Current Writing Projects

Today I got a rejection from a job I had forgotten I had even applied for. Of course with over a hundred applications sent out in the last two years that is not surprising. I sent one last academic application off on Tuesday. I do not think I will be sending anymore out. I do not like bothering three separate people in three different countries to waste their time and effort to write letters for jobs which I have no real chance. In fact I would probably be better off if I had spent the money I wasted on postage applying to academic jobs at the Casino del Sol/Casino of the Sun, an enterprise of the Pasqua Yaqui nation near Tucson. I certainly would not be any worse off.

So I have resigned myself to engaging in more productive activities than job applications recently. I have been getting a page done a day on my latest book manuscript. It is up to 95 pages now. I am currently finishing up the chapter on the 1960s and the movement by a small group of Russian-German activists to convince the Soviet government to restore the Volga German ASSR. Last night I completed the section on the second Russian-German delegation to Moscow during the summer of 1965 and its two meetings with the Soviet leadership. Like the first delegation earlier that year these meetings did nothing to address the grievances of the Russian-Germans in the USSR.

Currently, I am pretty free to pursue the book manuscript since I have no deadlines until 15 of July 2006. I have a paper due for a conference in Canada in August due then. I have written the paper already and just have to edit it fit their format before I send it off. The conference is on German diasporas and my paper is on the Russian-German diaspora in Kazakhstan. In 1989 there were almost a million ethnic Germans in the Kazakh SSR. In a number of oblasts they constituted over 15% of the population. Karaganda Oblast was over 20% ethnically German. Now the Russian-German population of Kazakhstan is less than 200,000 due to emigration.