The Kazakh Steppe: From Russian Empire to Soviet Utopia

In 1928, the head of the Kazakh party organization, Filipp Goloshchekin, organized a campaign against the Kazakh bai, which was called debaization. On August 27, 1928, the Central Executive Committee of the KASSR adopted a decree on the confiscation of property and expulsion of the bais in Kazakhstan. For this purpose, a special commission was created to examine the cases of those who had been declared bais. Behind this campaign was the typical Bolshevik desire to divide the traditional community along class lines, as they had done with the Russian community in Turkestan in 1920-1921.

We remember that in the Russian countryside the kulak existed mainly in the Bolshevik imagination. In the whole of the former empire there were a few fractions of a percent of them. There were a few more bais. 80% of Kazakh households owned up to 10 head of cattle per household, 17% owned between 10 and 35, and only 3% owned 35 or more. But these 3 percent of the bais hardly resembled the cartoon exploiters of Marxist propaganda.

Every tribal society is primarily based on family and kinship relations. In fact, the basis of tribal relations are family relations. Given the patriarchal nature of Kazakh society, this led to relations within the community based on the patronage of the older and wealthier members of the community over the younger and more vulnerable ones. Since the main form of organization of Kazakh tribal society from the late 19th century to the early 1930s was small communities (there were no large tribes), such a community was in fact an extended family.

Accordingly, within a compact tribal community, and even at a somewhat higher level, everyone was related to everyone else. This provided the necessary cohesion, including cohesion in the distribution of resources. Working for wealthier relatives was also an important factor. In addition, relatives provided loans, which were often non-repayable. In a critical situation, wealthy Kazakhs would help their poorer relatives. For example, in 1924 the executive committee of the Akmola uyezd "according to the national custom" assigned 25 thousand hungry people "to the bais to be fed."

By and large, such relationships were not based on altruism at all, but on quite pragmatic considerations. Providing regular assistance to a wide range of relatives strengthened family ties. At the same time, it created a network of loyal clients around wealthy Kazakhs. The existence of such a network, as well as its size, enhanced the status of a particular bai, both in relations with the state and in competition with other tribal communities. The latter factor was particularly important in the distribution of grazing land and the protection of cattle, which were the basis of wealth and influence.

In the fall of 1928, Kazakhs began to be drafted into the army. This was part of the state's policy of integrating Kazakhs into Soviet society. At the same time, the authorities abandoned the principle of external governance, which implied the autonomy of the existence of traditional Kazakh society with the preservation of the invariability of its organizational structure.

It is worth noting that military service in general was a way of socializing the population coming from traditional societies. It allowed the state to penetrate their closed social structure. Demobilized soldiers could serve as a basis for the Soviet bureaucracy. This was true for people from Kazakh nomadic communities as well as for peasants from Russian rural communities. Obviously, the state could not ignore such an opportunity to increase the number of its officials. In addition, conscription made it possible to remove from Kazakh society many young people who might have resisted "debaization."

As for the Kazakh population, conscription was introduced only when the state strengthened its influence within the KASSR. Obviously, it is not a coincidence that this happened in parallel with the beginning of the "debaization" campaign, as well as with the administrative-territorial reform in the KASSR.

In September 1928, a decision was made on territorial reform. Instead of the former governorates and oblasts, uyezds and volosts, 13 okrugs ("provinces") were created (including the Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast), consisting of 193 districts. The districts could be predominantly Russian or predominantly Kazakh, but now they were territorial units shared by the two main population groups.

Until then, the KASSR had about 400 volosts, which were smaller territorial units. They were inherited by the Soviet authorities from the days of the Russian Empire and were generally divided along national lines. Of course, this was not a general rule, and there was some mixing of Kazakh and Russian populations. For example, impoverished Kazakhs who worked for local peasants settled in Russian villages. Kazakhs also settled in predominantly Russian cities. But in general, Kazakh and Russian rural volosts existed separately.

After the territorial reform of 1928, new okrugs appeared, which could contain both Kazakh and Russian settlements. Of course, it was not easy to unite them into one territorial unit, mainly because of their different economic structures. Most Kazakhs led a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life, while the Russians were farmers. They were rather antagonistic in matters of economic activity; there was some interaction, but it was limited.

Thus, the Kazakh and Russian populations in the KASSR were barely connected in terms of both the principles of social organization and the dominant economic structure. In addition, there was a language barrier between them. Nevertheless, the administrative reform outlined the priorities of state policy, and the authorities generally sought greater social homogeneity among both the Russian and Kazakh communities, primarily to make them more manageable.

All of these events took place against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis caused by increased cash injections, inflation, and the refusal of the peasants to deliver grain at the prices they were offered. As a result, the urban population faced a food crisis, while the state was unable to export grain in the quantities planned, causing difficulties in the implementation of industrialization plans. By January 1927, 428 million poods (about 7 billion kg) had been procured; by January 1928, 300 million poods (about 5 billion kg) had been procured, seriously threatening the supply of bread to the cities and the army.

It is no coincidence that in the context of a growing food crisis, the state sought to increase agricultural production in the KASSR. In August 1928, the same month that the KASSR's commission on debaization began its work, a decision was made in Moscow to create 125 large state grain farms (sovkhozes), more than half of which were to be located in Kazakhstan. The state thus openly targeted the lands occupied by nomads and semi-nomads.

Significantly, in 1927 the capital of the KASSR was moved to Alma-Ata, the historic center of Turkestan's main agricultural region, Semirechye. The government was to move there in 1928. At that time, Semirechye was seen as an important agricultural area producing food grains for Central Asia. There was a clear political agenda. Moving the capital from Kyzylorda to Alma-Ata meant a change in the environment in which the capital was located. Kyzylorda was located in the center of a vast nomadic region; it was the winter pasture for many nomads from the north of the Kazakh ASSR. Kazakh nomads inhabited the steppes to the north and south of Kyzylorda. Accordingly, the city was surrounded by a predominantly Kazakh population. In 1928, when the KASSR authorities wanted to pursue a policy of debaization of the Kazakh population, the location of the capital in a nomadic region with access to Central Asia to the south seemed vulnerable, especially since local insurgents were periodically active in Central Asia at the time. Many of them operated against the USSR from abroad, from Iran and Afghanistan. In Turkmenistan, for example, it was Junaid Khan, and in Uzbekistan, Ibrahim Bek Lakai. Characteristically, they relied on nomadic tribes - Junaid Khan on the Yomut, Ibrahim Bek on the Lakai.

In this sense, Semirechye was safer. There were troops and border guards on the border with China. The region itself had a multi-ethnic population. Dmitry Verkhoturov wrote in connection with the move of the government to Alma-Ata that "the essence of the transfer was to detach the central administrative apparatus from the Kazakh nomadic masses." In essence, it was about changing the environment for the capital of the KASSR. If in Orenburg the capital was located exclusively in a Russian environment, in Kyzylorda - completely in a Kazakh environment, which then coincided with the policy of rootification, in Alma-Ata it found itself in a multi-ethnic environment. In addition to Kazakhs and Russians, there were also natives of East Turkestan, who after 1923 began to be called Uighurs.

In 1929, the USSR introduced a system of food rationing. The party leadership, which had set completely unrealistic goals for the country, decided not to back down but to intensify the concentration of all resources in the country. The NEP was abandoned and the authorities switched to prescriptive planning of the economy. Already at the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks in 1927, it was decided to start working on five-year plans. The first five-year plan was adopted at the 16th Party Conference in April 1929. At the same time, the implementation of this plan began to be counted from October 1928.

The abandonment of the NEP and the adoption of the Five-Year Plan was the first step toward a centrally planned economy, the organization of which required drastic centralization of the state and mobilization of society. When in late 1927 and early 1928, as a result of the inflationary crisis, the problems of grain procurement and food supply to the cities began to grow, the state did not reduce investment to a level compatible with the operation of market mechanisms, but simply shut them down. The country returned to forced requisitioning of grain.

The state now intended to mobilize all the resources available in the country for the purpose of accelerating the country's modernization. For this purpose, the apparatus of direct control combined with coercion was necessary, because it was a matter of seizing resources where they were still at the disposal of their owners. In the first place, this concerned the village, which owned the land and the agricultural products produced on it. But just as directly, it affected the nomadic Kazakhs, who occupied vast tracts of land that the Bolsheviks had long eyed. The country was coming close to its darkest hour.

The construction of the Turksib railroad in 1927-1930 was one of the most important projects of the early Soviet Union. The Turksib was designed to connect Siberia with Central Asia and ensure the economic development of the territories along its entire length. For the KASSR, it was the largest project realized in the 1920s. In addition, the Turksib was to pass through the cities of the eastern part of the KASSR - Semipalatinsk, Alma-Ata (formerly Verny), Taraz (Auliye-Ata), and Shymkent, giving them additional impetus for development.

At the same time, the Turksib was seen as a vehicle for creating the Kazakh proletariat. It was decided to set a quota of 50% for Kazakh workers. Since the Turksib required the hiring of tens of thousands of people, this should have immediately led to the emergence of a new social group in Kazakh society.

The class approach continued to play a decisive role in the Soviet Union. It was possible to recruit personnel for the KASSR management system from the working class. In addition, the participation of Kazakhs in one of the construction projects of socialism made it possible to somewhat weaken their ties to traditional tribal society. Thus, Turksib played an important role in the social engineering project.

Turar Ryskulov, as deputy chairman of the RSFSR government, supervised the construction of the Turksib. For Kazakh communists, such a project was one of the most powerful tools for modernizing Kazakh society.

However, there were a number of difficulties in getting Kazakhs to work on the site. First, the construction management was not interested in using unskilled Kazakh labor. Their training required organizational efforts, and it was easier to hire Russian workers. Moreover, nomads were not used to hard, monotonous work on land. Nomadic herding implied a greater degree of individual freedom. Naturally, production results were more important to the construction managers than social engineering projects.

Second, the Turksib was being built at a time when the Soviet Union was just beginning its transition to a planned economy. Under the NEP, unemployment in the country was very high, and news of the start of large-scale construction attracted tens of thousands of job applicants from European Russia. The local Russian population was also eager to get a job on this construction site. It is obvious that the information about the quota for Kazakhs could not but cause their resentment. This was the cause of the mass riots of Russian workers in Semipalatinsk in 1928, called the "Uprising of the Unemployed." The authorities suppressed the riots, but the principle of a quota for Kazakhs was very difficult to implement.

However, despite all the difficulties, the authorities managed to implement their plans and the Turksib played its role in the history of the KASSR. The railroad provided jobs, including for the Kazakh population. In 1940, the Turksib employed 79 Kazakh engineers, 123 assistant engineers and 200 levelers. This coincided with the destruction of the traditional organizational system of Kazakh society in the process of sedentarization. The demise of the nomadic community meant that the authorities could now use Kazakhs, like other nations of the USSR, to solve their enormous economic and social problems. By 1936, Kazakhs accounted for 41% of all industrial workers in the KASSR. Of course, this would have been impossible if the nomadic way of life had been maintained.

Turksib can only be seen in the context of the forced modernization of Kazakh society. The word "modernization," associated with social progress, usually evokes only positive associations. In the case of the USSR, however, the violent nature of modernization and the enormous sacrifices associated with it create an ambivalent impression.

This led Matt Payne to conclude that ultimately, the experience of Turksib suggested that Soviet national policy acted as both destroyer and creator of the new Kazakh nation. Of course, in contemporary Kazakh society, attitudes toward Soviet modernization can only be ambivalent. It was accompanied by the demise of the old Kazakh society with its centuries-old traditions. These traditions were at the heart of Kazakh identity. Accordingly, it was a matter of forcibly creating a new identity under the pressure of Bolshevik Moscow.

The paradox is that this new identity was formed within the framework of Soviet national policy, which followed the ideology of nation-state building. That is, the demise of the Kazakh tribal society took place within the borders of the autonomy acquired by the Kazakhs, and the formation of a new identity on a national basis began within the same borders. Despite all the efforts of the Bolsheviks, the former traditional tribal society remained important for the new nation.

That is why it remains so difficult for independent Kazakhstan to formulate its attitude to Soviet national policy. On the one hand, the old society is an unquestionable value for modern Kazakhs, it is a part of our historical memory. On the other hand, it remained archaic, closed, absorbed in itself. The surviving nomadic peoples of the world are on the periphery, virtually confined to reservations, even in the countries where they were once dominant.

It is clear that the overwhelming majority of Kazakhs in the 1920s were against giving up their usual way of life as nomads and semi-nomads. But it is equally clear that the vast majority of Kazakhs today do not want that way of life to be restored. The hardest question is whether there was any other option for modernizing traditional Kazakh society. That is something we will never know.

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