Asharshylyk (Kazakh famine of 1930–33)

Stalin and Filipp Goloshchekin, Kazakhstan’s leader and Party secretary for much of the famine, corresponded regularly during these crises, and Stalin was aware of the extent of Kazakh suffering.

On 17 September 1932, after the republic had endured nearly three years of agony, the Party’s Central Committee authorized limited concessions, including the private ownership of animals by nomads and shipments of food aid.

In early 1933, Moscow fired Goloshchekin from his position

largely blaming Goloshchekin’s wrong-headed leadership, the explanation given at the time

More than 1.5 million people, approximately a quarter of the republic’s population at the time, perished in the crisis.

Most Western scholars estimate that the Kazakh famine claimed the lives of approximately 1.5 million people, the vast majority of whom were ethnic Kazakhs.

Maksudov (770) argues that 1.45 million ethnic Kazakhs and 100,000 people of other ethnicities perished. Davies and Wheatcroft (412) estimate that 1.3 to 1.5 million people died in Kazakhstan.

Of its 1.5 million victims, approximately 1.3 million were Kazakhs. More than a third of all Kazakhs perished in the famine, and in the aftermath of the disaster Kazakhs became a minority in their own republic.

propose higher figures, such as 2.5 million ethnic Kazakh deaths

Overall the mortality figures for Kazakhstan have been subject to less scrutiny than those for Ukraine or Russia’s Volga, Don, and Kuban regions.

Though hunger struck Russian and Ukrainian peasant communities in the republic’s north and southeast, it hit the nomadic Kazakhs with particular intensity.

Payne stresses the destructive nature of forced sedentarization, while Pianciola emphasizes the role of the grain procurements in sparking hunger.

A secret police report in October 1932 calculated that animal numbers in the republic had dropped by 90.8 percent in comparison with 1929.

During the famine some ninety percent of the republic’s livestock herds perished, dealing a devastating blow to pastoral nomadic society.

Nomads began slaughtering their livestock herds for food and fleeing the republic. During the years 1931-33—the height of the Kazakh famine—more than 1.1 million people, the vast majority of them Kazakhs, left the republic.

They fled to neighbouring Soviet republics but also abroad, to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which bordered Soviet Kazakhstan to the east.

Many of these refugees would never return to Kazakhstan, settling in China or in neighbouring Soviet republics permanently.

Within Kazakhstan, massive uprisings, some numbering several thousand participants, erupted in the fall of 1929 and throughout the years 1930-33. Red Army troops brutally put down these rebellions.

The Kazakh famine was a part of the collectivization famines that afflicted the Soviet Union during the years 1930-33, most notably in Ukraine but also in the Volga, Don, and Kuban areas

activists began a program of “full collectivization on the basis of sedentarization,” a scheme to settle and collectivize nomads simultaneously. Famine began in the winter of 1930, a year earlier than in other parts of the Soviet Union.

The Kazakh famine was the direct but unplanned result of the total destruction of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Kazakh economy

it was aggravated by the strong anti-Kazakh prejudices of local officials

suffered the consequences of the Stalinist “revolution from above” more acutely than any other social or national group. Between thirty-three and thirty-eight percent of them disappeared during the famine.

The Kazakh famine developed in a specific colonial, frontier society with its own unique background and history.

were designated in 1930 to be the main providers of meat to Soviet urban dwellers

The famine led to the death of 1.5 million people, approximately a quarter of the population. More than a third of all Kazakhs perished.

the famine, which killed at least 1.5 million people -- roughly one-third of Kazakhstan's population

It also involved the mass requisition of livestock -- the main livelihood of the nomads.

Only after gaining independence in 1991 did Kazakhstan begin to openly discuss the Stalin-era famine, locally known as the Asharshylyq.

The previous number of Kazakhs in the republic was recovered only forty years later in 1972.

thousands of people were killed on the way by Soviet border guards, who were given orders to shoot refugees for illegally crossing the Soviet-Chinese border

for one surviving refugee, there were two deaths of mainly children, women, or the elderly who died during the journey.

in which the loss of the Kazakh population was estimated to be about 2 million people, or 49 percent of the population

and the “direct victims of hunger,” in their opinion, comprised 1,750,000 people that made up 42 percent of the Kazakh ethnic group.

The latest estimation made by the Kazakh demographer M. Tatimov was that 2,137,500 Kazakhs died of hunger and disease

the number of refugees from Kazakhstan leaving the country forever was 616,000 people