mass starvation, a regional refugee crisis, and, ironically, the total collapse of the steppe’s agricultural production. In Part II, I will analyze the role and intent of the Soviet state in the crisis. I argue that, although Soviet actions during the famine cannot be designated as genocide under the predominant legal framework, they nonetheless constituted an intentional and merciless attack on Kazakh nomadic culture that deserves greater public recognition. I thus propose characterizing the Kazakh famine as a “communist genocide,” a term applied by Norman Naimark. This terminology allows historians to sidestep the limitations of relying solely on faulty legal frameworks for genocide to properly communicate the scale and deliberateness of cultural atrocities like the Kazakh famine while emphasizing the fundamental role of authoritarian communism in causing them.
To provide the factual background for my analysis, I will primarily draw on the work of contemporary Western scholars like Sarah Cameron, Robert Kindler, Isabelle Ohayon, Niccolò Pianciola, and Martha Olcott while also incorporating references to primary sources and work by Kazakh scholars when pertinent. This cohort of Western scholars has done much in the last two decades to draw attention in the West to this unique and understudied episode of world history.2 With the exception of Cameron, these historians have relied primarily on Russian-language documents, which introduces a possible historiographical bias towards the perspective of state implementers. Nonetheless, while this limitation of the sources should be acknowledged, it does not substantially affect the conclusions of this investigation, which focus on Soviet action and intent over the course of the famine. Finally, the application of Norman Naimark’s framework for understanding communist genocide to the case of the Kazakh famine will allow us to widen the scope of genocide study beyond the flawed legal framework of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Part I: Collectivization, Sedentarization, and Famine
Bringing Socialism to the Steppe:
Specially adapted to the hostile conditions of the steppe, pastoral nomadism was the dominant economic activity among ethnic Kazakhs for centuries and formed the basis of Kazakh culture, governance, and livelihood. Kazakh nomads practiced one of the most ancient and ecological forms of subsistence, channeling ancestral knowledge to lead herds of goats, sheep, yaks, and horses along sophisticated routes following seasonal conditions. Despite disruptions caused by the arrival of large numbers of sedentary agricultural colonists from Russia in previous decades and the violence of the First World War and Russian Civil War, about three-quarters of Kazakhs continued to practice some form of nomadism prior to the famine in 1926 (Olcott, 124).
Soviet authorities had struggled since the Bolshevik Revolution with the question of how to reconcile communist ideology, economics, and state authority with the traditional nomadic society of the steppe (Cameron, 45; Kindler, 22). Many Bolsheviks saw nomadism as a “primitive, barbarous type of economy” that “[impeded] a more profitable exploitation of the territory,” pointing to its comparatively high land use and the fluctuation of herd sizes—a natural result of unpredictable climatic and epidemiological conditions—as evidence that nomadism was inherently inefficient and needed to be replaced by more “modern” forms of sedentary economic activity (Kindler, 44; Cameron, 47; Olcott, 139). Furthermore, nomadism seemed to be at odds with Soviet governance and ideology. State surveyors sent to the steppe found it difficult to quantify nomadic life in a way that could be centrally planned or collectivized, since there was no form of land ownership to measure or standard herd sizes to record (Cameron, 56-8). It was also believed that nomadic life, centered around the community of the aul, was inherently bound to outdated clan-based hierarchies headed by the bai, who was seen as an oppressive, feudalistic figure analogous to the peasant kulak (Ohayon, 4; Cameron, 68). To most Soviet planners, the preservation of pastoral nomadism was incompatible with the realization of the highly efficient, state-controlled, and classless future they envisioned for Kazakhstan 3
This view, however, was not shared by all. Many Kazakhs and Russians in the republic’s Commissariat of Agriculture maintained that pastoral nomadism was the most productive use of the steppe’s arid landscape and warned that the violent elimination of nomadism in favor of sedentary agriculture would lead to economic catastrophe or even the complete depopulation of the steppe. However, these experts were decried as capitalists or “bourgeois nationalists” for their views and were purged from the Party (Cameron, 60-4). By 1930, the Commissariat and the Party Secretary of Kazakhstan, Filipp Goloshchyokin,4 were united in the view that, to fully mobilize the economic resources of the steppe and assert Soviet dominance, nomads would need to be sedentarized (Zveriakov, 53; Kindler, 68).
Collectivization and Collapse
After a brief campaign the previous year to bring class warfare to the steppe known as “Little October,” full-scale collectivization was first decreed in 1929 as part of the First Five-Year Plan, a Union-wide effort to revolutionize the Soviet economy through industrialization and the elimination of free market principles in agricultural production left over from Lenin’s New Economic Policy (Olcott 123-4; Kindler, 68). Kazakhstan was to play a vital role in the plan as a primary agricultural base to fuel the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization (Cameron, 97). To achieve this, local party activists zealously promoted a dual program of “full collectivization on the basis of sedentarization,” fundamentally linking the plan’s success (and its targets) to both the nationalization of agricultural resources and the settlement of millions of Kazakh nomads (Cameron 2016, 119). Dizzying procurement goals for both grain and meat were set to fund industrialization by export and to meet the immediate needs of industrializing centers in Russia (Pianciola, 2017).5 Simultaneously, Kazakh herds, the largest livestock base in the Soviet Union, would be forcibly collectivized and moved to state and collective farms (sovkhozy and kolkhozy), forming the basis of a meat-packing industry “to rival Chicago” (Cameron, 3, 98).
These forced confiscations of grain and livestock were the proximate cause of the Kazakh famine, which began by the winter of 1930 (Cameron 2016, 117; Olcott, 122; Kindler, 100). Collectivization squandered agricultural output and the Soviet Union’s most important livestock base, devastating Kazakh nomads who relied heavily on animal herds and were particularly vulnerable to increasing meat and grain requisitions.
Collectivization brigades, primarily composed of local Kazakhs, enforced procurements.6 Since few of them farmed, Kazakhs across the republic were forced to sell their animals to satisfy onerous grain procurements. The material strain on herds grew exponentially as the influx of animals to the market caused a collapse in the regional value of livestock relative to grain (Kindler, 99; Cameron, 13). Meanwhile, animals were also requisitioned directly. Many slaughtered their animals voluntarily to avoid forceful nationalization or were forced to do so after fodder used to feed them was confiscated (Olcott 137-8; Kindler, 161). Often, livestock seized by local officials died before even reaching collective farms or state slaughterhouses as a result of lacking feed reserves, disease, or logistical failures (Kindler, 102-4, 161). In total, the republic’s livestock base fell by 92% as a result of collectivization drives, constituting a material loss that would not be recovered until the 1960s (Olcott, 123).
It is difficult to understate the catastrophic effect of this loss of livestock on the nomadic Kazakh way of life. Whereas on the eve of the famine in 1929, the average household owned 41 animals, that number had, by 1933, plummeted to 2.2 (Kindler, 100). This radically disrupted the entire production cycle of animal breeding, and many herders found themselves increasingly dependent on settled farmers, who were already burdened by lofty grain requisitions, for food (Ohayon, 7). Moreover, without pack animals like sheep, camels, and goats, food could not be transported to the kolkhoz or aul quickly enough to avoid spoilage (Kindler, 101). Although all rural populations in Kazakhstan were affected by the collectivization crisis, experts agree that the disproportionate death toll of Kazakhs during the famine can be explained by the nomadic economy’s structural reliance on livestock (Ohayon, 7; Olcott, 136-7; Cameron 2016, 120; Richter, 483).
Kazakhs who sedentarized—either by choice or as a result of abject poverty—also struggled to escape the famine. Formerly nomadic Kazakhs had no experience in settled agriculture and did not have the knowledge or resources necessary to prepare for and survive emergencies like the mass crop failure of 1931 (Kindler, 161). Meanwhile, kolkhozy designated by the state for nomadic settlement were so lacking in basic construction materials that only 15% of habitations planned in the state plan of 1930 were ever constructed (Olcott, 130). State farms were also located in desert areas far from water sources and did not receive adequate seed, leading to livestock death and insufficient crop yields that brought further suffering (Olcott 129-130). Collectivized agriculture in Kazakhstan was so ineffective that, by 1938, the future breadbasket of the Soviet Union was still a net importer of grain (Olcott, 137).
By the winter of 1930-31, the famine was so severe that “almost every Kazakh was in flight” (Cameron, 143). To avoid famine or requisitions, at least 600,000 people left the republic altogether, using traditional knowledge of seasonal migration routes to seek refuge in Western Siberia, other Central Asian republics, and Xinjiang (Ohayon, 3). This massive flight of starving Kazakhs created a transnational refugee crisis unique to the Kazakh famine.
Within the Soviet Union, fleeing nomads were known as otkochevniki7 and endured vilification and abuse. Refugees did not fit into any of the strict class categories defined by Soviet society and were thus treated as “declassified elements” not qualified for organized state relief (Kindler, 174). The destitution of the starving came to be seen as confirmation of stereotypes depicting Kazakhs as “lazy and filthy people,” and many were expelled from cities, targeted by racial violence, or selectively deprived of life-saving state provisions (Kindler, 177; Cameron, 14, 145). Meanwhile, new analysis by Cameron shows that thousands of Kazakhs attempting to flee the crisis by traversing the border to Xinjiang were shot by Soviet border guards on the orders of the Politburo, whose members sought to stem the outflow of livestock targeted for collectivization by whatever means necessary (Cameron, 123-4, Kindler, 142-3).
The conditions these refugees fled were appalling. By mid-1934, there were at least 60,000 orphaned children interned in various institutions around Kazakhstan, where, in some months, over 10% of them died. In some cases, orphanage operators embezzled food and money from children and adolescents too sick to resist (Kindler, 165-7). When the deputy chairman of the republic’s Planning Committee, Khasen Nurmukhamedov, raised concerns about the neglect of children in the republic, he was chided for his “bourgeois-philanthropic view” (Kindler, 174). Murder-cannibalism and the marketing of human meat were recorded in cities as corpses accumulated beside roads (Cameron, 156; Kindler, 158). The Kazakh steppe had become a graveyard of misery.
The End of Famine and Immediate Memory
The gradual path to recovery began on September 17th, 1932, when the Politburo issued a resolution declaring the successful completion of collectivization and sedentarization in Kazakhstan (Olcott, 134). The resolution, which paused grain and meat procurements for two years and greatly loosened restrictions on private ownership of livestock by nomads, likely spared hundreds of thousands of additional lives from starvation (Kindler, 191). Even still, famine conditions persisted locally until 1934, and it was not until the fall of 1936 that central authorities announced that there was once again enough grain to feed the entire human and animal population of the republic.8
After high-ranking officials began to formally denounce the catastrophe, the failure of collectivization drives and the ensuing famine were blamed on individual actors like Goloshchyokin, who was removed as First Secretary of Kazakhstan in 1933 (Ohayon, 7; Kindler, 238; Cameron, 145). For decades afterwards, Soviet historians largely echoed the government’s position that Goloshchyokin’s leadership was to blame for the crisis (Cameron 2016, 121). This view, however, is misleading: Goloshchyokin’s successor, Levon Mirzoian, operated under the same orders from Moscow and continued repressions until central directives changed (Cameron, 161). Furthermore, such scapegoating erases the role of local Kazakhs, who were incentivized to participate in collectivization drives as part of a deliberate state strategy to be discussed more below. By casting the blame on Goloshchyokin, Soviet authorities could both liberate themselves from responsibility for the disaster they ordained and simplify the narrative by ignoring the uncomfortable role that Kazakhs themselves played in the violence.
Death Toll
Determining exact casualty figures for the Kazakh famine is particularly challenging due to the concomitance of starvation and mass flight (Ohayon, 7). It is nonetheless widely accepted that the Kazakh ASSR lost the highest proportion of its population among all Soviet regions during the greater collectivization famine (Olcott, 136; Kindler, 1).9 While some Kazakh scholars have estimated the number of Kazakhs having perished during collectivization to be as high as 2,000,000 (Tätimov and Aliyev, 216, cited in Cameron 2016, 127), Western scholarship tends to converge around a total death toll of around 1,500,000.10 While both European and Asian populations in Kazakhstan suffered deeply (Kindler, 160), Kazakhs suffered disproportional losses as a result of their nomadism—roughly 90% of victims were ethnic Kazakhs, despite their constituting only 60% of the 1929 population (Cameron, 5). This amounted to the loss of more than one-third of the Kazakh population, rendering Kazakhs a minority within their own republic until 1999 (Ohayon, 3; Cameron, 2). Some Kazakhstani scholars claim that, without the famine, the global population of Kazakhs would today be 25 million or more, rather than the actual modern population of 18 million (Tätimov and Aliyev, cited in Cameron, 189).
Part II: Evaluating the Role and Intent of the Soviet State
Famine as a Tool of Soviet Power Consolidation
From the beginning, collectivization in Kazakhstan was designed to culturally destroy elements of Kazakh society incompatible with Soviet Communism. Even in the absence of a clear intent to cause genocide, the mass death that occurred during collectivization and famine was a direct consequence of Soviet policy on the steppe that consciously prioritized the consolidation of economic and political power over human life.
The actions and conscious inaction of the Soviet state throughout the famine led to the avoidable death of countless Kazakhs. From the beginning of collectivization, the Soviet Central Committee made clear that the preservation of Kazakhstan’s enormous herds would be subordinated to the greater goals of grain and meat procurement (Cameron, 99). Planners would certainly have understood that this neglect would have a devastating impact on Kazakh nomads who relied on their herds for mobility and subsistence. Even once it became clear that collectivization was having a catastrophic effect on Kazakhs, Soviet authorities waited years before issuing policies to stop their suffering, prioritizing collectivization targets over saving lives (Kindler, 8-9). Stalin himself was informed of the mass suffering of the Kazakh people at least three times from 1930 to 1932 and could easily have ordered a halt to collectivization long enough to spare hundreds of thousands from starvation (Cameron, 14).11 In many cases, Moscow ordered measures that made their suffering worse: When poor weather conditions led to the failure of both the 1931 and 1932 harvests, Soviet planners chose to maintain grain and meat procurement targets and continued to send hungry deportees, such as dispossessed kulaks or Kuban Cossacks, into Kazakhstan (Kindler, 102; Cameron, 118-9, 160). The previously discussed kill order given to Soviet border guards further illustrates the Politburo’s preference for retaining exploitable economic resources within Soviet jurisdiction rather than preserving the lives of suffering Kazakhs.
Furthermore, Soviet planners began implementing collectivization in Kazakhstan with the intent to erase the social and economic foundations of the traditional Kazakh way of life. Once it had been decided by central planners that nomadism was incompatible with the consolidation of Soviet control of the steppe, they sought the deliberate elimination of that nomadic culture. Indeed, around the launch of mass collectivization in 1929, Goloshchyokin highlighted the social and economic elimination of traditional Kazakh life through sedentarization as an inseparable part of collectivization:
“Settlement is collectivization. Settlement is the liquidation of the bai semi-feudals. Settlement is the destruction of tribal attitudes…Settlement is simultaneously the question of socialist construction and the approach of socialism, of the socialist reconstruction of the Kazakh mass without divisions by nationality, under the leadership of the vanguard of the proletariat and the communist party. “ Quote from Goloshchyokin, 1929, cited in Zveriakov, Ot kochevaniya k sotsializmu (From Nomadism to Socialism), p 53
This intent was repeatedly translated into concrete policy decisions punishing Kazakhs for their nomadism. For example, the vital practice of soghïm, the ritual slaughtering of animals for preservation in the winter, was criminalized while local officials were encouraged to conduct raids against Kazakh communities suspected of driving their livestock across newly enforced state borders along traditional seasonal migration routes (Cameron, 120).
Soviet planners also worked to undermine the foundational allegiances of steppe society by involving local Kazakhs in the violence of forced collectivization against other Kazakhs. By threatening exclusion from the party if vague or unrealistic procurement targets were not met, central authorities incentivized excess and brutality on the part of local implementers, most of whom were Kazakhs themselves (Olcott, 127; Kindler, 95; Cameron, 104). The task of determining who was an exploitative bai (the nomad equivalent of a kulak) deserving of particularly harsh treatment was also entrusted to Kazakhs themselves, who sometimes used their newfound authority to “settle old scores” through violence (Cameron video, 24:47). Experts agree that this choice to involve Kazakhs in the violent construction of socialism in their society was a deliberate one, by which Moscow hoped to dismantle traditional clan allegiances and pave the way for unchallenged Soviet authority on the steppe (Kindler, 237-8; Cameron, 205).
The economic decimation brought by collectivization also forced Kazakhs to sedentarize and accept Soviet institutions. Even after procurements eased and the famine subsided, two-thirds of surviving Kazakh nomads were materially incapable of returning to nomadism and migrated to towns or cities, permanently abandoning migratory life (Ohayon, 5; Cameron, 171). Once settled, Kazakhs found themselves reliant on the kolkhoz or other state institutions to avoid starvation (Kindler, 218; Olcott 125). Kazakhs were forced to abandon ancestral nomadic institutions and acquiesce to Soviet authority in order to survive.
In many ways, the famine marked the victorious Sovietization of Kazakhstan. Soviet leadership sought nothing less than the transformation of Kazakhs into an obedient socialist nation that could no longer obstruct Soviet control over the economic and political resources of the steppe. Soviet policies to this end, including but not limited to collectivization, pursued the near-destruction of traditional Kazakh culture and led to over a million deaths. This was consciously accepted as a necessary consequence of achieving the economic, political, and social imperatives of Sovietization.
Genocide
Over the course of the Kazakh famine, Soviet authorities pursued the cultural and economic destruction of traditional Kazakh society and took measures leading to disproportionate deaths among ethnic Kazakhs. In order to legally constitute genocide, however, these actions must fit the definition established by the 1948 Genocide Convention, the framework used by international legal bodies like the UN, ICC, and ICJ to prosecute genocide. According to the Convention, a genocide is a set of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Article II). The Soviet Union notably lobbied against the inclusion of political or social categories of victims in the definition, fearing that its past actions against class enemies, such as the kulaks/bais or against political enemies during the Great Terror (1936-1938), could be considered genocidal (Naimark, 86). Nevertheless, the existing Genocide Convention provides the definition used by the ICC and ICJ for genocide prosecutions, and its language must be respected for any argument about genocide to be legally valid. Adhering to this legal definition, the Kazakh famine does not qualify as a legal genocide for three reasons:
Firstly, no recorded evidence has ever been found that Stalin or any other Soviet leader12 ever expressed a will to wholly or partially eliminate the Kazakh people (Cameron, 15, 80; Ohayon, 13; Kindler, 241). This does not mean that such intent never existed, but until the hypothetical discovery of a “smoking-gun” document proving it, the Kazakh famine cannot qualify as genocide under existing international law.
Secondly, central authorities did make some attempt to mitigate the disaster’s effect on Kazakhs, such as by shipping 2 million pounds of grain to Kazakhstan as aid or by allowing nomads private ownership of livestock once again through the September 1932 resolution. These measures were either woefully inadequate or tragically late, but they together spared hundreds of thousands of Kazakh lives (Kindler, 191). Even if Moscow was willing to accept mass death as a consequence of power consolidation and took these measures solely to ensure the future economic exploitability of the steppe, the existence of any remedial response evinces a sense that Soviet policy had overshot—if Soviet authorities intended to eliminate Kazakhs, they would not have taken any action to halt their mass death.
Thirdly, although they suffered greater proportional losses than any other group in the USSR, Kazakhs were not the only victims of Soviet collectivization policies. Although it’s difficult to make exact estimates about relative death rates, it is clear that other minority groups living in Kazakhstan, such as Uzbeks, Uighurs, and even sedentary Ukrainians, Russians, and Germans, suffered deeply, with death tolls ranging from 12% to 30% (Kindler, 160; Ohayon, 8). Deadly famines also struck other areas in the Soviet Union, like Ukraine (where it has become known as the Holodomor)13 and in the Kuban, Don, and Volga regions of southwestern Russia, as a result of collectivization policies fundamentally similar to those that caused the Kazakh famine (Cameron 2016, 118). Even if European deaths in the Kazakh ASSR were somehow collateral damage to an overarching republic-wide policy to eliminate Kazakhs, it is unclear why Stalin would pursue nearly the same policy in areas where majoritarian Russians would suffer on an equivalent level to Kazakhs or Ukrainians. While ethnic motivations likely played some local role in the unequal death toll of the Kazakh famine, Soviet crimes against Kazakhs were aimed at solving problems the regime saw as political (such as the lack of meat and grain in industrial areas or the existence of potentially threatening social categories), rather than ethnic. In Ukraine and Russia, violent collectivization against sedentary peasant populations was pursued to similar ends.
Beyond the Legal Definition of Genocide
The intentional destruction of a culture through violence and large-scale famine is an egregious crime against humanity. That the Soviet leadership cannot be technically convicted of a crime whose criteria they helped to define post-factum only highlights the limitations of relying solely on legal frameworks of genocide as a historian. But the term still occupies an uncommonly significant position in the public imagination as evocative of the ultimate atrocity, and conserving the terminology can help historians to properly communicate the staggering truths of our past. The barbaric state policy that rationalized the starvation of millions during the Kazakh famine for political gain warrants a designation that properly conveys its criminal deliberateness.
To address this paradox, Norman Naimark has employed the term “communist genocide” to describe horrific events—such as the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1.7 million victims), the Great Leap Forward in China (30+ million), and the Holodomor in Ukraine (3.5-5 million)—in which millions of lives were extinguished as a direct result of the inhuman politics of communism (Naimark, 86). In both Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Soviet authorities, under Stalin’s leadership, deliberately imposed mass starvation to control a population seen as troublesome. In Ukraine, Stalin killed millions of Ukrainian peasants not necessarily because of their ethnicity, but because their growing national consciousness threatened Soviet power and the success of the First Five-Year Plan in a crucial grain-producing region (Naimark, 88-90). In Kazakhstan, pastoral nomadism similarly threatened Soviet exploitation of the economic resources of the steppe, so Soviet authorities14 forcefully pursued the destruction of Kazakh culture through a dual policy of collectivization and sedentarization.
The number of Ukrainians or Kazakhs that died along the way was not relevant; their survival only mattered to the extent that their labor plowing Ukrainian farmland or raising livestock on the steppe could be furiously exploited to fuel the Soviet Union’s modernization. As in Ukraine, Cambodia, and China, the horrors of the Kazakh famine were the direct, genocidal result of a dehumanizing communist ideology that rationalized the mass sacrifice of human lives for the perceived benefits of the state. By calling the Kazakh famine and other similar atrocities communist genocides, historians can widen the scope of genocide beyond its faulty legal definition and do justice to the memory of the tens of millions lost to the bloody hands of authoritarian communism.
Bibliography
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Forced collectivization USSR, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made
Cameron, Sarah. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Cornell University Press, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt21h4vb7. Cameron, Sarah. Video – The Kazakh Famine of 1930-33 and the Politics of History in the Post-Soviet Space, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q93qSC5b7To. Cameron, Sarah. “The Kazakh Famine of 1930-33: Current Research and New Directions.” ResearchGate, September 2016. https://doi.org/10.21226/T2T59X.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Kindler, Robert, and Cynthia Klohr. Stalin’s Nomads. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3znxgm.
Naimark, Norman M. Genocide: A World History. Oxford University Press, 2017. Ohayon, Isabelle. “La famine kazakhe: à l’origine de la sédentarisation.” Encyclopédie des violences de masse, 2012.
Olcott, Martha Brill. “The Collectivization Drive in Kazakhstan.” The Russian Review 40, no. 2 (1981): 122–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/129204.
Pianciola, Niccolò. “Stalinist Spatial Hierarchies: Placing the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in Soviet Economic Regionalization.” Central Asian Survey 36, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 73–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2016.1221380.
“The Collectivization Famine in Kazakhstan, 1931–1933.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25, no. 3/4 (2001): 237–51.
“Towards a Transnational History of Great Leaps Forward in Pastoral Central Eurasia.” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 3, no. 2 (September 10, 2016): 75–116. https://doi.org/10.21226/T2XW2F.
Richter, James. “Famine, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Space: Contrasting Echoes of Collectivization in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.” Nationalities Papers 48, no. 3 (May 2020): 476–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2019.17.
Stalin, Iosif. “Dizzy with Success.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, March 2, 1930. https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/collectivization/collectivization-texts/dizzy-with-success/. Viola, Lynne. “The ‘25,000ers’: A Study in a Soviet Recruitment Campaign During the First Five Year Plan.” Russian History 10, no. 1 (1983): 1–30.
Zveriakov (Зверяков), I. A. (И. А.). “От Кочевания – К Социализму. Алма-Ата, Москва,” 1932. https://www.academia.edu/42762344/%D0%97%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B A%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%98_%D0%90_%D0%9E%D1%82_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%8 7%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%9A_%D1%81%D0%BE %D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BC%D1%83_%D0%90%D 0%BB%D0%BC%D0%B0_%D0%90%D1%82%D0%B0_%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0 %BA%D0%B2%D0%B0_1932.