The famine was one of the great blanks in the Soviet historiography of Kazakhstan. After the state's independence, the famine became an object of historical research - though still as a national project undertaken at the behest of the state. For some time the famine continued to be explained as an "accident" or a "breach of Leninist principles". As the Soviet period recedes into the past, the famine is now increasingly being interpreted as a consequence of the violent policy of levelling and disciplining pursued by the Stalinist system, which is understood to have been totalitarian. As is the case in Ukraine, Kazakh historians and demographers are now discussing questions relating to the number of victims, the scale of the famine, and the effects of events coded as either a catastrophe or a tragedy. However, this debate is not at the centre of academic discourse.