Simple Pleasures - Walking

I walk to work and back everyday. One reason is because I enjoy it. An even bigger reason is that I would rather be waterboarded than ride on another marshrutka. They are indeed that uncomfortable. Time spent walking is never time wasted. There are many, many hours in my life that I feel that I have squandered. But, none of those hours were spent walking.

Life in the Slow Lane

The university is pretty much deserted now in the few weeks before classes start again. Things are pretty slow. I do not have any pressing article deadlines right now. I have been plodding along on one article dealing with issues of race and migration with regards to the Russian-Germans, but other than that I do not have much work to do until classes start. So despite not getting out of Bishkek this summer I had a fairly enjoyable summer. One key lesson I learned early on in Arivaca is that happiness is about enjoying what you have and where you are in the present.

Election Results

Bakiev, the incumbent president won yesterday's elections. The Internet has a lot of stories of complaints about the election by opposition leaders. But, none of the Kyrgyz people I actually deal with on a day to day basis seem to care that much about the elections. I think political apathy is a lot more wide spread in Kyrgyzstan than it is in the US or UK.

Presidental Elections Today

Today the Kyrgyz Republic is holding its presidential elections. Except for some television cameras outside the polling place near my flat I have not noticed anything different from yesterday.

A clean desk

Today I have not gotten much done at work. The last two days of proof editing used up a lot of my motivation to be productive. My big accomplishment this morning was to finish cleaning up the desk I am using.

Proofing Done

I finally finished editing the proofs of the article with the help of one of my co-writers today. It took a little longer than expected, but it is finally done. The article should be out next month.

Proof Corrections

I spent most of today at the office correcting the proofs for a journal article that should appear in print in August. Most of the corrections were in the end notes rather than the text itself. I will post the abstract for the article when it comes out in print.

Russian Politics Syllabus

Russian Politics
ICP 250
3 credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, PhD

Course Description: This is a course covering the political system of the Russian Federation. In particular it will examine the political geography of the state as an ethno-territorial federation. The course will start with a review of the history of the USSR followed by specifically looking at the formation and solidification of the RSFSR, the administrative territory that became the Russian Federation. It will then cover such issues as the ethnic structure of the Russian Federation, political culture, transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy, and human rights.

Requirements: The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, an oral report and a research paper. Students will have to write two short papers during the semester. These papers should focus on the assigned readings and be from 600 to 800 words. Students will also have to complete a 1400 to 2000 word research paper on some aspect of Russian politics. The paper is due the last week of class. In the two weeks prior to this deadline each student will be required to give a short oral presentation on the subject of the paper followed by a question and answer session. Late papers will lose one letter grade for each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. Please turn off all cell phones while in class. I will eject any students carrying on cell phone conversations during class from the room. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking clearly and loudly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: All the readings are contained in the course packet

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing I will give them a zero for the assignment the first time. If I catch a student plagiarizing a second time in the class I will fail them from the class. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying of from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than four words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F for the course and be recommended for expulsion from ICP. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.


Grading:

Two short papers – 30% (15% each)

Written research paper – 30% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 15%

Class participation -25%

Grading Scale:

100-96 = A
95-91 = A-
90-86 = B+
85-81 = B
80-76 = B-
75-71 = C+
70-66 = C
65-61 = C-
60-56 = D+
55-51 = D
50-46 = D-
45 and lower = F

Class Schedule

Week One: Introduction to the course and review of the syllabus.

General History of Russia and the USSR

Week Two Read: “Legacies: The Burdens of Russian and Soviet History” (chapter one) in Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 21-44.

Week Three Read: “Cracks in the Foundation: The Post-Stalin Years” (chapter two) in Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 47-83.

Week Four Read: Yuri Veselov, “Changing Trust in the History of Soviet Society,” in Heiko Schrader, ed., Trust and Social Transformation: Theoretical approaches and empirical findings from Russia (Munster: Litverlag, 2004), pp. 55-78. The first short paper is due at the end of the week.

The Formation, Structure and Ethnic Nature of the Russian Federation

Week Five Read: Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 414-452.

Week Six Read: “What is Rossia? Identities in Transition” (chapter twelve) in Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 246-271.

Week Seven and Eight Read: “Rebirth of the Russian State” (chapter two) in Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 38-93.

Week Nine Read: Michael McFaul, “Lesson’s from Russia’s Protracted Transition from Communist Rule,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, no. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 103-130. The second short paper is due at the end of the week.

Past Repression and Current Human Rights: is there a Link?

Week Ten: Read Arseny Roginsky, “The Embrace of Stalinism” at

http://www.opendemocracy.net/russia/article/The-Embrace-of-Stalinism

“Epilogue: Memory” in Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 505-514 and Conclusion of Lynne Viola, Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 183-193

Week Eleven and Twelve: Read “Our New Middle Ages, Or War Criminals of all the Russias” (chapter two) in Anna Politkovskaya, trans. Arch Tait, Putin’s Russia” Life in a Failing Democracy (NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), pp. 25-80.

Student Research

Weeks Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Sixteen: Final research paper due and concluding remarks.

POST 1000

This is the 1000th post on this blog. It seems like a lot. But, over a period of almost five years it is not really much. A lot of blogs do 1000 posts a year or more.

Post Number 999

This is my 999th post to this blog. Right now I am the only person in the office. I might be the only faculty member at the university. It seems I am the only person still working in the summer. I am trying to clean up the desk I have been using, put together syllabi and write a journal article. All of these things are getting done slowly.

Story on Arivaca

Almost all the stories about Arivaca published in the Tucson media are extremely negative. All they ever report are the few spectacular crimes that occur on average once a year. So it was nice to see this somewhat positive piece from the Tucson Weekly.

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/arivaca/Content?oid=1242330

More on Google Scholar

It turns out Google Scholar is also pretty good in German. It is almost as good getting full text journal articles, scholarly dissertations, government reports and whole books in German as it is in Russian. So why is it so lousy in getting any PDF files containing full text documents in English? Also can anybody tell me how good Google scholar is in other languages? How is it in Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French and other languages? Does it bring up a lot of useful full text PDFs in these languages like it does in Russian and German or does it draw a blank like it does in English?

Google Scholar

While Google Books is much worse in Russian than in English it turns out that this is not the case with Google Scholar. To the contrary, Google Scholar is infinitely better in Russian than in English. It has a lot of full text journal articles. The number of scholarly journal articles available in their entirety on Google Scholar in Russian is much, much greater than on Google Scholar in English. I have even found whole scholarly books and dissertations on Google Scholar in Russian. This all after only about thirty minutes of searching. Who knows what I might find if I knew what I was doing.

Google Books

Google Books is a great resource, but unfortunately very few books seem to have the limited preview option which allows you to look at some of the actual pages inside the book. While the number of English language books that have this option is small the number of foreign language books that have it is minuscule. Apparently only a couple of books in German and practically no books in Russian have the limited preview option on Google Books. Does anybody else have this problem or is it just the subject matter that I am researching?

Yet another faculty member leaves

My friend John Couper of the Journalism department is leaving AUCA to take a job at KIMEP in Almaty Kazakhstan this next semester. John was an important figure in helping organize the faculty union here. I found his insights on union issues extremely helpful. Indeed now that he is leaving the university, the union will be short one negotiator. I am sad to see John go, but I totally understand his reasons for refusing to stay here. I wish him the best of luck in Kazakhstan. There are now by my count only three people with PhDs left teaching at AUCA. Since May we have lost fully fifty percent of the PhDs that taught here full time in spring 2009.

Arivaca Memories

Although I had no job, money or girlfriend my two years in Arivaca were two of the best in my life. Despite being out in the desert I actually had very good access to research materials. Mary Kasulaitis and Jeanne Ferris at the local Arivaca library had an uncanny ability to get material on inter-library loan. I also had a lot of free time. That meant that I could get a lot of writing done. I also could get a lot of reading done. Every Sunday I would spend all day out in the Chicken Shack smoking my hookah and reading. The weather in Arivaca was almost always conducive to such activities. Finally, the natural beauty of Arivaca and the friendly nature of its people is something I have never found elsewhere. I do not miss having no money or girlfriend, but I do miss Arivaca.

More than two years since I left Arivaca

It has now been over two years since I left Arivaca. Although I am glad I came to Bishkek I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like if I had not gotten a job in Kyrgyzstan and had instead remained in Arivaca. It certainly would have been different.

First, I think I would have probably given up looking for a university job since no amount of academic publishing seemed to get me even an interview without teaching experience. I am still not sure why teaching experience is considered so much more important than publishing by search committees. After all the entire PhD. program is geared towards research and writing, not teaching. So if I had stayed in Arivaca I would have had to figure out some sort of career outside the university. I have no idea what this possibly could be since a PhD in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies has limited applicability outside of academia.

Second, the only purpose of academic writing is to help one's CV for academic jobs. So if one has no chance of getting any academic job interviews due to a lack of teaching experience it makes no sense to do any academic writing. It does not pay much. In fact academic journal articles pay absolutely nothing. Not to mention the fact that most are read by fewer than ten people. Academic books can make a little bit of money, but not much. So my writing would have moved to more popular and profitable outlets. I had already started along this path with Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. I did not make any money off of that writing either, but at least I did not have to wrangle with footnotes. I would have no doubt continued along the path of more popular writing if I had stayed in Arivaca. I probably would have started doing some serious, but non-academic writing about local issues such as the history of the US-Mexican border in that region of Arizona.

But, fortunately I did get a job teaching purely by accident. So I managed to escape unemployment and gain some teaching experience. Looking back on it, however, it really was completely a matter of luck and I missed being stuck in Arivaca by a very narrow margin.

Almost Five Years and 1000 Posts

I do not often blog about blogging. However, this August will be the five year anniversary of this blog. By that time it should have a 1000 posts. Currently this is post 991. So I should be able to make it. Granted at an average of 200 posts a year this blog is much less prolific than most. But, five years is also longer than many blogs last. I plan on continuing the blog, but the average number of posts per a year will probably decline. Between teaching, writing academic publications and other obligations I just do not have the time and energy to update the blog that often.

Kyrgyzstan is calm, but neighboring Xinjiang is not

For the last couple of days there have been serious race riots in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang province of China, between the ruling Han Chinese and the Uighur natives. The Uighurs are a Turkic Central Asian people that speak a language closely related to Uzbek, but written in Arabic script. Like other Central Asians they are mostly Sunni Muslims. There is a fairly large Uighur population in Kyrgyzstan. Many of them are the descendants of refugees that fled to the Soviet Union during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. The New York Times has a fairly good article on the recent clashes at the URL below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world/asia/08china.html?_r=1&hp

This article from the Wall Street Journal provides the immediate background for the current violence between Chinese and Uighurs.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124699285048707143.html

Syllabus for Political Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia

Political Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia
ICP 349
3 Credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University of Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.

Course Description:

This course focuses on political violence both by the state and by non-state actors in Central Asia during the Soviet era. The class will emphasize the political goals and changes sought by these actors through the use of violence. Specific episodes of political violence covered include the “Basmachi” revolt and its suppression, violence against women in response to the Hujum, collectivization, national deportations, GULag camp uprisings, ethnic conflict in the Fergana Valley and Islamic terrorism. By examining these events the course will seek to evaluate the success of violence by the Soviet state and others in achieving their political goals. Did violence achieve these goals or not? Could these goals have been satisfied without the use of violence? In which of these cases if any was the use of violence ethically justifiable?

Requirements:

The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, an oral report and a research paper. Students will be required to write three 600 to 800 word reflection papers. They will also have to write a 2500 to 3000 word essay on one specific case of political violence in Central Asia. The paper is due the last week of class. In the four weeks prior to this deadline each student will be required to give a short oral presentation on the subject of their paper followed by a short question and answer session. Late papers will lose ten percent each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: All the required readings are contained in the course packet.

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations:

I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them for the assignment. If I catch them a second time I will fail them from the class. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than five words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.


Grading:

Three Short Papers – 45% (15% each)

Written research paper – 30% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 15%

Class participation – 10%

Grading Scale:

100-96 = A
95-91 = A-
90-86 = B+
85-81 = B
80-76 = B-
75-71 = C+
70-66 = C
65-61 = C-
60-56 = D+
55-51 = D
50-46 = D-
45 and lower = F

Class Schedule:

Week one: Introduction to the course and review of the syllabus.

Weeks Two and Three: The “Basmachi” Revolt and its Suppression

Olcott, Martha B., “The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan 1918-24,” Soviet Studies, vol. XXXIII, no. 3, July 1981, pp. 352-369.

Ritter, William, S., “The Final Phase in the Liquidation of Anti-Soviet Resistance in Tadzhikistan: Ibrahim Bek and the Basmachi, 1924-31,” Soviet Studies, vol. XXXVII, no. 4, October 1985, pp. 484-493.

Marshall, Alexander, “Turkfront: Frunze and development of Soviet counter-insurgency in Central Asia,” in Tom Everett-Heath, ed., Central Asia: Aspects of Transition (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 5-29. The first short paper is due at the end of week three.

Week Four: The Hujum and Violence against Women in Uzbekistan

Kamp, Marianne, “The Counter-Hujum: Terror and Veiling,” chapter eight in The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 186-214.

Weeks Five and Six: Collectivization, Dekulakization and Famine in Kazakhstan

Olcott, Martha Brill, “The Collectivization Drive in Kazakhstan,” Russian Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, April 1981, pp. 122-142.

Ertz, Simon, “The Kazakh Catastrophe and Stalin’s Order of Priorities, 1929-1933: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives,” Zhe: Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Vol. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 1-14.

Shayakhmetov, Mukhamet, trans. Butler, Jan, “Deportation,” chapter fourteen in The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin (New York: Overlook/Rookery, 2006), pp. 121-132. The second short paper is due at the end of week six.

Weeks Seven and Eight: Deported Peoples

Comins-Richmond, Walter, “The deportation of the Karachays,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 4, no. 3, 2002, pp. 431-439.

Williams, Brian Glyn, “The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 3, July 2002, pp. 323-347.

Pohl, J. Otto, “A Caste of Helot Labourers: Special Settlers and the Cultivation of Cotton in Soviet Central Asia: 1944-1956,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., The Cotton Sector in Central Asia: Economic Policy and Development Challenges (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2007), pp. 12-28.

Weeks Nine and Ten: The Kengir Camp Uprising

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., trans. Willetts, Harry, “The Forty Days of Kengir,” chapter twelve in The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1992), vol. III, pp. 285-331.

Barnes, Steven A., “’In a Manner Befitting Soviet Citizens’: An Uprising in the Post-Stalin Gulag,” Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 823-850. The third short paper is due at the end of week ten.

Week Eleven: Ethnic Violence at the end of the USSR

Mirkhanova, Malika, “People in Exile: The Oral History of Meskhetian Turks (Akhyskha Turkleri),” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1, April 2006, pp. 33-44.

Tishkov, Valery, “’Don’t Kill Me, I’m a Kyrgyz!’: An Anthropological Analysis of Violence in the Osh Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, No. 2, May 1995, pp. 133-149.

Week Twelve: Post-Soviet Political Violence and Terrorism

Horsman, Stuart, “Themes in official discourses on terrorism in Central Asia,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2005, pp. 199-213.

Weeks Thirteen through Sixteen: Student Presentations. The final paper is due at the end of week sixteen.