Abstract

This article examines the memory of Stalin-era repressions in Kazakhstan through the prism of highly contested victim figures. It focuses on two key episodes most closely associated with regime violence — the famine of the early 1930s and the repression of the national intelligentsia during the Great Terror of 1937–38. The central task is to analyze the dynamics of the ongoing “war of numbers,” tracing its evolution from late Perestroika publications to the present.

First, the authors examine the demographic methodologies employed by scholars and compare them with available archival data. Second, they situate the debate over victim counts within the framework of an evolving national martyrology and shifting memory politics. Finally, at a theoretical level, they argue that the Famine and the Great Terror generate a fundamental epistemological incommensurability, as their respective “scales of catastrophe” perform different symbolic functions within Kazakhstan’s nation-building project and concomitant historical narratives.