Collectivisation, Sedentarisation, and Famine in Central Asia

Stalin launched total collectivisation of agriculture throughout the entire USSR during the winter of 1929-1930. Collectivisation was instrumental to the eventual transition to communism and, in the short term, to the extraction of rural resources to be used for breakneck industrialisation and to feed the expanding cities. Kazakhstan had to provide grain and livestock, while the rest of Central Asia was pushed towards a cotton monoculture. Overcoming widespread resistance through violence and selective deportations, the Communist Party and the political police forced independent peasants and nomads into state-supervised productive units. Anti-religious campaigns and the expansion of state institutions among populations that had largely escaped them made possible an acculturation to Soviet values and practices. In nomadic areas, campaigns of total sedentarisation provided a rationale for the devastation of the nomads’ economy. In Kazakhstan, increased livestock and grain procurements le...