Vladimir German and family

About a month a ago Vladimir German contacted me regarding his April immigration hearing. Vladimir and his family are ethnic Germans from Kazakhstan who have been living in working in the US for over 12 years and speak fluent English. In fact his two kids speak almost no Russian and certainly no Kazakh. Yet, despite obeying the law, working hard and having family in the US, the government has decided it wants to deport them back to Kazakhstan. It claims that conditions have improved now. Of course only somebody in the US government would be stupid enough to think that discrimination against people of German descent has ended in Kazakhstan. How come Jews and Cubans get automatic refugee status and Russian-Germans have to prove that they will be killed to avoid deportation? Today, Vladimir's American cousin, LeAnn Tupper sent me a long article on him in the Union-Bulletin (Walla Walla). I am still waiting for Vladimir's lawyer to call me. She sent me an e-mail saying she would call me a week ago. At anyrate the injustice of the matter is beyond blatant.

Other Blogs

I have been looking at some other blogs recently. They don't seem to look like this one. This blog is really just a diary which has the advantage of being in cyberspace so I do not lose it like I have all the paper ones. Even though other people could read it I am quite sure that no one has. Its content is in essence written for me alone. A lot of other blogs on the other hand are like seminars with multiple participants commenting upon issues in a very civil matter compared to say usenet. They also cross reference each other. I doubt anybody else will ever read my blog, yet alone comment on it, link to it or make reference to it elsewhere. But, then again most people don't do that with paper diary entries of people still alive either.

Why are there so many i tiles in scrabble?

I played Scrabble and actually won for the first time in months today. One recurring complaint everybody seems to have is that the game has nine i tiles. Other than gerunds the letter i does not appear that often in the English language. Since there are only two g tiles I am not sure what the makers of the game were thinking. If English used i to make plurals instead of s it would be okay. But, other than cacti and octopi I can not think of too many plurals in English that use i instead of s.

Applebaum and Soviet nationalities

I saw Anne Applebaum interviewed on tv today. Like her book Gulag: A History (which cites me a number of time) I found her talk almost completely avoiding the issue of nationalities, race, ethnicity or whatever one wishes to call the Soviet legal catagorization of people based upon their biological descent from specific cultural groups. I personally prefer to call a spade a spade and note that since it was inherited at birth, immutable during life and passed automatically to the next generation that nationality in the Soviet parlance is in fact code for race. Instead she merely talked about the total number of people to pass through the Gulag camps and colonies (18-20 million) and the number to die as a result (3 million). While this has the advantage of giving big numbers it is also misleading. This is like talking about the 11 million people murdered by Nazi Germany without ever mentioning that some people such as Jews and Gypsies were far more likely to perish than others. The fact that Russia and Russians do not pay too much attention to the Gulag (a fact lamented by Applebaum) can be better understood when one recognizes that the percentage of Russians killed by Stalin was pretty small. There are no exact figures on this, but Stalin probably murdered about 15 million people of which maybe 3 million were Russians, about 3% of their population.

Contrary to popular belief it was the non-Russian nationalities that bore the brunt of Stalinist terror and they do remember and memorialize the losses. The Ukrainians come in first numerically with about 7 million losses, mostly from the 1932-1933 famine (Holodomor). This represents about 20% of the Ukrainian population or more than six times as great a per-capita loss as the Russians. Among the small nationalities deported in their entirety to special settlements the losses are truly astronomical in percentage terms. The Chechens and Crimean Tatars probably each lost over 30% of their population due to the deadly conditions of exile in special settlements from 1944 to 1948. This is equal in proportional terms to Hitler's reduction of the world's Jewish population. Almost every Chechen knows what happened on 23 February 1944 and virtually every Crimean Tatar can recite the story of 18 May 1944, even three generations after these horrific events.

To give a total number of Stalin's victims without a breakdown by nationality and then to infer that most of them were Russian is not only inaccurate it allows the Russians to avoid responsibility for their role in the Soviet state. It would be as I mentioned above like referring to 11 million victims of Nazi terror with no reference to Jews and Gypsies and then compounding matters by giving the impression that most of the 11 million were Germans. Such manipulation would clearly be seen as Holocaust denial. I am not sure why otherwise bright people who are clearly critical of Stalin can not understand this.

Back to blogging

After a long break from blogging I have decided to return. In the meantime I got my Ph.D. from SOAS (U. of London) and returned to the US. I have since participated in one academic workshop in DC and one conference in Tartu Estonia both of which will result in books. I still have to revise my chapters, but they have been added to my evergrowing (now 3 pages) list of publications. I also submitted one journal article and one book review that will be published later this year. My dissertation got one book offer from a US publisher which I had to turn down because the contract was so lousy and is still being considered by three UK publishers. I hope to be able to add it to my list of publications soon. The job search has not gone so well. I am convinced that almost all these things are fixed. That is there is no actual search. Instead they choose the person they want for the job and only advertise it because they are required to do so by law. So I will probably end up going back to work for minimum wage making sandwiches and coffee even though I have more academic publications than most tenured faculty.

Academic Follies

I have now been done with my dissertation for five months. It will be at least another two months before my viva. In the meantime I have been applying for jobs and flogging my dissertation to publishers. The first front has not been very productive. I am still waiting to hear for four jobs in North America that start in September. I have the distinct feeling they are not even going to send me courtesy rejections. The book front is a lot more promising. I just sent the ms to a publisher in Reading. Of course a small publisher can put out 70 titles a year where as a big university is only going to hire one historian dealing with the Soviet Orient at the most. Which explains why I guy like me whose employment experience is confined mostly to serving coffee has two academic books out and a third on the way. Universities say they want faculty who publish, but from my standpoint I see no evidence that this is the case. I have a lot of publications. In fact most lecturers I know have far fewer. In truth I am told by insiders that lots of publications can hurt you. Nobody wants to hire somebody more proficient than themselves. At least if I go back to serving coffee they will have to call me Dr.

Israel's Stalinist Model

I can understand why the left in the US has always been pro-Zionists. It is the same reason the Stalin regime supported the creation of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. The Zionists, particularly under Ben Gurion were part of the Stalinist left. In many ways despite the rise in power of the Likud, Israel continues to be a socialist state. A full 92% of the land is owned by agents of the state and reserved exclusively for Jewish use. The fact that the Zionists conciously modeled the "transfer" of the Palestinians on Stalin's deportation of the Volga Germans in order to obtain most of this land is a major reason why many Jewish intellectuals and supporters of Israel have always been soft on the USSR. They adamantly resist aknowledging the racist nature of Soviet crimes such as the deportation of the Volga Germans because to do so would expose the Israelis to criticism for copying the original model.

Divided by a common language

George Bernard Shaw once said that Americans and Britians were "two people divided by a common language." Which is another way of saying that the English, less so the Celtic peoples, are just wierd. Even after being in the UK for the better part of three years and speaking a dialect of the language as my native tongue I am acutely aware of being in an alien culture. Today I paid my rent. I paid it in cash by depositing it in the land ladies account. Evidently this is common in London. It was new to me, however.

Why Stalinism is more evil than Hitlerism

The official line among western intellectuals is that Naziism is uniquely evil and Stalinism is a distant runner up. I reject this line of thought. The usual reasons given are special pleading. That is that the Nazis targeted Jews whereas the Soviets merely targeted people. Or that the Soviets had lofty goals of equality whereas the Nazis were just plain racists. Of course the Soviets also targeted a number of groups for destruction which they defined in racialist terms. Some like the Chechens lost about a third of their population due to government repression in the 1940s. The Russian-Germans, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks all sufferred from various forms of official and unofficial discrimination until the very end of the Soviet Union. The Moscow Helsinki Group even compared this discrimination to apartheid in South Africa. I certainly don't buy the idea that somehow proclaiming progressive goals justifies evil means. In fact I think it makes it a lot worse. It is the very fact that the Soviets claimed to be acting in the name of laudable ideals and that tens of millions of otherwise bright people in Europe, the Americas and Australia went along with this crap and still do that makes Stalinism several magnitudes of order more evil than Naziism. Even today a lot of people don't think Stalin's murder of 15 million people was nearly as bad as Hitler's killing of 5 million Jews. Minimizers of Stalin's crimes still hold quite a bit of influence in US academia. Nobody would wear a shirt with a Swastika on it around London. But, I see lots of sickle and hammer shirts. This ability to maintain a positive PR spin decades after his death is an accomplishment of evil by Stalin that Hitler could never have dreamed of accomplishing. It also allows his evil to continue. Right now Putin is busy trying to finish Stalin's dream of physically eliminating the Chechen people. It would be quite absurd to imagine modern day Germany ever persecuting its growing Jewish population.

Introduction

I am currently living in a bit of limbo. I finished writing my Ph.D. dissertation months ago, but will not have my viva until at least October. In the mean time I have been applying for university jobs and sending out book proposals to have my dissertation published. I have not heard anything definite on any front. The upshot is that I have a lot of free time on my hands currently. Most of it I waste wandering around London. Some of it I will now waste inflicting my opinions upon anybody who pauses to read this blog.