This title begins where 'The Silent Steppe' left off. It is 1945, and Mukhamet has travelled back to his home village in the eastern Kazakhstan steppe. Encountering scenes of desperate poverty, he realises the sacrifices made by local people. His insights portray a personal picture of life under Stalin and his pervading shadow.

"Here is a rare book. It is the first-person story of Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, born into a family of nomadic Kazakh herdsmen in 1922, the year of the consolidation of Soviet rule across his people's vast steppe-land in central Asia, specifically eastern Kazakhstan." "Thus was brought to an end, with dread ideological ruthlessness, a way of life of sanctified interdependence between man and nature. Designated as a kulak, Mukhamet's father was imprisoned as 'an enemy of the people', and his family were stripped of all possessions, including livestock, and ostracised." "Collectivisation of agriculture was forcibly imposed, and famine ensued. In the years 1932-34 alone, well over a million Kazakhs died: more than a quarter of the indigenous population across a territory as great as western Europe. Of all this, the outside world knew - or chose to know - nothing." "Somewhat as Wild Swans laid bare the truth of Mao's China, so The Silent Steppe awakens the reader to the scale of suffering of millions in Soviet central Asia under Stalin." "Shayakhmetov takes his story to his recruitment in the Red Army, his wounding at Stalingrad, and his long trek home as a discharged solider at the age of 21. He is today in his mid-eighties."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and diverse territory. The book then examines how the Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines, leading to a variety of new nation-states – including the Russian Federation – being born. Brigid O'Keeffe explains how and why the Bolsheviks inscribed ethnic difference into the bedrock of the Soviet Union and explores how minority peoples experienced the potential advantages and disadvantages of ethnic politics within the Soviet Union. Ukrainians and Georgians, Jews and Roma, Chechens and Poles, Kazakhs and Uzbeks – these and many other minority groups all distinctively shaped and were shaped by the Soviet and post-Soviet politics of ethnic difference. The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise gives you the historical context necessary to understand contemporary Russia's relationships and conflicts with its 'post-Soviet' neighbors and the wider world beyond.

Robert Kindler's seminal work is a comprehensive and unsettling account of the Soviet campaign to forcefully sedentarize and collectivize the Kazakh clans. Viewing the nomadic life as unproductive, and their lands unused and untilled, Stalin and his inner circle pursued a campaign of violence and subjugation, rather than attempting any dialog or cultural assimilation. The results were catastrophic, as the conflict and an ensuing famine (1931-1933) caused the death of nearly one-third of the Kazakh population. Hundreds of thousands of nomads became refugees and a nomadic culture and social order were essentially destroyed in less than five years. Kindler provides an in-depth analysis of Soviet rule, economic and political motivations, and the role of remote and local Soviet officials and Kazakhs during the crisis. This is the first English-language translation of an important and harrowing history, largely unknown to Western audiences prior to Kindler’s study. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

In the wake of Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, various protagonists grappled to become his successor, but it was not until 1928 that Joseph Stalin emerged as leader of the Russian Marxists’ Bolshevik wing. Surrounded by an increasingly hostile capitalist world, Stalin reasoned that Soviet Russia had to industrialize in order to survive and prosper. But domestic capital was scarce, so the country’s minerals, timber, and grain were sold abroad for hard currency for funding the development of heavy industry. Claiming total control of agricultural management and production, Stalin implemented the collectivization of farming, consolidating small peasant holdings into large collective farms and controlling their output. The program was economically successful, but it came at a high social cost as the state encountered intense resistance, and between 1928 and 1934 collectivization led to the deaths of at least ten million people from starvation and associated diseases. Hungry and Starving elicits the voices of both the culprits and the victims at the centre of this horrific process. Through primary accounts of collectivization as well as the eyewitness observations of ambassadors, reporters, tourists, fellow travellers, Russian emigrés, tsarist officials, aristocrats, scientists, and technical specialists, James Gibson engages the crucial notions and actors in the academic discourse of the period. He finds that the famine lasted longer than is commonly supposed, that it took place on a national rather than a regional scale, and that while the famine was entirely man-made – the result of the ruthless manner in which collectivization was executed and enforced – it was neither deliberate nor ethnically motivated, given that it was not in the Soviet state’s economic or political interest to engage in genocide. Highlighting the experiences of life and death under Stalin’s ruthless regime, Hungry and Starving offers a broader understanding of the Great Soviet Famine.

Russia in World History uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases drawn from the British Empire. Choi Chatterjee analyzes the concepts of nation and empire, selfhood and subjectivity, socialism and capitalism, and revolution and the world order in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In doing so she rethinks many historical narratives that bluntly posit a liberal West against a repressive, authoritarian Russia. Instead Chatterjee argues for a wider perspective which reveals that imperial practices relating to the appropriation of human and natural resources were shared across European empires, both East and West. Incorporating the stories of famous thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Wangari Maathai, Arundhati Roy, among others. This unique interpretation of modern Russia is knitted together from the varied lives and experiences of those individuals who challenged the status quo and promoted a different way of thinking. This is a ground-breaking book with big and provocative ideas about the history of the modern world, and will be vital reading for students of both modern Russian and world history.

The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.