Abstract

This panel examines the Kazakh Steppe as an enduring site of social and environmental engineering by the Russian Imperial and Soviet states, where the state's desire to tame and transform the steppe to realize its economic and social policy objectives presupposed a series of deeply interconnected interventions into the ecology, physical environment, distribution of ethnic populations, and socio-cultural modes of economic production that traditionally characterized the steppe milieu. Later Soviet drives to exploit the imagined latent potential of the steppe, particularly the Virgin Lands Campaign, existed at the nexus of several different, yet interconnected, processes of imperialism, settler colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and ethnic cleansing, from the late Imperial settlement of Slavic serfs to the depopulation and dispossessions of the 1930-1933 Kazakh Famine to the Stalinist deportation of so-called "enemy nations" and opening of the GULAG penal labor colonies. As such, the Khruschev-era projects explored by Harry and Sylvan's papers must be understood within the context of their early Soviet and Russian Imperial predecessors, as expounded by Jackie's paper.

Jackie’s paper illuminates how Russian Imperial (social-)scientific thinking about climate shaped the state’s attempts to engineer Steppe ecology, the theoretical basis for and experimentations with which informed early Soviet and particularly Stalinist knowledge about environmental engineering, processes which rendered Kazakh pastoralists vulnerable to and ultimately the victim of mass famine and dispossession from their flocks and lands. In the aftermath of the Kazakh famine and the Stalinist deportation and labor colonies’ transformation of steppe land into a site of farming and mining, Sylvan’s paper examines how widespread dissatisfaction with endemic shortages and inequalities on the Virgin Lands, culminating in the 1959 Temirtau Uprising, forced Soviet authorities to dramatically rethink mechanisms of social control in this frontier environment, developing a new framework of relations between ethnically-differentiated urban and rural subregions on the basis of agro-ecological reform. Finally, Harry’s paper examines how parallel processes of forced sedentarization and communization in pastoral Xinjiang prompted tens of thousands of Chinese Kazakhs to resettle in the Soviet Kazakhstan, through both legal and extra-legal processes. This coincided with the revival of roving animal husbandry through “herders’ brigades” in the Virgin Lands areas of the Kazakh SSR, to which leadership in Alma-Ata decided to send migrants from Xinjiang, where they imagined the unique socio-economic climate would best facilitate the arrivals’ inoculation into Soviet society, labor, culture, and personhood.