Abstract
The purpose of this article is a comparative analysis of the survival practices during the famines of 1932–1933 in Ukraine and 1931–1933 in Kazakhstan. The new materials introduced into the scholarly circulation allowed considering the faminogenic policy in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its goals. The authors’ perspective on the cause-and-effect relationships of the famine in the two republics has identified the specific survival practices of the Ukrainian and Kazakh peoples. The authors focused on the analysis of behavioural reactions of the population in an extreme situation. The famine determined antisocial and destructive phenomena: child abandonment, disintegration of family and kinship ties, cannibalism, and necrophagy. Definitely, on the one hand, this is a traumatic experience, heavily perceived by the modern society; on the other hand, it is family and generic memory – a frame that preserves the story of the famine. The authors believe that the Kazakh–Ukrainian experience of the collective trauma holds the memory of forced change of lifestyle, resettlement, compulsory labour, food catastrophe and mass deaths from hunger. At the same time Kazakhstan became a homeland for kulak families, Ukraine welcomed bai families from the Central Asia and Kazakhstan.