Caravanserai
Human Rights

Kremlin evades historical facts of devastating 1930s famine in Kazakhstan

By Kanat Altynbayev

The Ana (Mother) sculpture, a monument to the victims of the 1931–1933 famine in Kazakhstan, was erected in Almaty in 2017. [Kanat Altynbayev]

The Ana (Mother) sculpture, a monument to the victims of the 1931–1933 famine in Kazakhstan, was erected in Almaty in 2017. [Kanat Altynbayev]

ALMATY -- Fear of historical responsibility is the reason for a recent attempt by the Russian Foreign Ministry to whitewash a tragedy of the 1930s in Central Asia, say observers.

On February 22, the ministry posted an official statement "on insinuations surrounding the tragedy caused by famine in the Soviet Union in 1932–1933".

"Supporters of nationalist views" in Central Asia are imposing on their compatriots the claim that the Soviet government organised a genocide of their ancestors, claimed the ministry.

One reason for Moscow's nervous reaction is a documentary by Almaty journalist Zhanbolat Mamay, "Zulmat: Genocide in Kazakhstan" about the tragic events in Kazakhstan during that period. Zulmat is a Kazakh word for tragedy or catastrophe.

A woman with a child is shown in the early 1930s in Kazakhstan. [Kazakh Central State Archive of Film, Photo and Audio Documents]

A woman with a child is shown in the early 1930s in Kazakhstan. [Kazakh Central State Archive of Film, Photo and Audio Documents]

Kazakhs are shown trekking to China sometime in the 1930s to escape the famine from forced collectivisation. [Screenshot from the film "Zulmat: Genocide in Kazakhstan"]

Kazakhs are shown trekking to China sometime in the 1930s to escape the famine from forced collectivisation. [Screenshot from the film "Zulmat: Genocide in Kazakhstan"]

The documentary was screened January 30 in Almaty and drew an audience of more than 2,000 viewers. On YouTube, it has had more than 418,000 views so far and garnered more than 7,400 comments.

The film tells how the forced collectivisation of agriculture raged in Kazakhstan in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Starvation struck as Soviet troops seized grain from starving peasants, forced them and nomads onto collective farms, and killed or internally exiled the "kulaks", the more prosperous peasants, whom the regime declared a class enemy.

In "Zulmat", Mamay reveals the facts and the scale of the Kazakh tragedy -- neither of which have ever appeared in a single Soviet textbook.

"More than 3 million people died of starvation," he said in the film. "No war waged by the Kazakhs against foreign invaders took so many lives. This was a genocide in Kazakhstan that was orchestrated by the Bolshevik leaders."

Other sources offer different estimates of the death toll from the famine in Kazakhstan, with numbers ranging from 1.5 to 4 million victims.

More than a third of all Kazakhs died in the famine, turning the survivors into a minority in their own Soviet republic, according to the US historian Sarah Cameron. Thousands of Kazakhs found Soviet conditions so impossible that they fled to impoverished China.

Horror of the 1930s in Kazakhstan

The weight of the suffering landed much harder on the Kazakhs than on the ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan -- by the Kremlin's design, according to scholars.

When food aid came from abroad, Soviet authorities sent it only to ethnic Russian communities in Kazakhstan and steered it away from the Kazakhs, Kaidar Aldajumanov, a senior researcher at the Institute of History and Ethnology in Almaty, said in the film.

Mamay, in his documentary, also cited the Soviet use of air power against Kazakhs who rose up against the regime at that time. The pilots who bombed their own compatriots were declared Heroes of the Soviet Union, the country's highest decoration.

Joseph Stalin's regime collectivised agriculture to destroy private property, Anuar Galiev, a history professor at the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, told Caravanserai.

In addition, "the Soviet authorities were trying to build a Communist world revolution, and to do this they exported grain and livestock ... to finance the construction of defence factories," Galiev said.

Other goals of seizing grain and livestock by force included feeding the cities and the Red Army, even though rural dwellers (including the reviled kulaks) had nothing left for themselves; shattering the pastoral nomadism that many Kazakhs still practiced; and equipping the collective farms that turned peasants and former nomads into apathetic labourers with no profit motive.

The famine of the 1930s drove up the death rate in Soviet regions that grew grain and raised livestock, such as Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the Volga region of Russia, Nadejda Atayeva of Le Mans, France, president of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, told Caravanserai.

"This tragedy occurred because of the inhuman economic policy of the Soviet-era Communists," she said.

"The majority of the information held by the NKVD [the forerunner of the KGB] about these events remains classified," Atayeva added.

Archival materials prove deliberate genocide

The Foreign Ministry, in its February 22 statement, sought to hide the devastating truth.

The famine had natural causes, such as a drought and crop failure, and was compounded by "emergency measures that made things worse", in the Kremlin's delicate phrasing. The Soviet government had enacted emergency relief by 1933, said the Foreign Ministry.

"We are convinced that manipulation of historical facts by using the 'nationalist card' will not succeed in deceiving the peoples of Central Asia, who have a brotherly bond with Russians," added the Foreign Ministry.

Even after the passage of more than 80 years, Russia is trying to conceal the Stalin regime's purposeful creation of the famine, Mamay told Caravanserai.

"Russia is threatening to use archival documents to prove the opposite," he added, calling the Kremlin line on the famine "an outright lie".

"Archival materials stored in Kazakhstan confirm the occurrence of the genocide in Kazakhstan," said Mamay. "However, the Kremlin classified important archival materials."

Those Kremlin-held documents, if exposed, would force Moscow to "admit the greatest crime of the Soviet government", he said.

Russia fears historical responsibility and is trying to shift attention to the individuals raising this sensitive topic, said Atayeva the human rights activist.

"The Russian government is becoming a hostage of its own policy of silence," she said, adding that the policy would only backfire and that "people's desire to learn the truth will only grow".

A democratic society requires the creation of all the conditions enabling a historical and legal evaluation of such events, she said.

"At that point, the nationalist subtext that Russia is using for propaganda purposes will fall away," she said.

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97 Comment(s)

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Feeble arguments, especially concerning how the Kazakhs were intentionally being subjected to "famine" like no one else, as if the Russians living nearby all the while didn't even notice the hunger. Playing with the numbers is astonishing. How morally low should one be to manipulate the number of people who died of starvation like that?

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I have ordered Sarah Cameron's book and will watch Dosym Satpaev's movie tomorrow. You can't hide the truth; it will reveal itself sooner or later. Our declassified data should be enough to prove the genocide.

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Yes, they are not the kind of people who would feel guilty even if found guilty by the court. I am, therefore, happy they are getting cut off from the world and will remain in their vicious, intellectually underdeveloped country. Whatever the Chinese have planned for them will be their punishment for everything they did to Kazakhs and Koreans.

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It didn't happen in other republics because they didn't pose a threat to them! Russians have been afraid of Kazakhs and Ukrainians since the times of their czars. Inshalla, everything is going to change, the truth will shine, and justice will prevail!

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My grandma was Kazakh; she married my politically repressed Uzbek grandpa. Many Kazakhs fled to Uzbekistan to escape hunger at the time; the majority returned a while later, but those who stayed still live there to the present day. Our grandfathers and grandmothers told us about the Holodomor that was raging not only in Ukraine but Central Asia, too; they told us about hungry people eating animal fodder, which caused their bellies to distend, and they died. Their corpses filled the streets; bodies got collected and carried away to be buried in mass graves - they were Uzbek. Our school teacher said her father went home from work down the street late in the evening, then he stumbled in the dark and saw he tripped over a dead man; our elders told us there were many dead people. "Young Kazakh males left behind their families and elders trying to survive and only took 7-8-year-old boys with them," Saltanat Asanova said. "Ten years later, in 1941–1942, these saved boys made up the most draftees in Kazakhstan alone and got sent to the front lines. And how many of those were in other republics?" 292,000 Kazakhs had gone to Russia; 60,000 were from Turkmenistan; 278,000 from Uzbekistan, more than 200,000 frmn Kyrgyzstan; and 12,400 from Tajikistan.

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Russia brings only death and suffering to all peoples, including Russians.

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The Kremlin is afraid of no one and nothing. Volunteers can try for themselves.

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Why then did the Kremlin classify the archives and fail to use the documents in it to prove the famine wasn't intentional?

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Putin's serfs or the Kremlin itself? You are cowards and slaves of the system.

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he is afraid of thruth, everybody is afraid of thruth, he is afraid that whole world will hate him, and run avay from his cooperation

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Hmmm... However, the fact that not all the Soviet republics experienced the Holodomor speaks to how so much depended on local ethnic personnel. The climate in Kyrgyzstan is even worse than that in Kazakhstan, but our ancestors didn't allow major famines because they provided for each other as well as they could. As a result, ethnic minorities procreated just fine during the Soviet period. So, look for the enemy among your own instead of blaming it on a pockmarked and crooked Georgian.

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That's why famine didn't affect Kyrgyz; they didn't have enough food and cattle to snatch. Therefore 4% of Kyrgyz died versus 40-50% (according to some data, 60%) of ethnic Kazakhs.

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The USSR is a criminal country

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Of course Russia is guilty. And were your Kazakh commissars angels? Compensation? Deal. But first, pay Russia back the billions of dollars [Russia] paid for the USSR's debts. And who's going to pay Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Turks, Jews, Hungarians starved to death in Soviet Kazakhstan? Gotta know what you're talking about.

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Are you justifying the Holodomor?

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Your Kremlin should pay for it. [The Kremlin] exiled peoples driving them away from their lands.

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What billions? They are responsible for the debts themselves, for failing to return the LAND LEASE they have taken from USA during WW2. If those sitting in Kremlin had used their heads the country with the richest natural resourses wouldn't be in such a bad state. Churchill used to say: "I THOUGHT I WOULD DIE OF OLD AGE, BUT WHEN RUSSIA WHICH FED THE WHOLE EUROPE WITH BREAD, BEGAN TO BUY GRAIN, I REALIZED THAT I WILL DIE LAUGHING"

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Do you really understand the meaning of the phrase "the USSR's main enemy?"

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great

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Zulmot means darkness

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It was exactly like that; it was directed against the Kazakh population

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A genocide is a genocide! To what extent did they hate Kazakhs to torment them like that? How can one believe Communists after that?

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They needed the land.

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Russia will never recognize the Holodomor for two reasons. First, [Russia] would bear responsibility as the successor to the [Soviet] Union. Second, the Communist party exerts significant influence to this day.

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That is one of the reasons why there so many Russian speakers among Kazakhstan's population. That's genocide of our Kazakh brothers, and that went on in almost every Turkic-speaking republic.

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Against all the Turkic peoples, exactly. But after 1932, according to the census, [we] lost more than two million people. Conversely, there was growth in Uzbekistan and Russia, but Ukraine lost more than nine million. There, the revolutionaries jeered at those responsible for the pogroms against them.

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I want to know the truth.

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The Holodomor was real, my great-grandmother saved all the kids in her whole village from starvation! They remembered her till her last breath. She cooked oats in a large pot :(( Ural province, Kuskul village.

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I heard about the horrors of the Holodomor in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan from eyewitnesses as early as the Soviet times. And I consider it a crime against humanity. However, the problem is that the latest Genocide Convention of 1948 is equivocal. Namely, the USSR forced the removal of killings on the basis of class and social status from the initial draft leaving only racial and religious motives. So, let's not forget that a lot of legal documents are the result of a political compromise and should not be referred to as holy writ. The USSR was guilty as sin, so it took care of getting an indulgence for itself. Otherwise, this convention would not have been signed.

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I've seen for all my life since 1960 that living in Kazakhstan is better than in Russia.

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IRRELEVANT COMMENT. OR HAVE YOU WITNESSED THE FAMINE IN 1932-33?

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The Holodomor is brainwashing the younger generation. Why would Americans care about Kazakhstan? They are simply trying to put their hands on it. And you are still whining. You think it would be better living under the Yanks. But the first thing they will do is make these false scholars shut up. And you all will be squashed by yankee democracy. People, learn to think independently. Read and analyse, don't gobble up everything you get from these "scholars"

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What do you really know about our history? An elder told me personally about these events.

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I watched a program about the famine in Kazakhstan on NTV. They showed the official NKVD order saying "An indigenous population of 500,000 people should be left to work in the mines." What will you say to it? Looking at everything you wrote, you are the one brainwashed, not thinking independently. Or do you think that the people intentionally made up this fact about the death of millions of Kazakhs? Does your conscience allow you to write something like that? I feel sorry and ashamed for you! Learn to use your brain!

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We have our own scientists; we know what and how it happened without Sarah Cameron's book. She covered the documented facts kept in the archives in her country. She showed the Holodomor in Kazakh SSR from the other side. Talking about "learn to think," you would be better off following your advice. Exactly, Kazakhs are searching for themselves and their history. We have lost ourselves, the culture, the traditions, and the LANGUAGE during Soviet time. What happens now is a rebirth of the nation, however pompous it may sound.

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Rossiya oppressed Muslims a lot

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My mother told me in the 70s that all the horses in [her] village were seized, driven into a ditch and shot with machine guns. After that they brought kerosene and soaked carcasses so that hungry Kazakhs couldn't eat. Don't tell me that famine wasn't organised. Recalling the famine she said it turned out Russians couldn't bear starvation.

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Bastards!!! Russia will have to answer for its heinous crimes sooner or later. So many Kazakhs were killed. And before that they annihilated the nation's light and elite. They destroyed Alash's autonomy and its people. [a state that existed on the territory of Kazakhstan in 1917-1918]

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There's a proof of the Holodomor. All the bastards of the time like Goloshchyokin seized everything. He cabled Stalin that the they were treating the locals punishingly. [Filipp Goloshchyokin, First Secretary of the Communist Party in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic (1925-1933)]

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Stepan Bandera was a hero, not a criminal. Respectfully.

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There was no genocide whatsoever

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Evidence of the genocide is abundant everywhere; our grandfathers and grandmothers have never forgotten these Holodomors.

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Don't confuse hunger with the Holodomor [starvation]. When rich folks go on a diet they don't eat too but it has nothing in common with the Holodomor which was a deliberate genocide of the two largest ethnic groups. The USSR and Stalin were criminals.

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Famine is a fact, denying this is foolish. THERE WAS NO GENOCIDE! As well as there was no Holodomor [starvation] in Ukraine they are trying to portray as the genocide, this time of Ukrainians. Hunger was common in the beginning of the 20th century. The US famine in the early 30s is a good example. "We ate whatever was available as we had to change our usual diet. We used to eat bush leaves instead of cabbage. We ate frogs. My mother and my older sister died in a month." (Jack Griffin) In a decade from 1931 to 1940 the USA lost 8,553,000 people because of decreased population growth. And this is just official statistics that is strictly avoided. What's more is population growth dropped in an instant, exactly twofold (!!!) at the beginning of 1931. It plummeted and remained unchanged for ten years precisely. But any competent demographer would tell you such a drastic decrease in population growth in a huge country of 100 million people could only happen as a result of mass deaths. And now tell me, have you ever heard about the GENOCIDE of the American people? No! Because for them this famine is some kind of force majeure precipitated by the Great Depression. But in the USSR it's a genocide, of course! DOUBLE, TRIPLE, TENFOLD AMERICAN STANDARDS MAKE ME SICK ALREADY! ___ All the potshots at the USSR do not hold water and disappear if confronted with facts. Besides, blaming the USSR today is simply vulgar

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You're wrong. In the beginning the Soviet leaders were ignorant. They learned and were taught eventually, so things had started to change for the better. Many Kazakh schools had been closed at the time, there was only one Kazakh school among many Russian schools in [the city of] Karaganda with a population of 500,000 people. So you can see that they tried to get rid of the Kazakh language, customs, and traditions.

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That's true...... By 1958, there were only Kazakh boarding schools left for children from the remote rural areas...... City kids could go only to Russian schools...... I'm from Karaganda......

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Russia is the most criminal country. It has no honour.

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Correct!

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Oh, yes! They are going to any lengths to sow discord. This propaganda from the West is so obvious.

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Yeah, the West is to blame for everything. My great-grandmother said that Orystar [likely Kazakh term for Russians] snatched lands, apartments, cattle, and houses from Kazakhs and gave it to the same onbagan Orystar [likely Kaz. for 'dozens of Russians'].
And if our people made a fuss about it, they got killed like cattle. So, let it be the West, not Orystar - they are worse than the Chinese.

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Kremlin terrorists will never confess unless there's a trial.

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One of the reasons for inciting ethnic hatred is to sow doubts in a multi-ethnic country and destroy an already fragile state.

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Gentlemen! Russia also suffered from famine - my grandmother's three children died of starvation. Jews were raging. They covered themselves under pseudo-Russian surnames. And Jews had seized power in Ukraine. Think.

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The famine did exist indeed. My great-grandmother, born in 1903, and my grandma told me. They showed me the graves of those who died of starvation right in the backyards around our village. I saw a monument that still existed to the Red Army soldiers killed by those who were not willing to have their grain seized. Collectivization was forced upon them. Great-grandmother Evdokia said that they gave away their cows and calves to the collective farm. No one ever saw again those who didn't want to surrender [their property] (they were either forced to be re-settled or just killed). My father showed me the inner side of the fence surrounding the old Military Commissariat - it was peppered with bullets. They shot enemies of Soviet rule. It is so horrendous - God forbid. I am Russian, an Orthodox native of Voronezh Province.
I realize that nearly all Communist Party leaders were kikes. But I think what transpired was divine retribution, a punishment for our sins. We need to understand what we did wrong, why we attracted God's wrath so that it led to the Russian-Japanese [War], WWI, the October Revolution, Civil War, and WWII. I am sure that our ancestors committed endless sins that gave rise to all that.

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No one says there was no famine in modern Russian territory. About 40 million people of all ethnic backgrounds died of starvation throughout the Soviet Union. But the scale and consequences of famine in the Kazakh SSR are incomparable with the consequences for others. Compare this: if two million out of 20 million people died, it is 10% of the population, but for a nation of 6-7 million people (ethnic Kazakhs), the death of three-four million makes 57%. Do you see the difference? Although the genocide was directed against Ukrainians and Kazakhs, and more Ukrainians died of starvation, the percentage in the Kazakh SSR was higher because there were fewer Kazakhs.

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You write that Kazakhstan was a Soviet republic, but put the blame on Russia. Nonsense. Besides, a Georgian [Stalin] ruled the USSR.

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Kazakhstan was forced to join the USSR.

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The Soviet government is responsible. Russia is the Soviets' successor state, and the successor corrects the mistakes.

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Russia is essentially a cannibalistic country. It never admits to its crimes. Therefore its collapse and punishment would be only just.

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Another article by the American ass-kissers... Paid-for propaganda as much as others... A bit later you will feel what "American style freedom" means... Nazarbaev was the last leader raised by the Soviet system you hate so much. Dark days are looming all over the world. However, our (post-Soviet) countries will suffer more. "Thanks" to our modern "liberal" leadership, sold out and intoxicated by this very "American freedom" destabilizing everything within its reach... Wishing all the best to everybody!!!

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Facts are facts. Half of all Kazakhs died of starvation and it was the fault of the Soviet regime, simply because [the regime] seized livestock. As you know Kazakhs didn't do agriculture. Hence they were exterminated. And this is genocide.

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Well, in your opinion America concocts everything. But what are you going to do with the facts in this article? Our grandfathers and grandmothers told us about these things when we were kids. Russia always thought first and foremost about itself. It is always willing to subdue its allies in order to show off its greatness and dominate. It gave others no chance. Before you talk crap about America, admit Russia is no better, if not much worse. [Russia] destroyed the history of the Asian countries to demonstrate their development without the USSR was impossible. Russia should be grateful to the Asian countries for its achievements. It's not just us who depends on you. You depend on us too. Your arrogance would not let you admit it. Don't base your opinion about World War 2 on the information from Russia only. Stop deceiving yourselves thinking you are great and the friendliest people. You don't care about your parents, let alone other nations.

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The Holodomor happened!!! This is modern history, not some facts from the Stone Age. Witnesses stated and corroborated these facts. Who's going to be responsible for that?! No one, I think. But the policy is still being implemented quite successfully to this day; it's just that everybody wears a mask, and is in disguise in sheep's clothing.

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For military and economic crimes (genocide, de-kulakization policy and forced famine of 1918-1944‘s), Aral disaster of 1960-1980‘s, forcing cotton mono-culture Russia has to pay many billions to the nations of Central Asia. We must bring this issue to the Hague tribunal.

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Then you should pay Russia billions for the factories, machinery, universities, schools, for your borders, for the very existence of your people as well as for 19 million Russians and one million Central Asians killed in action during WW2 for you to write this sh.t now. But the common folk in Central Asia are fraternal people. Those like you are responsible for famine and other things. You are looking for excuses, you never work for the good of your countries, you can only cajole everything out of others and make a big stink from abroad.

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What factories? Those factories were built to process raw materials and send them to Russia. Moscow stole everything from Kazakhstan. Destroyed half the people. Now who is making a stink? A billion rubles is not worth one human life. But here we are talking about at least 3 million Kazakhs!!!

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Then we will give you back the lands you destroyed with heptyl and other toxins you poisoned us with, and keep doing so

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Russians, confess! Take the burden of this sin off your shoulders. Otherwise God will make you pay for everything.

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One can't blame every Russian for that. Today there's no one to be responsible for what happened then and the son shall not bear the sins of the father.

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It's about the Russian state, since it is the successor to the USSR and already hints at getting back the areas of land that it allegedly gave as gifts to Kazakhstan.

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While people had been dying of starvation in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, they [the authorities] were carrying out industrialisation. And paid the West with grain instead of feeding their own population. That's a disgraceful crime.

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Obvious filthy propaganda by our "Western partners" is evident here with the naked eye...

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Every elder would tell you about those events without Western partners. [They] had simply suffered much and kept silent. There are very few eyewitnesses still with us today. But we, Kazakhs (I'm not sure about others), knew since we were kids that no breadcrumb should fall on the floor, although everyone lived well already... Nowadays when cakes are thrown in faces, it's such an abomination. So, with or without the West, people know this and it's important to educate our younger generation to make them remember.

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Utter nonsense! Another piece of anti-Soviet bullshit! Learn history, then you will not be fooled by such crap...

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What history? Soviet history? Haha, it's like a [Hans Christian] Andersen fairy tale...

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"After famine in the 30s, which besides the USSR struck the Polish region of Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and Romania" - it's a lie!!! An attempt to hide the essence of the problem. There was no 20s-30s famine in the Polish region of Ukraine, nor in Czechoslovakia, Romania. But in the Soviet part of Ukraine famine had been created intentionally. Millions of people died... That's why it is an official Memorial day in Ukraine supported by the UN!

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There was no Holodomor on the territory of Ukraine that was part of Poland in the 30s.

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(Andrey Eremkin) Reply to Eremkin. You are distorting the facts in order to help the Kremlin "whitewash" [the tragedy]. This is not about Ukrainians as an ethnicity but about denizens of Ukraine of all nationalities in the late 20s - early 30s (Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks...). In my granny's family only two out of eight children survived and later they had gone along with their exiled parents from Ukraine to Ural. This is the tragedy of those generations...

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The US government apologised to Indians long ago and paid them compensations. Also, Indians living on their own lands are entitled to numerous benefits such as employment and education. And [Americans] don't deny the fact of committing genocide unlike Russia. Good for them

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A film about the genocide of Indians in the USA is badly needed. I'm wondering what the reaction of Caravanserai's owners would be. After that genocide they, for example, didn't establish a Union of Iroquois, Apache, Mahican or Cherokee republics. They didn't teach schoolchildren in the Indian languages. They didn't even teach those languages. Ninety percent of Indians died off. And their numbers have never gotten back up. But Kazakhstan is now made up of 70% Kazakhs. The Soviets committed a rather strange genocide. After famine in the 30s, which, by the way, hit not just the USSR but also the Polish region of Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and Romania, they gave Kazakhstan republican status!

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My grandparents fled Karaganda suburbs to Aulie Ata (Taraz) in 1929. Only two families out of 100 made it to the destination, my mother told me. Many people died on the road, they went there on foot having money in their pockets for livestock they were stripped of. They died of malnutrition in that town after a month of hunger. I witnessed my mother cry telling this story.

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There were cases proving the genocide of Kazakhs. They delivered food in the areas where many Russians lived. And left Kazakhs to die.

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My parents told me about the famine in great detail. My mother mentioned the culprits: Stalin, Goloshchekin.

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That was a genocide under the guise of collectivisation

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A terrible genocide

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As far as I understand after reading this article, the Kremlin only denies the nationalist explanation of these tragic events. And the article reads, "the famine of the 1930s drove up the death rate in Soviet regions that grew grain and raised livestock, such as Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the Volga region of Russia". If that was a genocide of certain ethnic groups, how would you explain the famine in the Volga region? This is Russian soil, neither Ukrainian nor Kazakh. A genocide is defined as the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic, religious or social group. The ethnic explanation doesn't work here. It is rather social - the so-called "kulaks", more prosperous peasants [killed or exiled]. But Ukrainians keep calling it the Ukrainian genocide (although there were ethnic Russian and German peasants among them), and now Kazakhs telling the same thing about their people. It would be correct to call it the genocide of peasants opposing collectivisation. And this makes it easy to understand why Ukraine, the Volga region and Kazakhstan also suffered... [Are you trying] to define the civil war as an ethnic genocide? This is not historical. Post factum assigning the roles of victims and persecutors? Propaganda and politisation... [that can easily] drown one in the Karpman drama triangle. (Andrey Eremkin)

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There were two episodes of famine in the Volga region in 1921-22 and in the 1930s. And if information about the drought [in the region] in the 20s had been confirmed, there was no such info about the 30s. The famine in the 30s had been organised intentionally. [The authorities] always sent food aid to the cities and never dispatched food to the rural population just like in the Volga region, namely in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. They're not allowed to talk about that.

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There was also another Holodomor [famine] in the Volga region, Moldova and Ukraine in 1946.

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It is clear (1) this is not about genocide; (2) The son shall not bear the sins of the father; (3) Kazakhs enforced Bolshevist collectivisation themselves , among other things. Question: why are the authors sticking to their telltale ignorance?

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Then don't answer and just shut up

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The Soviet regime is a regime of cannibals

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Russia itself and the USSR are the fruit of genocide. There are more Nazis in Russia than everywhere in Europe. Just give the go-ahead and Russians will go on a killing spree yet again!

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This simulated famine was made especially to destroy Turkish speaking native population. In the memoirs of Alikhotora Soghuniy it has been noted that during same years wheat was left in the fields in the neighboring China, because of surplus crop .

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Creation of the "genocide" myth is under way. Idiocy is going through the roof.

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The truth is bitter. You don't have guts to admit to it and pay for damages.

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We must demand restitution from Russia for this genocide of the Kazakh people, like Israel demanded from Germany.

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Would anyone expect anything different from the offspring of snitches and turnkeys.

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