Few noticed when earlier this month city authorities in the Kazakh capital, Astana, quietly replaced a memorial plaque honoring the victims of the deadly famine that ravaged the country in the 1930s. The original inscription referred to the tragedy as a Holodomor, a term that implies a man-made famine and genocide. The new plaque in Astana, however, uses the Russian word, "golod," meaning "famine," a more neutral term that removes the connotation of responsibility. While the move raised few eyebrows at the time, it has started to catch the attention of many and put the spotlight on a long-standing debate over the famine, which killed at least 1.5 million people -- roughly one-third of Kazakhstan's population --marking one of the darkest chapters in the Central Asian nation's history. Over the years, many Kazakh historians, politicians, and activists have called on their government to recognize the famine as a genocide orchestrated by Soviet leader Josef Stalin's regime. But, keen to avoid upsetting Russia -- a close ally and major trading partner -- Kazakhstan has so far resisted such calls. The word Holodomor itself originates from Ukrainian -- combining holod ("hunger") and mor ("death" or "plague") -- and is commonly understood to mean "death by hunger" or "deliberate starvation." Ukrainians interpret it as denoting a policy of extermination carried out during the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine, which is now known internationally as the Holodomor. Unlike Ukraine, which in 2006 officially labeled its Holodomor a deliberate act of extermination by Moscow, Kazakh leaders have consistently described their country's famine as the tragic result of misguided Soviet policies rather than an intentional crime against the Kazakh nation. Now, however, the politics of remembrance embedded in that single word are reverberating in Kazakhstan.