In anticipation to releasing my interview with Sarah Cameron on the 1930-33 famine in Kazakhstan, I decided to make a partial transcript of the interview to pique everyone’s interest. I hope to provide these partial transcripts more often since complete transcripts of 50-minute interviews are costly to transcribe and time consuming to edit. But partial transcriptions of some of the key parts of the conversation are much more manageable. If you do want to see more, then support them by becoming a patron of the SRB Podcast. This abridged version of the interview has been edited for clarity. Look out for the full audio version soon. Sarah Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Russia and Soviet Union history at the University of Maryland. She’s the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press. Your new book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, is one of the few studies on the famine in Kazakhstan. Why has the Kazakh famine been so marginalized in the history of Stalinism? It’s something I’ve thought a lot about as I worked on the project. How could such a big event, in which a million and a half people died, just get lost from our understanding of Soviet history? I think it boils down to a couple of reasons. First is, we tend to think, at least in the US and the West, of Soviet history as European history. To a large extent, Soviet history and the history of Stalinism has yet to incorporate the Soviet Union’s Asian half. And I think the Kazakh famine is just one illustration of how we’ve neglected the eastern half of the Soviet Union. If we look at the history of the Soviet East, I think we can find examples of other events that are really missing that might challenge our understanding of what Soviet history and what Stalinism was. I think another reason is that in the West, famine and collectivization has become closely associated with the Ukrainian famine, in which roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians died. This has happened, in large part, due to the efforts of the Ukrainian diaspora. There has been a very long-running and polemical debate surrounding the Ukrainian famine over the question of whether Stalin specifically used famine to target Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Because of the very polemical nature of this debate in the West, the famine that occurred in the Soviet Union during collectivization has come to be seen as an exclusively Ukrainian event. Famine, of course, afflicted Kazakhstan and other parts of the Russian heartland, where many Russian peasants died. I also think what’s happened is that some Ukrainians have sought to marginalize the fact that famine occurred in other parts of the Soviet Union in part to bolster their claims that this was an event directed specifically against Ukrainians. Therefore, the broader story, in a sense, has been lost. The third reason is a broader world historical one. And that is the way that the stories of nomadic peoples have been marginalized. The Kazakhs were pastoral nomads prior to the famine. It’s, of course, much more difficult to tell the stories of nomadic peoples. They leave fewer stories in the written record, and the stories that we do have