Dmitriy Panto
“[An official named] Daneman said that while en route to the village of Gulayevka, she observed corpses ‘lying’ along the roads and in the saxaul bushes at the roadsides. In the village of Ushtobe, a transportation department official reported that bodies were scattered about on the roads and filled up the ditches alongside the railway tracks. Villagers could no longer muster the strength to dig new graves, with every hole in the village having long been filled with corpses, then covered with snow.”
Although the subject of the Great Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor) is widely known and researched, the history of this tragedy in Kazakhstan has largely gone without mention in Polish historiography. Western historians have already set about studying this topic, though Poland still awaits a dedicated scholar who can get to grips with this difficult yet crucial chapter of Stalinist terror in the 1930s—a period that left an indelible mark on the Kazakh nation. In the Kazakh language, the famine is referred to as Asharshylyk (also, The hunger of the Steppe). This term ought to be used when describing this horrendous tragedy, just as the word Holodomor is used to illustrate the Ukrainian people’s suffering during the Great Famine. It is a pivotal term, a symbol, a warning.
The Great Famine was not something that happened overnight. It was a tragedy with a long history, rooted in the Soviet policies of collectivization, industrialization, and the broader sovietization of Kazakhstan. The annexation of Kazakh lands and the country’s sovietization was a lengthy and complex process. Soviet leaders employed an array of tactics to subjugate the Kazakh elites, knowing full well that their submission was crucial to controlling the population at large. The promises made in Moscow to representatives of Kazakh political parties were empty and went unfulfilled.
„Little October”: The Destruction of Kazakhstan
The territory of Kazakhstan was subjected to several significant administrative transformations. Initially, the Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established in 1920 in the region of present-day Kazakhstan. In 1925, it was renamed the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and only in 1936 did it become the Kazakh SSR, and then incorporated into the Soviet Union.
Only in 1921 did The Red Army only succeed in gaining control of the bulk of Kazakhstan. Over the course of 1924–1925, a territorial delimitation was undertaken, shaping the Soviet borders of Kazakhstan. The republic’s capital was first designated as Orenburg, later on being Kyzylorda. In the autumn of 1925, the Communist Party Secretary, Filipp Goloshchyokin (1876–1941), arrived in Kyzylorda. In his initial speeches, he declared that Soviet power in Kazakhstan effectively did not exist and proposed restarting the revolution in Kazakhstan. This process, which met with Stalin’s approval, was dubbed “Little October.” Goloshchyokin’s primary objectives were the elimination of the Kazakh national elites, sovietization of the auls (nomadic villages), the strengthening of Soviet authority in the steppe, developing propaganda and ideology, combating tradition and religion, and the dismantling of the traditional social structure. Mounting criticism from the Kazakh intelligentsia with regard to this newly adopted state of affairs, led to the first wave of repression against them.
One of the biggest problems faced by Moscow was the nomadic lifestyle of the Kazakhs. In an effort to undermine the wealthiest and most influential Kazakh elites (the bais), approximately 150,000 head of livestock were confiscated from them in 1928. The bais themselves were forcibly settled. This campaign against the bais was inextricably linked to collectivization, with the Soviets viewing the wealthy and respected Kazakhs as the primary obstacles to a sedentary life and collective farming. For a nation that lacked historical experience of large-scale agriculture, the rapid pace of collectivization proved to be devastatingly lethal. Any show of resistance was met with force. Between 1929 and 1931, there erupted almost 400 local uprisings, which were brutally suppressed by the OGPU (the Soviet secret police) and regular Red Army units. To enforce collectivization, party activists and OGPU operatives were dispatched from central and European parts of the USSR. The goals of collectivization and dekulakization were not simply to dismantle centuries-old systems of social relations, but to also obliterate traditions, religion, and local elites.
Asharshylyk: The Great Famine in Kazakhstan
A combination of mismanagement during collectivization, the Soviet policy of forced settlement, and a dzut (mass livestock deaths) culminated in the Great Famine in Kazakhstan. By 1931, the famine had spiraled to catastrophic proportions. Corpses of those who starved to death lay everywhere—by roadsides, at train stations, on city streets. Those who were starving consumed anything they could get their hands on, with reports of cannibalism. Starving children were sent to state orphanages following the deaths of their parents. In some cases, mortality rates in those places reached as high as 50–60%. For many Kazakhs, the only salvation—besides settling permanently—was to seek out work in the cities. Many however, perished during the journey, and urban factories also showed a reluctance to hire Kazakhs, often relegating them to the most difficult jobs, such as in the coal mine in Karaganda. One such miner, I. Timakov, described those years as follows:
*”I was young, with a wife and small child. We dug a one-meter-deep pit and covered the roof with blankets. Our child lived in that hole for a month before passing away. By 1931–1932, all the children and elderly had died. By 1933, there were only young adults; to see an old person was not common. Every day, 200 people perished. Three brigades worked on digging mass graves, two meters wide by five meters long. Except in winter, there was no time for grave digging; the dead were simply stacked up like firewood—500 to 700 bodies in each pile. I worked eight kilometers away in the Kirov mine, having to walk there and back through the steppe on a daily basis. When you work inside a mine, groundwater drips from the ceiling like rain. When you leave the mine, you’re soaked to the skin, there’s water in your wellington boots, your footwraps are soaked, so you just put on a dry shirt and run to the village in the minus-thirty-degrees frost. By the time we made it there, our clothes had already frozen to our bodies. Miners returning from work frequently collapsed and died on the road, their bodies lying there for the whole winter. Sometimes in a blizzard you can’t see the road, so their corpses served as markers in the steppe instead of milestones. In the spring, they were then loaded onto wagons.”*
Hunger, the cold, disease, and rising mortality impelled millions of Kazakhs to flee their homes between 1930 and 1933. Around 2 million were displaced; more than 800,000 emigrated to neighboring countries such as China, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Siberia. Many perished en route, their bodies buried or left lying, abandoned at the roadside, on the railway tracks, in small settlements and in the outskirts of villages. Soviet authorities, including the OGPU and local militia, made every effort to prevent mass migrations of the starving by forcing them to stay in their birthplaces. Those refugees who somehow managed to reach the borders were met with brutal treatment at the hands of border guards, who without hesitation either arrested or shot at them. In 1930 alone, 2,500 Kazakhs were detained near the Chinese border, with over 700 being killed. Huge groups of starving Kazakhs making it across the Soviet border was a severe blow to the image of the Soviet Union which had been created by propaganda, therefore the regime in Moscow demanded that the regional authorities put a brake on this kind of migration.
With the aim of shedding more light on the reality of The Great Famine in Kazakhstan (Asharshylyk), we present one example: In a letter dated March 9, 1933, Kazakh communist Turar Ryskulov wrote to Stalin, Kaganovich, and Molotov: *”The occurrence of mass migrations of Kazakhs from one district to another or beyond the republic’s borders, which began in late 1931, has at the present moment resumed again with some intensity. Mortality from hunger and epidemics has attained such levels in some Kazakh regions that the central authorities are forced to intervene. The situation which has presently emerged with regard to certain sections of the Kazakh population does not exist in any other region or republic. This is not merely a case of nomadism, which typically occurs in summertime and over short distances with livestock. It is largely the flight of starving people in a search for food. In certain regions, such an exodus has occurred to the extent of 40–50% of the population. The process is itself accompanied by the impoverishment of the kolkhoz, with looting of abandoned property, the death of cattle along the way (for those who possess any), and the selling off of any assets which remain. The situation is especially dire in the case of children. Many nomads have abandoned them to their fate. In cities and at railway stations, groups of discarded children with no caregivers, have started to appear. It was forbidden to speak officially anywhere (even in Alma-Ata itself, where the corpses of Kazakhs were being cleared off the streets) about the famine and the fact that people were dying as a result. And if that wasn’t enough! local officials dared not even mention the fact that livestock were perishing. And representatives of Kazakhstan, when visiting the central authorities in Moscow, officially never raised the issue of the situation that had unfolded in Kazakhstan.
This letter, penned let’s remember, by a loyal Soviet official, uncovers the scale of the tragedy. The chaos, death, and destruction caused by the famine were beyond imagination. The reality of the chaos and the destructive avalanche of the famine, could only be imagined.
Prelude to the Great Terror
The Great Famine in Kazakhstan turned out to be a demographic catastrophe for the republic. Between 1930 and 1933, not less than 1.2 million residents of the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Kazakh ASSR)—approximately 30% of the population—died as a result of collectivization, dekulakization, repression, and famine. The tragedy profoundly shaped the history and demography of the Kazakh people and only now has it begun to be studied by researchers who are able to communicate it to the world at large. In the mid-1930s, Joseph Stalin sought to repopulate the depopulated regions of Kazakhstan with deported ethnic groups, which would supply much-needed labor for factories and mines. The spiral of terror had the effect of fueling further tragedies.
The Great Famine was in fact a prelude to Stalin’s Great Terror, which reached its height in 1937–1938. On the basis of fabricated charges, hundreds of individuals were put to death in Kazakhstan, including some of the most prominent members of the Kazakh intelligentsia, such as Alikhan Bukeikhanov (1866–1937), Saken Seifullin (1894–1938), Sanjar Asfendiyarov (1889–1938), and others. In an ironic twist, many of these intellectuals had initially supported Soviet rule and worked to implement communism in the steppe, only to later be executed by the NKVD. Advocating for the Kazakh nation or expressing concern over its present and future frequently resulted in accusations of “bourgeois nationalism,” a charge that as a rule almost always guaranteed an automatic death sentence or a lengthy term in prison. It is estimated that during the Great Terror, over 100,000 people in Kazakhstan were handed down sentences, with approximately 25,000 of those being executions, of which 1,700 were victims of the NKVD’s “Polish Operation,” a campaign that targeted ethnic Poles.
Repopulating a desolate Land
Kazakhstan, its population decimated by the Great Famine, remained a site of mass terror both on the eve of and during the course of World War II. As is well known, ever since the early 18th century, the Kyrgyz Steppe had functioned as a destination for the mass exile of Poles. Its harsh climate, remoteness from major transport routes, and rich natural resources made it an ideal location for deportation and forced labor. Initiated by the tsar and continued under Stalin, the policy of forced migrations integrated Kazakhstan into the infamous “Gulag Archipelago” system. Between 1928 and 1952, no fewer than 180,000 Poles and Polish citizens were deported to Kazakhstan. During World War II, the region also served as the “deep strategic hinterland” for the Red Army. At the same time, military units were also formed in Kazakhstan, reinforcing the Soviet war effort. Over 1.2 million Kazakhs were called up to the army, with more than 600,000 perishing in the conflict. The hardships of war did not deter Stalin from further exploiting Kazakhstan for fresh acts of repression. During the war, not only Polish citizens were deported to Kazakhstan, but so too were entire ethnic groups who had long resided in the USSR, such as Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, and other so-called “punished peoples.”
Dr Dmitriy Panto – Certified Curator, Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk
Translated by Jan Dobrodumow