This research focuses on a little known incident of Stalinist mass violence, the Kazakh famine of 1930-33. More than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population, perished in this disaster, dramatically altering the demographic and environmental profile of the surrounding region. This research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of this terrible disaster, one which has important implications for our understanding of violence under Stalin, Soviet nationalities policy, genocide studies, and Kazakh society today. To reconstruct this story, I examined an array of Russian- and Kazakh-language materials, including recently declassified archival documents, published primary sources (including newspapers, agricultural journals, diaries and memoirs), and photographs. Additionally, I engaged with a large body of secondary literature on the topic of the famine, produced by Kazakhstani scholars since Kazakhstan’s independence.
Sarah Cameron, of the University of Maryland- College Park, was a 2011-2012 Short-Term Travel Grants (STG) [6] fellow.
