Epilogue

Abstract

The epilogue explores how the Kazakh famine of 1930-33 has been memorialized and remembered in independent Kazakhstan. It shows how the famine has become entangled with broader questions about how Kazakhs should remember the Soviet past, as well as Kazakhstan’s present-day relationship with Russia. The Ukrainian famine has, in turn, come to serve as both model and anti-model for Kazakh activists seeking to remember their own famine. Recent efforts by the Nazarbayev regime to reopen discussion of the Kazakh famine have exposed tensions between the regime’s simultaneous attempt to promote a multi-ethnic civic identity and appeal to an explicitly ethnic vision of Kazakh nationalism.