Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 31 – Today, the
government and people of Kazakhstan commemorate the terror famine Stalin
unleashed against the Kazakhs in 1932-33, an action that killed more than 1.5
million members of that nation and qualifies as a genocide because it
transformed the ethnic mix of that republic, allowing ethnic Russians to be the
dominant group until the 1980s.
Many across the former Soviet space and
elsewhere are familiar with Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine, a famine that
also rose to the level of genocide and helped to power the recovery of
Ukrainian independence and the integration of the Ukrainian nation; but far
fewer know about its analogue in Kazakhstan and about the role of that tragedy
for Kazakhs now.
But given the increasing protests in
Kazakhstan and the appearance of ever more anti-Russian groups within the
Kazakh population (total.kz/society/2016/05/30/kogo_zaschischaet_komitet_arasha), the long-ago and half-forgotten genocide of the Kazakh
people is attracting ever more attention among their modern counterparts; and
it is incumbent on those beyond its borders to understand the continuing impact
of this genocide too.
Saken Baikenov, a
Kazakh blogger, begins his commentary on this event by quoting Russian analyst
Dmitry Verkhoturov who has written that the terror famine “had an enormous
influence on Kazakhs.” Indeed, “after this terrible year, the Kazakhs became
another people, a MINORITY in Kazakhstan.”
And that change continues to cast a shadow on the country today.
Indeed,
Verkhoturov continues, “its remnant are a monument to all who died in the years
of the Great Destruction. Too much was lost, too many people died who were not
able to make their contribution.” All succeeding
generations of Kazakhs have thus suffered as a result (facebook.com/saken.baikenov).
“The hunger in Kazakhstan in 1932-1933
was part of the all-union hunger arising as a result of the official policy of ‘the
destruction of the kulaks as a class,’ collectivization, the incrase by the
central powers of collections of good, and also the confiscation of livestock
from the Kazakhs” – more than 90 percent of flocks were taken away or
destroyed.
Population losses were almost as
bad: 49 percent of the Kazakhs died or were killed and more than a quarter
million more fled abroad to China or Afghanistan. (These are the so-called “oralmany,”
many of whose descendants have returned to Kazakhstan in the last decade with
their stories about this.)
The Kazakhs resisted both the drive to
destroy their nomadic way of life and the plan to confine them to collective or
state farms. More than 80,000 Kazakhs
were involved in 372 risings during the anti-nomadic efforts and others fought
the collectivization effort as best they could.
All this is the focus of exhibits,
conferences and meetings in Kazakhstan this day and this week. But there is one new note that may matter
even more in terms of the future of Kazakh national identity. As Baikenov points out, Moscow’s policies in
the early 1930s were directed against all the Turkic peoples of the USSR/
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