An Empire Remembered? Collectivization and Colonialism in Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s 'The Silent Steppe'

This chapter considers some of the tensions present in Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Nomad under Stalin, which relates the author’s adolescent experiences of collectivization and repression in early Soviet Kazakhstan. The chapter argues that Shayakhmetov exhibits the same ambivalence about the Soviet project as is common in contemporary Kazakhstan, with a representation of the early USSR as both an imperial space and a postcolonial space.