Социальная поляризация казахского аула и классовая кампания советской власти в 1920-е годы

Abstract

This article examines the socio-economic dynamics of the Kazakh aul during the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the first regulatory campaigns launched by the Kazakh Regional Committee (Kazzkraikom), iden-tifying the causes of persistent stratification in rural society throughout the 1920s. It demonstrates that, whereas the shift to the NEP across the Soviet Union was accompanied by the growing importance of commodity–money relations and the emergence of market-based groups (rural hired laborers and affluent proprie-tors), these developments were less pronounced in the Kazakh aul due to the predominance of subsistence pastoralism and limited integration into commodity exchange. The study’s originality lies in treating the re-forms of the 1920s not merely as administrative campaigns but as interventions into systems of intra-communal norms, solidarity, and redistribution. By comparing official materials on household resource en-dowments, party assessments of reform outcomes, and oral testimonies recorded in field notes from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, the article shows that many transformations had limited effects: access to land and hayfields often failed to ensure economic self-reliance in the absence of livestock and implements, while the redistribution of bai property was constrained by the pressure of tradition and fears of losing communal guar-antees. As a result, polarization, marginalization, and pauperization persisted among substantial segments of the aul population until collectivization. The article draws on statistical data from the 1927 agricultural cen-sus, materials from party–Soviet meetings and reporting, as well as oral sources collected in expeditions of the Ch.Ch. Valikhanov Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR and preserved in its Manuscript Collection.