Citations in Journalism, Social Media, and Academia

One of the things I have written about has been the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. For a long time it was a topic, like most of what I have written about, that interested very few people. But, it appears that I do seem to be getting some readers recently. In the last two days I have found this article which cites me, this tweet by a person whose identity completely eludes me, this long drawn out message board debate in Spanish about my second book, and most impressively this academic piece in Russian from a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine's Institute of History of Ukraine on the English language historiography of the Crimean Tatars under Stalin and Khrushchev. So that means that there are at least a few people that I did not know about before who have recently been reading some of the stuff I have written. I realize that I am always going to be an extremely marginal figure in the academic world. But, it is nice to know that the extremity of the marginality is just a tiny bit less than it was before. I would never have dreamed that any historians at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine would ever have heard of me yet alone considered me an important part of the English language historiography on the Crimean Tatars or anything else.

Coffee is African. So why can't I get any at the University of Ghana in Legon?

This picture actually has nothing to do with anything. I just like it. Unfortunately, there is no place on campus where you can get real coffee. All they have is that nasty Nescafe stuff that is made in a laboratory and has no real actual coffee beans in it. I am not sure why this is since Nkrumah was a strong Pan-Africanist and coffee comes from the oldest state in sub-Saharan Africa, Ethiopia. But, every time I bring up this argument as to why they should serve me real coffee and not Nescafe people look at me like I am the craziest obruni they have ever seen. However, I am quite positive that Ghana can not hold out forever as the only country in the world still serving horrible artificial instant coffee instead of authentic real coffee.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

71 Years since the Deportation of the Balkars

Today is the 71st anniversary of the deportation of the Balkars from their homeland in the Caucasus to Kazkhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Stalin regime falsely accused the Balkars of mass treason and used this pretext to disperse them across the vast expanse of Central Asia. In total the NKVD loaded a recorded 37,713 Balkar men, women, and children onto 14 train echelons bound east during 8-9 March 1944. Like other mass deportations, the forced eviction of the Balkars coincided with a major Soviet holiday. In this case International Women's Day. The Balkars spent the next twelve years living under the special settlement regime as second class citizens.  During the first eight years they suffered over 7,000 excess premature deaths due to the harsh material conditions of their exile. The Soviet government only released the Balkars from the special settlement restrictions on 28 April 1956. After 1957, the Soviet government finally allowed the surviving deported Balkars and their children to return home to the Caucasus.

Academic Publishing

I have reached the point where I take it as a victory if a big name academic journal sends my manuscript out to peer reviewers rather than the editor rejecting it outright for arbitrary reasons. So I have cause today for a small celebration to coincide with Ghanaian Independence Day. Of course I have no hope that the peer reviewers will approve the piece for publication. But, the last piece I sent out was a lot more controversial and the peer review reports were not hostile. I found that extremely surprising. So I am banking on that.

Happy Independence Day Ghana

62 Years Since Stalin Died and His Regime is more Popular now than anytime since 1956

It has been 62 years since Stalin died. Despite knowing now more than ever about the crimes of his regime, Stalin is more popular than at anytime since Khrushchev denounced some of his crimes at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. The Perm-36 GULag camp has now been seized by the state.  No longer is it a museum dedicated to the victims of political repression under the Stalin regime. Instead it has been converted  into one celebrating the guards and other workers in the penal apparatus. The rehabilitation of Stalin's regime in the former USSR and other places has been going on for a while now. But, if you had told me in the 1980s at a time when Europe from Berlin to Baku was eagerly shaking off the yoke of Soviet rule that Stalinism would be undergoing a full rehabilitation from Madison to Moscow I would have thought you nuts. However, it turns out that the tepid attempts by Khrushchev at destalinization completely failed to take any root in Russia or Central Asia. 

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah Speech on 6th march 1957 at the independence square

Hppy Independence Day to Ghana.

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?