The great hunger: Stalin's famine in Kazakhstan

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Few people outside Kazakhstan know of the famine that destroyed nomadic life in the 1930s, and left more than a third of the population dead or displaced to China and far beyond. The famine, called Asharshylyk in Kazakh, was one of the most deadly man-made famines of the 20th Century; even more so, proportionately, than the much better known Holodomor in Ukraine during the same period. It resulted from the coming of Soviet power, the violent suppression of nomadism and forced settlement into disastrous collective farms. During the Soviet years, no one mentioned the Asharshylyk in public and its history was not at schools or universities. Rose Kudabayeva's grandparents didn't breathe a word to her about the Asharshylyk although they lived through the worst of it, losing several of their children. Now she travels through Kazakhstan trying to fill out the story, meeting archivists, writers, musicians, camel farmers and of course her own relatives.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:09.1	Just to let you know that this edition, The Great Hunger, contains interviews you may find upsetting, including references to cannibalism.
0:22.0	Hi. Hi. Hello. including references to cannibalism. I haven't seen my relatives for such a long time.
0:30.5	Hello, Tina.
0:32.0	Nice to meet you. Welcome, please.
0:35.6	Today I'm meeting with two of my aunts, my closest ones, younger sisters of my late father, with my brother, with my cousins, and even my brother-in-law.
0:47.9	Welcome back. How was your flight?
0:52.5	I hope we will have a really nice evening. I hope we know have really nice evening.
0:56.0	And for dinner, this is Khazer, which I was missing so much, that's a horse meat.
1:06.7	And we're going to have a traditional Kazakh dish called Besparmak.
1:12.1	Bishparmak, we just boil the horse meat, make a broth with onions, carrots, potatoes.
1:20.1	We make a sausage with horse meat.
1:24.4	And that's a tasty thing in the world for Kazakhs.
1:31.4	My name is Rosa Kudabayva, and we are in Kazakhstan, where I was born and grew up,
1:38.7	in pursuit of something that happened here a century ago, that altered the course of our history and that
1:47.0	of every Kazakh family, including my own. It was a famine, a sharsh-lok in Kazakh, one of the most
1:55.8	terrible anywhere in the 20th century, worse even than that in Ukraine in terms of loss of population.
2:04.5	It's very little known in the outside world,
2:07.5	and even in Kazakhstan people don't talk about it much.
2:11.7	My own grandparents who lived through it never said a word.
2:16.5	But my aunt Zura, who is making us all welcome, says she is ready now to show me some photographs.
2:24.0	There in a special box in the dresser, she's never shown me before.
	...

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