Boris Nemtsov murdered in Moscow

Reports from Moscow are noting that opposition politician Boris Nemtsov has reportedly been shot and killed by four bullets to the chest while out walking. This is the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report on the murder.

RIP Leonard Nimoy

Most people will remember the late Leonard Nimoy for his iconic role as Spock in the first Star Trek franchise. Indeed, reruns of that show were where I first remember seeing Nimoy's acting. But, I think my favorite Nimoy related show might have been In Search Of one of the very first documentary series on paranormal events. Nimoy was an important cultural figure for those of us who grew up in the 1970s because despite other models of coolness there was no way you could get any cooler than Spock.

Die Wolhyniendeutschen

This is my ethnic heritage on my father's side.

Today is the 71st anniversary of the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush

Today is the 71st anniversary of the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush. To celebrate Red Army Day in 1944, the NKVD systematically deported almost the entire Chechen and Ingush populations from their mountain homeland in the Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. There they lived under severe legal restrictions and in dire poverty. As a result of the extremely poor material conditions in their new places of settlement over 145,000 died prematurely before the end of 1952. Only in 1957 did the Soviet government restore the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and sanction the return home of the deportees and their children.

Vote YES! Support BDS call for Academic Boycott at SOAS

Ethnic Germans from Kyrgyzstan sent from the Red Army to the Labor Army

In the fall of 1941 the Stalin regime removed almost all ethnic Germans from the Red Army and sent them to the labor army. The vast majority of these loyal Soviet citizens came from the Volga since the Soviet government had stopped conscripting ethnic Germans from other regions in 1939 (German and Shul'ga, fn. 4 p. 31). Despite this fact there were still ethnic Germans from other regions of the USSR in the Red Army in 1941. Among these men were a number of ethnic Germans from Kyrgyzstan.This post will deal with five of them.  Egor Yakovlevich Mohr was serving in a cavalry unit at the start of the war. He was demobilized from the Red Army in September 1941 and then mobilized into the labor army in Sverdlovsk Oblast. Aleksandr Ivanovich Hizbrecht served in the Red Army in Ust'-Kamenogorod in Kazakhstan in 1941 and 1942 as a senior sargent. In 1942 he was demobilized from the Soviet military and then mobilized into the labor army and sent to work in Bakallag in Chelyabinsk Oblast. Walther Fernandovich Hertel had been mobilized into the Red Army from the old German settlements in Leninpol' Raion, Talas Oblast. He was then sent to the labor army in Chelyabinsk. He was arrested while in the labor army and sentenced to seven years imprisonment on 2 September  1943 under articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Vasilii Andreevich Alles served in the Red Army from 1938 to 1941. In May 1941 he was removed and sent to Sverdlovsk Oblast as a special settler. In 1942 he worked as a miner in a quarry. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Frick was serving in the Red Army in Novosibirsk Oblast in 1941 when he was demobilized from active military service and conscripted into the labor army. In 1942 the NKVD transferred him to Omsk Oblast (Shtraus and Pankrats, pp. 160-161). The systematic removal of loyal ethnic Germans from the ranks of the Red Army and their mobilization for forced labor in Bakallag and other camps applied to those both in the front and the rear. The Germans in Kyrgyzstan like their brethren in the Volga were not immune from this racially motivated repression.

Sources:

A. German and I. Shul'ga, "'Ne byvat' fashistskoi svin'e v nashem sovetskom ogorode.' Sovetskie nemtsy na fronte i v tylu vraga,"  Rodina, no. 5, 2010, pp. 28-31.

A. Shtraus and S. Pankrats, Svidetel'stva prestuplenii (Bishkek: Ilim, 1997).

“Loss, Retention, and Reacquisition of Social Capital by Special Settlers in the USSR, 1941-1961”

I have placed another piece of mine that was published in 2008 on my academia.edu page. The print version appeared as J. Otto Pohl, “Loss, Retention, and Reacquisition of Social Capital by Special Settlers in the USSR, 1941-1961” in Cynthia Buckley, Blair Ruble, and Erin Trouth Hofmann, eds., Migration, Homeland and Belonging in Eurasia (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center and Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2008). An electronic version can now be found here. Feel to leave any comments you have about the work here.

Provisional Time Table for University of Ghana Seminar Presentations

History Department Seminars

Spring 2015

Wednesday Mornings, Departmental Library 9:30 am

Date	Speaker	Title
11-02-15	J. Otto Pohl	The Persecution of Ethnic Germans in the USSR During World War II
18-02-15		Graduate Students
25-02-15		Long Essay Students
04-03-15	Larry Yarak	Kingship in Elmina
11-03-15	Kwame Adum-Kyeremeh	Ohene Djan and the Development of Sport in Ghana - A Historical Analysis
18-03-15	Doris S. Essah	Hairdressing in the Gold Coast Colony during the long Nineteenth Century
25-03-15	Joseph K. Adjaye  and Hist 607 Class	Reforming History Teaching in Ghanaian Schools
01-04-15	Graduate Students	TBA
08-04-15	Graduate Students	TBA
15-04-15	Graduate Students	TBA
22-04-15	Philip Kumahor	Sanitation in Accra
29-04-15	Victoria Smith	"Stranger in the Home": Literature in the History of Radio Ghana.

“Ethnic Erasure: The Role of Border Changes in Soviet Ethnic Cleansing and Return Migration”

I have now put up an electronic version  of "Ethnic Erasure: The Role of Border Changes in Soviet Ethnic Cleansing and Return Migration." The print version appeared in Eero Medijainen and Olaf Mertelsmann, eds., Border Changes in 20th Century Europe, vol. 1 Tartu Studies in Contemporary History (Hamburg, Germany: Lit-Verlag, 2010). The chapter deals with the elimination of the national-territorial units of the deported peoples and their restoration for the North Caucasians and Kalmyks versus the unsuccessful struggles by the Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans to restore their Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics.

"A Caste of Helot Labourers"

I have put up another older published piece of mine up on my academia.edu site. This one is from 2007. You can now go and read, "A Caste of Helot Labourers: Special Settlers and the Cultivation of Cotton in Soviet Central Asia: 1944-1956" there.  I figure if I am going to take the time to write these things that somebody somewhere should eventually read them. Unlike most US academics I don't care very much who constitutes my reading audience. In fact the whole idea of narrow specialists only writing for other narrow specialists is one of the major problems of academia.I have always been too much of a populist to fit into American academia.  Populism is much more accepted in Africa. At any rate I hope by putting this link here that I can garner at least one more reader for this particular piece of writing. If not then at least enjoy the awesome cartoon in the right hand corner.

"Suffering in a Province of Asia"

I have put up a piece of mine from several years ago on ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan. You can find "Suffering in a Province of Asia: The Russian-German Diaspora in Kazakhstan" on my academia.edu page. It is rather short, but contains ideas that are extremely unorthodox in the field of Soviet history. Please feel free to comment on it either there or here in the comments.

Trying to do Modern African History

I am currently finishing up footnotes on what will be my fourth short piece dealing with Africa in some way. As long as I am in the history department here at University of Ghana it seems that such opportunities, usually book chapters, come about once a year. To date the chapter I am currently finishing is the only one to focus on Ghana. The others have focused on Togo, South Africa, and the Black Diaspora. Officially the Black Diaspora is one of the six regions of Africa according to the African Union, although much of it including the part I wrote about isn't very African. One of the problems with writing about Ghana is that I am far more interested in the early independence era than I am in the colonial era. Yet, almost all of the archives for the post-colonial era still remain completely off limits. The fact that Ghana has been independent for over fifty seven years now hasn't done anything to speed up the declassification process. I was told by K.B. Asante that it is unlikely that Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents regarding events in 1963 will be available before 2043. So while the current piece I am working on is about 1966, the local archival source base for Ghanaian history is largely limited to the years 1874 to 1957 when it was officially a British colony. That puts a lot of restrictions on the type of history that can be written using the archives here as a source. I am not sure what it is like in other African states. Do any of them have archives dealing with the post-colonial era that are open to historical researchers? Are they all like Ghana and basically only allow access to documents pertaining to the years that they were under European rule?

Writing project on 24 February 1966 coup

Yesterday I finished a rough draft of my book chapter on the role of the CIA and other US government institutions during the Johnson administration in supporting the 24 February 1966 coup against Nkrumah. I linked the pattern used by the US to support the military overthrow of the Ghanaian government to the those used earlier in 1965 in Indonesia against Sukarno and later in 1973 in Chile against Allende. True it is a rather minor insight, but given the present day deification of LBJ by radical left wing US academics I don't think it is something that could currently be published in the US. They would undoubtedly insist that it was all the fault of Republicans and that LBJ should only be praised because he signed the CRA and VRA. Fortunately, the book will be published in Germany where left wing academics have yet to establish a cult of personality around LBJ.

More Links Between Soviet and South African Apartheid

The Russian-Germans deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan in 1941 were released from special settlement restrictions on 13 December 1955 by a decree of the Presidium  of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.  This decree, however, explicitly barred the ethnic Germans freed from the special settlement restrictions from either recovering property confiscated during the deportations or returning to the areas they had previously inhabited (Auman and Chebatoreva, p. 177). In practice after 1955 the Soviet government continued to confine the vast majority of ethnic Germans in the USSR east of the Urals in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia. The pardon of 1955 was followed by a partial rehabilitation on 29 August 1964 which formally lifted the charges of treason levelled against the Russian-Germans on 28 August 1941. It did not, however, remove the continuing restrictions on choosing their place of residence. Instead it noted that they had become "rooted" in their new places of settlement (Auman and Chebatoreva, pp. 178-179). Despite the continued ban on Russian-Germans from returning to their previous places of settlement, a number managed to move to other European territories under Soviet rule, most notably Estonia and Latvia. Technically, this was not a violation of the 1955 decree since almost none of the ethnic Germans coming from Kazakhstan and Central Asia to the Baltic had lived there previously. The MVD of the Estonian SSR thus issued a protocol, "It is prohibited to issue residency permits for the republic to people of German ethnicity, coming in from other republics." (Ziben, p. 39). Three days later on 25 March 1972, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia issued a decree prohibiting the issue of residency permits to ethnic Germans (Ziben, p. 40). The Soviet government only restored the formal equal right of ethnic Germans in the USSR to choose their place of residency on 3 November 1972 (Auman and Chebotareva, p. 179). This decree came just a year before the UN passed the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This convention was passed by the UN General Assembly on 30 November 1973. The resolution was cosponsored by the USSR and Guinea and prohibits among other things imposing restrictions on the right of "racial groups" to choose their place of residence (Tilley et al, pp. 295-300). Under the definition of the International Convention to Eliminate all Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1965 the restrictions prohibiting ethnic Germans in the USSR from choosing their place of residency constituted racial discrimination. It appears that the blanket legal ban on ethnic Germans choosing their place of residency was repealed at least in part so that the USSR could cosponsor the anti-apartheid convention without facing charges of hypocrisy.

Sources:

 V.A. Auman and V.G. Chebatoreva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763-1992),(Moscow: MIGP, 1993).

Virginia Tilley et al, Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law. (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2009).

V. Ziben, "Nemtsy v Estonii posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny, 1956-1991 gg." in A.A. German (ed.), Nemetskoe naselenie v poststalinskom SSSR, v stranakh SNG i Baltii (1956-2000 gg.) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi souiz nemetskoi kul'tury, 2003).

LBJ was a criminal who caused massive suffering in Africa and Asia

Right now all the "progressives" are rallying around the altar to worship LBJ, a US president who contributed greatly to the repression and murder of millions of people in Africa and Asia. What is worse they are doing so by portraying this monster as the greatest hero Black people have ever had in the world. The worst thing to ever happen to Ghana since it achieved independence from the UK on 6 March 1957 was the 24 February 1966 coup overthrowing Nkrumah. That coup was only successful because it had the full support of the US government under LBJ. The declassified CIA documents are pretty clear on the fact that the desire to remove Nkrumah emanated from Johnson personally. The coup set back political and economic advancement in Ghana and all of Africa by decades. LBJ was also responsible for making sure that Mobutu was made absolute dictator of Congo for decades to come. This of course does not even touch on his policies in supporting the massacres and coup by Suharto in Indonesia which followed the same logic as his backing of the coup in Ghana. Then of course there is the whole escalation of the war in Vietnam. But, evidently signing the Voting Rights Act completely wipes out all of the tortured, dead, imprisoned, and displaced people whose suffering Johnson caused in Ghana, Congo, Indonesia, and Vietnam. I do not understand "progressives." Dear God, please give me the old hippie leftists of yore back.

African Lives Matter Too (Baga Massacre)

While the world has been focused on the horrible murder of 16 people in Paris, Boko Haram has murdered as many as 2,000 people this last week in an attack that nearly wiped out an entire town. I don't expect this to get nearly as much attention as the events in Paris despite it being a much greater number of people. African lives have never been as valued as European lives by most people in the US. The people murdered in Nigeria were not cartoonists, their murder was not for anything they did, but instead a massacre by Boko Haram to disrupt the current presidential elections. They were murdered not for drawing offensive cartoons, but merely for existing.

In Lieu of Concrete New Years Resolutions

Again I am trying to be aspirational here. So this year I am going to try and read more, write more, and think about negative things less. I need to do things for their own sake and not for their consequences. I am a lot more content if I let the completion of things be their own reward rather than worry about external justifications. Most of all I think I need to proceed on a track that basically ignores most of the so called "First World." Nobody in Africa can be successful if they are obsessed with an American centered or European centered view of the world. Such a path is impossible. People in Africa including myself need to work in such a way that we can be successful in terms that matter for us here not what happens among people in the US or Europe. This is sometimes hard to do because of the historical cultural dominance of Obrunistan including in the sphere of academia. This dominance has been especially oppressive in global academia in the last couple of decades. But, I can't help thinking that there are other and better ways than slavishly following the intellectual fads popular in North America. Rather than following their established paradigms what if I and other people in the former second and third worlds just ignored their rules and established a parallel body of research? I am thinking especially about the field of history here.  This has been done before and it had considerable success. It certainly can't be less successful than the current path. Any and all thoughts, comments, and criticisms are welcome.

New Years Thoughts: Doors of Opportunity

Like the picture to the right here I like to be aspirational. So I am hoping that this New Year is better than last year. I think the key thing is to avoid panic and to just get a little bit done every day. After all Africa wasn't victorious in its struggle for liberation in a day. The other thing is that I am thinking I should be looking for parallel and alternative routes for getting recognition for my ideas. I am not exactly sure how to do that, but if anybody reading this (again I like to be aspirational) has any suggestions please let me know. My first thoughts are that both new tactics and new targets are needed. Entering unlocked rooms is always easier than trying to assault iron walls with your bare head. Of course finding those unlocked doors is the hard part. There don't seem to be any maps available marking out where they lie. But, just because the only door that comes into my vision first is the locked drawbridge across from a moat filled with piranhas doesn't mean that there are not easier entrances I just have not noticed. I just need to find the doors. Consider this open thread on possible doors of opportunity.

Happy New Year from Africa

Today in Legon

Most of the university is deserted now for winter break. Although the vital services and merchants I needed today were still at work. I had to go to the bank to get my new ATM card. On Saturday the machine told me my old one was "invalid." I also needed to buy a new pair of Chinese counterfeit Converse All Stars shoes from the guy under Legon Annex. They cost me a whopping 25 Ghana Cedis. Which is dirt cheap, but unfortunately they only last about two months before I need to again replace them. I also had to go to the Lebanese grocery store to buy more Colombian counterfeit Sriracha sauce. It is interesting that the South Americans are pirating the one item that actually should be manufactured in Asia. While I was there I went to the book store which was having a 20% off sale and purchased a modern history of Korea and a Norwegian mystery novel. I also got some work done on my book chapter manuscript on the role of the US government in overthrowing Nkrumah in 1966. Although I did not get as much written today on the manuscript as I had initially hoped.