The hidden nooks and corners of Soviet history
Imperialist crimes hiding in the open and slipping away from us all.
I was listening to episode 5 of Matryoshka of Lies created by maksym eristavi. These words stopped me in my tracks.
The man-made famine orchestrated by Moscow had driven people mad with hunger. The father spoke of the desperation watching in horror as people scavenged for corpses at railway stations and his family narrowly survived only on half a sack of wheat, payment for his work. When the famine ended, their village was decimated. It killed entire families.
maksym eristavi, Matryoshka of Lies, Episode 5.
The podcast was NOT about the Holodomor1 in Ukraine in 1932-33 when nearly 4 million people died as a result of Soviet policies, but about the Asharshylyk, a man-made famine in 1930 - 1933 in present-day Kazakhstan. During the Asharshylyk, 1.5 million to 2 million people died in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union. Of the approximately 2 million dead, at least 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. According to maksym eristavi, over 40% of Kazakhs died in this 2-year period “making them a national minority on their own ancestral lands.”
How did I not know about this earlier?
Had I been taught about this man-made famine and I chose to forget? Had I been taught, but my then fragile, self-absorbed, 20-year old mind rejected the overwhelming sadnesses that I could do nothing about? I shut out a lot of things between 19 and 25 years of age due to a kind of multi-layered loss, grief and anxiety that is yet to be named by clinical psychologists. Outside of my classrooms, in the ensuing years, did I never read or hear about 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs being wiped out (reduced from 60% to 38% of their republic’s population, according to Wikipedia), as a result of forced sedenterization of a nomadic culture and a brutal collectivization campaign?
A major reason for my possible ignorance of Asharshylyk may lie in the fact that the truth came out only after 1991 when Kazakhstan declared independence from the former Soviet Union. And it took 26 more years for the largest monument commemorating the famine to be built in Almaty (in 2017). Russians painting themselves as forever victims of Russophobia was one reason for the delay, perhaps, in addition to the ongoing systemic power imbalance regarding newsworthiness across the globe.
Did things change after 2022? No. Even the presence of Russian draftdodgers, over 200,000 of them, in Kazakhstan did not bring a sense of solidarity with the local population. The monument site was appropriated as a spot for vigil for Alexei Navalny in February 2024 much to the distress of Kazakhs.
When many in Central Asia took offense at appropriating the monument in the memory of the person who publicly dehumanized Central Asians in numerous racist remarks, many ordinary and high-profile Russians cried Russophobia…If everyone’s a victim, then who’s left to be responsible for the crime in Kazakhstan?
— Matryoshka of Lies
Listen to Diana Kudaibergen, a Kazakh sociologist and researcher of colonialism, in conversation with maksym eristavi in Matryoshka of Lies, Episode 5. While episode 5 touches upon Asharshylyk specifically, all episodes of Matryoshka of Lies weave the underlying theme of Russian colonialism. The latter is equally important to understand as, knowingly or unknowingly, each of us have the potential to perpetuate the imbalance of power between colonizer and colonized, despite the best of our human intentions to reach out to those who are hurting. As the saying goes, squeaky wheels get the oil. Some wheels squeak louder than others only because they are used to demanding and receiving attention, they have the ability to efficiently seek attention either due to historic privileges and resources at their disposal, and they outnumber other ethnicities. So, if we consider ourselves progressive and fair, we owe it to others and ourselves to keep listening, learning, and shedding old ways of thinking and knowing, so there is space for new.
Join me as I use the following resources to learn more about Asharshylyk (meaning famine):
The Kazakh Famine of 1930-33 and the Politics of History in the Post-Soviet Space
Remembering Kazakhstan’s Great Famine of the 1930’s
Monument to the Victims of Famine
***
On a WhatsApp group, a group member recently forwarded a call for membership to a newly-registered Association — the Indian Association of Alumni of Russian/Soviet Academic Institutions. I don’t know when the organization was officially registered as a Society in India, how long (months? years?) it took for the message to find its way to us, a small group of aging, once-upon-a-time-an-Indian-student-in-Ukraine people. But surely the message could not have been circulating online since 1991? Because that is when the region and the world stopped using ‘Soviet’ and started using CIS or Commonwealth of Independent States to signal the dissolution of the Soviet Union and recognize its legal successor (caveat: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania did not participate; Georgia withdrew its membership in 2008; Ukraine stopped participating in 2014 and formally ended its particpation in 2018; Moldova is progressively withdrawing its membership since 2022). So I don’t know which Neanderthal still uses ‘Soviet’ in their endeavors to organize people of various ages and cohorts to connect, network, socially contribute and professionally benefit, and vice versa, but I would be embarrassed to have to do anything with an organization that is, at best, living in the past.
This is only the latest of a networking phenomenon, online or offline, that I have paid attention to in the last decade or so that is distastefully uninviting even when they mean to be inviting — a naivete about the in-built hierarchy of power or an insentivity that runs counter to their promise of “contribute to meanigful projects and events” as one of their activities. Facebook has quite a few “Soviet” alumni groups, with memberships running in thousands from different countries in Africa, parts of Asia and parts of Latin America, that I and other international alumni of Ukraine steer clear of, especially since 2022. There is overt animosity between those brigades that remain brainwashed by Russia (or those who consider themselves sympathetic to Russia and supportive of Russia) and those who find Russian aggression, and by extension, Russophiles’ unapologetic over-enthusiasm, extremely cruel, unfairly powerful, and uncritically tone-deaf. There is a lot of emotional distress caused by jingoistic and/or fawning messages and posts by pro-Russia (or just pro-self) people who assume that everyone delights in their sharing of Russian or Soviet nostalgia — snippets of music, movies, official photographs, postcards. Worse, that everyone is in love with a certain “strong” man (who nevertheless hides himself in a bunker) and who is itching to ruel the world. It never occurs to some, whether outside the territory or living inside Russia, to remember that some of our friends and classmates still live in Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia, Moldova and other places that are coming to terms with Russian imperialism.
There are many factors — both at the individual’s and society’s levels — that can result in people’s choice of hanging onto a mythical past in small ways and big. However, our complete and voluntary ignorance of so much of people’s history of that region is a huge part of it.
I think I am doing my best to fill the gaps in my own knowledge, but Every.Single.Day. I come across some new piece of information that I did not know before. Take for instance the Asharshylyk…
***
To my younger readers, who probably came to know Kazakhstan through Dimash Kudaibergenov, an interesting anecdote: Dimash’s voice was introduced to me by someone who is as different as they can be from me. I am a brown, middle-aged woman, immigrant, mother, academic, liberal, progressive who has lived in several places before my current stop in a red state in the U.S. midwest. The young man who introduced me to Dimash a few years ago is in his 20s, putting college on a longish hold due to a successful early take-off in his chosen trade, proudly Republican, married young and — don’t miss this — never leaves home without a gun (especially when out with his wife) in our conceal-carry state which has been his home and universe throughout his life. It would have never occurred to me that he would be a very serious fan of Dimash and he, probably, doesn’t know I have friends my age in Kazakhstan (who failed to introduce me to their country’s best-known face and voice, their country’s much-loved unofficial diplomat). The serendipity of life, the joy when disparate people find something common to cherish — there is something magical about such discoveries.
If you want to know more about the Holodomor, this movie, available on YouTube, is a good option. Here is a link to the trailer.