Silent Steppe is, I think, a valuable source for our purposes because Shayakhmetov is so interested in delineating the effects of collectivization and cultural destruction down to the level of interactions between individual family members. During his description of the solo journey to the aul where he grew up in Chapter 17, Shayakhmetov recounts a particular uncle’s emotional reaction to the loss of a way of life: “Apart from consistently not having enough to eat, what drove my uncle to despair was the way communism had undermined the foundations of family life” (Shayakhmetov 2006, 170). A central question for Shayakhmetov is how communism destabilized familial connections as well as any number of other preexisting cultural traditions. I think it is important to ask, how does Shayakhmetov narrate his conclusions about the causality of this cultural destruction? And do we find that his conclusions sufficiently account for the changes he describes?
In Chapter 17, “Hunger Comes to the Aul,” he describes his mother and a small set of his relatives who they rely on after escaping the labor camp as the last holdouts of traditional Kazakh virtues. “‘Never stop caring for your relatives still on this earth!’” his mother says to him in the depths of the famine, and consequently he says, “experiencing town life and food shortages, cramped living conditions and what it really felt like to be in dire need had made me think long and hard… and I promised to myself there and then that when I grew up, I would do my duty as far as my family was concerned, and help those who were in need” (154). This notion of familial generosity appears to be one of his main takeaways from the purges and the famine. He continues to say that this sense of duty informed his actions for the rest of his life.
But mostly, these chapters present a landscape of unfulfilled duty and collapsing tradition. He describes the famine as “possibly the first time in the history of the Kazakh people that two families living under the same roof—and, what’s more, related through marriage—did not eat together” (162). Shayakhmetov describes one in-law, after having secured a position as a minor official: “He did not even seem to notice me. I sensed this at once because I recalled how affectionate he used to be with me” (169). Essentially, hospitality and familial support are refused over and over again in Chapter 17. And when a gift is given to a visiting relative there is a sense of shame at its inadequacy: “Other people there asked for his forgiveness and then lowered their eyes, somber and ashamed” (159). But who, according to Shayakhmetov, is at fault for this collapse of solidarity?
He tells us briefly how the famine was exacerbated by rapid collectivization, how rations were not sufficient, and how policies like the dairy cow distribution had adverse effects on the food supply. It is, of course, ironic that in this time of enforced collectivization people simply stop sharing with each other, but is extreme food shortage enough to account for the radical collapse of traditional relations? And why do Soviet officials seem to be distant and passive in Shayakhmetov’s famine narrative? Is he placing some measure of fault on the people themselves whose reaction to shortage is to cut back on generosity which, according to Shayakhmetov, had been a bedrock of Kazakh cultural understandings before collectivization disrupted traditional ways of life?
“… how does Shayakhmetov narrate his conclusions about the causality of this cultural destruction? And do we find that his conclusions sufficiently account for the changes he describes?”
Pages 184-185 and 179-181 and 169 would be good to look at as instances where he speculates on the degeneration. Financial strain is an obvious answer that he presents every now and then. I’ll point us toward pages 174-175, which contains a kernel of explanation that for the most part is what he repeats in other earlier instances of our reading.
“The men in the Mukazhanov household were less enthusiastic about my arrival than the men had been. Was it because men are naturally more reticent, or because they were afraid of having ties with a kulak’s family? I can’t say.” (174-175)
Fear of association with kulaks is a real threat, as his family’s eviction on page 161 shows, but Shayakhmetov expresses that he never quite knows for sure why each individual chooses to abandon tradition. Generally, it’s just desperation in very pressing times that makes it hard to support even oneself, let alone others. In other cases, it’s youth who give up the old ways, perhaps from having so little experience and connection with them. Shayakhmetov can only speculate.
I think that this question is really interesting in light of Shayakhmetov’s aside on page 146-7, starting with:
“Writing these words now, so many years later, I find myself thinking long and hard about the past. For years our ancestors lived under a tribal system where relationships were based on mutual help: they were convinced of the enduring worth of their centuries-old principles and perhaps as a consequence used to regard any innovation with suspicion, fear and even disapproval.”
and ending with
“The way we Kazakh’s have always clung to the past has proved disastrous for our people”
In this moment, Shayakhmetov gives the example of his cousin Aiken, in which Aiken would have better saved his family from starvation had he stayed in a Soviet workforce instead of fleeing back to the aul near the end of ihis sentenced. I think that this example and the comments on Kazakh culture could be really interesting in relating to the question of how and why the Kazakh cultures and traditions died out (among the reasons, collectivization, famine, fear of association with Kulaks, as y’all have been pointing out). Is this part of the memoir evidence that Shayakhmetov is fine with some traditions dying out, or at least that he believes it could have done so in a way that more suitably adapted to the political environment of the time?
I was also interested in the possible insufficiency of the material explanation that Shayakhmetov provides for the changes in relations. The sharing of resources that happens during the famine seems to support Shayakhmetov’s idea that the reason why people aren’t sharing is because of material conditions, as on p159 when Kairankazhi gives Toimbai-ata some grain to hold him over, or on p155 when Kairankazhi takes in Shayakhmetov and his family. I would also say that a possible reason for Shayakhmetov emphasizing the material conditions in explaining a cultural change is the Soviet culture which Shayakhmetov enters into. As we talked about last class, Shayakhmetov benefits to some extent from the Soviet system, going on to become an education official. Becoming an official would seem to require “buying in” to Soviet ideology at least to some degree, and as art of that he probably received an official Marxist-Leninist education at some point.
The question of the distance of the Soviet officials is an interesting one, it may be that the distance of the officials from the memoir is a reflection of the distance of the officials from Kazakhstan. As an empire, the Soviet Union was administered from Moscow. The physical distance of the officials from Kazakhstan meant that the activists who Shayakhmetov talks about were probably the most common interaction between Kazakhs and representatives of the Soviet State. I also found some of what Shayakhmetov wrote about the activists in the chapters for today’s reading interesting, like on p124 where Shayakhmetov writes “They [the Kazakh women] eventually decided that the Russian families had such a lot of valuables with them because the Russian activists were not such determined robbers as the Kazakh officials: they might be infidels, but they were still more sympathetic and kind hearted.” This quote seems to suggest that the activists were most responsible for carrying out Soviet policy and that activists in different areas treated the people differently.
I think the decreased role of Soviet officials you point to derives from the way Shayakhmetov can impose a historical narrative on his memoir. He notes the times when the state benefited the Kazakh people, such as permitting collective farm workers to take a dairy cow. (156-7) But in general, I think Shayakhmetov is largely invested in displaying how the structures of the state caused radical changes to the Kazakh traditions he was used to observing on the individual and familial level. The last paragraphs of Chapter 18 demonstrate a searing indictment of the policies of the USSR. He notes that “our party leaders were more concerned about receiving accolades from Party delegates than they were about the deaths of working people” and attributes this to its desire to “live up to the slogans.” (189) He reaches this conclusion not through his childhood understanding of the issue in the 1930s, but from “the archival documents” after the fact. (189)