Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation, translated by Simon Pawley and Anton Platonov ed. by Zhulduzbek Abylkhozhin, Mikhail Akulov and Alexandra Tsay (review)

Despite the now considerable number of monographs about specific political campaigns and policies in Soviet Central Asia, during limited periods of time, we still do not have a comprehensive study of the entire Stalinist period for any of the Central Asian republics, and certainly not for the whole region. Therefore, Stalinism in Kazakhstan, which covers the entire period from the 1920s to the early 1950s in one Soviet republic, is a very welcome addition to the scholarly literature. This collection of articles is the English version of a Russian-language book published in Kazakhstan in 2019. The texts collected in the book originated from presentations delivered during the public “Living Memory” lectures in Almaty, associated with the art exhibition of the same title. One-third of the texts focus on visual art – commenting on both the artistic production in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Kazakhstan and contemporary artistic creations that engage with the memory of Stalinism in the Central Asian state. The Russian edition of the book was in part an exhibition catalog, with color reproductions of many of the works on display; this section of the book is not present in the English edition, though it nonetheless includes several black-and-white reproductions of paintings and art installations.

In some ways, the book falls short of its potential, especially in terms of engaging with the existing historiography about Stalinist Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and the Soviet Union more widely. However, due to its interdisciplinary character, the book enriches our approaches to the Stalinist past by bringing to the fore the problematics of memory and artistic representation. Among the volume’s contributors are historians, journalists, curators, and artists belonging to different generations. All of them are Kazakhstani, with the exception of Marinika Babnazarova from Uzbekistan.

The book is divided into three sections, titled respectively “History,” “Memory,” and “Representation.” In the first section, the historian Mikhail Akulov deftly compares the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, focusing on their ideologies. His chapter is followed by one penned by the historian Zhulduzbek Abylkhozhin – one of the most important figures involved in recovering the memory of Stalinism since Gorbachev’s glasnost. In 1989 Abylkhozhin coauthored (with the historian Manash Kozybaev and the demographer Makash Tatimov – both of whom have since passed away) the first scholarly article ever written on the great famine in Kazakhstan of the early 1930s. Until then, this had been a taboo subject in Soviet historiography and the public sphere more widely.¹ Abylkhozhin’s contribution to this collected volume revisits the conclusions of his studies published in the early 1990s. One can only regret that Abylkhozhin missed the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with historians of younger generations. The most recent secondary source referenced by Abylkhozhin is Nikolai Ivnitskii’s 1994 study of collectivization.² As Catriona Kelly points out in her short but insightful introduction to the volume, in order to understand any “national” case, a comparison with parallel cases would be necessary; at least, the specificities of Kazakhstan should be discussed within the larger cluster of famines brought about by forced collectivization and state procurements. Abylkhozhin, however, does not discuss the Russian-language contributions of historians such as Viktor Kondrashin, who studied the famine in the Central Volga region in Russia, or the burgeoning historiography of the 1932–1933 famine in Ukraine. Nonetheless, Abylkhozin’s intervention takes a very clear stance in the public debate about the great famine in Kazakhstan, which has been rekindled by a number of recent documentary films about the famine, and by the translation into Russian and Kazakh of Sarah Cameron’s Hungry Steppe.³ Abylkhozhin implicitly denies the validity of characterizing the horrific famine as an anti-Kazakh genocide carried out by the Soviet government. He instead defines the policies of “dekulakization,” somehow incongruously...