Some historians and scholars describe the famine as a genocide of the Kazakhs perpetrated by the Soviet state. In Kazakhstan, some studies repeated the Soviet explanation of the genocide, terming it as the Goloshchyokin genocide (, ) after Filipp Goloshchyokin to emphasize its man-made nature. Goloshchyokin was the First Secretary of the Communist Party in the Kazakh ASSR and is also known as one of the primary perpetrators of the killing of the Romanov family.