Stalin`s Great Famine in Kazakhstan: Collectivization and Starvation

Niccolò Pianciola
Associate Professor of History, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Stalin's Great Famine in Kazakhstan: Collectivization and Starvation in
Nomadic Central Asia
The famine in Kazakhstan during the first half of the 1930s wasthe most severe of the Soviet
regional famines triggered by collectivization, in terms of percentage of population.
Approximately a quarter (1.5 million) of the total victims of the Soviet collectivization famines
lived in Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs, before the famine the biggest pastoral nomadic people in
Eurasia, suffered more than any other national group in the Soviet Union, as approximately
one third of them died between 1931 and 1933. Based on years of research in Kazakhstan and
Russian archives, the talk will outline the factors that led to the famine and will compare the
events in Kazakhstan with the concurrent Ukrainian tragedy. At the crossroad between
Bolshevik anti-colonialist and neo-colonial policies, interwar Kazakhstan is a crucial area for
the understanding of the relations between the Stalinist leadership and its peripheries, and the
contradictory policies of Soviet nation-building and nation-destroying engineered by the
dictator and his collaborators.
Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His
book Stalinismo di frontiera. Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in
Asia Centrale 1905-1936 [Frontier Stalinism. Agricultural Colonization, Extermination of the Nomads
and State Building in Central Asia 1905-1936], (Rome, 2009) won the 2010 "Best First Monograph
Award” awarded by the Italian Society for the Study of Modern History. In addition to articles in
journals such as Cahiers du monde russe and Central Asian Survey, he has also published L’età delle
migrazioni forzate. Esodi e deportazioni in Europa, 1853-1953 [The Age of Forced Migrations.
Exoduses and Deportations in Europe, 1853-1953] (Bologna, 2012), co-authored with Antonio Ferrara;
and Islam, Society and States across the Qazaq Steppe, 18th - Early 20th Centuries (Vienna, 2013), coedited with Paolo Sartori. He is currently researching a book on science and socio-environmental
change in the Aral Sea region from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries.

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