Can You Get to Socialism by Camel?

Abstract

This chapter examines the initial phase of Soviet rule over the Kazakh steppe, scrutinizing how officials, ethnographers and Kazakhs themselves struggled to fit Kazakhs’ nomadic practices and the Kazakh steppe’s arid environment into a Marxist-Leninist worldview. Initially, Moscow pursued a contradictory approach, seeking to support pastoral nomadism in some realms and weaken it in others. Nonetheless, this chapter finds that there were aspects of Kazakhs’ practice of nomadism that brought this way of life into clear tension with the proposals for more rapid industrialization that began to circulate during this era. By 1928, Moscow’s assault on pastoral nomadism had begun.