Famine in the Kazak ASSR in the 1930s: A Historiographical Drift

Abstract

The famine in the USSR in the early 1930s as a historical fact has been the focus of scholarly journals over last 30 years; the media are especially active in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The article analyzes historiography of famine in Kazakhstan by Kazakh and foreign (Russian, Ukrainian, American, Italian and German) scholars. A noticeable increase in special publication activity took place in the first half of the 1990s; a new surge of interest in the topic emerged in the 2010s, especially among Western European and American historians. In Kazakhstan, it continues to this day and is increasingly acquiring a political connotation. Some Kazakh historians interpret asharshylyk (famine in Kazakh) as famine, that is, following the Ukrainian interpretation of famine as genocide, ethnocide of the Kazakh people. Such publications are characterized by the neglect of available historical documents on the topic and a descriptive method of research, when the main emphasis is placed on suffering of the starving people. The article focuses on the analysis of three debatable issues: the time of the famine, losses in manpower, and mass resettlement of the population. Currently in historiography there are different interpretations of the chronological framework; the scale of the catastrophe; various estimations of the losses and population migration (migration, as a result of sedentarization and collectivization) in the Autonomous Republic under conditions of famine; there is no clear definition of the geography of famine. The article attributes it to different methodological approaches. The greatest results in the study of the topic can be obtained by means of approaches proposed by the Russian researcher P. A. Sorokin and the Irish scholar Komrak O’Grad. Further research is impossible without a thorough study of the already published documents and expanding the source base.