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Abstract

This paper utilizes Soviet archival sources to explore the responses of officials across the Kazakh SSR to a spontaneous mass influx of predominantly Kazakh migrants from China in 1962-1963, which exacerbated already-serious housing and material shortages. Leadership in Alma-Ata incentivized migrants to resettle in the areas of the Virgin Lands Campaign, where they imagined the unique socio-economic organizational structure of the campaign would best facilitate the arrivals’ inoculation into the Soviet workforce, society, culture, and ultimately personhood. This coincided with the revival of roving animal husbandry in the Virgin Lands through “herders’ brigades”, as well as a series of campaigns to induct foreigners and stateless people living in Kazakhstan into Soviet citizenship and provide rural residents with passports. Amidst heated Sino-Soviet geopolitical conflict on the global stage, ethnicity would emerge as a defining factor for the differing treatment of migrants from China at the hands of the Soviet state, as Kazakhs were treated as rightful members of the Soviet nation regardless of their de jure citizenship status and possession (or lack thereof) of passports and legal documents, while Han Chinese migrants were overwhelmingly treated with hostility, subjected to constant and invasive surveillance, and disproportionately excluded from admission into Soviet citizenship.