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

by Sarah Cameron

The Hungry Steppe by University of Maryland historian Sarah Cameron is about the 1930-33 famine in Kazakhstan, caused by the forced collectivization and settlement of herders whose livelihood depended on a nomadic existence tending sheep, cattle and camels. More than 1.5 million people died—a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population—and yet many of us know little about it. “In its staggering human toll, the Kazakh famine was certainly one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime,” Cameron writes. By 1933 over 90% of livestock had also perished, ending a way of life that had lasted some four millennia.