Making Sense of Catastrophe: A Social and Cultural History of the Kazakh Famine

30 May, 18:00
 

The Kazakh famine claimed 1.5 million lives (more than one third of the Kazakh population) and displaced another 1 million. Even if the Soviet famine of the early 1930s is predominantly associated with Ukraine, nowhere else in the USSR was the mortality rate this high. This project provides a new interpretation of the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, one of the most disastrous but least known tragedies of the twentieth century. More than three decades of scholarship by both local and foreign historians now allows us to understand the political and economic dynamics of this catastrophe. However, the social history of the famine is largely undeveloped, and cultural history is completely untouched. Consequently, we still know very little about the human face of this tragedy. This project provides the first comprehensive social and cultural history of the Kazakh famine (and its aftermath), based on both archival documents and previously uncharted survivor accounts. Particularly, thanks to the coverage of hundreds of previously neglected famine testimonies in Kazakh, this project attempts to understand how people experienced, survived and made sense of this catastrophe. Among the topics discussed are children's experiences, gender and women's experiences, perpetrators, interethnic relations, survival strategies, post-famine society and memory and trauma.

Mehmet Volkan Kasikci received his Ph.D. in history from Arizona State University in 2020. He is a historian of Soviet Central Asia and he wrote his dissertation on children and childhood in Kazakhstan from 1928 to 1953. For his research, he lived in Kazakhstan for more than three and a half years. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies.

The seminar will be held in English