The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence & the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan

Kluge Fellow Sarah Cameron analyzes a little-known episode of Stalinist social engineering, the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, which led to the death of more than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Soviet Kazakhstan’s population. Using memoirs, oral history accounts, and archival documents, she explores the stories of those who lived through the famine, asking how this crisis reshaped Soviet Kazakhstan and what it meant to be “Kazakh,“ and how the case of the Kazakh famine alters understandings of development and nation-building under Stalin.