Although the Kazakh famine of 1930-1933 is largely unknown outside of Central Asian studies, three decades of scholarship have provided a substantial body of literature on the collectivization drive that brought disaster to many parts of the Soviet Union. In 1931 the Soviet government began forcing nomadic and semi-nomadic Kazakhs to switch to a sedentary way of life, at the same time requisitioning their grain reserves and livestock. Mass starvation followed. When the famine came to a halt in 1934, the nomadic society had totally collapsed. At least 1.5 million perished. More than 90% were ethnic Kazakhs, 1/3 to 40% of the Kazakh population. Nowhere else was the mortality rate this high, even if the Soviet famine of the early 1930s is still predominantly associated with Ukraine.

I was not a historian of this catastrophe. When I first started my dissertation research, I was primarily interested in the fates of the Kazakh detdoms (orphanages) that sprang up after the famine. I started looking for memoirs in the hope of finding reminiscences of detdom children. In the process, though, I came across collections of famine testimonies. I first found Näūbet (Calamity) and Qyzyldar Qyrghyny (Red Slaughter). Soon after, I came across others: Qazaq Khalqynyñ Qasireti (The Sorrow of the Kazakh People), 32-niñ Zulmaty (The Disaster of ’32) and Asharshylyq Aqīqaty (The Truth of the Famine). I eventually learned that there were hundreds of eyewitness accounts.

This was a surprising finding. For there was a myth in the literature that, unlike with the Ukrainian case, we had only a few eyewitness accounts of the Kazakh famine. Explicitly or implicitly, Western historians have claimed this, and as a fresh PhD student I accepted it as a given. Some historians have only used a single personal account, Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s The Silent Steppe (2007), simply because it was the only one available in English. Even Kazakh historians have paid insufficient attention to famine testimonies.

Slowly, I came to understand that I could provide a new perspective on the famine based on these testimonies. I was eager to find more. While I was reading memoirs of World War II veterans, I discovered that many of them included reminiscences of the famine in a wider life story. I started looking for testimonies published in periodicals or on websites. When I completed my dissertation, I had uncovered a significant number of eyewitness accounts and I was the first historian to use the great majority of these sources. Up to this day, I have not been able to read all the available testimonies, a reminder that the reality is enormously different from what previous historians of the famine have implied.

Sary Kitap, or Yellow Book, was published in 2020 when I was about to complete my dissertation. (Yellow is the color of sorrow, explains the editor in his introduction.) It is a collection of memoirs published in the literary journal Zhuldyz [Star] from 1989 to 1994. While it does not include any new testimonies, the book is still an important publication since most of these memoirs have long been forgotten or completely ignored. Some of them were republished in other collections, most importantly in Qyzyldar Qyrghyny, but others were only available in the journal. These memoirs include some of the best personal accounts of the famine. Among the earliest to tell their stories are writers and other public figures. These authors usually provide more detailed and complete accounts of the famine, but not all the memoirists were famous. In the last decade, published memoirs or oral history interviews have included a significant number of reminiscences retold by either children or grandchildren of survivors. The early testimonies included in Sary Kitap, on the other hand, were mostly written by the survivors themselves, many of whom were already adults by 1930.

Ghalym Akhmedov, who served the Soviet state in many posts, was the first one to publish his memoirs in Zhuldyz. During the famine, he was the director of the Veterinary Technical College in Äūlīe-Ata (contemporary Taraz). Akhmedov was employed in a team that investigated cannibalism claims, most of which he says he witnessed personally. One of the distinctive features of Kazakh testimonies is their openness on the issue of cannibalism. Although cannibalism happened in most great famines of world history, it has turned into a taboo and a matter of national honor. Some scholars of other famines tend to dismiss cannibalism stories as cultural constructs, yet Akhmedov’s memoir is one of the most reliable sources on this. Other testimonies that include descriptions of cannibalism cases in the book are Töken Bekmaghambetov’s, Zhorabek Düysenbin’s and Qapash Ghalīmov’s.

A common image in Kazakh testimonies is the clog of dead bodies on the roads both in the rural areas and in city centers. Many witnesses remember the nightmarish moments when they had to pass through hundreds of dead bodies, sometimes even by walking on top of corpses. According to Zhortūyl Rysaqov’s testimony, the whole country was full of dead bodies: the city centers, streets, bazaars, train stations, and so on. He saw white-haired old women, adolescent bodies “that lost their lights,” twelve-year-old “beautiful rosebuds,” young children, and infants, all lying on the road. Some mothers died with their babies in their arms whereas some toddlers were walking around their mothers’ dead bodies. Qapash Ghalīmov was in a group sent to investigate the situation in Kazakh aūyls (nomadic encampment). He provides a very vivid description of a deserted aūyl full of abandoned corpses.

Akhmedov’s memoirs include another common image of the famine in survivors’ memories: a cart removing child corpses from a detdom. Akhmedov was living on Buryl street in Äūlīe-Ata where a detdom was located. Akhmedov says even in his old age the vision of dead children being transported at dawn still haunts him. He assumes that they were taken to graves each morning, but he is not sure about the destination. What he does remember are the legs and arms of naked children dangling from carts. In 1932 Seyitqasym Boranqulov entered a detdom in Torgay region. He remembers how catastrophic the conditions were. Dead bodies were first stacked in a barn, and when the barn was full, teenagers in the detdom took them on a cart to an unknown place. One day, the teenagers invited Seyitqasym to join them. They were throwing the children’s bodies off a cliff.

The memoirs of Märīyam Khakimzhanova, a famous writer and one of the early woman activists in Kazakhstan, were published in Zhuldyz in 1990, a year after her death. Unlike Akhmedov’s memoirs though, to my knowledge, they were not republished anywhere else. Hence, they are long forgotten, even for people interested in these testimonies. During the famine, Khakimzhanova was a college student in Almaty. Her memoir is a rare source for understanding how the catastrophe was experienced within the city. Although the urban population suffered too, there was an obvious hierarchy of suffering in which urban residents were treated relatively better. Khakimzhanova remembers that students’ food was poor, and they were also half starving. However, the streets were full of starving Kazakhs who had come from outside the city in search of food. Most of the people she saw were starving women with their children in their arms. Khakimzhanova recalls that female students usually ate their cabbage soup, but shared their bread with these desperate women, while male students kept their portions for themselves. This, according to the author, is proof that Kazakh women are stronger than Kazakh men. Indeed, what Khakimzhanova recognized is a universal truth which has nothing to do with national traits. It is now widely accepted in the literature that women are more resistant to malnutrition, and there is a certain female mortality advantage in most famines across the world.

Khakimzhanova’s memoirs are also useful for understanding how people, particularly city residents, acclimated to the sight of dozens of dead bodies, which they witnessed daily. Eventually, Khakimzhanova was involved in a group organized to clean the city streets of the clog of corpses and prevent the spread of epidemics. Another person who was given the same task was Nughyman Bayandin who was a student at the Agricultural Technical College in Semey. Bayandin recalls how after coming back to the dormitories at the end of their first day, students were crying hysterically, some got sick, and others spent the night vomiting. Bayandin also recalls one particular scene: Students removed a blanket from atop a woman’s body and saw an 8-9 -month-old infant still trying to suck her dead mother’s breasts. Similar scenes have been reported by survivors of the Irish, Ukrainian, Chinese, and other modern famines. They are some of the most horrifying images of starvation.

Mukhtar Maghaūīn, a noted writer and public intellectual, played a crucial role in collecting and publishing these testimonies. Although his work bringing to light these highly significant sources cannot be denied, unfortunately, his introduction to the book provides a very politicized, historically inaccurate, and nationally exclusionary account of what happened. For example, Maghaūīn “knows” that the famine took at least 3, more likely 4 million lives (though he then cites “a second calculation” which brings the toll closer to 5 million out of the total population of 7 million Kazakhs). In contrast, Talas Omarbekov, the dean of famine studies in Kazakhstan, has estimated that 2.2 million people perished. Maqash Tätimov, the leading Kazakh demographer, has estimated the number to be closer to 1.7 million, Maghaūīn dismisses both scholars’ claims and calls Tätimov a brainwashed Bolshevik. These kinds of attacks are not rare in famine studies, nor are they confined to Kazakhstan. A specialist on the Ukrainian famine once called a fellow historian a “genocide denier” simply because the latter estimated the death toll in their country at only 3.9 million.

Maghaūīn is representative of a group of contemporary Kazakh public intellectuals who make fantastic claims about the death toll of Kazakhs without providing any evidence. Their estimates have less to do with the suffering of real people and more with contemporary political agendas. In fact, an obsession with demographics is the most common reaction to the memory of famine in contemporary Kazakhstan. This is understandable when we consider how great the population loss was. However, this obsession, coupled with popular fantastic claims about the death toll, is frequently used for contemporary exclusionary ethno-political arguments, while the real suffering is largely ignored. Contrary to the obsession with demographics, historians have found that famine mortality rates have relatively little apparent impact on long-term demographic trends (for example, see Cormac Ó Gráda’s Famine: A Short History).

This political agenda can take a more dangerous form when public intellectuals create a false imagery of the famine (or larger history of Kazakhs) in which only Kazakhs help Kazakhs, and all others are enemies. According to Maghaūīn, Kazakh refugees survived when they went to areas populated by Kazakhs, while the ones who went to Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan were forced to go barefoot, exchange their valuables for bread, or even sell their daughters. My research shows that this is quite contrary to how survivors remember the famine. The very testimonies that Maghaūīn helped to collect and publish in this book prove him to be wrong. Ībrakhīm Shämshätuly’s testimony is a good example of how grateful some survivors were to members of other nationalities (in his case, Uzbeks). This is not to say that other ethnic groups ever refused to help starving Kazakhs. Quite contrary, many famine testimonies make it clear that this was a time when nobody cared about anyone. Ghalym Akhmedov’s, Sädū Mashaqov’s and Ībrakhīm Shämshätuly’s memoirs include depictions of starving Kazakhs beaten in bazaars by Uzbeks, Russians or other nationalities. Yet, this heartlessness was as true for Kazakhs themselves as it was for non-Kazakhs. Moreover, many Kazakhs survived thanks to non-Kazakhs. Shämshätuly’s case is a perfect example. As a young orphan trying to find a spot in a detdom, he was shocked by the heartlessness of Kazakh officials. On the other hand, he recalls how a young Russian woman had mercy on him and helped him survive. Shaghī Särsenbekova and his mother too were taken care of by an acquaintance of his father in a Russian village. Initially, they had to leave their village because belsendiler (those who implemented the regime’s collectivization and requisition policies) continuously harassed his mother. The image of belsendi as the main perpetrator of Kazakhs’ suffering is very strong in testimonies. Belsendi were almost always ethnic Kazakhs.

As I discuss in my own research, despite the usual problems of oral histories or memoirs, Kazakh testimonies are relatively more reliable sources for various reasons. Survivors’ memoirs provide more coherent narratives than some public intellectuals’ politically loaded narratives. Unfortunately, the great majority of these testimonies are ignored by Kazakhs themselves. While it is our duty to remember, mourn and commemorate the victims of this great catastrophe, we are also required to hear the voices of the survivors. Despite its problematic introduction, Sary Kitap is an important attempt to bring together these voices.