In 1929 the leaders of the Soviet Union determined that Kazakhstan’s pastoral workforce would go to work on farms. This forced collectivization was framed as a civilizing mission to modernize a population whom many Russians had long viewed as primitive barbarians. Land formerly devoted to grazing was irrigated and turned over to wheat production, with the immediate result that around 90 percent of the country’s livestock died. The subsequent famine caused the deaths of one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan and anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of all ethnic Kazakhs, a human-made
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