Kazakhstan and the Politics of Hunger, 1931–34

Chapter Six examines the final phase of the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, the refugee crisis of 1931-33. By the winter of 1930-31, Soviet Kazakhstan’s food crisis had deepened to the extent that almost every Kazakh was in flight, and the arrival of starving Kazakh refugees led to outbreaks of violence. The chapter finds that the refugee crisis began to embed ideas of nationality at the local level, although not always in the ways that Moscow had hoped. In 1934, the famine finally came to an end, a resolution reached in part through a certain amount of good luck, including good weather, as well as renewed attention initiated by a variety of state agencies to problems revealed by the famine’s course.