Update

I noticed that somebody left a rather thoughtful comment regarding my Hitler vs. Stalin post. It was posted under my post on other blogs. Oh well, at least one person read this blog so its inspired me to add a few more posts.

The good news is that Vladimir, Katya, Pavel and Oksana German all got political asylum. Given the discriminatory nature of US asylum law I can only attribute it to divine intervention. It is some powerful miracle to make a federal judge see the truth.

The bad news is I am still unemployed and the academic hiring season is over. I am going to go out to Arizona and live on my uncle's ranch until I can think of a new career option. One that does not involve working at a coffee shop, I hope. I am trying to take full advantage of the LOC while I am still in the DC area. Out at my uncle's place it is an hour drive to Tuscon.

I have a few writing projects going on. The big one, I have 42 pages written is to write a popular history of the Russian-Germans under Soviet rule. I am going to call it Catherine's Grandchildren I decided today. I had originally thought prehaps Splinters of the Fatherland, but very quickly dismissed it. The term Fatherland unfortunately has taken on too much political baggage. It is hard enough to get any sympathy for people descended from German speakers as it is. Even though the Soviet government admitted that the charges of treason against the Russian-Germans were false in 1964 I still encountered Americans, Canadians and Israelis that still took the old Stalinist line on the internet in the 1990s. Actually I encountered a lot of them on usenet. I no longer bother to pay attention to such people. It just makes my borderline bloodpressure go over to the wrong side.

Other writing projects are a few encyclopedia articles for a project on modern slavery. They are due in October. I also just got accepted with some support (meals and lodging) for a conference on cotton in Central Asia at my alma mata, SOAS. The papers will be published in a special topic issue of Central Asian Survey. Now I need to go to the LOC and find out enough to write more than the 500 word abstract I submitted. That paper is due soon, September.

All right I am going to try and address my one comment in my next post.