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The Benefits of Marginality: The Great Famine around the Aral Sea, 1930–1934

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2019

Niccolò Pianciola Open the ORCID record for Niccolò Pianciola [Opens in a new window]
Niccolò Pianciola*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China
*
*Corresponding author. Email: niccolopianciola@ln.edu.hk
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Abstract

Based on research in Kazakhstani and Russian archives, this article is a regional study of the 1931–1933 Soviet famine. It compares Soviet policies in the southern and northern “halves” of the Aral Sea region. While the Kazaks in the northern part of the region suffered from the famine, the Karakalpaks in the south did not. The article explains this difference by underscoring the role of the main transportation infrastructure connecting Central Asia to Russia, the Orenburg-Tashkent railway. The railway crossed the northern, Kazak, part of the Aral Sea region and made massive livestock and grain procurements possible, while the absence of any reliable transportation route connecting Karakalpakstan to Soviet industrial centers contributed to shielding the Karakalpaks from the famine. The article also investigates the consequences of the famine for the Aral Sea fishing economy. The famine led to the inversion of the relative economic importance of the northern and southern parts of the sea: if before the famine fishing was concentrated in the former, after the famine it had shifted to the latter. Finally, the article situates the administrative detachment of Karakalpakstan from Kazakstan in 1930 within the context of Stalinist economic policies in Central Asia.

Keywords

StalinismAral SeafamineKazakhsKarakalpaks
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 48 , Special Issue 3: Special Issue on the Soviet Famines of 1930–1933 , May 2020 , pp. 513 - 529
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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