This paper studies the role of textbook authors when portraying the Kazakhstani famine of 1931-33 in textbooks printed between 1992 and 2021 for the secondary school subject 'The History of Kazakhstan'. Drawing on a multilayered and inter-discursive analysis of seven of these textbooks, and after 10 interviews with curriculum developers and textbook authors, this paper argues that authorship agencies have reflected a level of ambivalence: on the cause(s) of the famine; on their evaluation of it as a tragedy or as a genocide; on the identification of the perpetrators and victims; and the people's revolt against the collectivization. The textbook authors have echoed the narratives from the cautious approach to the famine's commemoration portrayed in state-led nation-building, to those in Kazakh nationalist narratives and the academic history. The results of this paper oppose the general assumption that textbook narratives are merely constructed from 'above' in a non-democratic state such as Kazakhstan.