The great hunger: Stalin's famine in Kazakhstan

22:48Then south again into India before setting out for Turkey. It took them 10 whole years to get to Turkey. 10 years, yes. For 10 years they travelled with their yurts. Many times they were shot at when they approached the borders. The Indians shot at them, the Turks shot at them, but some of them survived and passed through. Some of our relatives live now in Istanbul and Ankara. There aren't very many now, around 30 people. They still live across the border. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. Do stay with us after this short break.

23:58to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:14Hello. Hi. Hi. My name is Rose Gudabaiva. We're here to see Andrew Cairns. Oh, yeah. You're expecting me, yeah. I'm going to come over. So it's just this box here. and just the four folders in there. Is that OK? Yes. I've been here for 25 years. You're the first people that have ever asked to actually see them. It took quite a long time to find them, to be honest.

24:41You are listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service and we've come to the Marshall Library of Economics in Cambridge University. I had no idea what would find here in the UK an eyewitness account of the famine in Kazakhstan in the 1930s. The library catalogue says it was found in a cupboard 60 years later. Andrew Cairns was a Canadian. He spent four months in the USSR in 1932, travelling through the Volga region and east into Siberia. The greyish paper with a black bonding, It's written on a typewriter, so old-fashioned way. And we found a map of the USSR, which is just lying inside.

25:34So I presume Andrew Cairns used this map during his travels. First page, the title is Description of a Tour in Western Siberia. Confidential Not for Publication by Andrew Cairns 7th June, 1932

25:59Dear Lloyd, I'm writing this report in the form of a chronological description of what I have seen and heard. I expect when I return to Canada, I shall soon forget what little Russian I know. But never will I forget the Russian equivalent of please give me some bread. or the expression on the faces of the tens to scores of people who made the request at practically every station. Both in the Urals and western Siberia, the amount of begging, obviously not professional begging, but genuine cases of hunger by children, women and men, was simply amazing. Cairns was a grain expert in the Empire Marketing Board in London, sent to report on how the Soviet policy of collective farms was going.

26:48He travelled by rail, visiting small towns and villages, and took notes all the way. He saw at first hand the escape of the Kazakhs out of their ancestral lands. Keynes uses the word Kyrgyzian, as foreigners often did then. His reports are like photographs, coloring in the official files that Zira showed us in the National Archives. Many thousands of Kyrgyzians were traveling into West China and north to Siberia in search of food. At every station I saw hundreds of them, all thin, cold, rag-clad, hungry, and many begging for bread. In Slavgorod, I have photographs of them begging for bread, some getting on their knees and others lying down to do it.

27:44In two days, motoring in one direction from Slavgorod, I saw many small groups of Kyrgyzians camping on the prairie, every group beside a horse which had died, and all eating the meat for food, and drying the skin in the sun to make boots, etc. Many thousands of horses and cattle and other livestock have died. Dr. Schiller, the agricultural attache of the German embassy, came to see me. Dr. Schiller had been in Russia for eight years, and he knew the agricultural situation was very serious, but he could not have imagined that conditions anywhere could be so terrible as in western Siberia and Kazakhstan.

28:29In 1925, he had taken a long trip with camels through the central and southern parts of Kazakhstan, and the plains were thickly dotted everywhere with cattle. A week ago, he had driven by motor over 116 kilometers of good grass, and he did not see one single head of livestock.

28:54That's an absolute truth, what he's talking about here. I didn't know that there were foreigners who witnessed the famine in Kazakhstan. And I didn't know about the existence of such documents. I'll read you a bit more. On our way home from the bazaar, we saw a crowd on the street. We saw a crowd on the street and went to have a look. A woman was sitting in the dust with a small baby at her breasts. And two young children were sitting, crying for food. A woman went by and turned to us and said, You can see such sights all over the Soviet Union. And a number of others spoke up and said, Yes, she's right.

29:42Schiller turned to me and said, I'm very astonished at the way people talk. They do not seem to care who hears them. I have never heard the people talk so much, so bitterly or so openly before. A small boy, on the point of death, was standing, holding up his little shirt, displaying thighs only about three or four inches thick. As Schiller took a photograph of him, two women with tears streaming down their faces said, that is what is going to happen to all of us. Will you give that picture to the newspapers in America so that they will send us food? On the train, we talked to a woman from Karaganda, middle Kazakhstan.

30:32She said that even the last chicken had been collectivized, that the horses on the collective farms had died, and they were still waiting for the government to send them tractors. And in the meantime, their land remained idle. People were eating mice and gophers. the Kyrgyzians were dying in the streets the bazaars and stations faster than the army could bury them we arrived in Tatarsky on the morning of May 25th two Kyrgyzians both as thin as crows in bare feet and only one or two thin rags around their bodies climbed up onto our train and mourned and wailed that they were going to die Then several girls and boys came into the train to beg for bread.

31:24It was a bitter cold morning. A cold wind was blowing, and it was snowing a little. And the hundreds of peasants sitting and lying on the cold, damp ground along the railroad track presented a terrible picture. Sincerely yours, A. Cairns.

31:48I'm trying to look at the past to see the future. Evgeny Jovtis, lawyer, human rights campaigner and public figure, is a native Kazakh. He's lived here all his life. Not all citizens are of Kazakh heritage. Evgeny's Ukrainian Jewish father escaped the Nazis during World War II and found refuge in Kazakhstan, where he met his Russian wife. Yevgeny has a long, wide and deep view of Soviet history and its legacy. First of all, we have to look at the famine in Kazakhstan in a broader context. It was the famine related to the Bolsheviks' policy in the whole Soviet Union, which led to the absolutely tragic consequences, and especially in some parts of the former Soviet Union.

32:49Ukraine, southern Siberia, Ural, Kazakhstan, and North Caucasus. But it was, from my point of view, especially painful for Kazakhstan because of the nomadic culture. It hurts Kazakhs even more comparatively. The famine, the political repressions in the national memory. And the national memory for the nomadic culture means even much more than for the settled culture. These big families, big tribes, they lost their relatives and it does not disappear. It's still kept in the memory, fresh as it happened yesterday in the memory. rather than in certain buildings, in certain monuments and so on. It's an absolutely different perception of the outer world.

33:49My Aul, they were just fleeing, moving from one place to another until about 1960. They looted up their camels with their yurts, so their houses travelled with them. Smaguri Lubaif, journalist and author, never saw the outer world in terms of buildings or monuments. They are from the west of Kazakhstan and headed across Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan into the fierce deserts of the south.

34:24They moved with their own. They moved almost to the border with Afghanistan and found jobs as herders. That is how they survived. I was born there.

34:39We lived in Yurts. For us, the nomadic way of life lasted another 30, 40 years. From an early age, I listened to my parents' stories about the famine, Asharsilik. I was fascinated by those stories, and they stayed in my memory.

35:07The local people, Uzbeks, Turkmen, they were settled people who had crops. They weren't starving. The Kazakhs who had just arrived, they didn't have money to buy bread. Some of them sold their daughters. Some of these girls were eight, some nine, some twelve years old. They were sold to elderly Turkmens, to elderly Uzbeks, for half a sack of flour or bread. Those young girls didn't want to live with these old men. So when they'd had some food and got back their strength, they'd tried to run away. But when they were caught, they were killed. My own parents witnessed everything. There were many such stories.

36:00So many girls and women disappeared, their fate unrecorded, lives that left little trace on the earth. This beautiful song is called Bright Moon in the Windless Night. A young Kazakh woman, Tokzhan, is singing it for us.

36:22Her grandmother Samal and great-grandmother escaped the famine for China. Like many Kazakh women, they made the journey alone as sole survivors. They never came home. Tokzhan grew up a Chinese citizen of Xinjiang. Many thousands of Kazakh families, like hers, are still in China to this day.

36:51In 1961, my parents moved to Almaty. At that time, when we looked through the history books, there was nothing about the famine. But there was nothing about it at all. We were stunned. Because the famine was, to us, the main crime of the Communist Party. That is why they didn't want to talk about it. But we had courage in our hearts, and we started to do our own research.

37:27At that time, people who witnessed the famine and survived were still alive. I traced the route my family and relatives took. I went to find these witnesses to talk to them, to write down what they told me. I talked to so many elderly people. In 1982, I borrowed a yurt from my brother, who is a shepherd, and went up into the mountains. There, I put up this yurt near a spring. I lived in this yurt all alone. There, for three summers, I wrote the first volume of my novel, The Lonely Yurt. The Lonely Yod tells a story of three generations of a Kazakh family, from 1927 to modern times. It is a novel, but the vivid characters and action are drawn from life.

38:23In 1985, the book was ready. But it wasn't published before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It couldn't be published. This novel was the first book about the famine in Soviet literature. and in Kazakh, it was a Jewish world. In 1992, the newly independent Republic of Kazakhstan set up a commission to investigate the Asharshalaq, its causes and consequences. State records were opened and published for the first time. Kazakhs could read at last an open account of what became of their relatives. The Commission estimated that two million people had died of famine or fled from Kazakhstan between 1931 and 1933, almost all of them Kazakhs.

39:18Russian researchers put the figure much lower, and that difference has never been settled. Almost a century on, we don't have a complete picture of that shakalak.

39:33Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, lots of documents in the archive were redacted or burned. Sabit Shildibai is the director of the National State Archive in Almaty. Perhaps some documents were taken to Moscow. We don't really know. Lots of letters, for example, about people dying of hunger. We don't have them. documents related to the number of deaths, exact figures. We don't have. And even now, not all records are open to today's researchers. The KGB keep their documents in their own archives. The KGB archives are closed. To work with their documents, you need special permission. Generally speaking, access to them is restricted.

40:29But to say that we'll get exact figures if we got access to KGB documents, that's not right. Because almost all those documents were redacted. They were changed. We have still a lot of documents which are still classified. One of the key problems of the post-Soviet countries is an existence of post-Soviet institutions which have never been reformed substantially. I'm meaning committee on security or intelligence, law enforcement, prosecutor's offices and judiciary. They're keeping the same institutional memory. They're keeping the same features of the former Soviet institutions, even if there is a new personnel in place who were not born in the Soviet times, but they're following the same patterns.

41:15This is the explanation why something is still classified. It's institutional memory. or the key challenge all the countries of former Soviet Union are facing is the Soviet past. How to get rid of the Soviet past. And when you are looking to this challenge, you should understand what this Soviet past was.

41:42The worst legacy is the fear that was sowed in our souls.

41:50Our people carried the scar of fear for life. My mother died in the 1990s, up until her death. She was telling me that for them, for people who survived the famine, what mattered was to have bread, nothing else. Never drop a crumb of bread on the ground, she'd say.

42:26We are very grateful to you coming here to tell the story of this tragedy. We bow to you and to every listener.

42:44My name is Yahya Tajibakov. I was born in 1959. I'm 67 years old. I live here in Nisaur, and life is good here. It's not bad at all.

43:06Before we left Kazakhstan, we went south and out onto the steppe. There we met Yahya and his family, selling fermented camel's milk. They still make a living from camels, horses and sheep. It's autumn, but still hot and the air is thick with dust.

43:33A herd of horses goes past, grey, brown and black. There are around 50 or 60 camels coming in for milking here. Others are out grazing. People milk them by hand and watch over them. The she-camels that produce milk graze in their own places, while male camels graze separately.

44:04Even people from the cities drink our camel's milk. Yahya's herders have rubbed their faces in scarves against the dust. We are nomadic Kazakhs, but I always lived here. Actually, I was born exactly here, where we are standing right now, in one of the stables of this farm. So I'm a nomad who lives in one place. I was born and brought up here, the son of a shepherd.

44:49When the famine came, my family suffered. My father told us he saw people boiling sheepskins and eating them during the famine. Some people gave away a rug for just one pumpkin. One rug for one pumpkin. And boiling and eating a sheepskin, which is meant for sitting on him.

45:22My mother, she was an orphan. She was left as a baby at the railway station or somewhere like that. Such were the times then. My grandfather adopted her. So Yahya's mother, born in 1933, was one of the newborn infants left at the railway by desperate parents in the hope against hope that someone would find her and take pity. And someone did. Thanks to the kindness of strangers, Yahya's mother lived. My parents saw hard times when they were young.

46:09They saw me turn out fine, though. Granddad didn't, but my father did. And now, thanks God, I have eight daughters and one son. We've brought them all up and doing fine.

46:30Yakhya has 35 grandchildren, or thereabouts. They, like me, like all of us here in Kazakhstan, are here by a fragile thread of chance. Can you take a photo of Zura? Who? Photography. Yes, yes. Can you take a photo of Zura? has one more photograph in her box in the dresser. Underneath the picture of my aunts and uncles who died in the famine as children, there's one of my grandparents with another toddler. That photo, that's my father. And he is a very chubby little boy.

47:18And my aunt says that her parents who lost four kids before my father was born. They were feeding him all the time. That's my father and three girls. Galia, Zwayda, and Zura. That's my mother. And that's Zura when she was young. Each Friday I bake round flat loaves of bread as my mother and grandmother did. It's a custom called Jet Nan, seven breads, and with each piece of bread will remember our ancestors. This Friday I will break my breads to remember those who died in the famine. I want them to know that they are remembered. Kazak custom says that everyone should be able to recite by heart the names of the seven generations who came before them.

48:19I think I can do five. The fifth are my cause, after him Bektimir, after him Gali, after him Bayande, after him Sakha, after him Iskak, after him Alpan, and after him me.

48:46Master Dombra player Bilal Iskakov can recite all seven of his generations and last to play the music they also knew.

48:59Don't imagine that we have only sad music. Kazakhs have cues for the sunny days too, wonderful cues that inspire people to live, cues that support people so they can overcome their difficulties. Not all Kazakh music is sad.

49:22We Kazakhs love life. I personally have had my share of sadness. But we Kazakhs, we love life. We don't have all that much faith in the afterlife. Of course we have our religion, but we love this life, the life we have now.

49:45This queue is about a man riding a camel. It's called Bozengen, riding a camel. Kazakhs always used camels on the road to move from one place to another. He's sitting on the camel, riding it.

50:06You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Rosa Kudabaeva. Our musicians were Bilal Iskakov and Tokzhan. Kavork Malikian played Smoguly Yelubaev. Irina Kara was Zira Tulenova. Kerry Shale played the role of Andrew Cairns and Yahya Agha. Ibrat Safo was Bilal and Vlad Giocescu was Sabit Sheldibay. The producer was Monica Whitlock.

50:44If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.