Sarah Cameron

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.

In Kazakhstan the famine’s primary victims were pastoral nomads rather than peasants.

Of these five scholars, only Payne (in “Soviet Steppe”) has argued that the Kazakh famine should be considered a genocide, while the others have argued, using various definitions and rationales, that the Kazakh famine should not be considered a genocide.

I have argued that the Kazakh famine does not fit the legal definition of genocide as adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, but it may fit broader definitions of genocide

All of these scholars agree that Moscow sought to use famine as a means of bringing Kazakhs under Soviet rule.

In the Soviet Union, the death toll from collectivization was somewhere between 5.5 to 6.5 million people.