SUMMARY:

Ian Campbell argues that the large-scale resettlement of peasants from Russia’s European provinces to the Kazakh steppe as part of the Stolypin reforms was clearly a policy of settler colonialism and national Russification of the region. Its immediate result, however, was producing a socially and economically mixed society. This hybrid and dynamic arrangement was radically disrupted by genocidal violence unleashed by the imperial authorities against the Kazakhs, in response to the 1916 uprising in the steppe. The combination of the failed state with a readily available nationalizing worldview structured the indiscriminative application of force as intentionally genocidal, to the effect of differentiating the entangled Turgai society into clearly bound national compounds.