I will use Amartya Sen’s food entitlement theory to discover the causes of the crop failure and famine itself, investigate collectivisation, death and survival in the famine districts involved, and explore the British press and Foreign Office perspectives of the famine. This is an investigation into the causes of the 1932-1933 Famine in the Soviet Union. Finally, the article situates the administrative detachment of Karakalpakstan from Kazakstan in 1930 within the context of Stalinist economic policies in Central Asia. The famine led to the inversion of the relative economic importance of the northern and southern parts of the sea: if before the famine fishing was concentrated in the former, after the famine it had shifted to the latter. The article also investigates the consequences of the famine for the Aral Sea fishing economy. The railway crossed the northern, Kazak, part of the Aral Sea region and made massive livestock and grain procurements possible, while the absence of any reliable transportation route connecting Karakalpakstan to Soviet industrial centers contributed to shielding the Karakalpaks from the famine. The article explains this difference by underscoring the role of the main transportation infrastructure connecting Central Asia to Russia, the Orenburg-Tashkent railway.
While the Kazaks in the northern part of the region suffered from the famine, the Karakalpaks in the south did not. It compares Soviet policies in the southern and northern “halves” of the Aral Sea region. The exclusion of the Kyrgyz ASSR from the massive livestock procurements that fed the Soviet political and industrial centres, and which led to the great famine in Kazakhstan (1931–33), can be explained by early Stalinist economic regionalization.īased on research in Kazakhstani and Russian archives, this article is a regional study of the 1931–1933 Soviet famine.
The increased central control brought by the Stalinist Great Turn created a new spatial hierarchy directly connecting the bottom of the Soviet social and spatial pyramid, the livestock-breeding regions, to its top, the elite regime cities.
After analysing debates from the 1920s, and limited sedentarization among Kazakhs and Kyrgyz during collectivization, the article argues that only by focusing on the economic regionalization of Central Asia, which placed the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz in two different economic regions with dissimilar priorities, is it possible to explain the radically different outcomes of early Stalinist policies for similar pastoral peoples. Based on research in Russian and Kazakhstani archives, this article investigates connections between policies of peasant colonization, the sedentarization of pastoral nomadic peoples, and the economic regionalization of the USSR.
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