Abigail Bratcher, The Transformation of the Steppe: Ecological Imperialism and Livestock-Agriculture in Kazakhstan, 1891-1964, PhD dissertation, University fo Chicago, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Abigail Bratcher, The Transformation of the Steppe: Ecological Imperialism and Livestock-Agriculture in Kazakhstan, 1891-1964, PhD dissertation, University fo Chicago, 2025

25Aug25

Excerpt: In 1929, 7,442,000 head of cattle were spread across the vast territory of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. By 1931, the number had dropped to 2,800,000 animals.1 By 1935, only 1,830,000 animals remained, nearly an 80% reduction.2 Over the course of the First Five-Year Plan, Kazakh livestock herds—once the wealth of nomadic pastoralists and the lifeblood of Russian imperial food systems—were on the brink of collapse. Yet decades later, First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party, Dinmukhamed Kunaev would celebrate the restoration of these livestock herds in the republic as the conquering of a “second Virgin Lands [vtoraia tselina].” In the process of this tremendous destruction and resuscitation of animal life, nomadic pastoralism as a traditional mode of Kazakh animal husbandry faded away. In its place stood gigantic fields of grain monocultures, barns with the capacity to shelter hundreds of animals, and Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Caucasian cattlemen that measured their work in feed units per hectare rather than seasonal migrations across ancestral pastures. This dissertation began from a basic, awestruck question: How did this transformation occur—all in less than a century?

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