Little October

Background

Kazakh society in the mid-1920s was organized around a nomadic economy, clan structures, and a stratum of notables known as bais. When Goloshchyokin took charge of the Kazakh party organization in 1925, he offered the diagnosis that this society had not yet experienced the October Revolution. The phrase Little October came from that claim, that Kazakhstan required a revolution of its own.

The policy had three axes: confiscation and redistribution of bai property, sedentarization of nomads, and early collectivization. A decision on the confiscation of bai property and deportation was adopted in 1928, and notables numbering several hundred households lost their property and were deported.

Execution

Two problems compounded each other in execution. One was that the attack on clan structures dismantled the practical framework of livestock management and pasture use. The nomadic economy depended on seasonal movement and cooperation at clan level, so dissolving that organization meant the collapse of production itself.

The other was the manner of sedentarization. Settlements often lacked housing, fodder, and water, and as settlement and collectivization proceeded together livestock died in large numbers under concentrated management. Slaughter and flight across the border ran alongside, and herd numbers fell sharply.

Consequences

Mass famine struck Kazakhstan from 1931 to 1933. The proportion of population lost was the highest of any region in the USSR, and hundreds of thousands moved toward China and Mongolia. The nomadic economy effectively ended in these years, and the Kazakh share of the region's population fell steeply.

Goloshchyokin was transferred out of Kazakhstan in 1933, arrested in 1939, and shot in 1941. Little October is treated in Kazakh historiography as a direct cause of the famine, and how the period is to be defined has continued to be debated in Kazakhstan since the Soviet collapse. The case shows that full collectivization produced destruction on entirely different scales depending on the social structure of the region.