Asia 637
SARAH CAMERON. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Vio-
lence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 277.
Cloth $49.95.
ROBERT KINDLER. Stalin’s Nomads: Power and Fam-
ine in Kazakhstan. Translated by CYNTHIA KLOHR.
(Central Eurasia in Context Series.) Pittsburgh, Pa.:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 360.
Paper $28.95.
Based on exhaustive research in archives in Kazakh-
stan and Russia, Sarah Cameron’s The Hungry Steppe:
Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakh-
stan and Robert Kindler’s Stalin’s Nomads: Power
and Famine in Kazakhstan are the first—long over-
due—English-language monographs on an event of
world-historical importance. In the early twentieth cen-
tury, the Kazakhs were the largest nomadic population
inhabiting the grasslands of the Northern Hemisphere.
Stalinist policies in the Kazakh steppe were the most
violent case of state-led colonization of nomadic pasto-
ral areas in the modern world. At stake was the control
of land (to be used for agriculture, large-scale livestock
breeding, and industrial expansion), and the exploita-
tion of the animals that were the main economic re-
source of the grasslands’ inhabitants. From 1928 to
1932, state procurements of horses, camels, sheep, cat-
tle, and grain led to a famine that killed more than one-
third of the Kazakhs, and to the loss of 90 percent of
their animals. As Cameron points out, a drought in
1931 made the famine even worse. Estimates vary, but
not much fewer than 1.5 million Kazakhs died, while
Slavic settlers suffered to a much lesser degree (Slavic
peasants had migrated to the region before 1914, and
made up one-third of Kazakhstan’s population around
1930). Many Kazakhs survived only by fleeing to
China or to neighboring Soviet regions. This was the
most severe famine anywhere in the USSR in terms of
losses to the total population (the contemporaneous
famine killed one-fifth of the Ukrainians). During the
1930s and 1940s, Kazakhstan was the object of a new
wave of agricultural colonization, made up at first of
deported Russian peasants, then of the victims of eth-
nic deportations.
Remarkably, Soviet neocolonial policies evolved
from initially harsh decolonization policies. In the
early 1920s, the new Bolshevik government evicted
thousands of Slavic settlers from Kazakh (and Kyrgyz)
lands. The Bolsheviks were committed to building a
new kind of state, in which Central Asians were to be
an organic part, not second-class subjects. The Com-
munist Party, which by the end of the 1920s also in-
cluded many Kazakh administrators, shaped the
Kazakhs as a Soviet ethnonational group by eliminat-
ing their prerevolutionary elites. In 1928, rich livestock
owners and former tsarist administrators were
deported; non-Bolshevik Kazakh intellectuals and for-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
mer politicians were imprisoned, exiled, and eventu-
ally killed. Kazakh society, discursively structured
around a segmentary lineage system, had to be “detrib-
alized.” A campaign of total sedentarization of the
Kazakhs was proclaimed on the eve of collectivization
in 1929, and effectively merged with the latter. But, as
Cameron and Kindler show, the sedentarization cam-
paign remained of secondary importance in compari-
son with policies aimed at taking control of the
Kazakhs’ resources.
While Cameron brings in environmental history to
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explain the famine, Kindler’s argument is rooted in the
analysis of a society dismantled by widespread vio-
lence. Cameron’s initial chapter provides an elegantly
written overview of the environmental setting of the
story. She explains that the Eurasian steppes’ aridity
and climatic unpredictability from year to year made
local pastoral and especially agricultural production
highly unstable and prone to periodic crises. Even if
her environmental history approach recedes in the fol-
lowing chapters, Cameron convincingly shows the
conscious gamble that the Stalinist leadership made by
trying to forcefully expand agriculture at breakneck
speed in a region characterized by “ecological instabili-
ty” (9). Cameron thus looks at outcomes of Stalinist
policies as partially determined by environmental con-
straints, and emphasizes how the influx of Slavic set-
tlers during the late tsarist era had made the Kazakhs’
pastoral economy more fragile. Cameron starts her
narrative from the late nineteenth century and stops just
after the famine in 1934. Kindler only sketches the
prerevolutionary situation, but he explains in more de-
tail than Cameron how the region emerged from the
famine, and he explores the post-famine period until
the early 1940s. In a fascinating chapter, he shows how
nomadic practices were “rehabilitated” in Kazakhstan’s
system of collective farms after the famine (chap. 6,
“Soviet Nomadism”).
At their core, the two books are devoted to the 1920s
and early 1930s, and they agree on most interpretative
issues. They both build on previous scholarship on the
topic that started in Kazakhstan in the late 1980s and
1990s, particularly the works of Zhulduzbek Abyl-
khozhin, Talas Omarbekov, and Turganbek Allaniia-
zov. Both Cameron and Kindler underscore that the
famine became instrumental for Bolshevik state build-
ing, as the survivors were at the mercy of the state.
They both clarify how ultimate responsibility for the
famine lies with the Kremlin and its policies of violent
exploitation of the region’s resources. Cameron pro-
vides a nuanced analysis of the different positions of
scholars and administrators who debated the character
of the Kazakh economy and society during the 1920s.
She makes it clear that for most of the 1920s there
were no plans for a violent end to nomadism, as Kin-
dler also underscores. It was really Stalin’s decision to
return to forced grain procurements in 1928 that pre-
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638 Reviews of Books
cipitated a policy change that led to extreme plans of
total sedentarization of the nomads, pushed forward by
Kazakhstan Communist Party secretary Filipp Golosh-
chekin. In the analysis of the famine years, the two
books do not bring particularly new insights on the po-
litical, demographic, and economic dynamics of the
catastrophe. They instead innovate in focusing on the
border area between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, and in
showing how violent and indiscriminate were the So-
viet measures taken to keep the Kazakhs from fleeing
with their livestock to China. Thousands of famine ref-
ugees were killed while trying to cross the border.
Drawing on the anthropological and sociological liter-
ature on violence, Kindler sees the dynamics of vio-
lence during collectivization and famine as diverging
from the usual historiographical picture of a binary op-
position of “state repression” versus “society resis-
tance.” Instead, Kindler suggests that the aggressive
policies of the state against the rural population created
a zero-sum game in which both the population and
state repressive organs expected the other side to resort
to extreme violence. This led to a spiral of localized vi-
olent confrontations, while the famine itself extended
this system of incentives to relations between different
groups within Kazakh society. In fact, Kindler
explains, society did not break up completely, and
starving Kazakh “clans” were the basic social groups
that fought against each other for the redistribution of
scarce food resources (183). This unleashed what Kin-
dler calls a “fragmented civil war” that largely deter-
mined who would survive the famine and who would
perish. Kazakh survivors were those who emerged as
the victors of this internecine struggle, and were tied to
the Soviet regime by what Kindler sees as entangled
degrees of “guilt.” This would partially explain why
public discussion of the famine did not happen in Ka-
zakh society to the same extent as in Ukraine after the
end of state censorship on the topic in the late 1980s:
“Where no one spoke of dying and suffering, no one
asked about personal responsibility and guilt” (244).
Kindler tackles important interpretative questions re-
garding how social divides influenced policy out-
comes. However, the documentary evidence he pro-
vides supports his conclusions only very partially. One
wonders to what extent and how often, during the fam-
ine, families and “clans” starved each other to death.
These dynamics might well be at play, but Kindler
does not delimit in any way the explanatory validity of
the “fragmented civil war” thesis, or the degree to
which it can help explain the magnitude of the famine.
Many primary sources Kindler cites refer to alliances
between members of different Kazakh “clans” (and
even of Kazakhs and Russian peasants) against the
state’s pillage of their alimentary and economic re-
sources. Moreover, any general conclusion about the
importance of tribal divisions in the dynamics of the
famine should rely on an assessment of their salience
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
and character in Kazakh society in the early twentieth
century. Kindler instead uncritically refers to ideal-
typical “clans.” As for the divide between Slavs and
Kazakhs, Kindler provides important evidence that the
distribution of state food aid favored the peasants
against the nomads, who were those most in need of it.
However, there is no trace during collectivization of the
kind of ethnic conflicts that pitted Slavic peasants
against Kazakh pastoralists during the uprising of 1916,
the post-tsarist Civil War, and the 1920s. Cameron is
similarly ambiguous in her treatment of the role of eth-
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nic diversity in early Stalinist policies. On the one hand,
she emphasizes Kazakh agency and the participation of
thousands of Kazakh cadres in repressive policies, espe-
cially the deportation of pastoral elites in 1928. On the
other hand, she acknowledges that the Red Army and
political police detachments that extinguished anti-
collectivization uprisings were overwhelmingly manned
by Russians and other Soviet Europeans, and that, in
general, the most powerful repressive institution of the
Soviet state in Kazakhstan, the political police, was the
one in which Kazakhs had less power.
On the heated question of whether the Kazakh fam-
ine should be categorized as genocide, both Cameron
and Kindler respond in the negative, if the definition of
genocide considered is the one of the 1948 UN Con-
vention. However, Cameron claims that instead Ra-
phael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, from his Axis
Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), which did not neces-
sarily imply an exterminatory intent, applies to Stalin-
ist Kazakhstan. According to Cameron, policies aimed
at eradicating nomadism were tantamount to the anni-
hilation of the Kazakh nation as such, since “the term
‘Kazakh’ was a mixed social and ethnic category, one
that denoted an ethnicity but also a way of life, pastoral
nomadism” (11). A new Soviet Kazakh nation
emerged from the famine years, because the equiva-
lence between nomadism and ethnicity was irrevoca-
bly broken. This hardly seems convincing. Cameron
does not provide strong historical evidence backing
this supposedly preexisting equivalence. The Kazakhs
who, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, became mullahs, teachers, tsarist officers, agrono-
mists, lawyers, engineers, and even members of the
Duma, might beg to differ about the characterization of
their life trajectory as an abandonment of their identity
as Kazakhs. After all, the leaders of the first nationalist
movement among the Kazakhs, the Alash Party in
1917, were certainly not nomadic pastoralists, and be-
fore World War I they had advocated sedentarization.
Despite these interpretative problems, these two
valuable monographs deserve to be widely read. They
show how the study of the violent transformation of
Kazakh society under Lenin and Stalin makes it possi-
ble to contextualize properly synchronous events such
as the great famine in Ukraine. They are also instru-
mental in shedding new light on much larger issues,
APRIL 2020
 Oceania and the Pacific Islands
such as the interaction between ideology and policy-
making in the Stalinist system, the history of Commu-
nism in Asia, and the modern environmental and social
history of the earth’s grasslands.
NICCOLÒ PIANCIOLA
Lingnan University
OCEANIA AND THE PACIFIC ISLANDS
ANN CURTHOYS and JESSIE MITCHELL. Taking Liberty:
Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Co-
lonial Australia, 1830–1890. (Critical Perspectives
on Empire.) New York: Cambridge University Press,
2018. Pp. xiv, 432. Cloth $105.00.
Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell’s carefully
researched and crafted book Taking Liberty: Indige-
nous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial
Australia, 1830–1890 makes an invaluable and timely
contribution to the historiography of Aboriginal-settler
relations and settler colonialism in Australia. One of
the rewards of reading it was being reminded of the im-
portant foundational work Australian historians have
done and are doing in this field, as the authors clearly
build on this substantial edifice. Yet they do so to de-
velop a new angle, to emphasize a particular historical
view, one which synthesizes two fields of history—po-
litical and Indigenous history—that have largely cir-
cled around each other—a circumlocution this book
emphasizes can no longer pertain.
Curthoys and Mitchell ask what colonial self-
government meant to Indigenous people and what role
Indigenous-settler relations played in the establishment
of self-government. As they show, while there is an ex-
tensive historiography on the political foundations of
Australian democracy, which tends to emphasize the
peaceful transition to self-government, there is an alter-
native body of historiography that emphasizes violent
dispossession and displacement of Indigenous people.
In the history they tell, we see that not only did these
things happen simultaneously, but they more often than
not involved the same players. By inserting key aspects
of Indigenous history into the story of Australian de-
mocracy, the authors bring this encounter into the foun-
dation narrative, situating it more centrally in under-
standings of Australian political and social identity.
The book is both a map and a tapestry. It shows just
how and when imperial governments washed their
hands of Aboriginal policy on the ground in Australia,
and just how and when colonial governments adopted
and adapted Britain’s policies following self-
government. It provides a detailed reading of each co-
lonial jurisdiction to demonstrate the particularities of
this process in each setting and identifies key players.
At the same time it weaves the stories of Indigenous
and settler, empire and colonies, local and metropole,
conscience and defiance, and compassion and remorse-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
639
lessness, and it demonstrates the limited horizons im-
perial administrators had for comprehending Indigene-
ity and personhood in the early nineteenth century.
Assimilation, for example, was the go-to, feel-good
policy objective that imperial administrators like Her-
man Merivale recommended as they left colonial
administrators to their own devices. As the authors
show, this narrowness of view was ideological: empire
makers were in awe of themselves and their self-
appointed civilizing task to do with the continent what
they believed Indigenous people had failed to do.
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Might and right were inseparable, and as they show,
this ideological vision remained one of the tenuous
links that Britain maintained with the Australian colo-
nies following colonial self-government through the
rise of racial science.
Historian Antoinette Burton comments on the back
cover of the book that “in narrating the dialectics be-
tween indigenous communities and settler ones, the
authors provide a case for rooting principles of inclu-
sion in deep genealogies of the nineteenth century expe-
rience.” This is very true. The authors demonstrate how
these dialectics shaped Australian institutions, constitu-
tions, governance, ideologies, and relations more pro-
foundly than we are led to believe in the popular stories
and myths of Australian history that we tell ourselves,
even in the stories and myths themselves. Take the
phrase “bunyip aristocracy,” which Australian-born
Daniel Deniehy used to mock W. C. Wentworth’s aspi-
rations for a landed gentry based on hereditary (conser-
vative and pastoralist) membership. As the authors
show, this epithet referenced Indigenous people and
beliefs. Some colonists believed that the half-horse,
half-alligator “bunyip” referred to by Aboriginal people
in the southeast may have been a real antipodean speci-
men until it was discovered as a figment of Aboriginal
mythology. After this the term, “bunyip” was synony-
mous with humbug.
Certainly, the book reminds us of the importance of
the colonial context for understanding the legacies of
empire and settler governance that shaped these rela-
tions to the present day. Yet the deep genealogies of
nineteenth-century experience do not reinforce inclu-
sion. This was and is a perverse dialectics. As Cur-
thoys and Mitchell argue, even the very idea of Ab-
original political subjecthood was raised not as a seri-
ous possibility but as a means of mocking their fellow
white statesman, as, for example, when the Colonial
Observer mocked conservatives’ public meeting in
New South Wales calling for the formation of a colo-
nial aristocracy as a “Pitt-Street Corrobbory” (123).
In this political history, Indigenous historical experi-
ence is positioned as disturbingly apolitical even as the
authors demonstrate the deeply political nature of In-
digenous responses and the ways in which, in the dia-
lectic, their politics were shaped by that of the settler
society. The front cover image (the book could have
APRIL 2020