More on Soviet Kurds

The other day I gave a lecture on Kurds in the USSR to my History of the Middle East class. Tomorrow we will return to the subject. The Kurds in the Caucasus and Central Asia during the Soviet era make an interesting case study in Soviet nationalities policies. Soviet polices ranged from favorable ones such as creating a "Red Kurdistan" territory in Azerbaijan and various Kurdish language institutions to negative ones such as the mass deportations from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 1937 and from Georgia in 1944 to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.The swing from granting Kurds in the Caucasus the benefits of korenizatsiia to deporting a substantial number of them to Kazakhstan and Central Asia as special settlers is typical of the range of Soviet policies towards many smaller nationalities in the USSR during the reign of Stalin. But, their position as a diaspora of a large concentrated population in the Middle East makes the interaction of Soviet internal and external policies towards the Kurds particularly interesting. Even more so than Soviet policy towards Jews the overall pattern of the Soviet position towards the Kurds as a whole was ambiguous, fragmented, and contradictory over time. At the same time Kurds deported from Azerbaijan and Georgia suffered horrible material conditions and strict legal restrictions as special settlers in Kazakhstan and Central Asia the Soviet government helped the short lived Kurdish Mahabad Republic in Iran and granted sanctuary to Mustafa Barzani and 500 of his armed followers. Ultimately, however, the USSR never played a major role after the collapse of the Mahabad Republic in supporting any of the Kurdish nationalist movements including the Marxist-Leninist PKK fighting against Turkey, a member of NATO. Instead the PKK's major state sponsor was Syria.

Happy Thanksgiving

To anybody from the US that might stumble across this blog I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.

My articles dealing with Africa

I did not write and publish as much related to Africa as I wanted to during my five and a half years living and working in Ghana. But, I do have four published or soon to be published pieces dealing with Africa at least in part. The first article is "Soviet Apartheid: Stalin's Ethnic Deportations, Special Settlement Restrictions, and the Labor Army: The Case of the Ethnic Germans in the USSR." The next piece,  "The Relative Failure of German Togoland as Model Cotton Colony" I wrote with Felix Longi. The next piece I published was "Is there a Black Eurasia? Ghanaian and other African Diasporic Populations in the USSR in Comparative Perspective."  The final piece is "Nkrumah, the Cold War, 'The Third World', and the US Role in the 24 February 1966 Coup." It is true that my scholarly output dealing with Africa is very modest. But, I arrived in Africa in January 2011 knowing only that I knew almost nothing about the continent and taught myself at the school of hard knocks.

Non-election related reading

If anybody is looking for something to read not related to the elections I have put up the text of the book chapter I co-authored with Felix Longi on Cotton in German Togoland. J. Otto Pohl and Felix Y.T. Longi, "The Relative Failure of German Togoland as a Model Cotton Colony" in Wazi Apoh and Bea Lundt (eds.) Germany and its West African Colonies: "Excavations" of German Colonialism in Post-Colonial Times, (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2013) is now up on my academia.edu page. Feel free to leave any comments on the article here.

Coffee