The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, also known as the Asharshylyq, was a man-made famine in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Soviet Union, during which an estimated 1.3 to 2.3 million people died, the majority of them ethnic Kazakhs. Between 38 and 42 percent of all Kazakhs perished, the highest proportion of any ethnic group killed in the Soviet famines of the early 1930s. Other estimates put the number of deaths at about 1.75 million, while some research suggests the toll may have exceeded 2 million.
The famine was a direct result of Soviet collectivization policies, implemented in Kazakhstan under the authority of First Secretary Filipp Goloshchyokin. Traditionally a nomadic people, Kazakhs relied heavily on livestock herding. Collectivization destroyed this system: herds were seized by the state, traditional migrations were disrupted, and communities were forced into collective farms ill-suited for the steppe environment. Hunger was intensified by harsh state requisitioning, the imposition of excessive grain and livestock quotas, and repressive measures such as the blacklisting of entire districts from trade. Thousands of Kazakhs who attempted to escape to neighboring China were shot by border guards, while others died during mass migrations across Central Asia.
The famine began in late 1930, a year before the worst phase of the Ukrainian famine, or Holodomor, and lasted through 1933. Its effects were catastrophic: Kazakhstan's population fell by more than a third, and Kazakhs were reduced from about 60 percent of the republic's inhabitants to 38 percent, making them a minority in their own homeland for decades. Large numbers of survivors fled permanently to China, Afghanistan, and other regions. The famine thus not only killed millions but also transformed the demographic and cultural landscape of Kazakhstan.
Interpretations of the famine remain debated among scholars. Some, including a Kazakh parliamentary commission chaired by historian Manash Kozybayev, have concluded that the famine was a genocide, arguing that Moscow deliberately targeted Kazakhs by pursuing policies that knowingly led to their mass death. Others have concluded that the famine, while primarily man-made, should be seen as part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–1933, driven by Joseph Stalin's push for rapid industrialization and collectivization, rather than as a targeted national campaign. A middle position suggests that while the famine may not have begun with genocidal intent, Soviet authorities later instrumentalized starvation, selectively punishing Kazakhs for resisting collectivization and undermining their traditional way of life.
Public recognition of the famine was suppressed in the Soviet Union until the period of glasnost in the late 1980s. Since Kazakhstan's independence in 1991, the famine has been increasingly studied and commemorated as one of the greatest tragedies in the nation's history. While international recognition has not reached the level of the Holodomor, the Kazakh famine is often discussed in the broader context of man-made famines, forced collectivization, and mass repression in the Stalinist era.
Etymology
The famine is commonly known as the Asharshylyq or Asharshylyk. It comes from Kazakh: Ашаршылық, [ɑʃɑrʃɯˈɫɯq], meaning 'famine' or 'hunger'.
Background
In the years leading up to the famine, several interconnected factors played a crucial role in exacerbating the dire situation. The historical context was shaped by a complex interplay of demographic changes and traditional nomadic pastoralism practices in Central Asia, particularly centered around a meat and dairy based diet. The nomadic lifestyle of Kazakhs involved the seasonal movement of herds across vast expanses of steppe as a response to the unpredictable availability of grazing resources, driven by the region's harsh climate and varied terrain. As a result, the reliance on meat from livestock, especially during the long and harsh winters, became a fundamental aspect of survival in the Kazakh steppe.
The demographic landscape also played a crucial role, as the population in the region was marked by a substantial number of nomadic Kazakh herders, contributing to the reliance on livestock for sustenance. The traditional practices of raising animals and consuming their meat were intricately linked to cultural norms and historical traditions of Kazakhstan.
However, the destruction of nomadic pastoralism had its roots in the 19th century with the Russian conquest of Central Asia, which marked a significant turning point. Russian authorities introduced changes that included auctioning fertile land as an effort to lure Russian peasants in the region with a focus on agriculture, aiming to transform the traditional nomadic lifestyle. This alteration in land use and economic activities disrupted the delicate equilibrium that had been maintained by Kazakh pastoralists for millennia, resulting in decreased nomadic mobility and increased consumption of grain. These changes set the stage for further disruptions in the early 20th century, as the region grappled with the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War. The situation was exacerbated by the policy of Prodrazvyorstka adopted by the Bolshevik government, coupled with the already challenging effects of severe intermittent drought, involved requisitioning grain from rural areas to support urban populations and export which led to the Kazakh famine of 1919–1922, with an estimated 400,000 to 2 million people dying in the event.
With the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, Kazakhstan was drawn into the sphere of Soviet authority. This transition placed the region under the influence of policies enacted by the Soviet government, particularly the first five-year plan implemented under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. At the heart of these policies was the drive for collectivization of agriculture, a practice which involved in integrating private landholdings and labour into collective farming.
Overview
Signs of the Kazakh famine began emerging in the late 1920s, with the factor being the jut from 1927 to 1928, which was a period of extreme cold in which cattle were starved and were unable to graze.
In 1928, the Soviet authorities started a collectivization campaign to confiscate cattle from richer Kazakhs, who were called bai, known as Little October. The confiscation campaign was carried out by Kazakhs against other Kazakhs, and it was up to those Kazakhs to decide who was a bai and how much to confiscate from them. While nomadic Kazakhs, involved in pasturing, were forcefully placed in collective farms which resulted in decline of adequate grazing. This engagement was intended to make Kazakhs active participants in the transformation of Kazakh society. More than 10,000 bais may have been deported due to the campaign against them. The campaign corresponded to arrests of former members of the Alash movement and repression of religious authorities and practices. Kazakhstan's livestock and grain were largely acquired between 1929 and 1932, with one-third of the republic's cereals being requisitioned and more than 1 million tons confiscated in 1930 to provide food for the cities.
One third of Kazakh livestock was confiscated between 1930 and 1931. The livestock was transferred over to Moscow and Leningrad which in the opinion of Niccolò Pianciola shows that Kazakhs were consciously sacrificed to the imperial hierarchy of consumption. Some Kazakhs were expelled from their land to make room for 200,000 "special settlers" and Gulag prisoners, and some of the inadequate food supply in Kazakhstan went to such prisoners and settlers as well. Food aid to the Kazakhs was selectively distributed to eliminate class enemies. Many Kazakhs were denied food aid as local officials considered them unproductive, and food aid was provided to European workers in the country instead. Despite this, the Kazakhs received some measure of emergency food assistance from the state, though much of it did not arrive or was heavily delayed. Soviet officials sent medical personnel into Kazakhstan to inoculate 200,000 Kazakhs from smallpox.
However, Kazakh victims of the famine were widely discriminated against and expelled from virtually every sector of Kazakhstan's society. Soviet authorities referred to Kazakhs in private memos as "two-legged wolves". As famine raged Soviet authorities continued to procure grain from the Kazakhs, with Stalin explicitly advocating for a "repressive track" in the collection process due to procurements having "undergone sharp declines." In this vein within 1932, 32 out of the less than 200 districts in Kazakhstan that did not meet grain production quotas were blacklisted, meaning that they were prohibited from trading with other villages. As Historian Sarah Cameron describes it in an interview with Harvard University's Davis Center, "[in] a strategy explicitly modeled upon a technique that was used against starving Ukrainians, several regions of Kazakhstan were blacklisted. That essentially entraps starving Kazakhs in zones of death where no food could be found." In 1933, Filipp Goloshchyokin was replaced with Levon Mirzoyan from Armenia, who was repressive particularly toward famine refugees and denied food aid to areas run by cadres who asked for more food for their regions using, in the words of Cameron, "teary telegrams"; in one instance under Mirzoyan's rule, a plenipotentiary shoved food aid documents into his pocket and had a wedding celebration instead of transferring them for a whole month while hundreds of Kazakhs starved. Shortly after his arrival, Mirzoyan announced that those who fled or stole grain were 'enemies' of the Soviet Union, and that the republic would take 'severe measures' against them. However, as Cameron notes, this definition could be extended to every starving refugee in the country. With this campaign, Mirzoyan pushed for the use of brutal punishment such as shootings.
Thousands of Kazakhs violently resisted the collectivization campaign with weapons left over by the white army with 8 rebellions occurring in 1930 alone. In the Mangyshlak Peninsula 15,000 rebels resisted between 1929 and 1931. In one rebellion Kazakh took over the city of Suzak in Irgiz returning confiscated property and destroying grain depots. Rebels also decapitated and cut the ears off of party members upon their takeover of said city. Other Kazakhs in the rebellions fought to reopen previous closed down mosques and free religious leaders. OGPU officials are reported to have drunk the blood of Kazakhs shot during the repression of the rebellions. Lower level cadres often disaffected and joined the rebellions to help fight against Red Army forces.
Prominent Kazakh writer Gabit Musirepov reported finding corpses "stacked like firewood" by the roadside in the Turgai district of Kazakhstan. Another first account testified that "It is not rare to meet a Kazakh family, fleeing from who knows where and dragging behind them a sled, on top of which lies the corpse of a child, who died along the way."
Though he didn't witness it firsthand Welshman Gareth Jones was probably the first journalist to report on the Kazakhstan famine. He was told in March 1933 by a 'German from Central Asia' that "one million at least out of 5 million ... have died of hunger" and also wrote in his diary of "corpses in Kazakhstan. Terrible conditions."
In scholar James Richter's Famine, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Space: Contrasting Echoes of Collectivization in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, published by Cambridge University Press, many testimonies from survivors are documented:
My first memory is of the moon. It was autumn, cold and we were on the tramp somewhere. Wrapped up, the cart swayed beneath me. A sudden stop, and I saw in the black sky this enormous moon. It was full, round and shone brightly. I lay on my back and couldn't tear myself from the sight for a long time. Turning over, I could clearly see on the ground some kind of thickets with stretched-out, crooked branches; there were a lot of them on both sides of the road: they were people. Stiff and silent they lay on the ground.... It was '31 and we were then moving from a ramshackle aul to Turgai.
Casualties
Kazakhstan included some of the regions affected severely by famine, percentage-wise, although more people died in famine in Soviet Ukraine, which began a year later. In addition to the Kazakh famine of 1919–1922, Kazakhstan lost more than half of its population in 10–15 years due to the actions of the Soviet state. The two Soviet censuses indicated that the number of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan dropped from 3,637,612 in 1926 to 2,181,520 in 1937. Ethnic minorities in Kazakhstan were also significantly affected. The Ukrainian population in Kazakhstan decreased from 859,396 to 549,859 (a reduction of almost 36% of their population) while other ethnic minorities in Kazakhstan lost 12% and 30% of their populations. Ukrainians who died in Kazakhstan are sometimes considered victims of the Holodomor.
Refugees
"The old aul is now breaking apart, it is moving toward settled life, toward the use of hay fields, toward land cultivation; it is moving from worse land to better land, to state farms, to industry, to collective farm construction."
—Filipp Goloshchyokin, First Secretary of the Kazakh Regional Committee of the Communist Party
Due to starvation, between 665,000 and 1.1 million Kazakhs fled the famine with their cattle outside Kazakhstan to China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and the Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Russia in search of food and employment in the new industrialization sites of Western Siberia. These refugees took an estimated 900,000 head of cattle with them.
Kazakhs who tried to escape were classified as class enemies and shot. The Soviet government also worked to repatriate them back to Soviet territory. This repatriation process could be brutal, as Kazakh homes were broken into with both refugee and non-refugee Kazakhs being forcibly expelled onto train cars without food, heating, or water. 30% of the refugees died due to epidemics and hunger. Refugees that were repatriated were integrated into collective farms where many were too weak to work, and in a factory within Semipalatinsk half the refugees were fired within a few days with the other half being denied food rations.
Professor K.M. Abzhanov, Director of the Institute of History and Ethnology of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences stated that "One-sixth of the indigenous population left their historical homeland forever."