Seeing like a soviet state: Settlement of nomadic Kazakhs, 1928-1934

Abstract

This quote, grisly as it is, could have been a commonplace observation across the Soviet Union in the early 1930s as such sights became the terrible handmaiden of collectivization. This recollection, however, comes not from the usual victim of Stalin’s famine, the peasantry, whose vagabondage always signals a severe social crisis, but nomadic Kazakhs-a nation well acquainted with pulling up stakes during hard times. These Kazakhs, however, were not nomads but desperate "displaced nomads" (otkochevniki), without their herds, far from their familiar migratory routes, who endured not one but innumerable trails of tears at this time. What had been emblematic of a way of life, of Kazakhness (qazaqtyq)-nomads on the move-now became horror, as an observer in Pavlodar related: "It is not rare to meet a Kazakh family, fleeing from who knows where and dragging behind them a sled, on top of which lies the corpse of a child, who died along the way."3.