Russian-German Labor Army Conscripts in GULag Camps January 1945

This is a partial list of Corrective Labor Camps with Russian-German labor army conscripts employed as forced laborers in January 1945. The first number is the total number of Russian-Germans both men and women in the labor army working at the camp at that time. The number in parenthesis is the number of just Russian-German women in the labor army at that camp.  The number in brackets is the number of convicted prisoners of all nationalities working at the camp.

Aktiublag - Kazakhstan - Industrial Construction - 195 [9,121 prisoners]
Altailag - Altai Krai - Railroad Construction - 863 (462 women) [4,024 prisoners]
Arbumstroi - Arkhangelsk Oblast - Industrial Construction - 373 (372 women)
Bakallag - Cheliabinsk Oblast - Industrial Construction -19,860 [11,071 prisoners]
Belbaltlag - Karelo-Finnish ASSR - Industrial Construction - 4,096 [112 prisoners]
Bogoslovlag - Sverdlovsk Oblast - Industrial Construction - 8,603 (32 women) [10,864 prisoners]
Vorkutlag - Komi ASSR - Mining - 6,571 (1,415 women) [39,711 prisoners of which 3,242 women]
Vosturallag - Sverdlovsk Oblast - Logging - 4,767 (1,610 women) [10,524 prisoners]
Viatlag - Kirov Oblast - Logging - 3,707 (805 women) [13,220 prisoners]
Dzhindastroi - Buriat-Mongol ASSR - Mining - 1,572 (1,412 women) [9,393 prisoners]
Ivdel'lag - Sverdlovsk Oblast - Logging - 5,181 (880 women) [16,529 prisoners]
Kraslag - Krasnoiarsk Krai - Logging - 4,224 (824 women) [12,982 prisoners]
Krasnoiarsk Affainazhnyi Zavod -Krasnoiarsk Krai - Mining - 185 (85 women) [968 prisoners]
Ponyshlag - Molotov Oblast - Hydro Electric Station Construction - 17 (14 women) [94 prisoners]
Sevvostlag - Magadan in Khabarovsk Krai - Mining and industrial Construction - 613 [87,355 prisoners]
Sevzheldorlag - Komi ASSR - Railroad Construction - 4,377 [12,418 prisoners]
Solikambumstroi - Molotov Oblast - Industrial Construction - 5,980 [9,123 prisoners]
Tagillag - Sverdlovsk Oblast - Industrial Construction - 4,500 (972 women) [17,003 prisoners]
Unzhlag - Gorky Oblast - Logging - 4,531 (3,206 women) [19,867 prisoners]
Usol'lag - Molotov Oblast - Logging - 7,930 (2,763 women) [28,849 prisoners]
Ukhtoizhemlag - Komi ASSR - Oil - 5,030 (5,030 women) [12,896 prisoners]

Source: A.A. German, "Sovetskie nemtsy v lageriakh NKVD v gody Velikoi Otchestvennoi: Vklad v pobedy," Voenno-istoricheskie issledovaniia v Povolzh'e, Sb. Nauch. (Saratov: Izd-Vo: "Nauchnaia kniga," 2006), Issue no. 7: 292-304.

Happy Thanksgiving from Africa

I hope all of my half dozen readers in the US have a happy Thanksgiving. The weather is perfect this morning in Legon. I had koko for breakfast, but I still haven't decided what to eat for my main meal. I am tempted to go get pizza since I have had fufu a couple times this week already. Plus the book store is on the way to the pizza place and I could get another one of Lee Child's novels starring Jack Reacher. The first one I read was quite entertaining. I have to admire a character that walks clear across the US with nothing but an ATM card, an expired passport, and a toothbrush in his pockets. At any rate I am thankful to have a job as a history lecturer at Ghana's flagship university.

Fela Kuti - Water no get enemy

We are still having water problems. It has been out for two weeks now with the exception of two brief times during last Friday night and Saturday morning and last night and this morning. But, even if I don't have running water at least I can have Fela playing great music about water.

From Colonialism to Neo-Colonialism

Colonialism came to most of Africa fairly late. The map to the right is a map of European colonial and other holdings in Africa in 1885 before the Berlin Conference divided up most of the continent. For the most part before the conference European holdings were confined to the coastal regions of Africa. Most of the interior of Africa still remained under the domain of indigenous political entities at this time. The conquest of most of Africa takes place after 1886 and was only completed in the 20th century. Ethiopia remained the only truly independent indigenous state. Liberia created by returning Black Americans in the 19th century and White ruled South Africa were neither indigenous states nor truly independent from the US and UK respectively at this time. So in less than 30 years the European powers of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Belgium conquered the vast interior of Africa. Most of the colonies established were devoted solely to the extraction of resources rather than the settlement of European colonists. The European colonists only settled significant numbers of settlers in Algeria, Angola, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Rhodesia, and South Africa. Out of these colonies only Algeria and South Africa were ever more than 10% White. In the other settlement colonies Europeans remained in the single digits. Yet, despite their small physical presence in Africa, Europeans managed to dominate almost the entire continent politically and economically during much of the 20th century. Even decades after the formal independence of almost all of the continent the economic subordination of Africa to Europe established during colonialism continues to be the most salient factor in European-African relations. Despite granting formal independence to their former African colonies European powers like Belgium and France have actively assisted in the murder of leaders like Lumumba and Sankara who have attempted to break free of this continued neo-colonial subordination.

Dependency, Underdevelopment, and World Systems

My good friend Walt Richmond has suggested that I include more pieces on African - US and African - European relations. I am not sure if my opinions on these matters are all that novel or interesting. The other day at dinner Marc Becker broached that I was an un-reconstructed dependenista along the lines of people like Raul Prebisch and Andre Gunder Frank who developed the theory in the context of Latin America. With regards to Africa I would say that the term dependency theory is not used much. The term underdevelopment as expounded on by Walter Rodney in his  1972 classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is instead much more popular although in many ways it describes the same thing people like Prebisch and Frank were writing about regarding Latin America. There is really a clear intellectual development linking dependency theory, the idea of underdevelopment, and world systems. So one can see how Frank's ideas on Latin American - US relations get applied to African - European relations by Rodney, and then become completely internationalized by Immanuel Wallerstein. All of this stemming from the idea of interpreting international relations as consisting of interests in Europe and the US exploiting countries in Africa, Latin America, and also Asia. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev was one of the first theorists to fully articulate the idea of proletarian nations including Muslims in the USSR who were exploited by the metropolitan centers of colonial empires. But, after Stalin had Sultan-Galiev executed for his political heresy against the official line of the CPSU the idea went into hibernation. Its revival in the 1960s and 1970s largely concentrated on Latin America and to a lesser extent Africa. I think it largely fits regarding the political-economy of most of Africa. But, these are old and not very exciting ideas. So there is currently not a lot of interest by US scholars today even those specializing in Africa to do in depth research on such related topics as  the history of French neo-colonialism in Africa.

Work

Today I had my last lecture and first final exam of the semester. So now I just have to grade exams. I have also almost finished revising my conference paper for Ho. It looks a lot different than it started out. I have eliminated almost all the original references to Africa and concentrated on the ethnic Germans conscripted into the labor army in the USSR during World War II. I have also in the latest draft gone through and removed a lot of the excessive detail on geographic distribution that all my friends thought was boring and not very significant. I have replaced some of it with more description including a number of block quotations from survivors of the labor army. It has gone through five drafts. I am going to let it sit for a couple days now before I again return to editing it. Soon the paper is going to get to the point where I just want to get it finished and done with. I am hoping it is in pretty good shape by that time. I think the current incarnation is the first draft where it looks like all the major restructuring is over.

Fresh Blueberry Pancake - Heavy (1970)

The earlier piece I put up by this band, Clown on a Rope, has proven to be very popular judging by my site meter. So here is the whole album. It is the only album this band from Pittsburgh ever recorded.

No Water Again

For the fourth day in a row there is no running water in  my bungalow. Last night I had to make an extra long trip to find an unlocked storage tank on campus with water. This is the third time this semester we have had no water for a week. We never have running water at the office. That seems to be permanent, but I used to have water at the house. If I lived in Mali or Niger I could understand the lack of water. After all there is not a lot of water in the Sahara. It is a desert. But, Ghana has lots of water. It has the world's largest man made lake. How can the flagship university of the country consistently have water shortages for several times a semester that last for weeks on end? Fortunately, unlike most people of Obruni ethnicity I lived in Arivaca for a couple of  years. There we had similar problems, although Arivaca unlike Ghana was in desert so it was a lot more understandable.

The Difficulties of Comparative History

I am still revising my forced labor paper for Ho. I got some feedback from a colleague in California today that I will be incorporating. The paper has undergone four major rewrites now and is about to enter on its fifth. One major change has been the shift away from comparing colonial forced labor in Africa, particularly Mozambique and Rhodesia, to concentrate almost exclusively on the experience of ethnic Germans in the labor army in the USSR during World War II. The main reason for moving away from the comparison is that as I explored the Portuguese system of forced labor in Mozambique it became more and more difficult to make any relevant comparisons. My original hypothesis was that the two systems shared a number of broad similarities. But, on reconsideration these similarities really are almost too broad to make any insightful comparisons. Instead it looked more and more like I was comparing apples and oranges and saying that they both came from the tree of forced labor. Which does not tell us anything new. I am sure that people trying to write comparative pieces on revolution, genocide, and other similarly broad topics have also run into this problem. Trying to find specific similarities in the dynamics of the two systems of forced labor was hampered by the fact that I am only familiar with the primary source material in the Soviet case. I don't have access to the archival documents for the African cases and I can not read Portuguese. So already from the beginning the paper was doomed to be heavily imbalanced to the detriment of properly covering the African cases. It might be possible in the future to do justice to such a project. However, I think I would have to select case studies where I can read the primary sources for all the cases examined rather than solely relying upon journal articles written in English for one of the cases.

So now it is a much less ambitious project with a narrower and far less comparative approach. But, I figure it is better to talk about something I know about to an audience who knows nothing about it at the conference then to talk about something I know nothing about and the audience knows a lot about. Yes, that is the easier way out. On the other hand I only have so much time and effort I can devote to a conference paper and book chapter.

Fela Kuti - Sorrow Tears & Blood (Original Extended Version)

Sorrow, Tears & Blood from the Vagabonds in Power album is one of the greatest songs to ever come out of Africa. This particular video is fantastic in showing Fela's defiance of the corrupt and repressive dictatorship in Nigeria at the time. Africa needs more men like Fela and less vagabonds in power.

This Week in Legon

Today I wrote up my final exam questions. On Wednesday we have to "moderate" them, what ever that means. It is some new directive from the administration. But, we have Wednesday morning free to do this exercise since the departmental seminar I coordinate is now finished for the semester. I just have one last lecture on this Friday before the semester is completely over except for examinations. So I have some time to finish revising my conference paper for Ho. I am hoping to be able to get some serious work done on it tonight. I have removed almost all the references to Africa from the paper and have decided to focus entirely upon ethnic Germans conscripted into the labor army in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. The paper is due three days before Christmas so I should be able to have a presentable draft written up in time. I no longer can stand doing things at the last minute. I have to have plenty of relaxed lead time to do things now that I have entered middle age.

Fresh Blueberry Pancake - Clown On A Rope (US 1970)

This is another very rare song from 1970. The original demo album only had 54 copies. The band never made a second album.

Bulbous Creation - Lets Go To The Sea - 1970

A rare, but awesome song from a band that cut one album that was not released until 24 years after it was recorded and in the meantime all its members had completely vanished from the face of the earth.

Another Great Music Blog - The Red Hippie

The Red Hippie has a lot of great obscure rock and folk music from the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, it does not  have anything from Africa in its current incarnation. I never got to see it before it was resurrected. Nevertheless, it still has a lot of interesting information on bands from the 1960s and 1970s in the US and UK. There is a lot of fascinating music out there that you owe it to yourself to go check out.

KOUYATE-NEERMAN - Requiem pour un Con

I just saw these guys play at Alliance Francais tonight. They did a bang up job. I can really see that they have strong roots in the Krautrock/Progrock scene of the early 1970s. They also reminded me a lot of the French band Magma from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The band uses xylophones the way others would use keyboards. This particular video in addition to being a great cover of Serge Gainsbourg's piece also has some great animation. I hope everybody enjoys it.

More on why I am a reactionary and not a radical

It seems that the term "radical" in the context of US academics means militant support for Israel's war against the indigenous population of Palestine. Claire Potter and Cary Nelson are two very influential and established US academics who both call themselves radicals and strongly oppose any attempt to voluntarily boycott Israeli institutions complicit in supporting apartheid and colonialism. Nelson used to be the president of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) and it was under his tenure that the organization adopted a militant position of defending the apartheid state of Israel from any and all boycotts by US lecturers. The official position of the AAUP that boycotts of universities and other Israeli state institutions supporting human rights violations is a horrible imposition upon academic freedom is a ludicrous one. It is also extremely hypocritical because both the AAUP and "radicals" like Potter and Nelson supported a complete boycott of not only South African academic institutions, but individual South African scholars during the 1980s. I agree that the position of supporting the denial of human, civil, and national rights to Palestinians on the basis of their race is a radical position. I would even argue that Potter and Nelson are correct to see their support of apartheid and colonialism as the orthodox radical left position in the US. The international Left after all almost universally supported the Nakba against the Palestinians and the establishment of Israel as a racially based state in 1948. Potter and Nelson are continuing this tradition. However, I am not a radical or a leftist. I am a reactionary. I am a reactionary precisely because I reject the "radical" position of Potter and Nelson and believe that academics have a moral obligation to boycott the apartheid state of Israel until such time as the indigenous Palestinian population is give full and equal rights with the descendants of Jewish colonists in the territory. Everything else is just special pleading.

Random Work Related Points

I am still revising my paper for the forced labor conference in Ho. It is almost to a semi-readable state now. I figure by the time the conference rolls around in late January I should have edited it into a decent draft. At least now I think I am beyond major reworking of the basic concepts although I still may have to restructure some stuff. But, if anybody wants to give me some more free constructive criticism I am still willing to accept it.

Next week is the last week of lectures. So we have to write up our final exam questions. This year I have to do two sets because international students of which I have two are scheduled to take their exams early. In fact they take them the same day as my last lecture 22 November 2013.

Library

Today we had a special training session in the library. We in fact had it in the new state of the art computer lab that the Koreans built for us. Finding the lab, however, was not easy. First, they only moved it to the lab from the research commons this morning. I was running a little bit late so I did not get this information. Instead I entered the library and followed my head of department to the research commons where we were informed we were in the wrong room. So then we had to go through a labyrinth of narrow corridors and stairways to find the proper room. It turns out that the previous information that we needed to bring our laptops with us was also incorrect, something that would have been nice to know had they informed us earlier. At any rate the training session focused mainly on how to use the electronic library catalog and databases. It just barely touched on how to use footnoting software like EndNote or Zotero. We have to go back to the library in February to get that training session. I am hoping I can find somebody here before then that tell me how to use this stuff.

Lebanese Lunch

Today I got two letters of recommendation for former students sent off to Europe. Although I didn't get the letters written, printed, and entered into PDF form until after lunch. I had lunch at the Lebanese place at the Marina Mall today with a couple of coworkers. I had the kafta plate. It was a bit pricey (21 cedis including a coke), but not bad. It included hummus, chips with ketchup, salad, and pita bread in addition to the kafta. I wouldn't eat there every month, but as a change of pace from Ghanaian food it was decent. It did fill me up which counts for something.

Update: The sujuk at the Lebanese cafe made one of my coworkers really ill for the last two days straight. I think I will avoid eating there in the future.

"Forced Labour in a Socialist State: Ethnic Germans from Kazakhstan and Central Asia in the Labour Army 1941-1958."

I finally finished typing up all 104 footnotes for my conference paper coming up in January. The working title is "Forced Labour in a Socialist State: Ethnic Germans from Kazakhstan and Central Asia in the Labour Army 1941-1958." I massively reworked it and removed all of the direct references to Mozambique and instead concentrated on themes that I thought should also be looked at with regards to colonial Africa. The empirical or ethnographic part of the paper, however, concentrates on ethnic Germans in the USSR conscripted into the labour army while in Kazakhstan and to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The majority of them were then deployed to work in labour camps in the Urals. If anybody wants to offer constructive criticism of the paper let me know and I will send you a copy of the current draft. It is a lot better than the first draft, but there is always room for improvement.

How should slavery be remembered in Ghana?

I just finished reading through a paper by a Ghanaian historian on how slavery is remembered in Ghana. Or more accurately on how the participation of indigenous inhabitants of what now is Ghana in the various international slave trades as well as domestic slavery is ignored in Ghana. It is not denied. Nobody in Ghana claims that there was not significant participation by indigenous Africans in capturing and selling slaves. But, there is still not a public or even strong academic discourse that really focuses on the role played by indigenous Ghanaians in these institutions. Rather the slave forts are viewed primarily as a way in which to generate revenue from the Black diaspora in the US and as such part of a narrative in which only the roles of European perpetrators and African victims are emphasized. Dealing seriously with the legacy of slavery and the various slave trades and the role of indigenous slavers in what is now Ghana is not something that has engaged modern Ghanaian society. It is not considered to be an issue of significance to Ghanaians today to confront this past. This is also reflected on a Pan-African level with the conspicuous absence of Ghana's slave forts on the African Union Human Rights Memorial website. Indeed Ghana is not one of the countries listed by the African Union as having a national human rights memorial participating in its project for "Remembering Victims of Mass Atrocities in Africa." Hence the slave fort at Cape Coast is not listed at the African Union site even though the Maison des Esclaves on Goree in Senegal is listed. Nor does the African Union site list any Ghanaian partners. The paper I just reviewed argues that this needs to change and that Ghanaians especially Ghanaian historians need to be able to come to terms with a full telling of the past which recognizes the fact that people indigenous to the territory were also perpetrators as well as victims of slavery and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. While, Ghanaians may indeed be able to publicly acknowledge such a correction in the national narrative on slavery, I am guessing that such a radical rethinking of how slavery is memorialized would be strongly rejected by most US scholars and activists dealing with the issue. Giving the issue of African participation in the slave trade a prominent role in the historical narrative rather than just glossing over it is not something I see the people who currently dominate US academia ever doing.

Good News from Africa

This week I got some stuff done besides normal academic stuff. I got to the doctor and she took me off all of my blood pressure medicines. I no longer have to take any tablets daily. I go back in a month, but I am hoping that I can stay off the pills for the foreseeable future.

I also finally got my passport back with my residency permit. It only took three months this time. The GIS needs to start returning foreign passports in a reasonable period of time. Three months is not reasonable especially when they told me it would be three weeks. The loss of revenue due to potential foreign investors not wanting to give up their passports three months out of the year every year has got to run into the billions of dollars. If Nkrumah were alive I am quite sure things would be better on this front.

Footnotes they are my bane.

I hate footnotes. They take me much longer to type up than the actual paper by a factor of two to three times. Currently, I am finishing up the footnotes for a 14 page single spaced paper. I have done over 80 so far and it looks like the total will be well over 100. People tell me there are easier ways than typing them out individually. But, so far nobody has told me what or how those ways work. When I am writing I find it easiest to put the citation in parenthesis if I can quickly look it up or some cases just put citation needed after the sentence. This means I have a fair amount of work to do after writing the actual article. I am told there are ways I can key all the sources on my hard drive to be footnoted with a few clicks, but again this magic currently eludes me. So I am stuck going through each citation and typing it in the footnotes individually.  I may finish this week. Fortunately, the paper is not due for a few months. But, still the fact that the footnotes take so much work than the actual paper annoys me to no end.

Proposal for a Book on Comparative State Terror during the Cold War

I am currently reading Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism (London: Zed, 2004). The book argues that a number of states engaged in state terrorism, the US supported this terror, and that the claims that such extreme violence was necessary to fight against guerrillas or terrorists were largely unjustified. He has specific chapters dealing with El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and Indonesia. In so far as proving his three rather simple and at this point not particularly controversial points he does a good job. But, it is apparent that his selection is only telling part of a much larger and more interesting story. His most interesting point is that the reasons used to justify terror in Latin America were largely provided by the military regimes to get support from the US and that the real reasons were more complex and derived from domestic concerns. Unfortunately, he does not really investigate this point. But rather leaves the point without examining its basis. That the threats pointed to by these regimes to justify their use of terror were largely imaginary and that everybody involved was aware of this fact is not nearly so interesting as knowing what were the real reasons for the use of state terror. Alas these are largely glossed over. So there is an image of the military dictatorships in Central and South America engaging in shadow boxing against a largely imaginary threat of communist terrorist insurgencies backed by the Soviet bloc. While in reality the real war is being conducted against the civilian populations of these countries. He doesn't analyze what is the real motive for this massive violation of human rights, however, and instead the book reads like a combination of Amnesty International reports and a harsh critique of US foreign policy for supporting the regimes guilty of these crimes. Indeed the metaphor of shadow boxing is one I came up with and does not appear in the book.

It has occurred to me, however, that the shadow boxing went on in a lot more places than the five examples given in Gareau's book and not all of them were regimes supported by the US. The Soviet bloc conducted its own reigns of terror against civilian populations that it too justified by references to largely imaginary threats. The real reason for the violence again like in the case of Latin America stemming from the domestic goals of these governments. Among such Soviet mirror images in the 1970s and 1980s were Vietnam after unification, Afghanistan following the 1978 coup, and Ethiopia after the 1974 revolution. Inclusion of these examples of state terror by Soviet backed regimes would have greatly improved Gareau's book. Instead of just US supported dictatorships using the threat of Soviet communism to justify state terror employed largely for other reasons there were also Soviet supported regimes engaged in mass violence under the pretext of fighting against US backed counterrevolution. So in point of fact there are two blocs of states engaged in shadow boxing each other while in reality waging war against their own civilian populations for predominantly domestic reasons. This is a much more interesting and intriguing set up than Gareau's frankly one sided and limited approach.

I don't have the ability to write such a book on my own. But, I could definitely compile and edit one written by a variety of  experts. For the Soviet backed regimes I would definitely want to include Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia. I am more flexible regarding which US backed governments to include. But, I definitely would want a geographic balance that included a representative sample from Africa and Asia and did not overwhelmingly focus on Latin America. If there is anybody who specializes in state terror in any of the states that might be included in such a collection who would be interested in contributing a chapter, contact me. Maybe I can make this project a reality.

70 Years since the Deportation of the Karachais

On 2 November 1943, the Stalin regime deported almost the entire Karachai population from their Caucasian homeland to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Subsequently the Soviet government also relocated to Central Asia Karachais outside their natal territory such as those fighting in the Red Army against the Nazis. The Karachais like other deported peoples in the USSR came under the restrictions of the special settlement regime. On 26 November 1948, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decreed these restrictions to be permanent. In southern Kazakhstan the NKVD employed many of the deported Karachais in the cultivation of cotton at Pakhta Aral. About 40,000 initially ended up in Kazakhstan and 23,000 in Kyrgyzstan. A large number of Karachais died prematurely due to the poor material conditions they endured during their initial years of exile in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Soviet government finally released the Karachais from the special settlement restrictions in July 1956, but they were only allowed to start returning to their mountainous home in the Caucasus after 1957.

Marxism-Lennonism

In an alternate and much better universe Marxism-Lennonism rather than Marxism-Leninism would have become a prominent ruling ideology in the 20th century. I know this is an old joke, but my brain is too tired to put up anything too serious right now. At any rate the stamp to the right from the breakaway Republic of Abkhazia in Georgia is pretty cool. I don't think it is enough to persuade the US, UK, or any other governments to grant them diplomatic recognition, but I can't be the only person to find it to be highly amusing. I don't even care if it is not genuine. It is still awesome even if it is a fake. I actually don't know or care. I found it a few months ago on FB and just like the image.