Summer Activities

This summer is turning out to be pretty quiet. Nothing exciting has happened so far in Bishkek since my last batch of students graduated. Almost everybody except me is on holiday. I am still working as always. Right now I am preparing my classes for next semester. I am almost done with the syllabus for Political Violence and Terror in Central Asia.

Two new publications coming soon

In August and September I have two new journal articles coming out in print. The first is "Volk auf dem Weg: Transnational Migration of the Russian-Germans from 1763 to Present Day," scheduled for publication in the next issue (volume 9, no. 2) of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. The second article, "'In our Hearts we Felt the Sentence of Death': Ethnic German Recollections of Mass Violence in the USSR, 1928-1948" I co-wrote with Eric J. Schmaltz and Ron J. Vossler. It is scheduled to be published in the next issue (volume 11, no. 2) of Journal of Genocide Research. I will post the abstracts after their publication.

Lazy Weather

Bishkek is now really hot and humid. This combination of weather is sapping my energy and making me lazy. Fortunately, I do not have as much to do during the summer. But, this weekend I spent all Sunday doing nothing productive what so ever. It is very unusual for me to have a whole day where I do not get any work done. Today I am trying to make up for it at the office.

Another faculty member leaves

It seems that the number of foreign faculty at AUCA is rapidly declining and along with it the number of PhDs. I just found out that my friend and colleague Werner Bigell who taught in the American Studies Department across the hall has decided not to return next year. That means I will be the only person with a doctorate teaching any American Studies courses next year.

Then there was one

My friend and colleague Okon Akiba has left the International and Comparative Politics Department of AUCA to return to the US. These pictures were taken at his apartment in Bishkek. He is the tall guy wearing the turtleneck. It was a great pleasure and honor to work with Dr. Akiba during the two years I have known him. He combined both serious scholarship and good natured collegiality in just the right proportions. I will greatly miss his presence in the office and wish him the best of luck back in the US. Now that Okon is gone I am the only person remaining in my department with a PhD.

Interview with Walter Richmond on Circassians

Circassian World has an interview with my good friend Walter Richmond on the history and politics of the Circassians. This brief interview is extremely informative and brings a much needed humanistic and objective viewpoint to the past and present political situation in the Northwest Caucasus. He also has some very nice things to say about me.

"Although he has not written on the Circassians, J. Otto Pohl's tireless and uncompromising defense of all repressed peoples has been a great inspiration to me as well."

Walt has done a lot of fantastic work on the Circassians and other peoples of the Northwest Caucasus. It is a great honor to know that I helped inspire him in that scholarship. I urge all my reader to check out the interview.

It gets light early here

This morning I had to be somewhere I had not been before at nine am. That being the case I started walking there at seven am. So I set my alarm at six. But, I actually woke up at five and thought that the alarm had failed to go off because it was already light outside. I then went back to sleep until six thirty. Yes, I slept through the alarm. The walk was quite nice since it is still cool in the morning. I also found the state archives by accident. If things go well in the next couple of months I may try and get access to some of their holdings.

Summer Time

Summer has finally arrived. This last weekend was graduation. Since then the weather has been nice, no more rain or hail storms. But, it has been quite hot. I will be spending the summer in Kyrgyzstan again this year.

Hail Storm

Today there was a short, but intense hail storm in Bishkek. The hail stones were quite large. Fortunately, I was inside at the time.

Sunday Times Book Review of Remember Us

The Sunday Times in London has published a review of Ruth Derksen Seimens, Remember Us: Letters from Stalin's Gulag (1930-1937) (Kitchner, ON: Pandora Press, 2007). The review can be viewed online at the URL below.

<http://cts.vresp.com/c/?GulagLetters/2d9e6b8d2c/085b41c8ed/7bf7ee54f0/token=null&offset=0&page=1>.

Eyewitness accounts of the Surgun

The International Committee for Crimea has recently added a new section called "Surgun Stories" to the page "Surgun: Deportation of Crimean Tatars (18 May 1944)." This section consists of six personal accounts of the deportation and exile of the Crimean Tatars as well as a story by a Turkish journalist of Crimean Tatar heritage about meeting returning deportation survivors in Crimea. Four of these narratives are by survivors of the deportation including one by a Crimean Tatar soldier in the Red Army. The series also includes an eyewitness account of the deportations by one of the NKVD soldiers involved in the operation and a short memoir by a Russian woman who lived in a mixed Crimean Tatar - Russian village and witnessed the events of 18 May 1944 first hand. I hope this section will be expanded to include more accounts by survivors in the near future.

Renovations and Links

I am doing some slight renovations on this blog. One of the things that is being redone are the links. Evidently upgrading the template resulted in most of the original links being lost. I now have to redo them individually. If you have a blog that is linked to mine and you would like me to link to you please let me know in the comments below.

Finally finished for the semester

It looks like I have finally finished all my work for the spring 2009 semester. Last week I had to grade state exams. Now I have to prepare for next semester.

New Website and Book on Kyrgyz History

My colleague and friend Sam Tranum in the Journalism Department of American University of Central Asia recently edited a book and website dedicated to the history of Krygyzstan under Soviet rule. The project consists of 35 interviews conducted by 17 AUCA students with various people in Kyrgyzstan about what life was like in the Kyrgyz SSR. The website is called Preserving Kyrgyzstan's History and can be searched by keyword. The printed book version of this work is called Life at the Edge of the Empire: Oral Histories of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. University libraries may obtain a copy of the print edition by contacting Sam Tranum at samtranum [the at sign] gmail [the dot] com. I am in the acknowledgements and footnotes. I urge all my readers to go check it out.

Some of my Student Evaluation Comments

Dr. Pohl rocks!

Great teacher

In Dr. Pohl's classes I feel myself a real university student!!!!

Seems to me that we finally have a UNIVERSITY LEVEL Professor in AUCA

He is the best teacher

One of the best teachers at this university

Sixty Five Years Since the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

On 18 May 1944, the Soviet NKVD began the systematic round up and deportation of nearly the entire Crimean Tatar population from their ancestral homeland to Uzbekistan and the Urals. Early in the morning armed troops of the NKVD started knocking on the doors of Crimean Tatar houses and informing the inhabitants that they were to be deported. The official explanation given for this mass uprooting of women, children, elderly, Red Army veterans and even members of the Communist Party was the false claim that the Crimean Tatar nationality had collectively betrayed the Soviet Union and collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. The Soviet government did not repeal the last legal vestiges of this false charge until 7 March 1991 (Bugai, pp. 16-18). The authorities gave the deportees only a short period of time to pack. They had to abandon the vast majority of their movable as well as immovable property. Even more importantly they lost access to the natural and cultural resources of their national homeland.

On the first day of the operation, the Soviet security organs took 90,000 people to train stations of which 48,400 began their journey eastward (Bugai, doc. 11, p. 138). The following day the number of Crimean Tatars transported to rail stations increased to 165,515 of which 136,412 had been loaded onto train echelons bound for Uzbekistan (Bugai, doc. 12, p. 138). Finally on 20 May 1944, the NKVD completed the operation. They reported loading a total of 180,014 Crimean Tatars into 67 train echelons of which 63 with 173,287 deportees were already on their way to their new destinations (Bugai, doc. 13, pp. 138-139). On the same day the NKVD also reported mobilizing 11,000 Crimean Tatar men for forced labor, bringing the total number of Crimean Tatars removed from Crimea to 191,014 (Ibid.). A total of 23,000 soldiers and officers of the internal troops of the NKVD and 9,000 operative workers of the NKVD-NKGB participated in this operation (Bugai, doc. 21, p. 144). The NKVD succeeded in ethnically cleansing Crimea of its indigenous population in a mere three days.

The NKVD transported the Crimean Tatars in overcrowded and filthy train wagons to desolate areas of Uzbekistan and the Urals. They lacked sufficient food, water, medicine and hygiene to maintain their health. Many fell ill and thousands perished on the journey. By 4 July 1944, a total of 151,604 Crimean Tatars had arrived in Uzbekistan and 31,551 in the Urals (Bugai, doc. 20, p. 144 and doc. 16, p. 140). In these new locations they lived and worked under special settlement restrictions. Due to a lack of sufficient food, housing and medical care in the face of a severe malaria epidemic thousands died shortly after arriving in Uzbekistan. In the first eight months of exile in Uzbekistan a recorded total of 13,592 Crimean Tatars or 9.1% of the total population perished (Ibragimov, doc. 26, p. 68). The following year another 13,183 Crimean Tatar special settlers died in Uzbekistan bringing the death toll for the first twenty months up to 26,775 people or 17.8% of the population initially deported to Central Asia (Ibid.). This catastrophic loss of life occurred as a direct result of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to regions which the Soviet government knew were suffering from a malaria epidemic and had insufficient extra housing, food and most importantly anti-malarial drugs to prevent mass deaths among the deportees.

Stalin's ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars 65 years ago represents one of the worst violations of national and human rights during the 20th century. The Soviet regime deprived an entire nation of its homeland and reduced them to a caste of helot laborers under extremely punitive conditions. Indeed the material conditions of the Crimean Tatar special settlers proved to be lethal and decimated the population in Uzbekistan in less than a year. Please join with me and others for a moment of silence at noon, 18 May 2009 where ever you are to remember the victims of this crime against humanity.

Sources:

Bugai, N.F., ed., Iosif Stalin – Lavrentiiu Berii. “Ikh nado deportirovat’,” Dokumenty, fakty kommentarii (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992).

Ibragimov, Ayder, ed., Krimskii studii: Informatsiini biuletin, no. 5-6, September-November 2000.

For more information on the deportation of the Crimean Tatars see the following posts from 2006 and 2007.

Grades for the semester finished

Today I finished calculating and posting grades. I had three classes with a total of 68 students and each of them had to submit a final paper. It took me all weekend to read through them all.

Victory Day

Tomorrow is Victory Day. This holiday marks the defeat of Nazi Germany 64 years ago. Here in Bishkek there are lots of billboards up with Soviet iconography and praise to the Red Army and the surviving veterans of World War II. Most of the veterans pictured on the posters seemed to have served in tank units.

Update on Under Jakob's Ladder

I just got this comment on a post I did almost a year ago.


Hello. I am actor Peter Iasillo and I play the part of Vovik, one of the detainees/prisoners in this film. Mann and Robert Munoz (aka The Moon Brothers) are doing an outstanding job of producing and directing this film. Jeff Stewart (BBC's "The Bill") as Jakob is very convincing and a joy to work. I am very grateful to the brothers for casting me and giving me the opportunity to break out of my horror movie mold.

Research Opportunities

It dawned on me yesterday that there is a lot more opportunity in Kyrgyzstan than in the Russian Federation to study the deportation of nationalities under Stalin. This is for two main reasons. First, relatively little has been written about the experience of deportees in Central Asia compared to the central policy of forced removal formulated in Moscow. In particular, Kyrgyzstan as a location of research on the life of special settlers has been neglected in favor of Siberia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This means the history of special settlers in Kyrgyzstan remains a largely unexplored area of research. Second, the political climate in Kyrgyzstan is much more favorable for the conduct of such research than in the Russian Federation. My student research team and I have not encountered any political obstacles in the course of our project on the Karachai deportation. In contrast the Memorial offices in St. Petersburg were raided by the police on 4 December 2008. They confiscated eleven hard drives containing a large amount of scanned documentary evidence of Stalinist crimes. These included a number of letters written by special settlers, interview transcripts of victims of Stalinist repression and other material .