Kazakh Collective Farm Village in the 1930s

Unlike the majority of modern studies devoted to the history of the Kazakh aul in the 1930s, this article deals mainly with organizational, economic and socio-cultural aspects of collectivization rather than political ones.The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the process of collective farming in the Kazakh aul.Kazakh collective farm aul in its development experienced the same difficulties as other rural communities in different parts of the Soviet Union in the conditions of forced collectivization.At the same time, Kazakh collective farms had special features in their formation: it was collective farm construction in the region of nomadic and semi-nomadic livestock breeding, transition from nomadism to sedentarization, food collapse in the early 1930s.The economic and cultural turning point led to changes in the everyday life of the Kazakh aul population.The Soviet authorities planted previously unknown agricultural crops among yesterday's nomads, thus trying to eliminate both the traditional way of economic management, perceived as backwardness, and food difficulties.The life of the Kazakh aul was undergoing transformational changes of socio-cultural plan: the role of women in society was changing, young people were moving away from traditionalism, elements of official Soviet, urban and neighboring agricultural cultures were gradually introduced into everyday life.The collective farm system, which was contrary to peasant psychology, did not prove its effectivenessin an attempt to gain some economic stability, collective farmers had to resort to breaking the laws.