Draft – Please do not cite or circulate

Niccolò Pianciola

University of Trento, Italy

A "Modernization" Crisis?

The Famine in Kazakhstan and the Soviet State, 1931-33

Paper to be presented at the ARC Workshop

University of Melbourne, School of Historical Studies

March 2009

1. Nomads, peasants, and the State in Kazakhstan before the famine

At the end of the 1920s, nomadic pastoralists were further off from the control of the state, in comparison with the Slavic population in the region. Nomadslargely escaped from censuses and from administrative control from the part of the State, which was based on territorial entities transcending by annual transhumance routes. Nomads escaped from the fiscal control of the state, and they was, by large, exempted by exactions (in the 1920s a system of exemptions for poor countryside households implied that the majority of the nomads were exempted as poor households). During most of the twenties, they were also exempted from the draft.[1]With their nomadic paths, they hindered the full exploitation of Kazakstan economic potential, and they were a constant cause of tensions with sedentary population. They escaped from the cultural influence of the state (scolarization) – therefore they were not a reserve of labour force educated enough to be employed in the industrialization projects. They largely escaped from the Party political influence. Finally, they managed an economic resource (livestock) potentially exploitable by the State in different ways and for aims from those wanted by the State itself. Nomadic pastoralism was considered a backward and inefficient form of animal husbandry, which was producing a surplus not available for the market or for the State economic interests.

Everything changed with the famine of 1931-33, which was really a watershed event in Kazakh history, since more than a third of the population died, while most of the survivors had to change their economic and, to some extent, cultural habits. On of the main questions waiting for futher research will be to reach a more precise understanding of what do we mean when we say that the Kazakh famine was a watershed event. What did it change (in Kazakh social structure and in Kazakh pastoralism)? Was the structure of Kazakh society durably disorganized? How successful were the “modernization” plans of the Stalinist state, which was aiming at “detribalize” the Kazakh society and to sedentarize the nomads, i. e. to reorganize the economic way of life of the Kazakhs? Campaign of deportation of tribal leaders were implemented in 1928, while the “sedentarization” of the majority of the nomadic households was launched at the same time as collectivization in winter 1929-1930. These questions have only partial answers at the present stage of historical research. In this paper, I will limit myself to the treatment of the “watershed event” itself, the famine of 1931-33, trying to assess the impact of different factors in its occurrence.

How far we have to go back in order to explain this event? How much we can speak of an isolated event caused by exogenous factors, or we should perhaps speak about the culmination of a longer process?

Even if we rightly acknowledge the crucial importance of the immediate causes (especially political causes; i.e. the decisions taken in Moscow) it is important to go back in time, asking some questions, for instance how much the Kazakhs were sedentarized before the 1930s. And, most importantly, how poor they were. If they were close to the subsistence line, the crisis brought about by collectivization could have pushed them relatively easily below the subsistence line.

The famine is best understood if seen in historical perspective with other subsistence crises of the Kazakh economy. According to the pastoralists’ knowledge, approximately every ten years a major conjunctural crises was expected, due basically to climatic reasons. Major crisis in this sense meant the loss of significant part of the livestock (at the beginning of the twentieth century, these crises already killed more than one third of the cattle in different regions of the steppe. For instance in the Northern Kazakh steppes in 1901 and 1902; in Turgaj in 1911; in the Southern region of Semirech’e in 1903 approximately one million heads died). Kazakhs, as every other pastoral nomads, elaborated strategies to cope with these expected events. The first was the geographic mobility which is a factor of adaptation the environment and allows the animals to exploit ecological niches subjected to a productive variability during time; the second strategy is the diversification of the animal species (species could be complementary because they reproduce at different times, they exploit different pastures, the can help one another - horses, for instance, can break the ice surface of a late winter-early spring pasture;this allows other animals to reach the grass); the third strategy consist in putting together a sufficient quantity of reserves, to be used in case of crisis (fodder for the animals; grain for the humans; or the livestock itself); the fourth strategy is relying on market relations; the fifth and last strategy is the diversification of the occupational practices by different members of the family and/or the clanicgroup.

The economy of the Kazakhs was actually a multi-resources system, with part of the economic and social unit (the nomadic encampment) which remained in the same place all-year long for harvesting. Some of the members of the encampment could go and work in sector different from agriculture and pastoralism.[2] In time of crisis, a conjunctural shift of the Kazakh multi-resource system towards agriculture was observed.

Moreover, in order to understand the famine, it is necessary to bear in mind two events (or processes): the immigration of Slavic colonists to the Steppe; the crisis of the years 1916-1922 in the region (violent conflict and famine)

1. The presence of a larger and larger agricultural sector in the economy acted as an “economic attractor” for the Kazakhs who lost all their cattle during the periodical crises of the pastoral economy. The Kazakh economy was already a multi-resources economy, but with the presence of a significant agricultural sector, the opportunity for those Kazakhs who were deprived of their means of subsistence by the crisis of the pastoral economy was stronger. According to some scholars, each year approximately 20,000 Kazakhs worked in mines, or as farm-labourers for Slavic peasants. At the beginning of the Twentieth century, some 12,000 kazakhs lived as labourers only among the Cossacks on the Irtysh, the large river crossing Semipalatinsk and Pavlodar regions.[3]

Kazakh nomadism was also influenced by State policy of colonization. Especially in the Northern steppe, and partially in Semirech’e,[4] many Kazakhs were obliged to reorganize their economic activity because of the presence of peasants who came to till the best lands. Their economic activity was influenced by that, the nomadic path obliged to change and marginalized, many pastures occupied by peasants; from the juridical point of view, the Kazakhs tried in many cases to be recognized by czarist administration as sedentary communities, since the lands of the nomads which were more than a certain norm (defined “scientifically” by statistical and agronomical expeditions) starting in the 1890s where alienated by the Main Administration for Colonization and put in a special state fond to be distributed among new settlers.

2.The second factor that we have to bear in mind in order to assess Kazakh The crisis of 1916-1922. There is nospace here to explain how the crisis started and what was like. It will be enough to say that the crisis was exogenous, brought by the first world war; and that caused violence both among the Kazakh population, and between the Slavic and Kazakh groups. The disruption of the economy, with a drought in some regions, led to a major, albeit localized famine, in the Southern Kazakh territory (which was, in adiministrative terms,Northern Turkestan at that time) in 1918. Afterwards, the Soviet famine of 1921-1922 was particularly harsh in the North-Western Kazakh steppe. Civil war and famine gave a serious blow to Kazakh subsistence.

In any case, transformations brought about by colonization and war notwithstanding, the majority of the Kazakhs in the second half of the 1920s still lived of pastoralism. According to data of the Kazakh bureau of statistics, around 38% of them worked exclusively as animal herders; around 33% worked both as animal herders and in farming; 24% worked only in farming; 4-5% were craftspeople, some of them living in towns (the urban population of the Kazakh steppe was almost completely Russian). In Vernyj in 1917 there were more Bukharans and other representatives of the sedentary Central Asian population than Kazakhs. Kazakh pastoralism had huge regional differences, but the year-long nomadism was an exception. According to the same office, only approximately 10% of the Kazakhs moved further than 100 km away,following their annual nomadic routes.

In the 1920s, as in previous time of recovery from a crisis situation, the Kazakhs depended from the market for their subsistence. What was decisive for the events during collectivization and famine was the knowledge, on the part of the state apparatus, that the Kazakhs consumed wheat and other grain. Grain consumption for the Kazakh was inferior to grain consumption among the sedentary population, but was nonetheless significant. Contemporary estimates put the average year consumption among peasants from 165 to 200 kg; among the Kazakhs of different regions the grain consumption went from 130 kg per year to almost 150. Of these, only approx. 10% to 25% (depending of the different regions) of grain was cultivated by Kazakhs themselves. The rest was purchased on the market (bought or bartered). Therefore, in pre-famine Kazakhstanof the 1920s (which, as we saw, was also a post-famine society in some regions) for the herdsmen dependence on the commercial networks that connected them to the peasants was important in enabling them to subsist above the survival threshold, especially during winter months. Contemporary surveys showed that Kazakh herdsmen were much more «market-oriented» (as Uraz Džandosov, one of the leading Kazakh communists, wrote) than peasants.

The total collectivization drive that started in 1930 was characterized by requisitions and by a plan of sedentarization, which was never seriously implemented for reasons of policy priority. The state did not have enough resources to implement it, and for Moscow and its envoys livestock and, especially, grain collection were far more important. In what we can label a process of «redistribution of damage», local administrations set high grain quotas set for the nomads. As a consequence, pastoralists were obliged to sell their animals to peasants and lower-rank state officials in order to get money, buy grain and deliver it to the state grain collections (the low-rank state official in a number of regions organized profitable trade to re-sell the meat in the towns). It would be interesting to understand how much this was a state technique (the same procedure was implemented in Kyrgyzstan, see the memoirs of Karmysheva and the diary of Kirghizia president of People’s Commissar Abdurakhmanov).[5]But this requires further research.[6]The crucial difference between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan was the quantity of grain requisitions; this in my opinion largely explains why in Kyrgyzstan there was no famine.[7]

2. Balkhash district, spring 1930

In order to better understand what the situation on the ground was like, I will briefly describe what happened in the spring of 1930 in a district of the Alma-Ata region: Balkhash district. This district, with Lake Balkhashto the north, had a population of approximately 25,000. It was one of the three districts in Alma-Ataoblast’ that had been officially designated as having «a purely nomad economy» by the commission responsible for defining the dominant agricultural activity in each district, in order to rationally subdivide procurement quotas of grain, meat and animals.

In 1927 in Balkhash volost’[8](which comprised approximately 16,000 of the total population of the district) only one cell of the Communist party was present, with four members and eleven candidate members. All the members and the candidates of the Communist party in the volost’ were concentrated in one aul (aul number 3), members of this aul were not only members of the Party, but also ‘members’ of a sub-clanic division called Kara. The entire Kazakh population of Balkhash volost’ was inhabited by the upper lineage division called Sty, divided in sub-clanic divisions that occupied different auls.[9]Aul soviets had been organized there only in 1928, at the time and with the aim of implementing the first campaigns of forced requisitioning.

The method followed to meet quotas in the campaign of 1929-30 was to arbitrarily tax individual families, without regard to what their degree of wealth actually was. As Isabelle Ohayon showed for the debajzation campaign[10], figures of authority in society were sometimes exempted. In many local party organizations, especially at the rayon (district) and sel’sovet levels, a particular clan (usually the most numerous) controlled all power positions, excluding the minority lineage groups. The clan which controlled the local power apparatus could manage to protect its most authoritative members from requisitions and deportation campaigns. But, I would add, only if the plenipotentiary from outside were interested in fulfilling a quota of households that should be repressed (through deportation, for instance, like during the debajzation of 1928), and did not have the task to “extract” impossible quotas of grains and livestock from the population, as was the case in the campaigns from 1930 onwards.

As a matter of fact, in Balkhash district one of the richest bajs and tribal chief had been exempted from the agricultural tax and from requisitions in 1928 and 1929, but he led the revolt that broke out in April 1930, after months of indiscriminate requisitions. The results of the latter was, as Uraz Džandosov pointed out, that the «medium peasant and nomad [he wrote serednjak, but he referred to a district which was completely Kazakh and nomadic]lost assurance in the necessity of running a livestock economy».[11] Džandosov was one of the leading Kazakh communists, who helped Sovietize southern Kazakstan (Northern Turkestan) at the beginning of the 1920s. He had been sent to Balkhash district in order to understand what happened, and to «correct excesses». The crucial «excesses» had been the «collection of grain among a population which was not engaged in agriculture and which was devoted only to livestock breeding; the pressure of the sedentary centres of the district on the nomadic periphery».[12] The main responsible of the wild requisitions of grain was the plenipotentiary Sankevič (a European), in charge of requisitions in the area where the revolt broke out.[13]

Requisitions were carried out by plenipotentiaries coming from outside and exerting pressure on the whole district; but the division of the amount of grain to collectin each areas of the district followed the tribal structure of the local population. From the district (rayon) centre requisition orders were transferred in the countryside by the “activists in the auls”, especially poor nomads or peasants united in the bednota organizations[14] – although surely an amount of military force (or threat of it) was present. From this level of Soviet bureaucracy, at the very watershed of what traditional historiography on the Soviet Union used to call “State” and “society”, the order of requisition went to what Džandosov called the «tribal groups» (from three to five for each administrative aul). From this larger clanic units, implementation orders passed to the subclanic units, then to individual families.[15]

The documentation retrieved from the archives does not clarify why the revolt started in aul no. 2 of rayon Čokpar (as a matter of fact this aul, close to Balkhash rayon, was under the supervision of communist party cell of Balkhash district, and the revolt spread mainly in this area). The revolt consisted in an assault against Balkhash district centre (abandoned by staff and officials before the rioters arrived). The rebels proceeded to sack the deserted village, seizing the requisitioned grain stored there and destroying houses and farm machinery.[16]The rebels formed a sort of committee (Džandosov called it «a commission») where representatives of the three most important clans were present. The «commission» was formed by six persons, two from every clan.[17]

In April 1930, after the repression of the revolt, and after the March 1930 «Dizziness with success» pan-Soviet retreat in the offensive against peasantry, the Kazakh official Ernazarov went to Balkhash district. The district’s executive committee had a plan to requisition 410 tons of grain, and the plan was exceeded by an impressive 66 tons. However, as Ernazarov warned Kazakstan communist party secretary Gološčëkin, «the grain and seed were collected at the cost of ruining animal herding; in the district grain was used as currency».[18] Animals were bartered for grain and the Kazak herdsmen «were forced to exchange their last cow for grain, in order to observe the dispositions from the local official bodies».[19] As a consequence, the number of animals dropped 35% during the first winter of collectivization.