Paul Goble
Staunton,
October 10 – At the end of 1919, when the Bolsheviks concluded they would win
the Russian Civil War, a debate broke out between two Soviet institutions,
Gosplan and the Peoples Commissariat of Nationality Affairs that helps to
explain the pattern of the Stalin-organized famine in 1932-33 and discussions
today about regional amalgamation.
According
to Artem Kosmarsky of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, who draws on
the research of Italian scholar Niccolo Pianciola, experts at Gosplan, the
state planning agency, and Narkomnats, began a discussion about how the Soviet
state should divide up Central Asia (fergananews.com/articles/10218).
Pianciola reported
his findings in “Stalinist Spatial Hierarchies: Placing the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz
in Soviet Economic Regionalization,” Central
Asian Survey, 36:1 (2017): 73-92. According to Kosmarsky, the existence of
the two republics and the different ways they were treated in the 1920s and
1930s reflected the 1919 debates in Moscow.
Gosplan experts argued that the region should
be divided according to the dictates of economics, with more developed regions
put in one state division and less developed ones in another. But Narkomnats argued
that “such a division would in fact revive in the new state colonial relations between
an industrial center and raw-material-supplying borderlands. Gosplan replied
that socialism would quickly liquidate any inequality.
Gosplan wanted to divide Central Asia into
three economic-administrative districts: the Western Kyrgyz (that is, Kazakh)
charged with producing livestock, the Eastern-Kazakhstan which was to produce
both livestock and grain, and the Central Asian which was to produce cotton.
The first two would be in what is now Kazakhstan; the third encompass the rest.
But Narkomnats was opposed to ignoring ethnic
borders and, winning this round of the debate, carried out the national delimitation
of Central Asia in 1924. But its victory
was short-lived: Gosplan used first the creation of economic districts and then
the imperatives of the great mobilization to treat the republics in the way it
wanted to treat the territories of the republics.
The consequence of that was that
Kazakhstan, which was treated as a place for colonization and a meat supplier
to the Russian cities, lost a third of its population in the great famine of
1931-1933 while Kyrgyzstan which shared its characteristics but was linked to
the Fergana Valley and was supposed to produce cotton lost a far smaller share
of its population.
Because they were put in these different rgions,
Kazakhstan was forced to give up almost all of its livestock while Kyrgyzstan
was stripped of only 13.6 percent.For the residents of the two, this was the
difference in many cases between life and death, Kosmarsky says drawing on the work
of Pianciola.
As Kosmarsky puts it, “the essence of
empire is to sacrifice some for others.” The Soviet empire was “an empire not
of territories but of social groups,” which were ranked in the following way:
GULAG prisoners at the bottom, special settlers and collective farmers a little
higher up, and urban workers at the top.
This arrangement defined the fate of all
and the different fates of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstaan. But because of social
and economic change, it was not eternal.
Nonetheless, the 1919 debate and the consequences of coming down on one
side or the other of the economic or ethnic divide remains relevant as Putin’s
Russia discusses amalgamation and regionalization.
The results of the outcome of that debate
will create new classes or winners and losers, albeit one very much hopes no
losses as dramatic as those the losers suffered under Stalin, who at one point
headed Narkomnats but who later implemented Gosplan’s proposals.
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