Born in 1922 to nomadic Kazakh herdsmen near the Altai mountains, Mukhamet Shayakhmetov lived the traditional life of the steppe until Soviet collectivization shattered it — his father branded a 'kulak' and taken away, leaving a seven-year-old to help his mother and sisters survive. This memoir traces that upheaval and the catastrophic famine that followed.
Where there are no radios, telephones or post, news of new laws travels by word of mouth and can take up to a year to reach distant regions. People living under sweeping policies therefore learn of them as hearsay, unable to check what is official and what the local enforcers have invented.
Branding a family with a name like 'kulak', meaning well-off peasant and class enemy, turned ordinary herders into targets whose property could be seized and who could be sent to labour camps. The label did the work: once applied, a father could be stripped of everything and deported, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves.
A people whose economy depends on moving herds across open grassland cannot simply be fixed onto collective farms; forcing them to settle, then taking their scant food, produced mass famine. More than a quarter of the native population died, and the steppe itself was left emptied and silent.
When the state destroys a family's livelihood, survival can come down to old obligations among relatives, especially in-laws treated with near-sacred respect. A dispossessed mother and children walked thousands of miles living on the charity of kin, and the community's values of hospitality and solidarity outlasted the system meant to replace them.
When a revolution strips authority from established households and gives it to local activists, people who never managed their own affairs end up running everyone else's lives. Lacking any idea what to do with power, they use it erratically, and villagers see redistribution not as justice but as wealth moved overnight from the hardworking to the idle.