Towards a Transnational History of Great Leaps Forward in Pastoral Central Eurasia

he article places the great famine in Kazakhstan (1931-33) in the context of policies implemented by the Stalinist and Maoist governments towards Central Eurasian pastoral populations. After highlighting the factors that caused the famine in Ukraine, the article focuses on the specificities of the famine among the Kazakhs, and its regional distribution within Kazakhstan. It then analyses the role that the same factors could have played in other mainly pastoral regions, both during the 1930s (Kyrgyz ASSR, Outer Mongolia), and during Mao's Great Leap Forward (Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang). The article compares the different cases and investigates their transnational connections.