[5] A committee created by the Kazakhstan parliament[11] chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was "a manifestation of the politics of genocide", with 1.75 million victims.

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.

[14][15][2][9] Some historians describe the famine as legally recognizable as a genocide perpetrated by the Soviet state, under the definition outlined by the United Nations; however, some argue otherwise.

The historical context was shaped by a complex interplay of demographic changes and traditional nomadic pastoralism practices in Central Asia, particularly centered around a meat and dairy based diet.

The nomadic lifestyle of Kazakhs involved the seasonal movement of herds across vast expanses of steppe as a response to the unpredictable availability of grazing resources, driven by the region's harsh climate and varied terrain.

[19] The demographic landscape also played a crucial role, as the population in the region was marked by a substantial number of nomadic Kazakh herders, contributing to the reliance on livestock for sustenance.

[21] This alteration in land use and economic activities disrupted the delicate equilibrium that had been maintained by Kazakh pastoralists for millennia, resulting in decreased nomadic mobility and increased consumption of grain.

The situation was exacerbated by the policy of Prodrazvyorstka adopted by the Bolshevik government, coupled with the already challenging effects of severe intermittent drought, involved requisitioning grain from rural areas to support urban populations and export which led to the Kazakh famine of 1919–1922, with an estimated 400,000 to 2 million people dying in the event.

[24] Signs of the Kazakh famine began emerging in the late 1920s, with the factor being the jut from 1927 to 1928, which was a period of extreme cold in which cattle were starved and were unable to graze.

[31] Kazakhstan's livestock and grain were largely acquired between 1929 and 1932, with one-third of the republic's cereals being requisitioned and more than 1 million tons confiscated in 1930 to provide food for the cities.

[31] 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.

[15] 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.

[46] 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.

"[53]—Filipp Goloshchyokin, First Secretary of the Kazakh Regional Committee of the Communist Party Due to starvation, between 665,000 and 1.1 million[16] Kazakhs fled the famine with their cattle outside Kazakhstan to China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and the Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Russia in search of food and employment in the new industrialization sites of Western Siberia.

Abzhanov, Director of the Institute of History and Ethnology[58] of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences stated that "One-sixth of the indigenous population left their historical homeland forever.

Swiss reporter Ella Maillart, who traveled through Soviet Central Asia and China in the early 1930s, witnessed and wrote of viewing the firsthand effects of the repatriation campaign:[2]In every wagon carrying merchandise there were Kazakh families wearing rags.

[63]One report from an officer in Siberia reads: "When one thinks of the extreme distress in which Kazakhs live here with us, one can easily imagine that things in Kazakhstan are much worse.

[67]Two thirds of the Kazakh survivors of the famine were successfully sedentarized due to the 80% reduction of their herds, the impossibility of resuming pastoral activity in the immediate post-famine environment, and the repatriation and resettlement program undertaken by Soviet authorities.

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.

[88]Historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft believes that the high expectations of central planners were sufficient to demonstrate their ignorance of the ultimate consequences of their actions.

[26] However Historian Sarah Cameron, author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, stated in an interview with Harvard University's Davis Center that "Moscow's sweeping program of state-led transformation clearly anticipates the cultural disruption of Kazakh society.

[89] Historian Isabelle Ohayon stated she found "no evidence nor motive for the deliberate starvation" of the Kazakh population, and concludes that the famine did not constitute a genocide under international juridical standards, and therefore labelling it was an "empty exercise".

[2][72] Maya Mehra concludes that the famine was caused by intentional act of violence on part of Stalin and the Soviet state, but it was not in the legal sense a genocide.

[94][93][91] Instead of a broad definition that would have included Soviet crimes, Applebaum writes that genocide "came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust.

"[66] Historian Robert Kindler disagrees with calling the famine a genocide, commenting that doing so masks the culpability of lower-level cadres who were locally rooted among the Kazakhs themselves.

[96] In Famine, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Space: Contrasting Echoes of Collectivization in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, James Richter highlights:The link between the genocide argument and the use of Kazakh language was made explicit by the historian Kaidar Aldazhumanov in an interview with Radio Azattyq in 2014.

They do not want to know anything about research in the Kazakh language, nor do Russian researchers or Russian speakers living in Kazakhstan"[49]Historian Isabelle Ohayon, among other scholars, noted the importance of oral histories in Kazakh culture,[73] and wrote of disappearing famine accounts and lack of public narrative and awareness:First, the bearers of the memory of this story—the witnesses, the actors, the victims of the famine—traversed the Soviet century in obscurity by virtue of the ideological ban on discussing this tragic chapter in the collectivization campaign, but also due to the hiatus generated by the powerful phenomenon of acculturation, or even deculturation, after the death of a third of the nomadic population.

Abruptly introduced into Soviet modernity--with its new forms of authority and its obsession with written records and bureaucracy--surviving elders no longer found conditions in which they could relate their experiences.

[2]It is also important to note that Kazakhstan's government maintains close relations with Russia today,[97] which contributes to its official documentation and statements on the famine as genocide.