Sacrificing the Qazaqs: The Stalinist Hierarchy of Consumption and the Great Famine of 1931–33 in Kazakhstan

The article focuses on why the famine, which began in some regions of Kazakhstan as early as 1930 due to grain and livestock requisitions carried out in the previous two years, in 1931 turned into the largest mass death event in the history of Central Asia, and a great famine comparable in the USSR only to the Ukrainian Holodomor. On the basis of archival documents from the funds of the state agency in charge of requisitioning and distributing meat and livestock, the study claims that the decisive factor in multiplying starvation deaths to such a level as to kill every third Qazaq was the Stalinist leadership’s choice to make up for Soviet livestock losses caused by the chaos of collectivization by requisitioning, between the summer of 1930 and the summer of 1932, a unsustainable portion of the livestock of the Qazaqs, who at the time were by far the largest Soviet pastoral nomadic population. The article shows that the livestock taken from the Qazaqs was used primarily to feed the population of Moscow and Leningrad, thus linking the two areas and social groups of the USSR at opposite poles of the Stalinist “hierarchy of consumption”. It follows that the specificity of the Qazaqs in the 1930s is not that they were just victims of the policies of communist “modernization” (collectivization and sedentarization of Soviet nomadic populations, none of which were devastated to a comparable degree), but that they were a group consciously sacrificed to the raison d’état of a new (in terms of political logic and degree of ruthlessness) imperial hierarchy.