Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin

Although it mostly was a rather factual account of the author's young life in the 30s and 40s, the simplicity of the narrative really makes it rather powerful. The willful destruction of the nomadic life of the Kazakhs by both forcing them into collective farms and then making famine worse by taking away their meager food supplies was a completely unknown story to me and I was very taken by his telling of it.

"The pattern of our year was dictated by the needs of our herds and flocks", 7 August 2015

This review is from: Silent Steppe (Hardcover)
Until reading this work, I had never thought of how Stalin's policies impinged on the nomadic peoples of Central Asia. In this memoir, written by the son of a traditional Kazakh herding 'aul' (community), we follow his life from childhood in the 20s - a life of migration, of clan solidarity and traditional ways, to Stalin's disastrous enforced collectivisation in the early 30s. With a combination of corruption, ill-management and and drought, there was a mass famine, which the author only survived by the skin of his teeth.
"Three years earlier, my mother had ridden a white horse along this same route, show more sitting astride her silver-edged saddle studded with precious gems, with a child in a travel-cradle fastened to the front of her swaddle, leading a camel by a long rein attached to her left wrist. It was impossible to know what she was thinking now as she traipsed along in a state of semi-starvation."
He writes of being banned from school as the son of a 'kulyk' (wealthy peasant), of homelessness, of the freezing winters ...and at last of the onset of World War 2. We know he went on to do well in his chosen career of teaching, becoming a headmaster, and living into old age (this book was written in early 2000s.)
As another reviewer states, this is a 'flat', factual recounting of events, rather than an emotional or literary work, but informative, covering a place about which we hear little in the West. The introduction tells us that only "a fragment - perhaps some 5% of the stock-rearing population - has to this day survived." show less

There aren't very many books in English that come out of Central Asia, particularly from this period. Mukhamet Shayakhmetov is one of the very few people still alive who are old enough to remember Stalin's Great Terror of the mid-thirties, as well as what life was like for the Kazakhs before the unending march of Soviet progress ended their way of life forever.

Shayakhmetov writes clearly and plainly, without pretensions or self-pity, almost in a journalistic fashion. I learned a lot from his story. History needs more books like this.