Kazakhstan’s Embassy in USA Holds Virtual Round Table on Nation’s Great Famine of 1930s

Washington D.C., 8 June 2021 – A round table on Remembering Kazakhstan’s Great Famine of the 1930s, known in Kazakh as Asharshylyk, was held online in Washington DC.
The Embassy of Kazakhstan in USA co-hosted the event with the Central Asia Program at the George Washington University (GWU).
The speakers at the round table included Sarah Cameron, Associate Professor in History at the University of Maryland, the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, Peter Rollberg, Associate Dean of the GWU’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Dosym Satpayev, Kazakh political scientist and Director of the Risk Assessment Group, and Marlene Laruelle, Director of the GWU’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Opening the event, Yerzhan Ashikbayev, the Ambassador of Kazakhstan to USA, spoke about the meaning of the Great Famine of 1930s in the history of his country and made a special emphasis on the fact that a strictly scientific approach should dominate the study of this tragedy, without politicizing the issue.
Describing the causes and consequences of Asharshylyk, Sarah Cameron noted that she approached the study of these events as objectively as possible, relying on sources in both the Russian and the Kazakh languages. She also noted the growing interest in the topic of the event within the academic community, reflected in that particular event, which could arguably be the first discussion of the topic in the United States in such a format.
In his turn, Dossym Satpayev elaborated on the publication of Cameron’s book in Kazakh by his private cultural and educational foundation, which seeks to help the the young generation of Kazakhstan to learn more about those tragic pages of its history.