Kazakh nomads: the road to socialism

Abstract

The article deals with the history of socio-economic modernization of Kazakhstan in the 1920s-1930s. Based on the methodology of interdisciplinary approach the author has revealed the micro-sketches of the process of forced collectivization and its consequences. The relevance of the proposed study is the need to develop, a platform generally accepted historical concept of the Sovietization of the Kazakh aul, the definition of its regional specificity to understand the causes of such disastrous consequences. The spearhead of the permanent violence in the Kazakh steppe was directed to the eradication of the kin networks of the Kazakh aul and the formation of the Soviet identity of the Kazakh aul. The path to socialism destroyed the structural elements of the social life and traditional culture of the Kazakhs. Adaptation processes of Kazakh people conditioned new rules of Soviet social life, combined with applied survival strategies and practices of conformist behaviour. The content of the article is based on the analysis of adaptation practices of Kazakh nomads on documents and materials from archival fonds. The author shows daily, individual strategies of adaptation and survival of the population, in conditions of implementation of the program of social and economic modernization of the Kazakh aul. The result of author’s research is the analysis of two behavioural levels: fleeing - migrating and adaptation, that became a consequence of economic coercion and destruction of the social layer of «the former». Kazakh auls transferred the network of tribal communications and the system of traditional values to the collective farm, forming unique «Kazakh-style collective farms». Election campaigns to the grass-roots apparatus of the Soviet power became the place of clan battles. The power actively used intra- and inter-clan conflicts for realization of strategic tasks of socialist construction. However, the status ranking of clan structures provoked unethical forms of behaviour such as denunciation, incitement, and the use of compromising materials. The documents have preserved many micro-histories which focus on the fates of individuals and the tragedy of family breakdown because of confiscation, eviction, and divorce. These fragments of oral history reveal the reasons behind the Kazakh aul’s nomadic move. To summarize, the author noted that on the one hand clan traditionality was trying to solidify itself under Sovietism, while on the other hand it was trying to escape from direct conflict by fleeing. However, all the adaptive behavioural levels taken together could not save the nomads from starvation. The «imagined community» of the Kazakhs was destroyed not so much by generic contradictions as by the political will of the Soviet state, for the sake of forming a new Soviet identity, a new Soviet society. On the way to socialism the historical memory was transformed, and the ancestral memory of the Kazakh people was destroyed.