Collectivization in Kazakhstan combined grain and meat procurement with a campaign to settle the nomadic and semi-nomadic population on collective farms. Livestock, the basis of the pastoral economy, collapsed from roughly 40 million head to about 4.5 million between 1928 and 1933 through requisition, forced slaughter and disease. The resulting famine killed between 1.1 and 1.5 million people, most of them ethnic Kazakhs, a loss of roughly a third to two-fifths of the Kazakh population, and drove hundreds of thousands across the borders into China, Mongolia and beyond. Kazakhstan is the only Soviet republic whose titular nationality became a minority in its own territory as a result. The famine is officially commemorated in Kazakhstan, but the state has not sought a genocide determination, and scholars differ over whether the catastrophe was an intended outcome of sedentarization policy or a consequence of it.
Soviet authorities under Filipp Goloshchyokin confiscated livestock and forced nomadic Kazakh pastoralists into sedentary collective farms
The 1926 census counted 3,637,612 Kazakhs; projections for 1930 put the figure nearer 3.9-4.1 million. The 1937 census counted 2,181,520. Scholarly estimates put deaths at 1.3-2.3 million, that is 38-42 per cent of all Kazakhs, and flight abroad and to other Soviet republics at 665,000 to 1.1 million, of whom perhaps 200,000-400,000 never returned.
Werth gives 1.1 to 1.4 million dead of hunger or epidemic disease out of a population decline of 1.7 to 2 million; Cameron's reconstruction gives about 1.5 million, of whom roughly 1.3 million were Kazakhs. The disagreement turns on how flight and unrecorded return migration are separated from mortality in the census gap.
Livestock requisition, the destruction of pastoral households and the punishment of those who resisted sedentarization are documented in republican party and OGPU records used by Cameron and Werth.
Kazakhstan, China, Russia