Diabolus ex Machina: Complexity, Nomadic Resistance, and the Machinery of Forced Migration in Kazakhstan

Abstract

Organizations may perceive disorder in their environment as a threat which can impede the attainment of desired goals. In such a situation, organizations may become single minded, obsessed, and rely on brute force to attempt to bend the external environment to their will. These efforts may be enabled by perceived power imbalances between the organization and other actors in the environment, but they may also be stymied by the complexity of other organizations in the institutional field. This paper examines such an example in Soviet Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1933, when the All Union Communist Party pursued a policy of sedentarization of the nomadic people. Forcibly migrating nomads to collective farms under a brutal policy of repression, the Soviet bureaucracy at all levels saw no policy as off-limits to achieving its goals but continued to run up against resistance from the complex organizational forms inherent in Kazakh nomadism. Using archival documents, testimonies from Kazakhs, and arrest records from this time period, I show just exactly how the Soviet apparatus pulled the devil from the machine and how, ultimately, the machines were doomed to failure. However, the human cost of forced migration continues to linger.