The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan by Cameron Sarah (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 382 as Mme Blavatskii, who was a noted occultist. However, if this report is true, General Brusilov probably thought she was a bit ‘flaky’. Brusilov eschewed politics, although he was not without ambition. He was fatalistic, optimistic and pragmatic. But, steeped in the culture of the Caucasus, Russia’s ‘wild south–south-east’, and with his family ennobled for services to the empire in Ukraine in the eighteenth century, he was profoundly Russian. He came to hate the Germans who held positions in Poland in the early twentieth century. His men adored and revered him. He was the second Suvorov. The Bolsheviks needed that, above all. Having been orphaned at six, whatever the Russian-German set in Warsaw, the Austro-Hungarians, the Germans, the Whites and the Reds, could throw at him, he survived. He is the greatest hero of the Imperial Army who still had an unassailed reputation in the Soviet period, and lives on. He was Russia’s greatest general after Suvorov and until Rokossovskii. But, as Jamie Cockfield explains so well, he remained true to himself, his family and his country. Anyone who underrates this story today and its relevance to the new Russia might take note. London Chris Bellamy Cameron, Sarah. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2018. xii + 277 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95: £43.00. In The Hungry Steppe, Sarah Cameron presents a well-researched and wellwritten history of the famines and other traumatic experiences that Kazakh pastoralists endured during the first two decades of Soviet rule. Her study presents substantial new information from archival sources but is problematic in dealing with issues outside Kazakhstan. Cameron views the literature on Soviet agriculture as incomplete because it focuses on peasants and neglects pastoral groups. She argues that her study differs from the three other studies of the Kazakh crisis because she interprets it in the context of environmental history and modernization. Cameron’s first chapter describes Kazakh territories in late imperial Russia, the decline in food consumption that followed increased peasant settlement, and the agricultural crises and famines in World War One, caused by the 1916 Central Asian rebellion, and the Russian Civil War. The second chapter addresses the policy debates of the 1920s, during which Soviet officials shifted from supporting nomadism as efficient to condemning it as holding back the region’s potential. REVIEWS 383 The third chapter describes the first repressive policies toward Kazakhs, the confiscation of ‘wealth’ from the bais or nomad elites that Kazakh Communist Party leader Filipp Goloshchekin imposed in 1928–29, provoking the first mass Kazakh flight from the region. Chapter four describes the subsequent chaotic and often violent collectivization campaign in Kazakhstan, and Kazakhs’ responses of rebellions, livestock slaughter and further flight. The fifth chapter discusses the problems caused by fleeing Kazakhs, security forces’ attempt to stop them by shooting at them, killing thousands, in late 1930–31, and the successful flight of 200,000 into Xinjiang, where they became a diplomatic issue with Republican China. Soviet authorities feared these Kazakhs could be rebels and assumed they had abundant livestock. The sixth chapter addresses the peak of the famine, 1931 to 1934, the state’s ‘brutal policies’ of closing borders, expulsion of starving people from cities and blacklisting districts, the large livestock losses, the Kazakh refugee crisis and the estimated 1.5 million deaths from starvation and disease, mostly Kazakhs. Stalin blamed Goloshchekin and replaced him with Levon Mirzoian, who worked to alleviate the crisis. Policy changes and the grain harvest in Kazakhstan in 1934 ended the famine, but recovery was slow. A conclusion and epilogue discuss the aftermath of the famine, discussion of it in contemporary Kazakhstan, and the issue of genocide. Cameron’s narrative is well supported with archives and Kazakh memoirs and monographs. Yet on several points it raises questions that she does not address. For example, she notes that in earlier history, extreme weather could kill 90 per cent of livestock (p. 30) and up to 80 per cent in the Adai region in western Kazakhstan (p. 113). She never discusses whether such...