Living under Stalin's Rule in Kazakhstan

Abstract

Living under Stalin's Rule in Kazakhstan Mekhmet Volkan Kaşıkçı (bio) Zh. B. Abylkhozhin, M. L. Akulov, and A. V. Tsai, eds., Zhivaia pamiat´: Stalinizm v Kazakhstane—proshloe, pamiat´, preodolenie. 332 pp. 2ndexp. ed. Almaty: Dajk-Press, 2020. ISBN 13 978-6012901108. Published in English as Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation, trans. Simon Pawley and Anton Platonov. 212 pp. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN 13 978-1793641625. $100.00. Roberto J. Carmack, Kazakhstan in World War II: Mobilization and Ethnicity in the Soviet Empire. 272 pp. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. ISBN 13 978-0700628254. $50.00. Allen J. Frank, Gulag Miracles: Sufis and Stalinist Repression in Kazakhstan. 153 pp. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019. ISBN 13 978-3700183341. $33.00. Maksim Kim, Karaganda: Zhizn´ liudei v gorode uglia, 1931–1941 gg. ( Karaganda: People's Lives in a Coal Town, 1931–1941). 216 pp. Moscow: R osspen, 2017. ISBN 978-5824321623. For the first time, Stalinist rule in Kazakhstan has attracted much attention beyond the field of Central Asian studies thanks to Sarah Cameron's book on the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. 1Cameron's book has won several prestigious book prizes in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies. The horrible famine of 1930–33 was the most important event that shaped the Soviet Kazakh experience. Whereas the Ukrainian famine is now widely recognized [End Page 905]as the "Holodomor," however, the Kazakh famine is still largely unknown in the rest of the world. Although Cameron's book has been vital in introducing Kazakhstan's Soviet experience to a wider audience, its reception as the first scholarly account of the Kazakh famine has created an image of a completely stagnant field that does not do justice to all the other historians, both local and international, who have made significant contributions to the study of famine and other issues in the history of Soviet Kazakhstan. The goal of this review essay is to introduce the main debates on Stalinist rule in Kazakhstan and to acknowledge contributions from both local and international historians. Including books published in Kazakhstan, Russia, Europe, and North America serves this purpose well. Stalinism or Stalinist rule here does not merely refer to repression, although that is an inseparable aspect of this period. Instead, I bring together works on repression (including famine, the anti-Islamic campaign, the Great Terror, and ethnic deportations), religion, social policies, mobilization, and the war experience. In contemporary scholarship, we are usually stuck with two separate histories of Soviet Central Asia. On the one hand, we have a history of violence and repression in which collectivization, anti-Islamic destruction, and the Terror occupy a central place. On the other hand, we have a history of social and cultural development in which Central Asian intellectuals, politicians, artists, or women activists create a new culture and society in which violence and repression are rarely taken into account. This duality significantly limits our understanding of the Soviet experiment in Central Asia. Although the edited volume Zhivaia pamiat´is specifically devoted to repression, the other three books help us overcome this duality. In his social history of Karaganda, Maksim Kim understands the establishment of the Karaganda basin as a study of forced modernization which interweaves the formation of social policies and a draconian state apparatus. While Allen Frank focuses on the suppression of Sufi circles, he also shows continuities in Muslim culture and how even these suppressed religious figures were eventually integrated into the Soviet project. Roberto Carmack's book shifts the focus from the 1930s to the role of World War II in the formation of Soviet identities and the Sovietization of the republic's political and economic system. ________ Almost all aspects of Soviet Kazakh history are understudied; the famine is no exception. Yet it is hard to disagree with Catriona Kelly, who writes in [End Page 906]her introduction to Zhivaia pamiat´that the cover description of Cameron's book as "the first scholarly account of the murderous famine of 1930–33" by a leading historian of modern Central Asia is a bizarre comment (10). It is difficult to understand why the book is presented as...