It is nice to be appreciated even if your efforts are totally ineffective

I got the comment below on an older post today. Unfortunately, there is nothing effective I can do about the Turkmen government's travel ban and other unjust actions against AUCA students. All I can do is express my strongest opposition to these policies on this blog.

Thank you, Otto, for the worries about Turkmen AUCA students. I am one of your students, I took Comparative Politics from you and Emir last year. But now I am stuck here with the rest.. Anyways, I am glad that you have several posts, regarding our travel ban. Thank..

It is wicked cold now

While December and January were for the most part quite warm, February has been really cold. It has gotten so cold that Oksana went out and got me some long underwear. The extra layer helps a little bit, but it is still freezing.

Monday mornings seem to be unblocked

Blogger is unblocked now. It was blocked most of last week. However, a pattern may be emerging. For the last two Mondays I have been able to gain access to Blogger.

The Banality of Zionism

Today I taught Politics of the Middle East. This is the second time I have taught the class. The first time it was quite thrilling to be able to criticize Israel without being viciously attacked as happens to anybody in the US who openly holds a political position hostile to Zionism. But, here my views are considered part of the mainstream international opinion. Of course most people think that Israeli apartheid and dropping white phospherous on children are morally wrong. It is only in the US and obviously Israel that anybody else thinks differently. So now I am finding teaching the class less interesting. Most people outside the US not only view Israel's actions against the Palestinians as evil, but banal as well. Arendt was right on this much.

Excess Deaths among Deported Peoples in the USSR

Russian-Germans: 228,761 (1942-1952)

"Punished Peoples": 213,302 (1944-1952)
Ethnic Breakdown of "Punished Peoples"
Karachais: 13,141

Kalmyks: 12,564

Chechens: 125,477

Ingush: 20,284

Balkars: 7,594
Crimean Tatars: 34,242

Total: 442,064

Source: D.M. Ediev, Demograficheskie poteri deportirovannykh narodov SSSR (Stavropol': STGAU "AGRUS",2003), table 104, p. 294.

Quoted in Daily 49er (California State University Long Beach)

This comes at an interesting time since the abstract quoted is from an article I assigned to my Politics of the Middle East class last week. At any rate, Gerard Morel-Cruz, a graduate student of English and a writer for the paper quotes the abstract to my article "Socialist Racism: Ethnic Cleansing and Racial Exclusion in the USSR and Israel" in this last Sunday's online edition of the paper. So I guess at least one graduate student in the US has read something I have written. If I can only move that number up to a hundred.

Armored Frog

I only know a very little bit of Kyrgyz. Like almost everybody else of European descent in Kyrgyzstan I communicate in either Russian or English. Although my spoken Russian is far from perfect, it is the language I use when talking to Oksana and Askarbek. At this point neither of them know much more English than I know Kyrgyz. But, every so often I pick up a new word in Kyrgyz that I can actually pronounce. Yesterday I learned the word for turtle. It is tashbaka which literally means armored frog. I like that.

Sugar Stockpile

Oksana said there was a shortage of sugar in Kyrgyzstan and that prices were set to climb signficantly. So yesterday she purchased 20 kg of sugar at Osh Bazaar. I think we have enough sugar now to last us a while.

This time Blogger was only blocked for four days

Amazingly Blogger works today despite being blocked for the last four days. So with any luck I will be able to put up a couple of posts today. I am not sure how long it will remain unblocked.

Between a Journal Article and a Book

It seems to me that the average academic journal at 5-8 thousand words is too short and the average academic book at 80-100 thousand words is too long for some of the types of writing I would like to do. Right now I have just cut a journal article down from nearly 11 thousand words to under 8 thousand. But, if there were a publishing venue I could easily see writing pieces that are 20-30 thousand words. However, there seem to be no publishing outlets for academic works between the 8 thousand word maximum of a journal article and the 80 thousand words of a short monograph. Am I the only person who laments the absence of an intermediate length academic publication between these two extremes?

Today's Work

Today I only had one class to teach. The rest of the day I have been using to do other academic things. I marked up a few drafts sent to me by seniors writing their honor theses. I also have been revising the format, particularly the citation format of a journal article so I can submit it to a particular journal. I got about half way through the article converting the footnotes to in text citations. I must say revising citation formats is probably the least interesting part of writing.

Letters of Rec

I have had a lot of students ask me for reference letters for MA programs in the last couple of years. Looking through academic blogs I see that we are supposed to try and discourage students from attending graduate studies due to the very poor job market. But, to be honest I just write the letters and do not give any advice.

Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism Class

Currently my Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism class has the best discussions of any class I am teaching. This class is going much better than the last time I taught it. I think the fact that it has about half as many students this semester as it did a year and a half ago is a big reason for the improved discussions.

Hope Against Experience

I have applied for a promotion on the basis that I have had six scholarly pieces including two peer reviewed journal articles published since I started working at AUCA. I have also taught thirteen different courses since 2007. On my last student evaluations I got perfect scores for two classes, Russian Politics and Political Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia. Of course I have never seen any indication that research and teaching are in any way related to academic hiring and promotion. But, with a huge amount of luck and divine intervention I might possibly get the promotion.

Link on "German" Woman Deported to Tajikistan by Stalin

Here is a link to a very interesting article on a woman deported from Lithuania to Tajikistan by the Stalin regime because it viewed her as an ethnic German. Her mother was German and German is her native language. However, her father was a Lithuanian Jew and her mother formally converted to Judaism to marry him. She was born in Lithuania in 1938 and deported to Tajikistan in 1944. At any rate the story is a very good example of the proliferation of multiple identities in Central Europe during the 20th century. The woman in the story considers herself to be in various ways German, Jewish and Lithuanian.

Academic Journal Article Cites My Blog

The International Black Sea University in Tbilisi Georgia publishes a journal called IBSU Scientific Journal. Recently this journal published an article by Valeri Modebadze with the title, "Historical Background of Meskhetian Turks' Problem and Major Obstacles to the Repatriation Process." One of the citations in the article is to this blog. I have reproduced the bibliographic information for the blog post below.

Pohl, J. Otto, More Thoughts on Meskhetian Turks, (accessed 24 November 2008). Available from World Wide Web: http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2005/10/more-thoughts-on-meskhetian-turks.html.

Blogger Available Again

After nearly two weeks of being blocked I can again access blogger. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when blogger is available here. So there will be a few posts today, but then it may be a couple of weeks before I can post again.

Things I am Currently Teaching

This last two weeks I have been teaching Reconstruction in American History, the Mandate Period in Politics of the Middle East, the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism in Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism and the relationship between social class structure and democracy in Democratization.

Important Advice for Future Ph.D. Candidates

These instructions on how to write a Ph.D. dissertation are very funny. They also contain a lot of actual good advice like not spending extra years of your life trying to make the dissertation perfect. I did my Ph.D. in two years, but a lot of people seem to waste close to a decade completing the degree.

hat tip: Frogs and Ravens

How do I get Students to do the reading?

It is the second week of the semester and already I am having trouble getting students to do the reading. I do not want to assign weekly quizes because I feel that infantilizes the students. I would much rather treat them as adults. I also do not want to require them to write weekly summaries or responses to the reading because frankly with over 80 students it would be a lot of work to grade. On the other hand verbal cajoling to do the reading has so far been ineffective. Does anybody have any suggestions?