This article discusses issues related to the forced migration of the Kazakh population in the early 1930s. The terrible famine that broke out as a result of the forced campaigns of the Soviet government to confiscate the property of the so-called "bays" and harvest agricultural products became the detonator of the mass flight of the population outside of Kazakhstan and their mass death, both along the route and in places of stay.
This tragedy is still little studied due to ideological stereotypes that are firmly planted in the public consciousness. At the present stage, cardinal changes are taking place, expressed in the unification of the efforts of academic communities and government agencies to study and rehabilitate the victims of mass political repressions.
The article attempts to comprehensively analyze the complex of written and oral sources that reveal the causes, circumstances of mass migrations, their directions, the scale and consequences of the tragedy. To show its regional features, we have chosen the Pavlodar Irtysh region, which closely borders the Altai Territory and Western Siberia. The population of this region suffered greatly from the famine. The vast majority were Kazakhs who lived in rural areas and were engaged in nomadic cattle breeding. Their imposition with "brutal" plans for grain procurement, forced transfer to settled life, "dispossession and confiscation" are key markers of the obvious goal of the Bolsheviks, which was to develop repressive tactics to subordinate the national outskirts to the interests of the Soviet totalitarian state.