In anticipation to releasing my interview with Sarah

Cameron on the 1930-33 famine in Kazakhstan, I decided to make a partial

transcript of the interview to pique everyone’s interest.

I hope to provide these partial transcripts more often

since complete transcripts of 50-minute interviews are costly to transcribe and

time consuming to edit. But partial transcriptions of some of the key parts of

the conversation are much more manageable. If you do want to see more, then

support them by becoming a patron

of the SRB Podcast.

This abridged version of the interview has been edited for

clarity. Look out for the full audio version soon.

Sarah Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Russia and Soviet Union history at the University of Maryland. She’s the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press.

Your new book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, is one of the few studies on the famine in Kazakhstan. Why has the Kazakh famine been so marginalized in the history of Stalinism?

It’s something I’ve thought a

lot about as I worked on the project. How could such a big event, in which a

million and a half people died, just get lost from our understanding of Soviet

history? I think it boils down to a couple of reasons. First is, we tend to

think, at least in the US and the West, of Soviet history as European history. To

a large extent, Soviet history and the history of Stalinism has yet to

incorporate the Soviet Union’s Asian half. And I think the Kazakh famine is

just one illustration of how we’ve neglected the eastern half of the Soviet

Union. If we look at the history of the Soviet East, I think we can find

examples of other events that are really missing that might challenge our

understanding of what Soviet history and what Stalinism was.

I think another reason is

that in the West, famine and collectivization has become closely associated

with the Ukrainian famine, in which roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians died. This

has happened, in large part, due to the efforts of the Ukrainian diaspora. There

has been a very long-running and polemical debate surrounding the Ukrainian

famine over the question of whether Stalin specifically used famine to target

Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Because of the very polemical nature of this

debate in the West, the famine that occurred in the Soviet Union during

collectivization has come to be seen as an exclusively Ukrainian event.

Famine, of course, afflicted

Kazakhstan and other parts of the Russian heartland, where many Russian

peasants died. I also think what’s happened is that some Ukrainians have sought

to marginalize the fact that famine occurred in other parts of the Soviet Union

in part to bolster their claims that this was an event directed specifically

against Ukrainians. Therefore, the broader story, in a sense, has been lost.

The third reason is a broader

world historical one. And that is the way that the stories of nomadic peoples

have been marginalized. The Kazakhs were pastoral nomads prior to the famine. It’s,

of course, much more difficult to tell the stories of nomadic peoples. They

leave fewer stories in the written record, and the stories that we do have