His Mantle Lingering • Adroit Issue 47

An Obit for the first Almata and finalist for the Adroit Prize, in remembrance of the Asharshylyk

I feel the need to start this by saying that I’m in an issue with Richard Siken, oh my god. I will literally never stop being excited about that.

‘His Mantle Lingering’ is for my Ata, and the very origins of my mother’s family (that we can trace). He was initially excited for communism and the end of Imperial Russian Rule, but he lived through the Central Asian Uprising of 1916 in Toshkent as a child. He also survived the man-made famine of the early 20s, and left Soviet Turkistan in the beginnings of the Goloshchyokin Genocide, more commonly known as the Asharshylyk. We have no knowledge of what happened to his eight siblings who remained, or if they have descendants today. He fled alongside one sixth of the entire Kazakh population during a time in which over one third died.

His Mantle Lingering, Or Obit 65 In the Adroit Journal:

Mehmet Almata, my ata, died like myth under an apple tree. He fashioned his own name out of the carvings he carried with him, all the way from Almaty to Turkey. Almaty contains the only wild apple forests, the very origin of the fruit. They were killed off, fought back, torn down. They remain, haunt their own graves, unwieldy as they are to those that claim to tend them. Some things always grow back.

If you want to learn more about the events, Sarah Cameron’s The Hungry Steppe is one of the best English sources there is. James Richter’s article in Cambridge University Press is also fantastic in its scope. There is also an English translation of Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s memoir The Silent Steppe. These sources have been invaluable to me in understanding my family’s history.

But that’s all a lot to go into, so I’m excerpting Wikipedia for you all, which is not a decent source, but it covers it pretty well from what I’ve read. I made sure to check the sources on everything I’ve quoted here.

The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, also known the Goloshchyokin Genocide, or Asharshylyk (Kazakh: Ашаршылық, meaning 'famine' or 'hunger') was a famine during which approximately 1.5 million people died in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. An estimated 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Other research estimates that as many as 2.3 million died. A committee created by the Kazakhstan parliament chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was "a manifestation of the politics of genocide", with 1.75 million victims.

The famine began in the winter of 1930, a full year before the famine in Ukraine, termed the Holodomor, which was at its worst in the years 1931–1933. The famine made Kazakhs a minority in the Kazakh ASSR; it caused the deaths or migration of large numbers of people, and it was not until the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that the Kazakhs became the largest ethnicity group in Kazakhstan again. Before the famine, around 60% of the republic's residents were ethnic Kazakhs, a proportion greatly reduced to around 38% of the population after the famine. The famine is seen by some scholars to belong to the wider history of collectivization in the Soviet Union and part of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. Soviet authorities engaged in repressive policies during the famine such as blacklisting entire districts from trading with other areas and shooting thousands of Kazakhs dead during attempts to flee across the border to China.

One third of Kazakh livestock was confiscated between 1930 and 1931. The livestock was transferred over to Moscow and Leningrad which in the opinion of Niccolò Pianciola shows that Kazakhs were consciously sacrificed to the imperial hierarchy of consumption. Some Kazakhs were expelled from their land to make room for 200,000 "special settlers" and Gulag prisoners, and some of the inadequate food supply in Kazakhstan went to such prisoners and settlers as well. Food aid to the Kazakhs was selectively distributed to eliminate class enemies. Many Kazakhs were denied food aid as local officials considered them unproductive, and food aid was provided to European workers in the country instead. Despite this, the Kazakhs received some measure of emergency food assistance from the state, though much of it did not arrive or was heavily delayed. Soviet officials sent medical personnel into Kazakhstan to inoculate 200,000 Kazakhs from smallpox.

However, Kazakh victims of the famine were widely discriminated against and expelled from virtually every sector of Kazakhstan's society. Soviet authorities referred to Kazakhs in private memos as "two-legged wolves". As famine raged Soviet authorities continued to procure grain from the Kazakhs, with Stalin explicitly advocating for a "repressive track" in the collection process due to procurements having "undergone sharp declines." In this vein within 1932, 32 out of the less than 200 districts in Kazakhstan that did not meet grain production quotas were blacklisted, meaning that they were prohibited from trading with other villages. As Historian Sarah Cameron describes it in an interview with Harvard University's Davis Center, "[in] a strategy explicitly modeled upon a technique that was used against starving Ukrainians, several regions of Kazakhstan were blacklisted. That essentially entraps starving Kazakhs in zones of death where no food could be found." In 1933, Filipp Goloshchyokin was replaced with Levon Mirzoyan from Armenia, who was repressive particularly toward famine refugees and denied food aid to areas run by cadres who asked for more food for their regions using, in the words of Cameron, "teary telegrams"; in one instance under Mirzoyan's rule, a plenipotentiary shoved food aid documents into his pocket and had a wedding celebration instead of transferring them for a whole month while hundreds of Kazakhs starved. Shortly after his arrival, Mirzoyan announced that those who fled or stole grain were 'enemies' of the Soviet Union, and that the republic would take 'severe measures' against them. However, as Cameron notes, this definition could be extended to every starving refugee in the country. With this campaign, Mirzoyan pushed for the use of brutal punishment such as shootings^.

Prominent Kazakh writer Gabit Musirepov reported finding corpses "stacked like firewood" by the roadside in the Turgai district of Kazakhstan. Another first account testified that “It is not rare to meet a Kazakh family, fleeing from who knows where and dragging behind them a sled, on top of which lies the corpse of a child, who died along the way.”

In scholar James Richter's Famine, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Space: Contrasting Echoes of Collectivization in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, published by Cambridge University Press, many testimonies from survivors are documented:

"My first memory is of the moon. It was autumn, cold and we were on the tramp somewhere. Wrapped up, the cart swayed beneath me. A sudden stop, and I saw in the black sky this enormous moon. It was full, round and shone brightly. I lay on my back and couldn’t tear myself from the sight for a long time. Turning over, I could clearly see on the ground some kind of thickets with stretched-out, crooked branches; there were a lot of them on both sides of the road: they were people. Stiff and silent they lay on the ground. … It was ’31 and we were then moving from a ramshackle aul to Turgai."^[51]

Ibragim Khisamutdinov, who lived through the famine as a young boy, saw starving Kazakhs dying in the streets on his way to school. More than 50 years later, he noted, "To this day, I can hear the desperate cries of the dying and their calls for help."

A monument for the famine's victims was constructed in 2017. The Turkic Council has described the famine as a "criminal Stalinist ethnic policy". A genocide remembrance day is commenced on 31 May for the victims of the famine.

Kazakhs who tried to escape were classified as class enemies and shot. The Soviet government also worked to repatriate them back to Soviet territory. This repatriation process could be brutal, as Kazakhs homes were broken into with both refugee and non-refugee Kazakhs being forcibly expelled onto train cars without food, heating, or water. 30% of the refugees died due to epidemics and hunger. Refugees that were repatriated were integrated into collective farms where many were too weak to work, and in a factory within Semipalatinsk half the refugees were fired within a few days with the other half being denied food rations.

Professor K.M. Abzhanov, Director of the Institute of History and Ethnology of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences stated that "One-sixth of the indigenous population left their historical homeland forever."

As the refugees fled the famine, the Soviet government made violent attempts to stop them. In one case, relief dealers placed food in the back of a truck to attract refugees, and then locked the refugees inside the truck and dumped them in the middle of the mountains; the fate of these refugees is unknown. Starting from 1930 onward thousands of Kazakhs were shot dead as they attempted to flee to China, such as in one infamous killing of 18 to 19 Kazakhs by state border guards called the Karatal Affair which not only had killings but also the rape of several women and children occurring in the incident as noted by a doctor who analyzed the event. The flight of refugees was framed by authorities as a progressive occurrence of nomads moving away from their 'primitive' lifestyle. Famine refugees were suspected by OGPU officials of maintaining counterrevolutionary, bai, and kulak 'tendencies', due to some refugees engaging in crime in the republics they arrived in.

In November 1991, the Kazakhstan parliament created a committee, chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev, to investigate the famine and its causes. A year later, the commission reported out that “the magnitude of the tragedy was so monstrous that we can, with full moral authority, designate it as a manifestation of the politics of genocide."

Europeans in Kazakhstan had disproportionate power in the party, which has been argued as a cause of why indigenous nomads suffered the worst part of the collectivization process rather than the European sections of the country. Notably, many scholars have compared the internal colonization of Kazakhs as similar to American policies towards Native Americans such as the Sioux, who were similarly nomads. Niccolò Pianciola argues that the Soviet authorities undertook a campaign of persecution against the nomads in the Kazakhs, believing that the destruction of the 'class' was a worthy sacrifice for the collectivization of Kazakhstan., and that from Lemkin's point of view on genocide all nomads of the Soviet Union were victims of the crime, not just the Kazakhs. However, other nomads within Soviet territory were also Indigenous Turkic or Mongolic Central and North Asian peoples, had similar treatment by the Soviet Union, and discrimination that continues to this day. Kazakhs and other Central Asians are still referred to in Russian sometimes as aziaty, or as Churka or Churki (Russian: Чурка), a racial slur that means "darkie" or "block of wood".

These events carry an immense weight, but make me grateful that we’re here and able to learn about them. My existence is the result of the Almatas. Being of Kazakh ancestry has defined the trajectory of our lives, and shaped the means we had to live them. I don’t have much to say about that now, but I continue to search for the words.

Anyway, I love my family and hope that this obit helps memorialize my ata in a way that shows the value this family has brought to my life. Thank you for reading.