The great hunger: Stalin's famine in Kazakhstan

伟大的饥荒:斯大林在哈萨克斯坦的饥荒

The Documentary Podcast

2025-11-09

49 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Few people outside Kazakhstan know of the famine that destroyed nomadic life in the 1930s, and left more than a third of the population dead or displaced to China and far beyond. The famine, called Asharshylyk in Kazakh, was one of the most deadly man-made famines of the 20th Century; even more so, proportionately, than the much better known Holodomor in Ukraine during the same period. It resulted from the coming of Soviet power, the violent suppression of nomadism and forced settlement into disastrous collective farms. During the Soviet years, no one mentioned the Asharshylyk in public and its history was not at schools or universities. Rose Kudabayeva's grandparents didn't breathe a word to her about the Asharshylyk although they lived through the worst of it, losing several of their children. Now she travels through Kazakhstan trying to fill out the story, meeting archivists, writers, musicians, camel farmers and of course her own relatives.
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单集文稿 ...

  • This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

  • Just to let you know that this edition, The Great Hunger,

  • contains interviews you may find upsetting, including references to cannibalism.

  • I haven't seen my relatives for such a long time.

  • Hello, Tina.

  • Nice to meet you.

  • Welcome, please.

  • Today I'm meeting with two of my aunts, my closest ones, younger sisters with my late father,

  • with my brother, with my cousins, and even my brother-in-law.

  • Welcome back.

  • How was your flight?

  • I hope we will have a really nice evening.

  • And for dinner, this is Khadra.

  • which I was missing so much.

  • That's a horse meat.

  • And we're going to have a traditional Kazakh dish called besh parmak.

  • Besh parmak, we just boil the horse meat, make a broth with onions, carrots, potatoes.

  • We make a sausage with horse meat.

  • And that's the tastiest thing in the world for Kazakhs.

  • My name is Rosa Kudabaeva, and we are in Kazakhstan, where I was born and grew up,