The rest of the week

I finished typing of a draft of the encyclopedia article. I am going to edit it today and tommorrow and then send it off to the editor. My word count tallied it at exactly 1000 words. It is amazing how much information you can condense into a small space when you do not have any extra room.

I will be posting an entry on the 28th of August in rememberance of the deportation of the Russian-Germans in 1941. The 28th marks the 64th anniversary of the decree ordering the deportation of the Volga Germans from the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Saratov Oblast and Stalingrad Oblast. I have gotten a really good response from the last two deportation posts on the Russian-Koreans and the Kalmyks.

On 1st September I will be blogging about cotton in Uzbekistan. In honor of Uzbekistan's independence day a number of bloggers will be writing in favor of sanctions against the nation's cotton crop. I have written elsewhere here on the horrible conditions of cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan. The state owns the farms and pays those who work on them only a small fraction of the vast sums it earns selling cotton. They are also tied to the land as they were in Soviet times. It also regularly employs child labor on a mass scale during the fall to harvest the cotton crop. If that were not enough the regime is a repressive dictatorship with thousands of political prisoners, many the victims of torture. The poltical-economy of this regime depends upon cotton. I will have more to write on this come the first.