Country and Minority Flags of Europe
EU Country Profiles & Immigration Info
Minority Languages & Identities in Europe

About the EHL/The Staff/Contact Us
Submit Articles & Content
Online Language Translation
Join our Mailing List
Donate to the EHL
Bookmark the EHL to Favourites!

     
      
     
Click a Flag to Translate

• Ethnic/religious groups of Habsburg Empire
• Historical breakup of Yugoslavia ('91-'09)
• Muslim populations in European countries
• History of Christianization of Europe
• Soviet Union, Communist influence
• Map of European ethnic groups
• Map of Arab and Turkish Rule in Europe
• Religions & ethnic groups in Russia
• Detailed map of French colonization
• Detailed map of British colonization
• Napoleon's conquests & legacy
• Ethnic & religious map of pre-Nazi Poland

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

• Pecs, Hungary: crossroads between
East and West
• Auschwitz and Birkenau
• Poland's resistance to Nazis in pictures
• Stalin's private summer home
• Ravenna: capital of Gothic empire
• Czar Nicholas II's Ukrainian palace
• European traditional cultural costumes
• Inside the Vatican, house of all wealth
• Banknotes/currencies of Europe
• Croatia's Dubrovnik, untarnished gem

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

• Arab Warriors vs. Christian Crusaders
• Poland-Lithuania vs. Teutonic Order
• Nevskiy's Russia vs. German Crusaders
• Ivan the Terrible vs. Muslim Tatars
• Soviet Propaganda: Defeat of Germany  

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

• A Hungarian government perspective on Gypsy/Roma integration
• An analysis of Mussolini's 1938 racialist legislation
• The disastrous effects of Soviet collectivization on Kazakhstan
• Changing meaning of Italian identity under Fascist rule
• Yugoslavia's independent break from East and West
• Stalin's Ethnic Cleansing of Muslim Tatars
• The Galicians: the Celts of Spain
• The modern Macedonian Slavs and Alexander the Great
• An argument for the Romanians' links to ancient Dacians
• Mussolini's Italian death camp for Jews, Slovenes, and Marxists
• The disappeared Jews of Hungary and the Arrow Cross regime
• The Gypsies in history and today, treated as Europe's public enemy
• History of Chechnya versus Russia (1800-today)
• Post-WWII expulsion of 10 million ethnic German civilians
• Ethnic & religious history of Serbs, Croats, & Bosnians
• Breakaway states and independence movements in Europe
• The ancient Germanic Runic alphabet and Runestones
• Teutonic Order and their 800-year legacy in Eastern Europe
• 460-year struggle for Albanian homeland, and 540 for Kosovo
• 2,800-year-old white mummies of China, bringers of Buddhism?
• Alexander the Great's Greek descendents in Pakistan?
• Visual History of Yugoslavia and its breakup (1918-2008)

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

The disastrous human and environmental effects of Soviet
collectivization on Kazakhstan
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)

Print this Article    •    About the Author    •    Citations    •    Bibliography/Sources

See the current effects of the Soviet collectivization and water diversion legacy on Kazakhstan today in pictures at the bottom.

Arguably the most drastic economic policy employed by Marxist-fashioned governments and the Soviet Union was that of agricultural and industrial collectivization. Forcing local Soviets to develop state-controlled farms and industrial construction projects, the Soviet collectivization programs generally had two overarching purposes: the ideological liberation of the Soviet orbit from class antagonisms and the concupiscent parasitism of “kulak” banditry, and the economic attainment of a fiscally self-sufficient Marxist society. Soviet republics endured two major phases of collectivization that yielded both beneficial and catastrophic effects. The Stalin government (1922-53) initiated collectivization projects as a means to cultivate “socialism in one country,” with an industrialized war machine and a well-fed population completely free of the capitalist approach. As the Comintern and NATO plunged into the Cold War, the Khrushchev government (1953-64) reimposed agricultural collectivization with the so-called “Virgin Lands Program” specifically with the intent of freeing the USSR from humiliating dependency on Western capitalist food imports. Soviet collectivization made possible economic and industrial achievements that would otherwise have been impossible. However, the blatant accomplishments of collectivization came at a tremendous price, directly creating some of the most horrendous human and environmental catastrophes of the twentieth century.

In both phases of Soviet collectivization, the people of Kazakhstan endured by far the worst of these disasters, suffering man-made famines and starvation, irreparable environmental desiccation, the eventual transformation of the entire Aral Sea to saline ruin, mass exodus and displacement, and astronomical casualty. Even worse, the second phase of collectivization (the Virgin Lands Campaign) only exacerbated the irrecoverable environmental tragedies of the first phase. These disasters are entirely derived from the legacy of collectivization.1 Despite the Soviets' ideological insistence on the benefits of collectivization programs in Kazakhstan, the Kazakh people experienced far greater suffering and calamity than they profited, and are still struggling to recover from the ecological consequences even today.

Stalin's first phase of Soviet collectivization represents easily the worst physical and environmental nadir of Kazakh history. The collectivization initiative began almost immediately after the final incorporation of the Kazakh tribes and polities into the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) in 1936. The agricultural potential of the fertile and pristine Kazakh steppe was perceived as an invaluable source of tremendous collective output for the state. As in the other, recently “liberated” peoples newly incorporated into the USSR, those Kazakhs that were fully absorbed into Soviet society through forced collectivization would eventually enjoy significant benefits that would have otherwise been impossible for the semi-nomadic Kazakhs, such as theoretically near-universal literacy and employment, the development of urbanized cities and transportation systems, health care, job security, and sustenance. Although the majority of these benefits owe themselves to Soviet policy rather than collectivization itself, these accomplishments must be weighed with the tragic consequences if we are to conclude that collectivization had an overall negative effect on Kazakh society.

Ideological propaganda by the Russian Communist Party and the Kazakh CP emphasized collectivization's undeniable eventual benefits and ignored its disastrous costs. The occurrence of famines or negative consequences of collectivization were even buried and censured until the Glasnost era of the Gorbachev regime of the 1980's.2 Kazakh Communist Party pamphlets espoused that collectivization transformed the Kazakh SSR from a class-stratified backwater of tribal infighting into a socialist paradise. It was reported that the Kazakh SSR went from being a mere 2.8 percent of Imperial Russia's agricultural output to the Soviet Union's breadbasket, thus preventing Moscow from in any way taking advantage of the Kazakh people because of the important role they played in Soviet macroeconomics.3 Collectivization allowed for the construction of the massive Balkash copper works, the Leninogorsk polymetal factory, the Amlaty heavy metal producers, the Chimkent leadworks, and the Kounrad copper mines. The huge Karaganda industrial center was akin to Russia's exemplary Magnetogorsk.4 These new industrial collectives indeed allowed Kazakhs to inject themselves into the Soviet labor system and its social security. Official party organs extolled that collectivization brought the Kazakh working class from 20,000 in 1913 to 2,000,000 upon its completion.5 It went from a tribal, yurt-dwelling equestrian people to the Soviet Union's foremost exporter of copper.6 It was portrayed that the Soviet Union would not dare impose any policy that generated suffering in Central Asia. Rather, the Moscow government was a beneficent supporter of the Kazakhs, showering them with tremendous investment in the interests of their liberation.7 In truth, the Kazakh steppe had been transformed by collectivization into an integral, largely productive, and comparatively quite urbanized socialist republic.

Despite these marked benefits that the first phase of Soviet collectivization obviated in Kazakh society, a number of crucial cultural, political, and environmental factors consigned the Kazakhs to disaster and starvation at the same time. Ultimately, the negative consequences, both long-term and immediate, would far outweigh the triumphs. Stalin's program was firstly troubled by the difficult reality that the majority of the Central Asian SSRs were either barren desert or semiarid terrain, requiring the concomitant construction of massive dams, irrigation projects, and water diversion with an unforeseen or otherwise ignored ecological and human toll. Many Soviet agronomists and experts warned the Soviet government that the Kazakh steppe was completely unfeasible for collectivization because of this topographic problem, but the Party dismissed such admonition.8 In order to irrigate the inhospitable desert for new collective projects, Kazakhstan's Amu Darya and Syr Darya tributaries to the massive Aral Sea were diverted. As a result, the water flowing into the crucial Aral Sea became a trickle unable to even support sea level,9 splitting the sea into two lakes. (The modern consequences of the Aral Sea disaster are covered at the end of this essay). Immediately after the diversion of the rivers, salinity and pesticide runoff from irrigated collective farms made local waters deadly.10 As early as 1950 it was losing noticeable volume and by 1980 had decreased by half.11 From 1956 and 1986 some 225km³ of water had been diverted to irrigate the absurd Kara Kum Canal project in the Turkmen SSR alone.12 Soviet mismanagement, drastic over-irrigation and over-tilling knowingly caused ecological disaster as a means to an end.13 Collectivization now polluted and depleted the drinking water and fish supplies at the same time as collective farms failed to meet basic sustenance needs.14 The environmental and technical improvidence of the Soviet collectivization program only exacerbated the local, human factors contributing to the worst proportionate starvation in Soviet history.

Another major problem for Stalin's collectivization program was the semi-nomadic nature of the Kazakh people who were, overnight, expected to assimilate into an alien socialist ethos. Early on, it was feared that the great contrast between Kazakh culture and Western mores of industry, sedentary farming, centralized authority, and especially the alien Communist ideology would stymie hopes for efficient agricultural output and industrial capacity. The lack of exposure of the Kazakhs to the Marxist worldview inevitably caused them to interpret the Soviet land and livestock seizures of collectivization as the next phase of belligerent Russian imperialism. Kazakhs of the 1930s were not espousing the anti-feudal polemics that most would in the 1950s, especially since they had just emerged from long-sought independence from Russian colonial rule as the Alash Autonomy regime. The appearance of resistance movements and armed revolt across Central Asia, such as that of the reborn Basmaçi, can be seen as an interpretation of the proletarian “liberation” as oppression by many Kazakhs.15 The foreign, intrusive nature of collectivization was emphasized to Kazakhs by the fact that massive ethnic Russian settlement for collectivization efforts relegated the Kazakhs to being a minority in their own country by 1933.16 Steady non-Kazakh settlement resulted in the gradual phasing out of the Kazakh language, such that even as late as 1990 40 percent had only a weak command of Qazaq.17 The lack of a shared ideological and economic agenda between the encroaching Soviet pioneers and the Kazakh tribes made cataclysmic disaster an almost inevitable consequence of collectivization in the Kazakh SSR.

Mass starvation was suffered almost immediately and pervasively across the Kazakh steppe. The conflict between sedentarized collective farming and semi-nomadic animal husbandry contributed significantly to the resulting famine and exodus. Soviet officials forced some 95 percent of the entire semi-nomadic rural population to abandon their property for compulsory relocation to distant state-owned farms by 1933.18 These collectives were improvidently and poorly arranged in order to force the political subjugation of Kazakh bands to the Soviet Union. In many collectives in Kazakhstan, the newly-settled Kazakh families were given very little or even no agricultural equipment, seeds, fertilizer, or beasts of burden.19 The Kazakh people, whose ancient heritage as steppe riders with wandering livestocks had been vanquished in the interests of the Marxist collective, simply had no expertise in the task of settled farming that they were ordered to do with a metaphoric gun pressed against their temples. The Soviets took no consideration in adapting their agricultural methods for the semiarid steppe, instead applying the same methods that they used in the disastrous collectivization campaigns in lush European Ukraine as they did in desolate Asian Kazakhstan. The Soviet collectivization policy was thus more interested in gaining new labor and industrial output than they were in the well-being of the Kazakh people. Risking execution, many Kazakhs refused to go to work in the fields in protest or because they simply did not have adequate supplies to yield basic sustenance during an ever-worsening famine.20

The greatest crisis caused by collectivization that contributed to the mass famine was the Kazakhs' intentional mass slaughtering of cattle and sheep to avoid seizure by Soviet authorities. The official population of registered cattle and sheep dropped from 36,000 to 3,000 from 1929 to 1932 alone, resulting in near civil war, as Kazakhs struggled to find scraps of food.21 Other reports cite 90 percent of livestock being decimated.22 Soviet proletarian “liberation” initiatives, such as the liquidation of “kulaks” and the “bourgeoisie,” were broadly interpreted as truculent, resulting in mass voluntary exodus from the Soviet orbit. 40,000 families were “de-kulakized” (i.e. purged) from 1930-33 alone.23 Families, villages, and nomadic camps disappeared almost overnight due to executions, expulsions, starvation, and especially fleeing. Households declined from 1,233,000 in 1929 to 565,000 in 1936.24 Tens of thousands of Kazakhs and other Central Asians fled Soviet-created starvation and anti-kulak aggression to Chinese warlord states, with most starving to death in transit.25 The Kazakh steppe had been transformed from a vast plain of semi-nomadic riders into a warzone in the name of the socialist collective.

More than 1,500,000 Kazakhs lost their lives due to malnutrition, mismanagement, executions, displacement, and overslaughtering, totaling one-third of the population of the Kazakh SSR26. Another statistic cites that some 40 percent of the total population of 4.12 million Kazakhs died between 1930 and 1939.27 Proportionately to the republic's population, the Kazakh tragedy is by far the worst famine in Soviet history, surpassing the tragedy that the same collectivization policy inflicted on the Ukrainian SSR (the Holodomor) at the exact same timeframe. The disastrous famine was entirely caused by collectivization, as seen by the statistical fact that the agricultural improvements brought by collectivization had no hope of meeting basic need for Kazakh survival. The population of Kazakhs with the nomadic and livestock lifestyle was reduced from 80 percent in 1926 to 27.4 percent in 1930. In the same timeframe, however, the population of Kazakhs successfully producing crop yields – the intent of collectivization – only increased 17 percent.28 When coupled with the death of nearly all of Kazakhstan's livestock, this means that the Kazakh people had been stripped of all means of attaining basic sustenance, and had very little food output from Soviet collectives to feed themselves. Nearly all traditional methods and businesses that may yield food outside the collectivization method, such as animal breeding and independent crop planting, were banned.29 Thus, the Soviet authorities enforcing the collectivization program directly caused the decimation of the Kazakh population.

Collectivization had inflicted an incomprehensible cost on the Kazakh people, as the Kazakh SSR was reshaped into a starving and desolated wasteland. Skulls and bones could be seen littering the collective fields and roads. Cases of cannibalism, even of roadside human carrion, are ingrained in the memory of Kazakhs who suffered the price of the Soviet collectivization policy.30 Even today construction workers accidentally unearth the skeletons of children who starved to death during the Soviet collectivization program in the 1930s.31 The Soviets in Kazakhstan imposed, sustained, and caused the starvation and exodus of millions of citizens of the Kazakh SSR, ignoring the tremendous cost of collectivization in order to achieve the undeniable benefits. Unfortunate for nearly two million Kazakhs, the disastrous consequences of collectivization far outweigh the profits to the Kazakh people.

The second phase of collectivization in Kazakhstan (1950's-60's, full-scale by 1954) was initiated for very different purposes and with very different results than the first phase imposed by Stalin. Premier Nikita Khrushchev sought to invigorate the romanticism of the self-sufficient Russian field peasant, as well as to break the USSR's embarrassing status of dependency upon Western grain imports in order to become an exporting, well-fed Communist paradise by 1980. Yet again the Kazakhs bore the physical and environmental brunt of this collectivization policy far more than any other SSR. The vast and idle lands of the Kazakh steppe were deemed the ideal candidate for a massive new agricultural collectivization project known as the “Virgin Lands Campaign.” The fertile Ukrainian SSR was to be geared towards dairy and meat, the Kazakh SSR to grain and rice, and the Uzbek SSR to cotton exports.32 Although the second phase of collectivization in Kazakhstan would not result in mass famine, exodus, and death, it would further offset the balance between ethnic Kazakhs and Russians in the Kazakh SSR, and tragically inflict almost unparalleled man-made ecological disasters that only exacerbated the calamities of the first program some thirty years earlier.

The Virgin Lands Campaign, like the first collectivization phase, incurred far greater benefits to the Soviet government and to the non-Kazakh pioneers than it profited the Kazakh people. More than six million people from outside of Kazakhstan (300,000 in 1954 alone33) settled in the virgin fields of northern Kazakhstan, igniting already-dormant ethnic conflicts between Kazakhs and Russian settlers that went back to the late Imperial period. Some 12,500 combine tractors and 3,500 self-propelled combines were sent to the new collective farms.34 The Kazakhs were seldom even involved in the Virgin Lands program; they reaped little of what little benefit resulted, but all of the terrible consequences. In fact, the incoming Soviets literally forced the Kazakhs living in the northern virgin lands out of their homes to be relocated for non-Kazakh pioneers to settle.35 Many Kazakh Communist politicians opposed the Russian settlement because they rightly feared that this collectivization program would only further weaken the ethnic Kazakh control of the Kazakh SSR over the more powerful ethnic Russian population.36

The second collectivization campaign yielded even fewer benefits than that of Stalin, and was only an ephemeral agricultural and economic success. Initially, the collective farms in Kazakhstan produced three times as much grain in 1956 as in 1953.37 Moscow quadrupled its investment in the Kazakh SSR, allowing over 37,000,000 hectares to be under corn and grain cultivation by 1962.38 13,000,000 were reported as yield.39 Kazakh party pamphlets celebrated that Khrushchev's collectivization elevated the Kazakh SSR to the honorary and respectable status of a breadbasket. They reported that sixteen million tonnes of grain were exported from Kazakhstan in 1956 alone,40 and that the collectivization campaign resulted in the tripling of the sheep population, a fifty percent increase in cattle, a tripling of meat, a doubling of milk, and an eighty percent increase in eggs, turning “70,000 tonnes of waste into 10,000 million rubles.”41 Propaganda was intentionally hiding the fact that in 1952 the Soviet regime reported an eight billion poon yield when only 5.2 billion poons were harvested.42

The initial success of the Virgin Lands Campaign was bound for inevitable ecological disaster. Khrushchev knowingly dismissed and sacked the admonitions of agronomists who warned that the Kazakh steppe was just as unworkable as it was in the first collectivization program.43 The chairman of the Kazakh Communist Party, Dinmohammad Kunayev, was even derided by Kazakhs during the Virgin Lands collectivization for “gross violation of agro-technology, poor cultivation of the soil and contamination of fields, sowing with poor-quality seed, and loss of grain during harvesting.”44 Like Stalin, the Khrushchev regime cared more for quick results during the tense Cold War than the inevitability of long-term calamity for the Kazakh people. Khrushchev encouraged pioneers and collective farmers to pay more attention to their state-owned farms and the Virgin Lands program than their local plots, 45 thus allowing proven crops to fail at the same time as the doomed Virgin Lands crops fell to ruin. Despite warnings from Soviet experts, authorities imposed poor cultivation methods and refused to practice crucial crop rotation that was so desperately needed in the first collectivization campaign.46 47 The pioneers also tore out huge tracts of vegetation and nutrients to make way for impractical irrigation projects, thus consigning the nutrient-bereft soil to erosion. The Kazakh steppe's powerful winds then tore up what little fertile land remained, and blew them astray in massive dust storms that not only further depleted the remaining nutrients but decimated other collectives across the whole Kazakh SSR. This “dust bowl” phenomenon rendered the “virgin and idle lands” into a barren wasteland, a legacy of the overall disastrous effects of collectivization on the Kazakh people.

The mismanagement and improvidence of the Soviet pioneers – preferring immediate socialism and results at any cost – ended in awful failure that only compounded the Soviets' status as being dependent on Western food imports. By the end of the program, Moscow struggled to avoid burgeoning famine, and was forced to import some 11,000,000 tonnes of grain from capitalist nations, and 2,000,000 from the United States in 1963 alone.48 Dust storms, soil and nutrient depletion, and vegetation removal – all either directly caused or severely exacerbated by Soviet collectivization in Kazakhstan – eventually desolated more than 4,000,000 hectares of fertile land from 1960-65 alone, with more than 12,000,000 hectares rendered useless. The Soviet dream of collectivized socialism had even made it difficult for Kazakh farmers to see the sun at noon because of dust storms caused by over-plowing and over-planting.49 Nitrogen, sulfur, and other crucial soil nutrients were swept away by the dust storms to the point that it may take centuries to recover.50 Worse yet, the complete pilfering of shrubbery and vegetation made the soil worthless for non-collective animal grazing and farming for Kazakhs after independence.51 The Virgin Lands Campaign exacerbated the soil erosion, water depletion, and dust storms that were knowingly created by Stalin's first collectivization campaign in the interests of “socialism in one country.” Both campaigns promised ideological liberation and agricultural cornucopia, but ultimately came at the cost of tremendous environmental ruin and sorrow which endure and worsen today.

The most enduring legacy of Soviet collectivization in Kazakhstan, as well as the most salient proof that collectivization inflicted far greater harm than benefit on the Kazakhs, is the continuing desiccation of the Aral Sea basin in now-independent Kazakhstan. Its conversion from the sixth largest inland body of water to a desolate saline valley is entirely a man-made consequence of collectivization due to the conscious diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya tributaries in the 1930's. The over-irrigation, over-tilling, decimation of vegetation, and brutal dust storms caused by both collectivization campaigns only worsened the desertification of the Aral Sea. Since 1961 the water level has declined with increasing speed from 20 to 80-90 centimeters per year, its volume reduced by 75 percent from 1960 to 1995. The Aral Sea, going from the sixth largest sea to the fourth,52 has even split into two separate lakes, with a third lake presaged for the coming tragic future.53 A massive desert formed out of the former Aral Sea has even been called “Aralkum” (“Aral Sands”). Some parts of the shore are 120km from where they used to be.54 Today, the Aral Sea is a mere 10 percent of its former self, entirely as a consequence of collectivization.55

As a result of the Virgin Lands Campaign especially, dust storms blow up to 100,000,000 tonnes of dust out of the Aral Sea annually, bringing the pesticides, toxins, fertilizers, chemicals, urban wastes, and aerosols from former collectives to decimate the flora, fauna, and crops of today's Kazakh farmers in its wake.56 The vegetation season has been reduced to only 170 days due to the desolation wrought by collectivization, the pasture productivity reduced by half, and meadow productivity cut tenfold. Traces of toxic wastes and pesticides from over-irrigated collectives have been blown from the Aral Sea basin as far away as Greenland and Norway.57 Nearly all of the fish in this once-flourishing sea are now dead due to over 18 percent salinity in 1980, thus depriving this dry and undernourished steppe country from a crucial source of food and private fishing.58 The once-flourishing fishing industry of more than 44,000 tonnes per year has almost vanquished,59 leaving thousands of fishing boats to rust in the sands of the new Aral Desert in apocalypse-like ship graveyards. Previously profitable seaside hotels are now in the middle of the wasteland, leading to bankruptcy and recession in what few market opportunities everyday Kazakhs can exploit. The collectivization program, initially intended to allow once-nomadic Kazakhs to enjoy lifetime work security and sustenance, has relegated many to financial oblivion, poverty, and health crisis.

The pesticides, chemicals, aeolian dust, and toxins spread by dust storms are almost universally believed to be the direct cause of a tremendous prevalence of respiratory maladies and cancers. Toxins and chemicals enter the food chain and thence the Kazakh people. This is believed to be a salient cause of the fact that Kazakhstan has the highest child mortality rate in the ex-USSR, and especially the highest rate of esophageal cancer around the Aral Sea basin due to pesticide inhalation.60 Inordinately high cases of tuberculosis and other diseases are also reported.61 There is a high trace of ailment-causing lead in the water supply because of runoff from once-collectivized industries, factories, and leadworks like Chimkent, which is in turn carried across the country by the dust storms.62 Saparbey Kazahbayev, a Kazakh biologist, personally believes that the reason for his huge esophageal tumor, as well as the death and sickness of so many others are entirely resultant from toxins and pesticides spread adrift by the desiccation and pollution born of the Soviet collectivization legacy.63 For this modern environmental crisis, lugubrious protection efforts by the Nazarbayev government – understandably preferring the oil and gas investment over environmental issues – allows this ecological catastrophe to worsen unchecked.

The long-term unforeseen consequences wrought by collectivization in Central Asia have even been whimsically linked to fears of terrorism and biological warfare. Rebel movements in the breakaway Karakalpakstan autonomous region in Uzbekistan specifically cite their disastrous environmental situation – one entirely caused by collectivization – as an impetus to their revolt against the Uzbek government for independence. Another, more ominous and globally significant concern also owes itself to the enduring legacy of Soviet rule and mismanagement. The small Aral Sea island of Vozrozhdeniye was used by the Soviets as a biological weapons test site for fifty years, and has functioned as a storage site for anthrax, the plague, smallpox, tularemia, and numerous other chemical and biological weapons since the Soviets dumped them there in 1988. With the Aral Sea crisis, the island has increased in size and is now almost touching the ever-receding shoreline. Several researchers and terrorism experts fear that rodents and even dust storms may carry these deadly traces to local human populations or be carried by the wind all across Central Asia and beyond.64 An unforeseen consequence not intended by the Soviets during collectivization, Vozrozhdeniye has been described as a “ticking time bomb” for now-independent Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

It must be acknowledged that the Soviet Union never intended to directly inflict any physical catastrophe on the Soviet republics or the Kazakh people. It must also be readily emphasized that the Soviet collectivization policy eventually contributed to undeniable industrial, political, cultural, and employment achievements, which transformed tribal Kazakhstan into a modern republic and an exporter of anything from steel, to cotton, to Snow Queen® vodka. But the price that the Kazakh people were forced to pay was far too high. Both phases of collectivization have inflicted an indelible legacy of agricultural ruin, economic depression, physical ailment, and environmental catastrophe that far outweigh the benefits of the forced proletarian liberation brought by the Soviet Union. Unfortunate for the Kazakhs, the tragic legacy of calamitous Soviet agro-economic policy did not fall with the Berlin Wall, and it may require centuries to recover.

The changing size of the Aral Sea, a direct resut of Soviet collectivization and water diversion projects

________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.

CITATIONS:

1. Kathleen O. Galvin et al., Fragmentation in Arid and Semi-Arid Landscapes (New York: Springer Press, 2007), 161.
2. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola, A Researcher's Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 119.
3. Dinmohammad Kunayev, “Kazakhstan: Seven-Year Plan for Prosperity,” The Fifteen Soviet Republics Today and Tomorrow 60E (1959): 5.
4. Kunayev 1959, 7.
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Ibid., 11.
7. Ibid., 14.
8. Fitzpatrick et al. 1992, 119.
9. UNEP/GRID-Arendal. “Aral Sea,” United Nations Environmental Programme, http://enrin.grida.no/aral/aralsea/english/arsea/arsea.htm.
10. Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 415.
11. Weiner 2002, 415.
12. Philip P. Micklin, “Desiccation of the Aral Sea: A Water Management Disaster in the Soviet Union,” Science Vol. 241, No. 4870 (1998): 1171.
13. Kerstin Lindahl Kiessling, “Conference on the Aral Sea: Women, Children, Health, amd Environment,” Ambio Vol. 27, No. 7 (1998): 560.
14. Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 478.
15. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 189.
16. Keith Rosten, Once in Kazakhstan: The Snow Leopard Emerges (Bloomington, IN: IUniverse Press, 2005), 64.
17. Saulesh Esenova, “Soviet nationality, identity, and ethnicity in Central Asia: historic narratives and Kazakh ethnic identity,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 22 (2002): 21.
18. Galvin et al. 2007, 161.
19. Conquest 1987, 193.
20. Fitzpatrick and Viola 1992, 119.
21. Hosking 1992, 244.
22. Radio Free Europe, “Kazakhstan: the forgotten famine,” Radio Liberty, http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079304.html.
23. Conquest 1987, 189.
24. Ibid., 190.
25. Rashid Ahmed, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New York, Penguin, 2002), 37.
26. Rashid 2002, 37.
27. Olivier Roy, The New Central Asia: Creation of Nations (London: IB Tauris Publishers, 2008), 88.
28. Conquest 1987, 195.
29. Rashid 2002, 75.
30. Radio Free Europe, “A tragedy Kazakhstan must never forget,” Radio Liberty http://www.rferl.org/content/A_Tragedy_Kazakhstan_Must_Never_Forget/1357455.html.
31. Radio Free Europe, “Kazakhstan: the forgotten famine,” Radio Liberty, http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079304.html.
32. Hosking 1992, 356.
33. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, W.W. Norton/Company, 2004), 263.
34. Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 1995), 232.
35. Martha Brill Olcott, Kazakstan: Unfulfilled Promise (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 70.
36. Michael H. Glantz, Drought Follows the Plow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 143.
37. Hosking 1992, 357.
38. Ibid., 358.
39. Richard Mills, “The formation of the Virgin Lands policy,” Slavic Review Vol. 29, No. 1 (1970): 64.
40. Kunayev 1959, 8.
41. Ibid., 18.
42. Mills 1970, 62.
43. Tom Bissel, Eternal Winter: Lessons of the Aral Sea Disaster (New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2002), 41-56.
44. Olcott 1995, 228.
45. Michael Kort, A Brief History of Russia (New York: Checkmark Books, 2008), 203.
46. Sandra L. Batalden, The Newly Independent States of Eurasia (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997), 36.
47. Hosking 1992, 357.
48. Kort 2008, 204.
49. Glantz 1994, 145.
50. Ibid., 146.
51. Ibid., 147.
52. Earthshots: Satellite Images of Environental Change, “Aral Sea: Central Asia,” United States Geological Service, http://earthshots.usgs.gov/Aral/Aral
53. BBC News, “Aral catastrophe recorded in DNA,” BBC, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3846843.stm
54. Kiessling 1998, 560.
55. Philip Mickin et al., “Reclaiming the Aral Sea,” Scientific American (2008),
    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=reclaiming-the-aral-sea&sc=rss
56. UNEP/GRID-Arendal.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. BBC News.
60. Ibid.
61. Radio Free Europe, “Uzbekistan: Shadowy Group Agitates For 'Free Karakalpakstan,'” Radio Liberty, http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079304.html.
62. Giles Wiggs et al., “The Dynamics and Characteristics of Aeolian Dust...,” The Geographical Journal Vol. 169, No. 2 (2003): 143.
63. BBC News.
64. CNN.com, “Athrax 'time bomb' ticking in Aral Sea, researchers say,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9906/21/anthrax.island.
    

BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:

Batalden, Sandra L. The Newly Independent States of Eurasia. Santa Barbara, CA:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997.

BBC News. “Aral catastrophe recorded in DNA.” BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3846843.stm

Bissell, Tom. Eternal Winter: Lessons of the Aral Sea Disaster. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2002.

CNN.com. “Athrax 'time bomb' ticking in Aral Sea, researchers say.” CNN. http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9906/21/anthrax.island/

Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Earthshots: Satellite Images of Environmental Change. “Aral Sea: Central Asia.” United States Geological Service. http://earthshots.usgs.gov/Aral/Aral

Esenova, Saulesh. “Soviet nationality, identity, and ethnicity in Central Asia: Historic narratives and Kazakh ethnic identity.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 22 (2002): 11-38.

Ferguson, Bill. The Devil and the Disappearing Sea: A True Story About the Aral Sea Catastrophe. Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2005.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Lynne Viola. A Researcher's Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992.

Galvin, Kathleen A., Jim Ellis, Robin S. Reid, Roy H. Behnke, and N. Thompson Hobbs. Fragmentation in Arid and Semi-Arid Landscapes. New York: Springer Press, 2007.

Giles F. S. Wiggs et al. Sarah L. O'hara, Johannah Wegerdt, Joost Van Der Meer, Ian Small, and Richard Hubbard. “The Dynamics and Characteristics of Aeolian Dust in Dryland Central Asia: Possible Impacts on Human Exposure and Respiratory Health in the Aral Sea Basin.” The Geographical Journal Vol. 169, No. 2 (June, 2003): 142-157.

Glantz, Michael H. Drought Follows the Plow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Hosking, Geoffrey. The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Khrushchev, Sergei, Shirley Benson, and William Curti Wohlforth. Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2001.

Kiessling, Kerstin Lindahl. “Conference on the Aral Sea: Women, Children, Health and Environment.” Ambio Vol. 27, No. 7 (November, 1998): 560-564.

Kort, Michael. A Brief History of Russia. New York: Checkmark Books, 2008.

Krech, Shepard, John Robert McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant. Encyclopedia of World Environmental History: A-E. New York: Routeledge Press, 2004.

Kunayev, Dinmohammad. “Kazakhstan: Seven-Year Plan for Prosperity.” The Fifteen Soviet Republics Today and Tomorrow 60E (1959).

Micklin, Philip and Nickolay Aladin. “Reclaiming the Aral Sea.” Scientific American (April, 2008). http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=reclaiming-the-aral-sea&sc=rss

Micklin, Philip P. “Desiccation of the Aral Sea: A Water Management Disaster in the Soviet Union.” Science Vol. 241, No. 4870 (September 2, 1988): 1170-1176.

Mills, Richard. “The formation of the Virgin Lands policy.” Slavic Review Vol. 29, No. 1
(March, 1970): 58-69.

Olcott, Martha Brill. The Kazakhs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 1995.

Olcott, Martha Brill. Kazakhstan: Unfufilled Promise. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002.

Radio Free Europe. “Kazakhstan: the forgotten famine.” Radio Liberty. http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079304.html

Radio Free Europe. “A tragedy Kazakhstan must never forget.” Radio Liberty http://www.rferl.org/content/A_Tragedy_Kazakhstan_Must_Never_Forget/1357455.html

Radio Free Europe. “Uzbekistan: Shadowy Group Agitates For 'Free Karakalpakstan.'”
Radio Liberty. http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079304.html

Rashid, Ahmed. Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Rosten, Keith. Once in Kazakhstan: The Snow Leopard Emerges. Bloomington, IN:
IUniverse Press, 2005.

Roy, Olivier. The New Central Asia: Creation of Nations. London: IB Tauris Publishers, 2008.

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and his Era. New York: W. W. Norton/Company, 2004.

UNEP/GRID-Arendal. “Aral Sea.” United Nations Environmental Programme. http://enrin.grida.no/aral/aralsea/english/arsea/arsea.htm

Weiner, Douglas. A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Weiner, Douglas. Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservatism, and Cultural Revolution in the
Soviet Union. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.