Moscow Outlet Dismisses Kazakh Genocide as ‘a Myth’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 8 – In December 1992, the Kazakhstan government declared on the basis of a study prepared by a commission of historians and ethnologists that the mass murder of Kazakhs in the late 1920s and 1930s during their forcible sedentarization and collectivization was so massive as to constitute an act of genocide.          

“The size of these tragedies” in which an even larger share of Kazakhstan’s population died that did in the terror famine in Ukraine “fully justifies designating it as a manifestation of a policy of genocide”  (camonitor.kz/33451-massovyy-golod-1930-h-v-kazahstane-asharshylyk-eto-genocid.html

In the decades since, Kazakhs have devoted significant time to the study and popularization of this issue, seeing it as central to their national history; and Moscow has denounced this as an invented issue and insisted that Soviet policies of sedentarization and collectivization were not animated by ethnic animus and therefore weren’t genocides.

For background on these Kazakh actions and Moscow’s responses, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/05/another-soviet-genocide-kazakhstan-1932.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/11/stalin-used-terror-famine-to-russify.html,  windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/05/debate-on-mass-deaths-in-kazakhstan.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/08/mass-murder-of-kazakhs-occurred-under.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/06/sedentarization-compounded-crime-of.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/01/terror-famine-happened-in-kazakhstan.html.

Now with relations between Moscow and Astana deteriorating and many in the Russian capital fearful that Kazakhstan may follow Ukraine in exiting from the Russian sphere of influence, Moscow writers are attacking the very idea of a terror famine in Kazakhstan as “a myth” much in the same way they have done about Ukraine’s Holodomor.

The latest and in some ways the most outrageous of these Russian attacks on historical truth appears in the latest issue of the Moscow propaganda outlet, Asia-Today, which dismisses all the research Kazakhs have pure invention by Russophobes who want to sow ethnic discord and weaken ties between Russia and Kazakhstan (asia-today.news/08072025/6413/).

After denouncing all the research on the subject as a fabrication, the Russian outlet says it has definitive proof that there was no genocide in Kazakhstan. Had there been, Asia-Today says, Kazakhs would never have fought as heroically as they did for the Soviet Union and against Hitler as they did.

If that is the best that Moscow can come up with on this subject, it has, as it should, lost the battle; and ever more Kazakhs are going to recognize that Moscow’s moves against their ancestors in the 1920s and 1930s were acts of ethnic genocide intended to crush the Kazakh nation and allow more ethnic Russians to move into their territory.