The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan

Professor Cameron’s talk examines a neglected episode of Stalinist social engineering, the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, which led to the death of more than 1.5 million people. She finds that through the most violent means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan and forged a new Kazakh national identity. More broadly, she argues that the case of the Kazakh famine overturns several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin.

Sarah Cameron is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell, 2018), which has won four book awards and two honorable mentions.