By Madeleine Schmuckler

Abstract:

Nation building in Soviet Kazakhstan was a violent and incongruent process. As the Soviet Union embarked upon projects to consolidate the periphery, it promised to move away from the colonial strategies of Imperial Russia – even when their policies were equally brutal and controlling. This paper examines forced collectivization of ethnic Kazakhs and deportations of non-titular groups, such as Koreans and Chechens, to Kazakhstan. It argues that these two policies functioned as dual vehicles to subjugate the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, even when this decision had negative repercussions for the broader Soviet Union. The legacy of forced collectivization in Kazakhstan was extremely deadly and deleterious to the traditional way of life, and contributed to a mass depopulation of Kazakhs reflected in modern demographic patterns. Moreover, forced deportation left deep scars amongst displaced populations, and policies preventing ‘ethnic mixing’ between collective farms further fragmented the region. The legacy of these choices can be seen in conversations regarding ethnic identity  within modern Kazakhstan, as Kazakhs’ demographic challenges and the distinction between ethnic and civic identity, all while maintaining cultural recognition for deported populations. As this year’s journal theme focuses on the peripheries, understanding past fractures within former Soviet space – in this case, the ‘Kazakh’ ethnic group vs. ‘Kazakhstani’ civic identity – can help shed light on why certain problems endure.

Keywords: Civic identity, National identity, Consolidation, Mythology, Forced collectivization, Colonialism.

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The monolith of ‘Soviet identity’ is deceptively simple. Beneath the high degree of political and ideological unity espoused by the Soviet state lay a high degree of heterogeneity of cultural identity. A key example of this complexity is the Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs). After the Russian Revolution, many areas of the Soviet Union were organized into semi-independent SSRs, allowing them recognition of status within their own titular republics – something they had not experienced under Tsarist rule. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union continued many Tsarist-era governance practices, furthering the imperialist goals of controlling Central Asian peoples and extracting their resources.^[1] Their policy of korenizatsiia, or indigenization, was ostensibly designed to empower formerly colonial groups through giving them some measure of recognition and autonomy within the Soviet Union.^[2] Practically, however, these changes were a repackaging of former imperial policies under new Bolshevik terminology, which served to establish greater control over the periphery of the USSR, and ensure that local leaders in each individual SSR were in favour of new Soviet policy. These policies began under the framework of korenizatsiia, which aimed to provide greater autonomy to the diverse ethnicities throughout the Soviet Union, but in Kazakhstan became a vehicle for enforcement and control over Kazakhs.^[3] This retrospectively problematizes the Soviet authorities’ own assertions that they had abolished imperialism, as their claims that they had broken with imperial Russia’s past were challenged by the continuation of certain imperial policies. In many cases, Soviet policies were even more repressive than those which had been experienced under imperial rule. In Kazakhstan, this manifested in the horrific forced collectivization of the nomadic Kazakh people in order to form kolkhozes, or collective farms – a process which was extraordinarily deadly. Moreover, the forced deportation of Chechens, Ingush, and Koreans to Kazakhstan, and their compulsory involvement in kolkhozes, resulted in demographic problems, non-indigenous minority rights issues, and ethnic Kazakhs becoming a minority population within their own republic. This last point was not caused solely by the introduction of deported populations, but was specifically an effect of both this deportation and the extraordinary loss of Kazakh life under forced collectivization.

The Soviet policy of collectivization and forced deportation of minorities to Kazakhstan represents a new physical manifestation of  peripheral subjugation. In fact, policies of disorder were deliberate: the near-destruction of Kazakh society through chaos, violence, and starvation also helped the Soviet authorities permanently entrench their power in the region.^[4] Soviet authorities both capitalized upon the disorder, and presented themselves as the only unifying force in Kazakhstan, both from an administrative and ideological perspective. These policies of forced collectivization and deportation of ethnic minorities can be seen as two aspects of an overarching Soviet policy designed to bring Kazakhstan entirely under the political and economic control of the Soviet Union, even when these actions were to the region’s detriment.

Kazakh Famine

            Since the 19th century, a mistaken Russian perception of the Black Sea steppe has existed: that these were “agricultural lands of abundance,” that were simply waiting to be cultivated.^[5] This mythologization of the steppe as valuable, untouched agricultural land which had been foolishly squandered for centuries by nomads had resonant implications in both the imperial Russian and Soviet histories of the region.^[6] Following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, many peasants illegally travelled to the territory which became Kazakhstan in order to escape poverty and “land hunger” which characterized this period in Russian history.^[7] These ethnic Russian migrants immediately began to encroach upon and disrupt the nomadic patterns of the native Kazakhs; nevertheless, the envisioned “civilizing role” that Slavic settlers could play in this territory was rewarded by the Resettlement Act in 1889.^[8] This act was ostensibly designed to stem the flow of migrants, but in practice merely codified and formalized the process, allowing the state to benefit directly in a monetary and cultural capacity.^[9] The tsarist government expected that over time, the introduction of peasant settlers would encourage Kazakhs to abandon their nomadic way of life for settled, agricultural pursuits – a hope that was shared by the new Soviet government.^[10] Indeed, during colonization of the steppe, many Kazakhs adopted practices that observers described as “semi-nomadism” – in other words, limited agricultural practices.^[11] This was a practice that was considered by imperial administrators to be “evolutionarily ‘correct,’” and it was assumed that eventually nomadism would be eradicated entirely.^[12] Later, when nomadism did not fade out as Soviet officials had hoped, they worked towards abolishing the practice more formally.

Beginning in 1928, the Soviet Union engaged in a brutal policy of forced collectivization across the empire.^[13] Under Stalin’s leadership, the government wished to possess more reliable control over food supplies, as they recognized that the ability to control grain stores and production would be essential to strengthen their new nation.^[14] In the Kazakh case in particular, forced collectivization was also seen as a way to reassert state control over nomadic Kazakhs and their mobile resources. Forced collectivization most saliently affected two spaces: farmers in Ukraine and parts of Russia, and nomadic peoples living in Kazakhstan. Ukrainian farmers had been farming on their lands for centuries, but were forced away from traditional practices into collectives, and given impossible quotas in order to brutally force the population into submission and feed the rest of the empire.^[15] In Kazakhstan, however, native Kazakhs were forced onto collective farms primarily to eliminate nomadism, and thus had to learn best farming practices, as well as the practice of sedentary agriculture. Sedentary agriculture writ large was not a common practice on the steppe, making their forced transition away from nomadism a unique challenge of the Kazakh experience. The failure to comply, or to do so effectively, would result in deadly food shortages. Hunger was not the plan on the steppe, but for many Soviet officials, it was a “welcome outcome of events,” as hunger broke down Kazakh resistance to collectivization and the abandonment of nomadism.^[16]

The process of officially collectivizing the Kazakh steppe began formally in 1929, when the regime ordered nomads to settle formally on the land.^[17] The devastating death toll of forced collectives cannot be understated: although exact death tolls are difficult to calculate from extant sources, many scholars estimate at 1.5 million died from 1930-1933.^[18] This represents approximately a quarter of the republic’s population, the majority of whom were ethnic Kazakhs.^[19] From 1930, however, the Soviet regime substantially increased livestock quotas from the area, partly to enforce collectivization, but largely to feed urban centres.^[20] The difficulties of farming within the region soon became obvious: although much of the soil in the area was very good due to centuries of nutrient buildup, areas of “black earth” and the less fertile “chestnut soils” were interspersed and difficult to distinguish, and the hot, harsh sukhovei (dry winds) that swept through the area disturbed topsoil and dried out fields.^[21] This caused the first few years of crop yields to be somewhat productive, but quickly yields decreased even as demands from the Soviet central authority increased.^[22] For his part, Stalin blamed the local Kazakh party boss, Fillip Goloshchekin, for the millions of deaths within Kazakhstan, and argued that his inability to effectively collectivize the steppe resulted in the quota shortfalls.^[23] Eventually, when the enforced shortages of the 1930s were abandoned, forced collectives became productive.^[24] These collective farms developed the status of being the “USSR’s agricultural crutch,” specializing in cereal and meat production, and served as a target of Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaigns in the 1960s.^[25]

Although some of the scars of the Stalinist period were exposed during Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, he elected not to disclose the true extent of the harm created by forced collectivization.^[26] Memory of the trauma was passed verbally within families, as well as included passively within Kazakh-language novels.^[27] The trauma of forced collectivization in Kazakhstan is impossible to understate, both with regards to the sheer level of mortality, but also the cultural and social impact. In the pre-Soviet period, being Kazakh and Kazakh life was almost synonymous with nomadism and traditional practices of animal husbandry.^[28]The forcible halting of this nomadic practice was fundamentally deleterious to the traditional Kazakh way of life, as well as the Kazakh peoples’ conception of the steppe, which “precluded an attachment to a ‘nation’ grounded in territory.”^[29] The removal of nomadism and the altering of the Kazakh relationship with their own land also destroyed the nation’s previous self-conception of their identity, which was ideal for the Soviet Union, who hoped that being Soviet would come to replace any individual ethnic connection. The Kazakh identity which emerged from forced collectivization and the period of korenizatsiia was irrevocably altered from their former one, largely due to the destruction of many customs practiced under pastoral nomadism. As Robert Kindler asserts in his work on forced collectivization, “clans were replaced by kolkhozes, brigades, and other collectives that produced and distributed indispensable resources. People became dependent on the institutions of the Soviet state…It was Sovietization by hunger.”^[30]

            A long-standing debate within the historiography of collectivization and famines throughout the Soviet Union exists, regarding whether the process was based on the “nationality” or “peasantry” questions. When discussing the Holodomor in Ukraine, some scholars argue that the destructive practices were directly related to the USSR’s dislike for the Ukrainian people, due to the problems they presented to the regime, whereas others argue that the famine is best understood as anger towards the peasant class.^[31] This debate, however, assumes that nationality and social status are necessarily distinguishable – something which was much less distinct in Kazakhstan. In fact, the Soviet regime went to great lengths to integrate ethnic Kazakhs into infrastructure of social control, such as the local government and army, and publicly framed forced collectivization as a “national transition” to a more developed state.^[32] Soviet authority also entrusted locals to determine who were bai, literally a “nomadic exploiter,” but practically resembled a Kazakh-specific term for what were effectively kulaks, and punish them for their excess resources.^[33] Locals were often also entrusted with determining how to fill quotas for meat and produce, resulting in deadly processes that prioritized the acquisition of goods at any cost, much as was seen in Ukraine.^[34] The inordinate demands for meat from the central government required Kazakhs to kill their horses and other livestock en masse, providing further damage to a culture which was incredibly centred around horseback riding, and which economically depended upon these horses for survival.^[35]

            One of the other demographic elements of forced collectivization was the vast number of ethnic Kazakhs who emigrated in this period. Although fleeing was severely punished by Soviet authorities, thousands fled across the nearest border.^[36] The majority of refugees went to China, from 1929-30, but by winter 1930-31, starvation conditions had become so severe that “almost every Kazakh was in flight” to the nearest possible place to find food.^[37] Refugees flooded cities and industrial centres in Western Siberia and the Middle Volga of the RSFSR, Uzbekistan, Kirgizia, and Turkmenistan, as well as across the border of the Soviet Union to China, and to a much lesser degree, Iran and Afghanistan.^[38] International border crossings in particular were extraordinarily dangerous. Many of these economic and humanitarian refugees were caught by OPGU officials, who either captured or killed many of the would-be escapees.^[39] One such incident, which came to be known as the Karatal Affair, occurred when forty Kazakh and Dungan families attempted to escape across the Chinese border: of these, only nine managed to flee, with the rest being killed or captured.^[40] Archival records of OGPU reports also document that many of the women and children who were captured were raped, and both the living and dead were looted.^[41] The Sino-Soviet border cut through traditional Kazakh seasonal migration routes, meaning that there were historic Kazakh populations on either side of the border. Nevertheless, forced collectivization dramatically increased the Kazakh population outside of their titular republic within the Soviet Union, which created tension between ethnic Kazakhs in the Soviet Union and China – in addition to complicating international relations between the two nations.^[42] This complicated the creation of Kazakh nationalism, and effectively created a relationship between ethnic Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and China, a connection which would trouble Stalin for years to come.^[43]  It also resulted in further depopulation and marginalization of ethnic Kazakhs within Kazakhstan: those who fled were quickly replaced by deported ethnic minorities, and ethnic Russians who formed their own collective farms.

Forced Deportations

            The USSR engaged in a number of ‘strategic’ deportations of minority populations throughout the empire, often for political reasons. These deportations ended up reinforcing the newly-formed collective farms, as many deported minority populations were subsequently required to work on, or found, kolkhozes. One of the first groups to be deported in 1935 were Finns living in the Leningrad and Karelia regions.^[44] These ethnic Finns were relocated from Tajikistan to Kazakhstan, marking the first instance of a policy of “[cleaning] the border areas” of the Soviet Union.^[45] The Soviet Union would move minority populations when they feared their citizens might collaborate with individuals in states outside the Soviet border: such as Finns in Karelia, Koreans along the eastern border, and Chinese along the Sino-Soviet border. Sometimes these deportations were merely to punish and subdue the ethnic minority, such as the Chechens and Ingush.^[46] Nevertheless, these deportations were wholly unnecessary for the security of the Soviet Union itself. One contemporary source describes Stalin’s commitment to deportation of ethnic minorities thus: “On many occasions the aims could hardly be explained by anything else but paranoiac geopolitical fantasies of the ‘Father of the peoples’ [Stalin] and his maniacal distrust.”^[47] Often these deportations were illogical: trainloads of ethnic and political deportees passed those of expelled Kazakh bai being sent to Ukraine, which was in the midst of its own attacks on kulaks.^[48]

Deportations of ethnic minorities from across the Soviet Union to the Kazakh SSR both served to support newly formed collective farms, and minoritized Kazakhs within their own republic. This would not pose a substantial issue during the Soviet period,  in part due to the envisioning of nationality as something which would eventually ‘disappear’ or be subsumed by a broader Soviet identity. The fact that nationality did not disappear, along with the new ethnic diversity within Kazakhstan, would later create substantial questions surrounding national identity after the collapse of communism. Ethnic tensions began in the Soviet period, with old tsarist resettlement policies of encouraging Russians and Ukrainians to settle the steppe coming under harsh criticism.^[49] Local Kazakhs were deeply unhappy with Russians and Ukrainians, and “Slavic settlement [in Kazakhstan was] seen as a form of colonization of eastern peoples” by Soviet authorities and Kazakhs alike.^[50] During and following the Russian Civil War (which followed the Bolshevik Revolution), ~40,000 Slavic settlers were driven out of Central Asia, in a process seen as forcible decolonization.^[51] Other estimates, as advanced by Terry Martin, argue that the Russian population in Kazakhstan dropped from 2.7 million to 2.2 million from 1920-22, which they saw as a redress of historical grievances and an assertion of their ability to independently decide questions of land in Kazakhstan.^[52] Nevertheless, these expulsions – in addition to being quite punitive towards the Russian settlers – were eventually condemned by the central government due to their support of “ochednerost”, which advocated for “unconditional priority” towards Kazakhs in the “acquisition of all available agricultural land.”^[53] Decolonization was forcibly ended in 1922, and the central Soviet authority insisted upon equal rights for all settlers who remained.^[54] In spite of these forced deportations, as well as land reform in favour of Kazakhs, the population of ethnic Russians continued to increase: by 1939, 36.4% of the population were Kazakh, while Russians numbered at 41.2%, and Ukrainians another 10.6%.^[55] Continued immigration to Kazakhstan and population growth implicitly shows the failure of Soviet-era ‘decolonization’ attempts. This reduced the relative size of the Kazakh population within the state, and introduced domestic ethnic tensions which would destabilize the Kazakh SSR further.  Valerie Tishkov discusses in her article “Soviet Ethnic Engineering” how deportations “influenced and strengthened” identity formation, as exemplified by carrying a passport which marked one as a displaced person.^[56] Nevertheless, this identity formation was not inclusive of Kazakhs, but rather created a parallel narrative of Kazakhstan as a state to which people were deported, or even found a new sense of home and identity – as opposed to the Kazakhs who were indigenous to the space.^[57] Many deported populations formed their own kolkhozes, as opposed to joining which had been created by Kazakhs in the early 1930s. As evidenced by intermarriage records from the Soviet period, only in urban centres was intermarriage common, evidencing that communication between Kazakhs and deportees to Kazakhstan were limited in scope.^[58] This section demonstrates that the explosion of ethnic minorities within Kazakhstan served as an alternate method of controlling Kazakhstan, by introducing ethnic minorities which lived largely separately, and had their own unique immigration stories which prevented them from engaging in a broader narrative of Kazakh statehood. This can be analysed through a discussion of Korean deportees, who were a “model” minority within the state, and the Chechens and Ingush people, who were problematic towards the state authority, and suffered for it.

Beginning in 1935, approximately 180,000 ethnic Koreans were deported from land bordering Japanese-occupied Korea to Kazakhstan.^[59] This group, contemporarily referred to as koryo saram, inhabit an unique cultural space, as they maintain their ethnic distinction from both Kazakhs and Koreans living in Korea.^[60] Unlike ethnic Kazakhs, Koreans deported from the Far East had a long tradition of farming on their land, dating back to their arrival in the territory between the Ussuri and Amur rivers in the 1860s.^[61] In 1937, Stalin became concerned that Japanese spies had been infiltrating the Soviet Union through ethnic Korean spies, as Korea had been under Japanese control since 1910.^[62] This suspicion, coupled with concerns that ethnic Koreans may attempt to leave the Soviet Union, formed the grounds for their deportation to Central Asia. Kate Brown asserts that, by the 1930s, the “plan to improve backwards regions through resettlement merged…with the idea that spies and counterrevolutionaries had contaminated the population.”^[63] Mass deportation thus served functions of social welfare and protection through eliminating spies, and punishment of quarrelsome populations.^[64] Deportation thus served as the “apex of the political repression/cultural amelioration axis” of spaces such as Kazakhstan, demonstrating that deportation had the function not just of controlling the population who was being removed, but also enforcing greater sway upon the place to which they were being deported.^[65]

Upon arrival in Kazakhstan, Koreans joined in collectivization attempts.Here too, collectivization was disastrous. The concentration of Koreans in southern Kazakhstan enabled local concentrations of individuals experienced in rice and vegetable farming practices, but environmental differences between their traditional land and Kazakhstan made this farming incredibly unproductive.^[66] In spite of having been moved to Kazakhstan, the collective farms they joined were preponderantly, or entirely Korean, and they were not permitted to join existing Kazakh communities due to their status as deported, ‘punished’ peoples.^[67]Interethnic marriages between Koreans and Kazakhs did happen, but were much less common, and tended to only occur in cities.^[68] The vast majority of the Korean population in Kazakhstan lived on kolkhozes, and married within their community.^[69] Their exclusion was further aided by the long-standing Kazakh practice of endogamous marriage, or marrying within their community, especially in the 1930s.^[70] Finally, many Koreans living in Kazakhstan considered themselves Kazakhstani, but specifically koryo saram – that is to say, the combination of both identities.^[71] This provided a parallel ethnic identity within Kazakhstan, which specifically resisted any national identity along Kazakh ethnic lines for the nation of Kazakhstan itself. Nevertheless, koryo saram as an identity was still specific to Kazakhstan, as many Korean deportees assimilated linguistically and began speaking Russian, while still maintaining many Korean cultural practices.^[72] The koryo saram thus serve as one example of the multiple nationalities cohabitating within the Kazakh SSR, undermining the significance and genuine coherence of Kazakhs having a titular nation. All inhabitants of the Kazakh SSR were undoubtedly Soviets, but beyond this communal Soviet identity, any idea of a unified state identity becomes much less persuasive.^[73]

When the Soviets came to power, a Chechen-Ingush Autonomous SSR was created within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which finally represented official legal recognition of their different ethnic identity and homeland.^[74] This was in keeping with the Soviet policy of korenizatsiia, which aimed to integrate domestic national minorities within the broader system of Soviet government.^[75] The regime came into conflict with these groups in two main respects: their resistance to forced collectivization, as well as their unwillingness to break with Islam.^[76] This culminated in a series of resistance movements against Soviet officials throughout the 1920s and 1930s, which were brutally crushed by Soviet forces.^[77] In 1944, partly as a result of these resistance movements, the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous SSR was eliminated, its population branded “traitors of the Motherland,” and deported, primarily to Kazakhstan.^[78] The total number of deportees is difficult to identify, but some archival records estimate around 400,000 Chechens and Ingush arrived in Kazakhstan.^[79] Much like Korean deportees, they were forced into working on kolkhozes, and experienced the same starvation conditions and poor agricultural yields.^[80] Nevertheless, the poor living conditions, compounded with the loss of their autonomous region and historic territory, resulted in broad discontent and lack of cooperation amongst Chechens and Ingush.^[81] Contrary to other deportees to the region, such as Volga Germans, they engaged in active resistance against Soviet authorities, often resisting accommodation and forced work on collective farms.^[82] This led to a perception of Chechens and Ingush as “working ‘significantly worse than the Germans,’” and consequently Caucasians faced a higher frequency of arrest for crimes than their German counterparts.^[83]

Many of the deportees to Kazakhstan experienced stigmatization not only from the ethnic Russians living there, who felt that they were the ‘civilizing’ force of the region, but also the Kazakhs who felt that their territory had been encroached upon. Deportees were forced to work in collective farms, promised good farming conditions, only to face the same scarcity experienced by the domestic populations.^[84] These collectives were often separated from the established Kazakh ones, requiring deportees to completely construct their own settlements, and they were often unable to integrate with local populations. Moreover, Soviet officials living in Kazakhstan had told the locals that the deported populations were “criminals of the state and famous as cannibals,” contributing to genuine fear and mistrust amongst local populations.^[85]

According to scholars of modern Kazakhstan, “diaspora” is a complicated word to discuss their ethnic diversity, as in many cases ideas of a ‘homeland’ do not necessarily apply.^[86] Beate Eschment, in his discussion of Chechen and Kurd minorities within Kazakhstan, references scholarship on diaspora and ethnicity by Rogers Brubaker and Charles King, but critiques their work for “only [taking] account of nationalities that now had a new and independent home state.”^[87] Much of the scholarship within diaspora studies implies a home state – which is made all the more complicated when the ethnic minority does not have a home state, such as the Chechens and Kurds, or does not consider themselves as ‘belonging’ to their previous state of origin, such as the koryo saram.^[88] Eschment argues that “studying the Chechens and Kurds therefore requires the replacement… of the word ‘state’ with ‘land,” and draws a relationship not only between “diaspora, host state, and kin state,” but also the territory where the “Historic Homeland” of populations such as the Chechens and Kurds lie.^[89] The varied histories and ethnic identities of those who moved to Kazakhstan – forcibly or otherwise – create a complicated ethnic identity within Kazakhstan. This, coupled with the limited intermingling between ethnic populations, and historic encroachment of ethnic Russians upon Kazakh territory, sowed the beginnings of ethnic tensions which have become prevalent in a post-Soviet context. Discord between deported ethnic minorities, native Kazakhs, and ethnic Russians who arrived based upon quasi-colonial promises of free land, all demonstrate the ambiguity of contemporary national identity in Kazakhstan, as both ethnicized and civic forms endure in parallel. These ambiguities are made more complicated by the intertwined and overlapping  traumas of collectivization and deportation.    

Conclusion

One of the notable aspects of the legacy of Kazakh forced collectivization is its modern reception, and how this diverges from the Ukrainian memory of the Holodomor.^[90]  In Ukraine, collectivization has become one of the main scars in the memory of the nation, and has contributed to a nationalism which is confrontational to modern-day Russia. Nevertheless, commemoration of the Kazakh famine has not occurred on the same scale, nor has it been formally acknowledged by the government in the same way, representing a nationalism which hesitates to criticize modern Russia as harshly for the Soviet Union’s crimes. One of the possible reasons for this is the ethnic diversity of modern-day Kazakhstan. Despite being the titular nationality, the Kazakh population of the nation only surpassed that of ethnic Russians in 1989, and only became 50% of the population in 1999 – population disparities which were largely a consequence of the famine.^[91] Constructing a national narrative which is based on shared experience and points of reference within an ethnic group is fundamentally more difficult in an ethnically diverse state. Many ethnic minorities in Kazakhstan have historic homelands, diaspora connections outside of Kazakhstan, and kin living in other nations, which both creates indelible ties to other nations, and stymies the construction of a unified national identity that bridges these ethnic differences. The primary thing which unified the multiple ethnic minorities within Kazakhstan was being Soviet; now that this element is gone, the cracks which were created by that very Soviet system have resulted in longstanding division within the state.

In this way, the legacy of Soviet imperial policies can be shown to stretch into contemporary challenges for the state. This idea can help the reader understand forced collectivization and deportation as two sides of the same coin. Kazakhs were forced abandon nomadism and work on collective farms for economic and political reasons: their labour boosted the food stores of the Soviet Union, and requiring them to abandon nomadism served to control the population, and corresponded with the old tsarist conception of nomads as unproductive and ‘wasting’ the space they had been given. Forced deportation of minority populations from across the Soviet Union had different motivations, but functionally supported these two aims of economic control and ethnic fragmentation. The influx of new people buttressed collectivization, especially after the tremendous loss of life due to the deplorable living conditions in the early 1930s.

Moreover, the ethnic plurality in Kazakhstan, created by both Russian colonization and forced deportations to the SSR, both minoritized Kazakhs within their own state during the Soviet period, and fundamentally complicated understandings of a Kazakh identity. The destruction of pastoral nomadism altered previously constructed Kazakh self-conception, and the introduction of new minority populations meant that Kazakhstan as a state could not simply be understood as a state for Kazakhs. This created a notable distinction between Kazakh ethnic identity and Kazakhstani civic or state identity. These questions have persisted in a post-Soviet context, and have been made all the more complicated by the traumatic legacy around deportation for ethnic minority populations. Questions of identity and ethnicity within the Kazakh SSR, when coupled with forced collectivization, cemented the process of ‘breaking’ the nation and people within it and remaking it in their own Sovietized image, subordinating the nation to Soviet central authority. The ramifications of this decision can be seen in a modern context, both with the continued ethnic diversity of Kazakhstan, and continued Kazakh/Kazakhstani identity questions. In this way, forced collectivization and forced deportation can be seen not just as harmful practices of the Stalinist Soviet Union, but as yet another iteration of a center-periphery dynamic, weaponizing the subordination and subjugation established in the preceding Tsarist era.

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Endnotes

^[1] Cassandra Cavanaugh, “Acclimatization, the shifting science of settlement,”  in Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, ed. Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (Routledge, 2007), 169.

^[2] George Liber, “Korenizatsiia: Restructuring Soviet Nationality Policy in the 1920s.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 14, no 1 (1991): 15–16, https:/doi.org/10.1080/01419870.1991.9993696.

^[3] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939  (Cornell University Press, 2001), 1-5, 59-67.

^[4] Robert Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 2.

^[5] Brian J. Boeck, “Containment vs. colonization: Muscovite approaches to settling the steppe,” in Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, ed. Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (Routledge, 2007), 41.

^[6] Boeck, “Containment vs. colonization,” 41-2.

^[7] Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe (Cornell University Press, 2018), 20.

^[8] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 20.

^[9] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 20.

^[10] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 20. 

^[11] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 36-7.

^[12] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 36-7. 

^[13] Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010), 14.

^[14] Snyder, Bloodlands, 14.

^[15] Snyder, Bloodlands, 21-26.

^[16] Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads, 10.

^[17] James Richter, “Famine, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Space: Contrasting Echoes of Collectivization in Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” Nationalities Papers 48, no. 3 (2020): 476–77, https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2019.17.

^[18] Dukeyev, Berikbol. 2025. “Genocide or Not? The 1931–1933 Famine in the Collective Memories of Kazakhstan’s Post-Independence Generations.” Journal of Genocide Research, September, 1–22, https:/doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2025.2561440.

^[19] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 12.

^[20] Richter, “Famine, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Space,” 476-77.

^[21] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 29.

^[22] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 29-35.

^[23] Snyder, Bloodlands, 145.

^[24] Kazbek Toleubayev, Kees Jansen & Arnold van Huis. “Knowledge and agrarian de-collectivisation in Kazakhstan.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37, vol. 2 (2010): 353-377. https:/doi.org/10.1080/03066151003595069.

^[25] Toleubayev, Jansen and van Huis, “Knowledge and agrarian de-collectivisation in Kazakhstan.”

^[26] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 6.

^[27] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 6.

^[28] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 11.

^[29] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 11.

^[30] Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads, 2.

^[31] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 11-13.

^[32] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 11-12.

^[33] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 12.

^[34] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 12-13; Snyder, Bloodlands, 16-27.

^[35] Elizabeth E Bacon, Central Asians under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change (Ithaca, 1966), 29.

^[36] Valery Tishkov, “Soviet Ethnic Engineering: Success and Failure.” In Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame, 37, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446279427.

^[37] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 164-5.

^[38] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 165.

^[39] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 122-3.

^[40] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 141-2.

^[41] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 141-2.

^[42] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 124.

^[43] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 149; Dru C. Gladney, “Nations Transgressing Nation-States: Constructing Dungan, Uygur and Kazakh Identities Across China, Central Asia and Turkey.” In Post-Soviet Central Asia, ed. Touraj Atabaki and John O’Kane , 309, http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9780755619801.ch-019.

^[44] Lazzat Dinasheva and Mirzahan Egamberdiyev, “Forced Deportation Of People In Kazakhstan,” Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences 131 (2014): 301, https:/doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.04.120.

^[45] Dinasheva and Egamberdiyev, “Forced Deportation Of People In Kazakhstan,” 301.

^[46] Tishkov, “Soviet Ethnic Engineering,” 37-8.

^[47] Tishkov, “Soviet Ethnic Engineering,” 37.

^[48] Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2004), 115.

^[49] Alun Thomas, Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia Under Lenin and Stalin (I. B. Tauris, 2018), 56-7.

^[50] Brown, A Biography of No Place, 91.

^[51] Alun Thomas, Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia Under Lenin and Stalin (I. B. Tauris, 2018), 56-7.

^[52] Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 59-60.

^[53] Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 59-60.

^[54] Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 59-60.

^[55] Natalya Yem and Stephen J. Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan, 1937–1965.” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 28, no. 2 (2015): 137-8.; Thomas, Nomads and Soviet Rule, 56-9.

^[56] Tishkov, “Soviet Ethnic Engineering,” 37-8.

^[57] Tishkov, “Soviet Ethnic Engineering,” 37-8.

^[58] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan,” 140-146.

^[59] N. Marver-Kwon and R. Kangas. “Koreans in Kazakhstan: Questions of Revival for the Koryo-Saram.” International Relations and International Law Journal 106, no. 2 (2024): 78; Tishkov, “Soviet Ethnic Engineering,” 38, https://doi.org/10.26577/IRILJ.2024.v106.i2-08.

^[60] Koryo Saram. Directed by Matt Dibble and Y. David Chung. Trans Asia Screen Culture Institute, 2007. https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/koryo-saram.

^[61] Marver-Kwon and R. Kangas, “Koreans in Kazakhstan,” 79.

^[62] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram,” 136.

^[63] Brown, A Biography of No Place, 105.

^[64] Brown, A Biography of No Place, 105.

^[65] Brown, A Biography of No Place, 105. 

^[66] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan,” 136-39.

^[67] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan,” 136-39.

^[68] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan,” 136-39.; Wassim Y. Almawi, Abdelhafidh Hajjej, Saniya Abdrakhmanova, and Aida Turganbekova. “Distribution of HLA-A, -C, -B, -DRB1, and -DQB1 polymorphisms in the Korean minority in Kazakhstan, and relatedness to neighboring and distant populations” Gene 823, no. 20 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gene.2022.146386.

^[69] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan,” 140-146. 

^[70] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan,” 143.

^[71] Eunsil Yim, Être Coréens au Kazakhstan (Collège de France, 2016), 14-19.

^[72] Yem and Epstein, “Social Change and Marriage Patterns among Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan,” 140-145.

^[73] Yim, Être Coréens au Kazakhstan, 14-19.

^[74] Makka S.-G. Albogachieva and Kemper, Michael. “After Deportation: Chechen and Ingush Sufi Groups and their Zikr Rituals in Soviet Kazakhstan” Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques 78, no. 2 (2024): 251, https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2023-0031.

^[75] Albogachieva and Kemper, “After Deportation,” 251.

^[76] Albogachieva and Kemper, “After Deportation,” 247-251.

^[77] Albogachieva and Kemper, “After Deportation,” 251.; Shirin Akiner, Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union: (With an Appendix on the Non-Muslim Turkic Peoples of the Soviet Union) : An Historical and Statistical Handbook, (Routledge, 2010), 197-98.

^[78] Albogachieva and Kemper, “After Deportation,” 251.

^[79] Albogachieva and Kemper, “After Deportation,” 252.

^[80] Albogachieva and Kemper, “After Deportation,” 252.

^[81] Beate Eschment, “The Chechens and Kurds of Kazakhstan between Historical and Second Homelands,” Central Asian Affairs 8 (2021): 347-350, https:/doi.org/10.30965/22142290-12340012.

^[82] Michaela Pohl, “The “planet of one hundred languages”: Ethnic relations and Soviet identity in the Virgin Lands,” in Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, ed. Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (Routledge, 2007), 239.

^[83] Pohl, “The “planet of one hundred languages,” 239.

^[84] Brown, A Biography of No Place, 149-151.

^[85] Albogachieva and Kemper, “After Deportation,” 252.

^[86] Eschment, “The Chechens and Kurds of Kazakhstan,” 348.

^[87] Eschment, “The Chechens and Kurds of Kazakhstan,” 348.

^[88] Eschment, “The Chechens and Kurds of Kazakhstan,” 348.

^[89] Eschment, “The Chechens and Kurds of Kazakhstan,” 348-9.

^[90] Richter, “Famine, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Space,” 477-9.

^[91] Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 2.

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