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For all its magnitude and unprecedented loss of life, the Terror-Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine was not the only, nor the first, famine disaster connected with Stalin's collectivization drive. In the Russian Federation, the largely Ukrainian-inhabited Kuban, the adjacent Don Cossack region, and parts of the Volga region (especially the Volga German areas) were also profoundly affected. The earliest and most disastrous was the experience of Kazakhstan.1 In fact, as a national group, proportionately the Kazakhs suffered most the consequences of the "revolution from above" in the rural sector: according to the most recent and reliable estimates, S. Maksudov concludes that the number of Kazakh deaths directly attributable to the famine of 1931-1933 was 1,450,000, or approximately 38 percent of the total population, the highest percentage of any nationality in the USSR.2
To understand this catastrophe, its antecedents, and its aftermath in Kazakhstan it is important to consider some characteristics of the region. Traditionally a land of pastoral nomadism, Kazakhstan was yet differentiated from other zones in the USSR where nomad-pastoral peoples lived: it was one of the Asiatic regions of the Russian empire where the agricultural colonization of Europeans (primarily Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans) on the vast expanses occupied by native peoples had been strongest. In 1916 in the six Kazakh provinces-Turgai, Akmolinsk, Uralsk, Semipalatinsk, Syr Darya and Semirech'e-just under 1.4 million colonists from the European part of the empire were present, nearly a fourth of the total population of the region.3 Kazakhstan was a Soviet republic (along with Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) in which nomadic or semi-nomadic herdsmen constituted an exceptionally large percentage of the population: according to data from the Kazakh Bureau of Statistics, in the late 1920s, only 23 percent of Kazakhs were entirely sedentary.4 The herdsmen did not produce, but did consume, grain. The majority of the native population was composed of herdsmen, only some of whom were nomads, migrating year-round in arid regions or seasonally in the mountain pastures.
In the first historical study specifically on the famine, Dana Dalrymple pointed out that Kazakhstan, unlike Ukraine and the other areas of the USSR affected by the famine, was not a breadbasket for the Soviet Union.5 Northern and eastern Kazakhstan, however, were areas into which Moscow wanted to expand grain...