Brazil 3 Ghana 0

I really wanted Ghana to beat Brazil. I knew it was a near impossible task, but I have seen miracles before. The players from Ghana overall gave a very good showing in their first World Cup ever.

Italy 1 Australia 0

Italy won again only because of the bad call of a corrupt ref. They got an unearned penalty kick at the very end of the game. Clearly the Australians did nothing to justify such a penalty. This is the second suspicious win by Italy due to an obviously wrong call by the ref. I think an investigation is in order.

65 Years Since the Rainiai Forest Massacre and still the perpetrators live in freedom

On 25-26 June 1941, the Soviet NKVD brutally tortured and murdered 74 Lithuanians in the Rainiai Forest. Two of the perpetrators of this crime are still alive and being protected from prosecution in Lithuania by foreign states. Israel has refused to extradite Nachman Dusanski to Lithuania to stand trial for this crime. In a similar fashion Russia has refused to hand over Petras Raslanas over for justice. The hypocritical actions of the Israeli and Russian governments regarding the issue of World War II crimes against humanity is truly revolting.

The Big Idea is Rolling Along

It now looks like I have five presenters for my conference on migration and international borders. This is shaping up much faster than I expected. It is also shaping up much better than I expected. Among the topics that have been suggested and accepted by me are Albanian migrants in the European Union, illegal immigrants in Germany, Iranian refugees in Turkey and immigrants to post-Katrina New Orleans. This is turning out to be much easier to pull off than I ever imagined. I may be just one man with no money living in the desert, but it appears I can perform all the functions of a major university and do a better job at them. Some people should be really embarrassed.

Important World Cup News: Ghana Official New Team for US Futbol Fans

It seems that we the American people have spontaneously decided in the wake of our elimination from the World Cup yesterday to now back the team that defeated us. Us Yanks are rooting for Ghana. I say, "Go Ghana!"

What Happened to the Ethnic Chinese in the Soviet Far East?

Jon Chang left an interesting comment on my post "Big Idea: Step One Completed." It deals with the ethnic Chinese in the Soviet Far East. Unlike the ethnic Koreans the Soviet archives do not reveal much about their fate. This is especially true regarding population statistics. The 1926 Soviet census lists 50,183 Chinese in the Far East Krai. By the 1939 census this number had dropped by 90%. Of course the 1939 census did not count all Chinese in the Soviet Far East Krai. It only counted those with Soviet citizenship. It also does not count the 3,161 ethnic Chinese in Corrective Labor Camps on 1 January 1939. Nevertheless, the Chinese population dropped dramatically in the Soviet Far East during the 1930s.

The fate of Russian-Koreans in the Soviet Far East is well documented in the Soviet archives. There is a wealth of statistical data regarding the numbers deported and their geographical distribution over time. This is not the case with the ethnic Chinese. The only figures that exist for the number of Chinese in the Soviet Far East subject to "administrative exile" in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and arrest come from a single non-archival source. The head of the NKVD in the Soviet Far East, Genrikh Liushkov defected to the Japanese Empire on 13 June 1938. He had overseen the "Great Purges" in the region. He had also supervised the mass deportation of Russian-Koreans and ethnic Chinese to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. While living under Japanese rule Liushkov told the magazine Gekkan Roshia that during the deportation of the Russian-Koreans that the NKVD had also arrested 11,000 ethnic Chinese and exiled another 8,000 to the interior of the USSR. These are the only figures for the arrest and deportation of ethnic Chinese in the Soviet Far East that I have seen cited. The Japanese executed Liushkov before surrendering so he was unable to provide further insight into these numbers after the end of the war.

From other information it appears that the NKVD executed most of the arrested Chinese during 1937 and 1938. By the start of 1939, only a little over 3,000 remained alive in Corrective Labor Camps. The 8,000 Chinese exiles have not yet shown up in any Soviet archives to my knowledge. It is possible the Soviet government reclassified them as part of the much larger Korean population exiled to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Yet, the largest gap is between the number of Chinese in the Soviet Far East in 1926, over 50,000 and the number in 1939, only about 5,000. The 19,000 arrested and exiled Chinese noted by Liushkov fails to account for over 30,000 people. Research on this subject by people like Mark Sylte and Jonathan Bone point to a massive expulsion of ethnic Chinese across the Soviet borders into Manchuria during the months between December 1937 and May 1938. Thus the bulk of the decline in the Chinese population in the Soviet Far East during the 1930s can be attributed to their violent removal by the NKVD during 1937 and 1938.

This is my last post on the German Diaspora Conference

I received the following e-mail today from the conference organizer. I am posting it verbatium without any alteration. I will not be posting on the conference any more.

dear dr pohl,
i read the postings on your personal blogg regarding the conference
'diaspora experiences - german immigrants and their descendants. to say it
frankly at the beginning: i certainly do not share the political and
ideological persuasions which transpire in your postings, but i am
interested in hearing them expressed. however, i strongly object to you using
personal insults and ill-founded generalisations about a colleague in
academia. at a conference on history, linguistics and literature, i do
not expect any scholar to be familiar with the many different discources
in the various discplines and sub-disciplines, but i would hope that
everybody expresses their lack of familiarity with a particular discourse
in terms which others do not find insulting.
on a more general note: as somebody who recently received his phd, you
ought to be aware that conference presentations, in general and for
this conference in particular, are selected from a pool of submissions
through a careful vetting process which involves negotiated decisions by a
group of qualified people. if then an individual feels that certain
geographic areas and/or groups should be represented or other voices
should not be heard because they are not liked by this individual, then, i
can tell you from experience, this will neither increase the number of
paper submissions nor will it persuade the program committee to
reconsider its decisions.
best wishes
mathias schulze
conference program coordinator
'diaspora experiences - german immigrants and their descendants'

ps. i herewith give you permission to post the content of this e-mail
on your personal blogg (i was unable to post it there myself because i
am not a registered user.).

Ghana 2 US 1

I knew Ghana was going to be a tough team. As a result of the ref robbing of us of a properly earned goal against Italy we will now not advance to round two of the World Cup. Ghana's next game is against Brazil. I hope they win it.

Another Book Review Excerpt

This is an excerpt from another review of my second book, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999). It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of European Studies Journal. It is written by Caroline Brooke, a lecturer of Modern European History at the University of London.

...Pohl presents a detailed account of the deportations, while at the same time trying to uncover the Stalin regime's motivations behind the deportations...a comprehensive account of Stalin's policy of deportation of ethnic minorities. Pohl paints a chilling picture of the resolve with which Soviet officials, above all Stalin and Beria, sought to remove any threat to Soviet security, either real or perceived, from the non-Russian population, and in some cases even to punish certain ethnic groups for alleged collaboration with enemies of the Soviet Union...Ethnic Cleansing will be invaluable to scholars of Soviet history, politics, and ethnography.

Book Review Excerpt

The following excerpt is from a review of my second book, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999). The review is in the April 2001 issue of Canadian Journal of History. The author of the review is A.B. Pernal a professor of Russian and Eastern European History at Brandon University in Canada.

Ethnic Cleansing is not a product of Pohl's personal research in the Russian archives; it is, rather, chiefly a synopsis of the accomplishments of the late Soviet and new Russian historiography since 1989. His book does contain certain deficiencies. Nevertheless, it still has to be considered a valuable addition to the English-language historiography relating to the terrible developments in the Soviet Union under Stalin. It is much more valuable than the two existing scholarly books devoted to this subject matter in English -- Robert Conquest's The Nation Killers (1970), and Aleksander Nekrich's The Punished People: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (1979) - for neither of their authors had access to most relevant archival documents. Pohl's book should inform both the academic community and the general public about the true policy of the Stalinist regime toward the "Repressed People" in the Soviet Union.

Hollywood Take 3

I met with my Hollywood film maker today. She was very nice. We looked at some of the raw film footage she has taken and discussed the project. It looks like it will cover the years 1928 to 1946. Right now she needs to organize the footage into a coherent narrative. This will require transcribing the tapes. This will take a while. After that we can more easily work on the documentary. I will get in touch with her again in a week or so and we will take it from there. She may come out to Arivaca to see me in connection with the project. It looks like it will be rolling into high gear soon.

Spain 3 Tunisia 1

Tunisia played very well for the first 70 minutes. They led for most of the game by 1 to zero. Then Spain scored three goals in the last twenty minutes. I was really pulling for Tunisia to beat Spain. It would have been the greatest upset of this World Cup.

It looks like some people do read my writing

I am currently waiting for my Hollywood contact to call me to tell me she is on her way down here. But, last night when I was surfing the internet I found two new scholarly citations of my work. The first one is really interesting. Unfortunately, I was only able to view an abstract. They want alot of pounds sterling to show me the actual journal article online. I will wait until I can get the article for free. At anyrate The European Journal of Public Health published out of Oxford University recently had an article by a group of medical scholars out of Germany with the intriguing title of "Mortality from External Causes among Ethnic German Immigrants from Former Soviet Union Countries in Germany." The article cites a paper I gave at the Association for the Study of Nationalites (ASN) conference at Columbia University in 2001. The title of my paper was "The Deportation and Destruction of the German Minority in the USSR." There is now medical proof that communism is bad for your health.

I also found an article in Ukrainian on the deportation of Crimean Tatars that cites my 2000 ASN paper, "The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars." I found it funny that the first footnote referencing the paper refers to me as "young" and "American." Now I can not get David Bowie's song, "Young Amercian" out of my head. I wonder what it would sound like in Ukrainian?

Finally, I got an e-mail from Professor Karin Bauer of McGill University, the author of the unreadable abstract "The Domestication of Radical Ideas and Colonial Spaces: The Case of Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche - Session: Gender Perspectives." She did not like my post describing her abstract as feminist gibberish. I always find it highly amusing when powerful people feel threatened by people like myself who have absolutely no power. She claimed that she did not get her job by writing leftist and feminist nonsense. I do not believe her. But, I felt great Schadenfreude at the fact that a professor at one of Canada's most prestigious universities would respond in such a defensive manner to anything written by an unemployed guy living out in the middle of the desert. I laughed for hours at the thought of the powerful and mighty getting worked up over the musings of a man armed with nothing more than a Tucson-Pima County Public Library card. I know that is not an enlightened attitude to take. But, it did make me feel very good. I still feel good about it. I must be doing something right.

Ukraine 4 Saudi Arabia 0

Ukraine smoked Saudi Arabia today. It was a great game and Ukraine proved itself in spades. It looks like Ukraine will be able to advance to round two despite their disasterous earlier loss to Spain.

US 1 Italy 1

In reality the US won this game, but the corrupt ref took away our second goal. Despite being reduced to nine men and being robbed of a legitimate goal we still tied Italy. When Mussolini was alive the Italians won two World Cups. Now they are reduced to relying on bad calls by the ref to even tie the US. Our goal keeper, Keller, stood out in particular as an outstanding player. He blocked a number of goals and thus prevented us from losing the game. The US will probably now be able to advance to the next round. Our final round one game is against Ghana. It will not be an easy game. This morning Ghana defeated the Czechs by two to zero. Ghana is showing itself to be a much better team than anybody would have reasonably anticipated.

Estonian Deportation Website: No People, no problems

The link below has a plethora of information about the 14 June 1941 deportations from Estonia. It includes among other things a number of personal accounts by survivors of this trauma. It is well worth checking out. Thanks to Kristin for pointing this out to me.

http://www.erm.ee/kyyditamine/kyyditamineENG/index.html

"A Simple Estonian Woman"

This post is part of my exploration of the question about whether historians can convey anything about past human suffering other than a basic factual outline. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked this same question in the Gulag Archipelago. He concluded that it was not possible to transfer the experience of the Gulag through the medium of words to people who had not been there. I am not convinced this is the case. While the knowledge absorbed by the reader is of course only a very pale imitation of the actual suffering, I believe some small amount of understanding can be transmitted. Since it is the 65th anniversary of the Baltic deportations I am using examples from Estonian survivors. Estonia is also a country which I have travelled through a couple of times. It is also small enough that one can get some sense of the nation as a whole. Finally, I know I have at least one reader in Estonia. My overall readership is quite small so Estonians in fact do make up a big portion of it.

The following quotation comes from a book called She Who Remembers Survives: Interpreting Estonian Women's Post-Soviet Life Stories. It has nine short memoir pieces by Estonian women. It is one of the more impressive life history projects that I have seen. Below I have quoted an excerpt from one of women regarding her memory of the 14 June 1941 deportation.

"Aino's Story: The Story of a Simple Estonian Woman"

...They took us by lorry to the station where we were loaded into boxcars. The train was surrounded by trees and a Russian soldier was positioned atop each tree, his rifle cocked, ready to shoot. The boxcar had one small barred window high up under the ceiling. Double bunks lined the walls and we were able to get one of the lower bunks. Everyone in our car was a Tapa resident except Ms. Maria Parmas with her five children, the youngest six weeks old. She was from Ambla, the wife of the town's constable and daughter of a schoolteacher. There were no men in our car. In some cars, however, there were men and they were pulled out by force. It was a dreadful sight to see. There was much crying when the men were separated from their families, perhaps never to see each other again. Noone knows where their bones finally ended up in the Siberian soil. The doors closed. The train started to move during the night (p. 227).

Here we have "a simple Estonian woman" providing more truth about the experience of communism than dozens of leftist university professors in the US who sought and in some cases still seek to justify, minimize and outright deny such crimes. The moral idiocy of the tenured faculty in the US is of course incurable. As my uncle says, "You can't fix dumb." But, most of the rest of the planet can understand the basic human truth articulated in the quotation above.

Historians and Human Suffering

Kristin, a native of Estonia left a very thoughtful comment on my post dealing with the 14 June 1941 deportations. It got me thinking again about the limits of a historian writing about such horrible events. No matter how much I learn about them it is impossible for me to fully know the trauma of these events. The human imagination does not allow people to feel the suffering of others in its full force. I have long been convinced that saints and other people who are more sensitive to the plight of their fellow men must be in constant overload at the world's pain. I think I feel a little bit of this suffering and that is what motivates me to write about it. But, I am a very unenlightened and unempathetic individual in the large scheme of things. At anyrate I try everyday to be a little bit better in this regard. In light of the 65th anniversary of the deportations from the Baltic states I am going to try and explore this issue further in the next couple of days. I will be focusing on Estonia since I have been there three times. Last time I was there I picked up an English translation of memoirs by Estonian women. It has some powerful first person accounts of the events. I will post some quotations from these writings. Maybe the ability of even the best historian to try and convey the essence of events like Stalin's deportation of people to Siberia is limited to just a skeletal framework of facts. But, maybe some of the human experience can be conveyed.

Deutschland 1 Polska 0

Deutschland won its second game today. They will no doubt also beat Ecuador and advance on to round two. I think despite the skeptics claims that Deutschland can take it all the way this year.

I got a call from Hollywood last night

Yesterday I got a call from the Hollywood film producer who e-mailed me a couple months ago about working as a consultant on her current project. She is working on a documentary about the Crimean Tatars during World War II. She is going to drive down here to meet me on Monday. Then we will look at some of the film footage she has already shot and discuss the project. I believe that the project has great potential. If it goes well I am definitely going to try and do more historical consulting for film makers.

Saudi Arabia 2 Tunisia 2

This was a great game. Tunisia was strong in the first half. In the second half Saudi Arabia really poured on the offense and scored two goals. But, Tunisia came back at the last minute and headed in a goal to tie up the game. The European teams may play boring matches, but the Arab world can still put on a great game.

Descent of Terror Upon the Baltics: 14 June 1941

In August 1940, the USSR annexed the formerly independent states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Soviet occupation forces visited a brutal reign of terror upon the civilian population of these countries. Less than a year after annexing the Baltic nations, the Soviet Union undertook a massive deportation of individuals prominent in the political and economic life of these republics. Categories of people subject to deportation along with their families included members of nationalist parties, policemen, land owners, factory owners and civil servants. The NKVD had in fact already arrested many of these people and transported them to labor camps in the interior of the USSR. In the process the Soviet occupation regime confiscated their property, thus impoverishing their families. The NKVD then applied mass deportations to their families as a further form of collective punishment. On 14 June 1941, the NKVD rounded up and forcibly deported over 17,500 Lithuanians, 17,000 Latvians and 6,000 Estonians according to official Soviet records. The armed NKVD men gave these men, women and children only a short time to gather a few possessions into exile with them. The soldiers packed the deportees into overcrowded and unsanitary cattle cars headed eastward into the USSR. In a single day the NKVD expelled over 40,000 people from their homelands, many of them forever. The Stalin regime sent these deportees to Novosibirsk, Kazakhstan, Krasnoyarsk, Kirov and Komi. Here they lived under NKVD surveillance and severe legal restrictions. They could not leave their assigned places of exile and became subject to harsh administrative punishments for minor infractions. A lack of proper winter clothing, shoes, food, shelter and medical care resulted in massive mortality among the deportees. The crime of 14 June 1941 has become an important collective national memory among the people of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It is commemorated every year both in the Baltic states and among their diasporas.

Brazil 1 Croatia 0

This was an excellent game. Croatia played very well, but just could not get the ball past the Brazilian goal keeper. I hope somebody can stop Brazil. Right now it does not look like it. Croatia played better than any other team except Brazil to date and still failed to tie.

Old Hippies Never Die: Retro Radio Redux

I was listening to KLOS last night and I heard a voice from 20 years in the past. Jim Ladd is still spinning records at the home of dinosaur rock. I am pretty sure he was the model for Johnny Fever in WKRP in Cincinnati. He was practically mummified already in the mid-1980s. Yet, he is still the exact same as he was two decades ago. It is really good to know that some things never change.

Feminist gibberish in academic conference abstract

While there were quite a few abstracts for the German diaspora conference I would have rejected that got accepted, one stands out as particularly bad. The title of the paper is "The Domestication of Radical Ideas and Colonial Spaces: The Case of Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche - Session: Gender Perspectives." Immediately it is apparent that the paper does not deal with the topic of the conference and is written in language that is alien to everybody outside of the ivory tower. A diaspora is not a single immigrant. Diasporas require a transmission of identification with their imagined homeland to generations born abroad. They are also collective units. I was not an American diaspora during the years I lived in London. In fact the abstract does not even refer to the settlers of Nueva Germania in Paraguay in 1886 as a diaspora. Rather it identifies them as colonists. There are of course German diasporas in Paraguay including a Mennonite Russian-German one created by several waves of migration motivated by Tsarist and Soviet persecution. But, the 19th century German equivalent of Hayden Lake Idaho in the jungles of Paraguay falls far short of meeting the criteria of diaspora. It is just a compound. The concept of diaspora is not a difficult one to grasp.

Next there is the continued reference to "fascist Germany." I know this term which has Stalinist origins is used to avoid mentioning the Socialist part of National Socialist in Nazi. But, the fact is while National Socialism is not considered a socialist ideology like Social Democracy, Bolshevism, Labour Zionism, Trotskyism or Maoism it is not the same as fascism. Only one country officially had fascism and that was Italy. The differences between Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany are immense. This is especially true regarding the one aspect of "fascist Germany" that obsesses the abstract's author, anti-semitism. Anybody who thinks that Mussolini's policies towards Jews was the same as Hitler's is seriously misinformed. The term Nazi Germany and Nazism are perfectly acceptable for describing Hitler's regime and ideology as is the longer version of National Socialist. Fascist, however, is not an accurate term to describe Germany rather than Italy and carries with it some serious Stalinist baggage.

Finally there is the convoluted writing. I am still not sure what the abstract is about exactly. Only that it manages to use all the proper politically correct code words. I reproduce some of the more difficult to read sentences below.

"At issue in my exploration of colonialist activities is not to demonstrate female complicity with the colonial enterprise-as has been done by various explorations of colonialism-,but rather to turn Forster-Nietzsche into a case study for the female appropriation of it."

"While Forster-Nietzsche's duplicitous activities as the wife of the anti-Semite Forster reflect her political opportunism and the partial internalization of bourgeois moral codes pertaining to women, they also indicate her ambiguous stance toward and partial rebellion against the intellectual and social dependency implied by her role of female supporter of the enterprises of men."

"In domesticating her anti-Semitic husband's radical conservative and racist ideas in Paraguay, Forster-Nietzsche sets in motion a process of dispossession as she attempts to counteract her own subordination under the enterprises of men."

Can anybody translate any of the three sentences above into English?

Right now there is a lengthy ongoing discussion at Grant Jone's blog,
Dougout dealing with the left's abuse of language in this matter. I just found out today that you don't need to have any publications to get a univeristy teaching position in the US if you are a radical feminist. Given the quality of much of their output as demonstrated by the abstract described above prehaps it is best if they do not publish anything.

Italy 2 Ghana 0

Ghana played much better than I expected. If they play against the US as well as they did against Italy they might prove hard to beat. Even though Ghana does not have the reputation of either Czechia or Italy I do not think the US should underestimate them.

Czechia 3 US 0

Well the US did not do as well as I had hoped in its opening game of the 2006 World Cup. Our next game is against Ghana. I think we have a shot against them. This is Ghana's first world cup. After Ghana the US plays Italy. I do not think the US stands much of a chance against Italy. It does not look like we will be advancing to round two this year.

Mennonites

I have recently been doing some research on the Mennonites in the USSR. This religious minority among the Russian-Germans constitutes an absolutely fascinating ethno-confessional group. Although less than ten percent of the Russian-German population of the USSR there is a disproportionately large amount of material on the group both in German and in English. Much of this latter scholarship comes from Canada where many Mennonites from the Russian Empire and USSR settled. Other Russian-German Mennonite communities established themselves in the US and various Latin American countries. There are significant Russian-German Mennonite settlements for instance in Mexico and Paraguay. Their self imposed separation from their host societies has allowed them to maintain their unique culture and communal autonomy in many instances. Hence the Mennonite villages in Mexico and elsewhere still speak dialects of low German and maintain customs that have not changed in centuries. Few other diasporas have managed to retain so much of their original culture over such a long period of time.

The first Mennonite settlers in the Russian Empire came in 1789 from the region around Danzig. The next wave in 1803 also came from the Vistula. The Mennonites arriving in the Russian Empire established communities based upon their unique religion and way of life. Mennonite religious beliefs included a strong commitment to pacifism, voluntary adult baptism, a priesthood of all believers and living every day according to the example set by Christ. Their separate villages allowed them to maintain their religious based communities into the 20th century. Economically many of these settlements became relatively prosperous compared to the Russian and Ukrainian villages around them. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Russian-German Mennonite settlements spread from Ukraine and the Volga to North America, South America, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Mennonite settlements even appeared in the Khanate of Khiva, a protectorate of Tsarist Russia in Central Asia, during the late 19th century. The Mennonites established religious centered communities isolated from the surrounding population in all these new locations.

Due to their rejection of most interaction with the secular world including a refusal to serve in the military and swear oaths to the state, they came under particularly strong pressure from the Soviet government. Even more so than other confessional groups among the Russian-Germans, the Mennonites suffered horrible losses at the hands of the communists. As a result of the 1941 deportations, special settlement regime and labor army an excess of 250,000 Russian-Germans or about 20% of their population in the USSR perished during the 1940s. Other estimates put the number at 300,000 or 25%. There is general agreement that the Mennonites lost a greater portion of their population than other Russian-Germans due to these causes. Out of 100,000 Mennonites some 30,000 or 30% perished as a result. This is a loss equal on a per capita basis with that Hitler inflicted upon the world's Jewish population.

In the summer and fall of 1941, the Stalin regime forcibly deported some 28,000 Mennonites from Crimea, the Volga, Ukraine and Caucasus to special settlements in Kazakhstan and Siberia. Some 35,000 managed to avoid deportation due to the rapid advance of the German military. Another 27,000 Mennonites in the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia found themselves conscripted into the labor army. Out of the 35,000 that initially avoided deportation, the Allies forcibly repatriated 23,000 back to the Soviet Union. Only around 12,000 managed to avoid this fate. They later immigrated to Canada and Paraguay. The remainder of the Mennonite population of the USSR remained confined to its Asian regions.

In the post-Stalin period, the Mennonites remained subject to considerable persecution on the basis of both their religion and being German by nationality. The Mennonite Brethern remained an outlawed religious denomination until 1967. Even after legalization they continued to suffer from signficant restrictions on their religious practices. Continuing persecution convinced the Mennonites like it did all other Russian-Germans that they had no future in the Soviet Union. After 1987, most of the Mennonite population of the USSR left to settle in Germany. In this matter they did not differ from the Lutheran majority or the substantial Catholic minority among the Russian-Germans. The once self-contained Mennonite villages speaking Plautdiitsch in Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia have largely evaporated.

Portugal 1 Angola 0

This game was not as exciting as I anticipated. I had expected Angola to do better. A victory by a former colony over their previous overlords would have been good to see. Portugal played very poorly in the last World Cup in 2002 when we destroyed them to the surprise of lots of arrogant Europeans. They did a little bit better today. But, Angola unlike the US did not rise to take advantage of the opportunity.

Retro Radio Replays

Radio out of LA is alot more to my taste than the radio stations out of Tucson. Primarily because its music is more familiar. LA has a few stations that have not evolved since the 1980s. In contrast to Tucson where alot of stations strive to be current, "hip" and "alternative" with the result that they all sound the same. That is to say they all sound bad in the same way. KLOS which was a dinosaur rock station in the 1980s is still around and still playing the same playlist. Which is fine with me because Sabbath, Led Zepplin and AC/DC will never go out of style. I found another great station that calls itself "Jack" at 93.1 FM which seems to play almost all 80s music with a few songs from the 70s and 90s. It also has no stupid news, traffic reports or other chatter by brain dead announcers. Even the DJs behave themselves and just play music with their mouths shut. This is as God intended radio.

Argentina 2 Ivory Coast 1

This game was much more interesting than the one between Sweden and Trinidad and Tobago. Although I think Argentina like England and Sweden is playing alot worse than they did in their prime. Tomorrow Mexico plays Iran. Of the two reprehensible regimes, the Mexican one is a much greater immediate threat to me, my family and my dog. So I am less hostile towards Iran than I am to Mexico. After all the Iranian president is threatening Israel, not Arivaca. I think taking the presidents of Iran and Mexico and having a no rules cage match fight to the death would be the best solution. We could then shoot the winner.

Sweden 0 Trinidad and Tobago 0

This was a pretty boring game. Like most Americans I find the no scoring games to be sleep inducing. Sweden used to have a much better team. Like England I do not think they are doing their best playing in this World Cup.

England 1 Paraguay 0

Well I caught the end of the England-Paraguay game this morning. Paraguay scored one goal against themselves. Other than that nobody scored. So far Deutschland has been doing alot better than England. In an hour Sweden plays Trinidad and Tobago. I predict Sweden will win.

Deutschland 4 Costa Rica 2

I just finished watching the opening game of the 2006 World Cup. Or because I can only get it on Unavision which is a Spanish language station, Copa Mundial 2006. I am pleased to note that Deutschland easily won their first game. I don't have too many expectations this World Cup. But, I would like to see the US do well, England lose to people they consider racially inferior like the US or Angolans and anybody except Brazil take first place. Other than that I intend to just watch and enjoy the games.

Southern Man Food

I went out to lunch today at a Memphis style BBQ joint with my mother, brother and sister in law. I had the pulled pork sandwich with spicy sauce, hush puppies and sweet peach tea. I have not had any of these foods since I moved from Virginia to Arizona ten months ago. The BBQ in Virginia is better than here, but it was still pretty good.

The Racist Refusal to Recognize Germans as Victims

Another problem I have with the abstracts for the German diasporas conference is the fact that there are a disproportionate number of papers dealing with the Nazi persecution of Jews. I thought it was a conference on German diasporas not the Holocaust. Out of 66 papers 13 deal primarily with Nazi crimes against Jews. This is despite the fact that far from being participants in the Holocaust many members of German diaspora groups fought against the Nazis in Allied armies. In the USSR over 30,000 Russian-Germans fought in the Red Army against the Nazis from June to September 1941. In contrast in 1943, the total number of Russian-Germans fighting in military units organized by the Nazi occupation authorities only reached 20,000. Yet, the stereotype of all ethnic Germans being Nazis guilty of killing Jews is still perpetrated in the US, Canada, UK and elsewhere by people who claim not to be racists.

Far from consisting of perpetrators of crimes most German diasporas found themselves subjected to extreme repression during and after World War II due to their ethnicity. Even in the US nearly 11,000 German civilians including naturalized US citizens found themselves interned without due process. Unlike the internment of Japanese there has been no admission, apology or compensation from the US government for this injustice. Instead US textbooks, media and leftists professors consistently claim that only ethnic Japanese were interned without a solid basis in the US during World War II. This Germanophobia is still justified by the US intellectual elite even as interned and relocated Japanese and Italians have received public apologies.

In other countries the treatment of ethnic Germans during the 1940s consisted of ethnic cleansing and a complete denial of all human rights. I have already blogged alot on the plight of the Russian-Germans. The German diasporas of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia also met horrible fates. Between January and March 1945, the Stalin regime transported nearly 112,000 ethnic German civilians from Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia to forced labor camps in the USSR. Over 50,000 of these slave laborers were women. Additional levies of forced laborers from Upper Silesia, East Prussia and other areas of Germany during the first half of 1945 increased the number of "mobilized" and "interned" civilian Germans from outside the USSR to over 272,000. They served in the GUPVI (Main Administration for POWs and Internees) camps engaged in mining, construction, forestry and other heavy labor. During the five years the Stalin regime maintained these men and women in the USSR more than 66,500 perished from poor material conditions, overwork and physical abuse. Even today survivors of this crime against humanity remain banned by Russian law from seeking any restitution from the Russian Federation including a simple apology.

In addition to deportation to forced labor in the USSR the Ostdeutsche also suffered other forms of deadly persecution. Executions and deaths in concentration camps in Yugoslavia claimed the lives of over 50,000 Volksdeutsche between 1945 and 1948. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Russians forcibly expelled over 12 million ethnic Germans from east of the current German-Polish border westward. In the largest act of ethnic cleansing in modern history close to 2 million men, women and children perished. These victims usually do not even rate a footnote in the standard narrative of World War II put forward in English speaking countries. I took three German history courses as an undergraduate including one on World War II and only found out about the expulsions after I graduated.

The victimization of German diasporas in the USSR, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and even the US during and after World War II is impossible for anybody not blinded by Germanophobia to ignore. Yet, even at a conference on German diasporas there is barely mention of the fate of the Ostdeutsche. In contrast to the 13 papers on Nazi persecution of Jews there are only eight paper abstracts that even mention any of the above crimes against German diasporas. Only the Soviet deportation of Russian-Germans to Kazakhstan and the expulsion of the Sudetendeutsche receive what I would consider the minimally acceptable amount of coverage with two papers each.

World War II has been finished now for over 60 years. It is time to treat it as an historical event not a propaganda tool. A conference on German diasporas should deal with those diasporas in all their aspects including their mistreatment at the hands of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs and Americans. It should not instead focus on the crimes of the German state against Jews. There are plenty of other conferences where people can engage in such repetitive overkill.

German Diasporas Conference

I will be blogging about the German Diasporas conference in Canada scheduled for late August just as I did about the Central Asian Cotton conference in London last November. I have already submitted my paper. The abstract was posted here at the end of last month. I have now printed out all the abstracts. I still have to read through all of them and decide which ones I will attend.

The first thing about the papers that bothers me is their unbalanced geographic coverage. The conference is heavily biased towards papers dealing with Canada, the US and other English speaking countries. There are papers dealing Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa. Countries that all have historically had quite small German communities. The much larger German communities in Namibia and Mexico are not mentioned at all. But, the German communities in the US and Canada completely dominate the abstracts. There are ten papers specifically on the US and eleven on Canada. They make up almost a full third of the scheduled presentations.

In contrast the Ostdeutsche communities are largely neglected. Out of 66 scheduled papers only three deal with the Russian-Germans, a population that exceeded two million at its peak. In addition to my paper there is one other paper on Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan and one on "Re-Migration" to Germany between World War I and World War II. While I am happy that there is another paper on Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan, the absence of any papers on the Russian-Germans in Siberia is a serious omission. Their are also no papers dealing specifically with the large Russian-German communities that existed in the Volga, Ukraine and North Caucasus up until 1941. Nor are there any papers on the large diaspora that developed later in Kygyzstan. The Russian-German population of Kyrgyzstan exceeded 100,000 in 1989. But, compared to other parts of Eastern Europe, the former territories of the Russian Empire and USSR are fairly well represented. The history of the Russian-German diaspora only dates back to 1763 after all.

The much older and larger diasporas in Central Europe and the Balkans are so poorly represented that it baffles me. There are no papers on the important Baltic-German populations of Latvia and Estonia. This diaspora reached 180,000 people, about a tenth of the region's residents and dominated the local economy under Tsarist rule. Its roots reached back to the 13th century. There is only one paper on the Romanian-Germans from Transylvania, a diaspora dating back to the 12th century that reached nearly a quarter of a million by the start of World War II. There are no papers on the other German communities in Romania such as those in the Banat. Nor are there any papers on the Germans who used to live in the states that formerly constituted Yugoslavia. During the interwar period these communities numbered around a half a million people. There are only two papers specifically on the Sudetendeutsche, a community that numbered over three million people between World War I and World War II. Yet there is a paper on the small German emigre community in the Ottoman Empire, a paper on Austrians in modern Spain and other presentations on marginal and miniscule populations that can in no way be described as diasporas.

I will be blogging about my problems with the subject matter of many of the presentations in my next post dealing with the conference. Let us just say that many of the abstracts suffer from the methodological and ideological problems that have destroyed historical research in the US. Apparently Canada has followed the US model in this regard rather than the more traditional models of the UK and Central Europe.

Why I Support an Academic Boycott of Israel

I notice alot of the usual suspects are jumping up and down screaming about proposed boycotts of Israel. I suspect that their arguments are all just special pleading. I don't recall any of these people protesting the boycott against South African academics. Of course Afrikaaners are a politically incorrect people and Israeli Jews are a politically correct people among the US liberal elite. Well I was never one to join the sheep mentality of the American intellectual elite. I do support an academic boycott of Israel. I am only one man in the desert, but I will not not cooperate with any Israeli academics until such time as the state meets a certain level of civilized behavior. For the record I am also boycotting Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and a number of other states. But in many ways Israel is worse than South Africa. The RSA for instance never harbored Stalinist war criminals.

The state of Israel currently harbors a number of Stalinist war criminals guilty of abusing, torturing and murdering innocent men, women and children in the Baltic States and Poland. Foremost among these criminals is Solomon Morel wanted for trial in Poland. Israel has twice rejected extradition requests from Poland. They claim that the statute of limitations has run out. No other country in the world has a statute of limitations on crimes against humanity and Israel does not apply this limit to Nazi crimes against Jews. Solomon Morel ran the Swietochlowice-Zgoda camp for ethnic Germans from February to November 1945. A recorded 1,538 inmates perished at his hands due solely to their German ancestry during these months. Most of them were women and children. Another Stalinist war criminal currently being harbored by Israel is Nachman Dusanski wanted by Lithuania for the Rainai Forest massacre. Dusanski helped oversee and participated in the brutal torture and murder of 74 Lithuanian high school students on 25-26 June 1941. Like in the case of Morel, the Israeli government has refused to extradite Dusanski to stand trial for this crime against humanity. The hypocrisy of Israel's harboring of Stalinist war criminals while insisting on a right to try people like Demjanjuk is truly breath taking.

Until the State of Israel turns over Morel, Dusanski and other UB and NKVD criminals I will be boycotting all cooperation with Israelis. If they meet this first basic demand I will consider lifting my boycott. But, I will not compromise on this first issue.

One more reason we need to stop illegal immigration

I am currently away from Serenity Ranch visiting family in the OC. But, I do have a high speed internet connection here. So I try to keep up on news at home. Recently, illegal aliens blinded my friend Sandy's dog. The dog, Gobbler was in his kennel on Sandy's property when it happened. The criminals sprayed pepper spray into the eyes of a helpless animal just for "kicks." The dog is now blind. This story really upsets me. Blinding a man's dog should be a hanging offense. The full article can be found here. For all those people against taking strong measures against illegal immigrants, "Why do you hate puppy dogs?"

Big Idea: Hosting an Academic Conference

US universities long ago abandoned serious research in the humanities and social sciences and now only hire politically correct hacks. So I am taking it upon myself to make up some of the slack. It is true I have no institutional organizations. I am just one man with no money living in the desert. Nevertheless, I believe that I could organize a successful one day conference.

Arivaca has a great community center. It is part of the Pima County system. Barton Santello rented it earlier this year to host a film exposition. About 65 people attended the event. I do not anticipate quite so many people attending my conference. But, the conference will be open to the public, so anybody who can make it to Arivaca would be welcome to hear the presenters talk and ask them questions. I am going to keep the number of papers limited to a dozen so that we can get through them all in a day and have plenty of time for questions and discussions. I am also factoring in time for two coffee breaks and a sandwich lunch for the participants.

The topic of the conference would be international borders and migration in comparative perspective. Arivaca is right in the middle of one of the largest migration routes across an international border anywhere in the world. I am going to arrange for the conference presenters to go see the border crossing point at Sasabe. Just over the Mexican side of the border at Sasabe is one of the largest staging points for illegal immigrants into the US. Hence Arivaca far from being in the middle of nowhere is in the middle of one of the largest movements of humanity in modern times.

I am also going to try and get a representative from the Border Patrol to address the conference. I am not sure if they would be willing to do this, but I think it would be a good opportunity for them in terms of community outreach and public relations. A fifteen or twenty minute presentation with ten to fifteen minutes for questions by a member of the Border Patrol would really add to the event. It would put a human face on one aspect of the current migration situation on the border. The tendency for academics to reduce human problems to mere abstractions is a very real one and one I want to avoid at all costs.

In addition to papers on migration from Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries in the Americas to the US, I would like to have experts speak on migration from Central Asia and the Caucasus to Russia and migration from North Africa to the European Union. I am seeking proposals from historians, sociologists, geographers, political scientists, economists and anthropologists. I have been to a couple of workshops and conferences dealing with borders and migration in Eurasia that definitely added to the sum of the world's published knowledge. I think by expanding the comparative framework that I can generate even more understanding of these historical trends.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to provide any financial assistance to any of the presenters. I will also have to charge a registration fee to cover the cost of renting the community center and providing lunch and coffee. I will definitely try and keep this fee under $100 a person. I am going to probably start organizing the conference in earnest in September of this year. Right now I am aiming for a fall 2007 date for the actual event. If anybody has any interest please let me know. You can e-mail me or leave a comment here.

Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water: The Labor Army

During World War II, the Stalin regime mobilized nearly 400,000 Soviet citizens belonging to suspect nationalities into forced labor detachments. The majority of these men and women, 220,000 in total, worked in corrective labor camps under conditions almost identical to Gulag inmates. The NKVD assigned the remaining 180,000 conscripts to civilian commissariats. This second category of workers lived in guarded barracks and worked under NKVD supervision. This system of work colonies and brigades received the appellation of labor army (trudarmiia) from the men and women involuntarily pressed into its ranks.

Unlike Gulag prisoners, forced laborers in the labor army received no trials or sentences. Their only crime consisted in being able-bodied members of nationalities declared unreliable by the Stalin regime. These nationalities included Russian-Germans, Russian-Finns, Russian-Koreans, Russian-Bulgarians, Russian-Greeks, Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars. The vast majority of the labor army consisted of Russian-Germans. The Soviet government mobilized an estimated 350,000 Russian-Germans into the labor army. The incomplete Soviet archival record shows more than 315,000 Russian-Germans, 14,000 Russian-Koreans and 5,000 Crimean Tatars conscripted to serve in the labor army. Over 182,000 of the Russian-German inductees performed their obligatory labor service in Gulag camps. The remaining 133,000 Russian-German draftees worked in civilian run mines, oil fields and factories. The labor army constituted a form of forced labor in the USSR uniquely reserved for certain stigmatized nationalities.

The Soviet government conscripted the men and women in the labor army in a manner similar to military induction. It then transported them by overcrowded cattle cars to their new living quarters nearby their assigned work sites. Labor army conscripts built factories, constructed hydro-electric stations, laid railways, felled timber, mined coal, extracted oil and manufactured munitions in the Urals, Kazakhstan and Siberia during the 1940s. They worked long hours in unsafe conditions, lived in unhygienic barracks and suffered severe shortages of food and winter clothing. These poor material conditions took a huge toll in lives among the men and women of the labor army. Disease, malnutrition, exposure and accidents killed a large portion of the labor army. Scholars estimate that the deaths among the Russian-Germans alone due to inhumane conditions in the labor army exceed 100,000 people. Starting in January 1946, the Soviet government began to disband the labor army and send its surviving members into internal exile. This process took some time. The last labor army conscripts left the confines of the Gulag camps only in 1958. Unlike soldiers in the Red Army, veterans of the labor army received no recognition or compensation for their wartime sacrifices until after the collapse of the USSR.

One Year Worth of Posts

This blog now has over 365 posts. That would be one year's worth if I had written one a day. However, this blog is much older than a year. It will be three years old in August. I like to think that quality is more important than quantity.

Redoing My Blogroll

Those of you who have been paying close attention to this blog will notice that I have been purging my blogroll. I have been removing blogs that have died, gone into extended inactivity or removed me from their blogrolls. I will continue this purge. Since the number of blogs linked to mine is quite small this will leave only a few blogs listed in the side bar. If you have a link to my blog and are not listed please let me know so I can add you. If you would like to be linked to my blog then add a link to mine first and let me know. I will then add you to my small blogroll. I really think I need to be firm on this issue. If you do not link to me I will not link to you.

Made it to California

I made it to California on Thursday. It took me ten hours to get from Arivaca to Orange County of which I only spent two flying. I went through Las Vegas airport and won $1.25 on the $1.00 I played on the slot machines. So I came out $0.25 ahead on the gambling front. However, I paid out $3.00 for two bottles of water and $3.00 to check my e-mail. So I was down a grand total of $5.75. Long gone are the days when everything in Las Vegas except the wagers were free.

Here in California I am visiting relatives and eating ethnic food. Today I am going to a Hawaiian BBQ eatery with my brother. I last saw him over six years ago. I have also seen my parents, two aunts and my grandmother. I went out to a Thai place with my parents and aunts on Thursday night. I have yet to plan my excursions to Little Saigon and Little Gaza. But, OC is alot more culturally diverse than when I was last here almost a decade ago.

Vacation from Paradise - Thoughts about the Future

Tomorrow I am flying to California for a month. It will give me a chance to think about possible career options. It is quite clear that I will never get an interview to teach at a US university even as an adjunct no matter how many scholarly publications I produce. They only care about teaching experience. Selection committees do not consider research and publications at all. In fact US universities have just become overgrown high schools where kids can get drunk, have sex, smoke dope and learn nothing. So other than overseas positions and post-docs, both of which do not neccesarily require teaching experience, I am not going to bother to apply to any more academic jobs. I wasted a lot of time and energy this last year in that futile pursuit. I was very poorly advised about the reality of US higher education. I wish somebody had honestly said to me, "Books and other publications do not count in the selection process at any US university. All they care about is teaching experience." In California I am going to talk to some people about exploring avenues other than academia where I can engage in historical research and get paid. One of the possibilites is consulting on the production of history orientated films. I have so far certainly had more success in this realm than I have had in trying to get a teaching job.

Russian-German Bibliography

English Language Sources on Russian-Germans

Compiled by J. Otto Pohl

Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).

Bachmann, Berta, trans. Duin, Edgar, Memories of Kazakhstan: A Report on the Life Experience of a German Woman in Russia (Lincoln, NE: AHSGR, 1983).

Bender, Ida, trans., Anderson, Laurel, Anderson, Carl and Wiest, William, The Dark Abyss of Exile: The Story of Survival (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2000).

Brown, Kate, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2005).

Brown, Kate, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place,” American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 1.

Conquest, Robert, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New York, Macmillan, 1970).

Daes, Nelly, ed. trans. Holland, Nancy, Gone without a Trace: German-Russian Women In Exile (Lincoln, NE: AHSGR, 2001).

Dupper, Alexander, trans., “The Desperate Struggle of the Soviet Germans for their Human Rights and for Permission to Emigrate to Germany,” Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 1983).

Dyck, Johannes, “Revival as Church Restoration: Patterns of a Revival Among Ethnic Germans in Central Asia after World War II,” Transformation, vol. 21, no. 3 (July 2004).

Fleischhauer, Ingeborg and Pinkus, Benjamin, The Soviet Germans: Past and Present (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1986).

Isakov, Konstantin, "1941-Other Germans," New Times, no. 17, 1990.

Karklins, Rasma, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

Kloberdanz, Timothy and Rosalinda, Thunder on the Steppe: Volga German Folklife in Changing Russia (Lincoln, NE: AHSGR, 1993).

Koch, Fred, The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).

Lohr, Eric, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens During World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Long, James, “The Volga Germans and the Famine of 1921,” The Russian Review, Vol. 51, October 1992.

Long, James, From Privileged to Dispossessed: The Volga Germans, 1860-1917 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

Martin, Terry, “Stalinist Forced Relocation Policies: Patterns, Causes, Consequences,” in Weiner, Myron and Russell, Sharon Stanton, eds., Demography and National Security (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).

Mukomel, Vladimir and Pain, Emil, "Deported Peoples in Central Asia," in Naumkin, Vitaly, ed., State, Religion and Society in Central Asia: A Post-Soviet Critique (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1993).

Overy, Richard, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

Pohl, J. Otto, “Stalin’s Genocide Against the ‘Repressed Peoples,’” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2, no. 2 (June 2000).

Pohl, J. Otto, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999).

Pohl, J. Otto, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930-1953 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997).

Polian, Pavel, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in The USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004).

Schmaltz, Eric J., An Expanded Bibliography and Reference Guide for the Former Soviet Union’s Ethnic Germans: Issues of Ethnic Autonomy, Group Repression, Cultural Assimilation, and Mass Migration in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Fargo, ND: GRHC, NDSU Libraries, 2002).

Schmaltz, Eric and Sinner, Samuel, “’You Will Die Under Ruins and Snow’: The Soviet Repression of Russian Germans as a Case Study of Successful Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 4, no. 3 (September 2002).

Sheehy, Ann and Nahaylo, Bohdan, The Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Meskhetians: Soviet Treatment of some National Minorities (London: Minority Rights Group, 1986).

Simon, Gerhard, trans. Karen and Oswald Forster, Nationalism and Policy Toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991).

Sinner, Samuel D., The Open Wound: The Genocide of German Ethnic Minorities in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1915-1949 and Beyond (Fargo, ND: GRHC, NDSU Libraries, 2000).

Stricker, Gerd, “Ethnic Germans in Russia and the Former Soviet Union, “ in Wolff, Stefan, ed., German Minorities in Europe: Identity and Cultural Belonging (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000).

Toews, John B., Journeys: Mennonite Stories of Faith and Survival in Stalin’s Russia (Winnipeg, MAN: Kindred Productions, 1998).

Vossler, Ronald, We’ll Meet in Heavan: Germans in the Soviet Union Write Their American Relatives: 1917-1937 (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University, 2001).

Willems, Joachim, “Russian German Lutheran ‘Brotherhoods’ in the Soviet Union and in the CIS: Comments on their Confessional Identity and on their Position in ELCROS,” Religion, State & Society, vol. 30, no. 3 (2002).

German Diaspora Conference Abstract

Abstract

Suffering in a Province of Asia: The Russian-German Diaspora in Kazakhstan

Diaspora Experiences: German-Speaking Immigrants and their Descendants
Waterloo Centre for German Studies, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
24-27 August 2006

By 1989, nearly a million Russian-Germans lived in Kazakhstan. They constituted the third largest nationality in the territory after Russians and Kazakhs. At almost 6% of the population, the Russian-Germans formed the largest and most important diaspora nationality in the Kazakh SSR. The Russian-Germans played an important role in Kazakhstan’s economic development in the years after World War II.

The origins of the Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan are mixed. Russian-German colonists from other regions of the Russian Empire first settled there in 1882. By 1926, Kazakhstan had over 50,000 Russian-Germans. Deportations during the collectivization of agriculture in 1930-1931 further increased this population. In 1936, the Soviet government exiled the Russian-German population near the Polish border to Kazakhstan. On the eve of World War II the Russian German population numbered over 90,000 due to these deportations and natural growth. The events of 1941 increased this number by a factor of five. By 1942, over half a million Russian-Germans found themselves confined to Kazakhstan.

The vast majority of Russian-Germans from Kazakhstan are the descendents of deportees during World War II. During the fall of 1941, the Stalin regime deported more than 850,000 Russian-Germans eastward. Close to 400,000 of these deportees ended up in Kazakhstan. Here the Soviet government subjected them to inhumane living conditions of severe material poverty and denial of basic human rights. Only in the mid-1950s, after Stalin’s death, did their status improve significantly.

Despite these improvements, the Russian-Germans continued to suffer from official discrimination. They could not return to their former places of residence, they only had access to a few token German language publications and they remained largely excluded from receiving higher education and white collar jobs. This discrimination made it impossible for the Russian-Germans to adopt Kazakhstan as a new homeland. It continued to be a land of involuntary exile and suffering.

I intend to submit a paper on the history of the Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan. The paper covers the various waves of migration to Kazakhstan with a special emphasis on the mass forced resettlements during World War II. It then deals with the legal and material conditions endured by the Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan during the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, it addresses the problems of acculturation, continued discrimination, lack of cultural autonomy and the desire to immigrate to Germany that concerned the diaspora in subsequent decades. The paper draws upon a large variety of published primary source material from the archives in Moscow and Almaty. It also makes use of recently published memoirs written by Russian-Germans from Kazakhstan now living in Germany. The paper seeks to synthesize these sources to provide a more thorough historical account of the diaspora than previously possible.

Busy few days

I have been busy recently. I just finished editing my paper for the conference on German diasporas that will take place this August in Canada. I will post the abstract later today. Getting the format of the paper, especially the footnotes right is always the hardest part of any piece of writing. Everything else is easy in comparison. Thursday I fly to California. I got my ticket confirmation in my e-mail today. This weekend I made a bold attempt to read the four very thick library books I had checked out. I got one done and will finish another one before I leave. The other two I have returned without finishing. I still have to clean up my office and pack.

Happy Memorial Day

I hope everybody who chances to read this blog has a Happy Memorial Day. I will be grilling up hamburgers for the holiday. I have not grilled burgers in a while.

Next week I will be going to California for about a month to take care of a few things. I am not sure if I will be able to write any long scholarly posts during that time. But, I will certainly post a few updates from there.

The German Family One Year On: "Gott ist mit uns"

When I first received an e-mail message from Vladimir German asking for my assistance in his family’s asylum case I agreed to help them free of charge. Despite seeking to do everything in my limited power to prevent the deportation of the Germans back to Kazakhstan I was not optimistic. The same Germanophobia that motivated Stalin’s brutal deportation of the Russian-Germans had also infected the US during World War II. The hatred of all Germans including women and children took deep roots in the US. This extended even to the Russian-Germans who had overwhelmingly been loyal Soviet citizens opposed to Nazi Germany. Yet like in the USSR the US government and intellectual leadership considered all people of German nationality to be tainted by Naziism, a prejudice that still continues today.

The Soviet government itself publicly admitted that its charges of treason against its citizens of German descent had been false on 29 August 1964. This admission is still not well known and even many people among the US intellectual elite still believe the libel that the Russian-Germans were traitors to the USSR. Over 30,000 Russian-Germans fought in the Red Army in defense of the USSR before being removed to forced labor camps by the Stalin regime. Nearly half of them perished due to this inhumane treatment. Many Russian-Germans died fighting to defend Brest against the Nazis. One young soldier and Komsomol member, Heinrich Hoffmann died under extreme torture rather than betray the Soviet Union. Despite such acts of heroism the Soviet government considered all Russian-Germans to be disloyal and punished them accordingly.

The US to its great shame cooperated with Stalin in this punishment. Between 1945 and 1946, the US along with the UK and France forcibly repatriated most of the nearly 300,000 Russian-Germans they found in their occupation zones back to the USSR. The NKVD recorded receiving over 200,000 repatriated Russian-Germans including nearly 70,000 children during these two years. The US armed forces often used violent force against these defenseless refugees in order to compel them into Soviet custody. The NKVD sent all surviving repatriated Russian-Germans to engage in forced labor under special settlement restrictions in the Urals, Siberia, the Soviet Far East and Tajikistan. Here they worked in mines, shipyards, heavy industry and cotton farms. Russian-German repatriates in Kurgan-Tyube, Tajikistan had almost no food, soap or linen in January 1946 according to one report from the Peoples Commissariat for Health. As a result they suffered from massive starvation and death. By October 1948, nearly 50,000 Russian-German repatriates worked in Gulag camps including over 28,000 in the Kolyma camps, 4,700 in the Norlisk camps and 1,500 in the Vorkuta camps. All of these mining camps lay north of the Arctic Circle. The only crime committed by these tens of thousands of men and women was their German ancestry.

The US government has never publicly acknowledged yet alone apologized and offered compensation to the survivors of the forced repatriations to the USSR. Instead the myth that US forces never engaged in atrocities during World War II and that the Germans were a uniquely evil people deserving of no quarter even for women and children continues to have currency in America. This Germanophobia still has a strong legal basis in US immigration law with regards to the Russian-Germans. The Lautenberg Amendment is the primary law that governs the acceptance of refugees and asylum seekers from the former Soviet states into the US. It deliberately excludes Russian-Germans from the categories eligible for either status. As a result it is extremely difficult for persecuted individuals of Russian-German heritage from places like Kazakhstan to receive asylum in the US. In most cases they have to prove that they will be killed, tortured or suffer other bodily harm from their government for their political opinions, religious beliefs or ethnicity. Systematic denial of employment and education as a result of ones nationality is generally not considered sufficient grounds for asylum in the US. Thus I remained extremely pessimistic about the Germans’ chances of winning their appeal in Seattle after the Department of Homeland Security denied their initial petition filed almost 13 years earlier.

While waiting over 12 years for the US government to decide on their asylum petition the Germans worked hard, paid their taxes, purchased a house and learned fluent English. The two children Pavel and Oksana had gone almost all the way through US high schools. Oksana who maintained a 4.0 will be starting university this fall. I knew that if she was deported back to Kazakhstan that she would never have an opportunity to go to college. Honestly, I am quite sure that I would have been haunted by this fact for my entire life. I felt that my government was going to commit a horrible injustice against these people just as it had against their ethnic kin in 1945 and 1946.

Thus when I got a message from Vladimir’s attorney telling me that they had won I felt great joy. Despite the continued existence of a widespread and deep-rooted Germanophobia among the US elite, the judge had done what was morally right. The influence of a Germanophobia that is every bit as irrational as Nazi anti-Semitism is so prevalent among the ruling class of the US that I only have one explanation for the Germans’ victory. It was a miracle from God. Sometimes the saying “Gott ist mit uns” really is true.

I did not get the job

Well I did not get the foreign job I have been waiting over a month to hear on. They finally wrote me back after I e-mailed them every week for the last three weeks reminding them. They claimed they were waiting to hear if the two people they wanted more than me wanted to take the job. Why they did not write back earlier and tell me this can only be explained by rudeness. I seriously doubt the two people they hired instead of me have two books, several book chapters and half a dozen journal articles published each. Especially since the job only pays $500 a month with no benefits. That is correct the job pays less than US minimum wage. It also requires a Ph.D. from a western university. How many people applying for such a job have as many academic publications as me? I will bet $100 that none do. Their country is never going to develop with such policies.

The Process of Writing

I corrected my proofs for the article this morning. Now I need to mail them. They did a really good job on the proofs. Alot of academic journals create far more errors in the proofs than existed in the original draft. The published articles then end up with still even more errors. But, the editor at Human Rights Review has been very good.

Catherine's Grandchildren is now up to 125 pages. It is going to turn out to be a little bit longer than I originally anticipated. I found some new materials and have been incorporating them. Recently I have been writing about the feeding of Volga Germans by the American Relief Administration in the early 1920s, the fate of Volga German orphans during the same years and the incredible decline in the education level of Russian-Germans relative to other Soviet nationalities between 1926 and 1989. In regards to this last topic the Russian-Germans fell from number two, second only to Jews, to number 18 and below Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Mordvins, Kalmyks and 12 other nationalities. In Kazakhstan less than 6% of Russian-Germans in 1989 had ever attended post-secondary educational institutes. More so than almost any other nationality in the USSR, the Russian-Germans suffered from severe discrimination in the realm of education from 1941 on.

Speaking of Russian-Germans, not all is bad news. This Friday the German family in Walla Walla will be celebrating the one year anniversary of winning their political asylum appeal. I am very glad to hear that Vladimir, Katya, Pavel and Oksana have had a very good year since that victory. I hope they have many more great years here in the US. I will have a special post dedicated to the German family on Friday.

New Publication Next Month

Today I got my proofs for an article that will appear in Human Rights Review next month. The journal is published by the philosophy department of Loyola University in New Orleans. The title of the article is "Socialist Racism: Ethnic Cleansing and Racial Exclusion in the USSR and Israel." The abstract of the article is below.

During the 1970s, both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks in Soviet Central Asia compared their plight to that of the Palestinians. The Stalin regime deported both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands to dispersed settlements in Central Asia. The similarities between the Soviet policies of expelling and permanently excluding the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands and similar Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are not entirely coincidental. The Zionists based their mass expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and subsequent prohibition on allowing them to return to their homes in part on the Soviet model. The similarities between the two instances of ethnic cleansing are due in large part to this conscious emulation of Stalin's methods by the Zionists.

Books on Crimean Tatars

Crimean Tatar Bibliography

English Language Books

Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).

Allworth, Edward, ed., The Tatars of Crimea: Return to the Homeland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

Amnesty International, Chronicle of Current Events no. 31, 17 May 1974 (Amnesty International, 1975).

Conquest, Robert, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (NY: Macmillan, 1970).

Fisher, Alan W., The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1978).

The Forced Migration Projects of the Open Society Institute, Crimean Tatars: Repatriation and Conflict Prevention (NY: The Open Society Institute, 1996).

Naimark, Norman, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Nekrich, Aleksandr, trans. Saunders, George, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (NY: W.W. Norton, 1979).

Pohl, J. Otto, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999).

Pohl, J. Otto, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930-1953 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997).

Polian, Pavel, Against Their Will (Budapest, Central European University, 2004).

Reddaway, Peter, ed., Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union (London: Cape, 1972).

Saunders, George, trans., Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (NY: Monad Press, 1974).

Sheehy, Anne and Nahaylo, Bohdan, The Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Meskhetians: Soviet Treatment of Some National Minorities (London: Minority Rights Group, 1986).

Uehling, Greta, Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Return (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Williams, Brian, The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2001).

Happy Armed Forces Day

Usually my Get Fuzzy calender has holidays listed for Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK. Today it had a US one. My calender did not have VE day a couple weeks ago. I find that surprising because all of the countries listed above plus the former Soviet states participated in the victory. At any rate my uncle who served in the Marines in between the Korean and Vietnam wars put up the flag again today in honor of the occasion.

Stalin's Ethnic Cleansing of the Crimean Tatars: 18 May 1944

In the early hours of 18 May 1944 some 32,000 members of the NKVD and NKGB began the systematic round up of the entire Crimean Tatar population. These armed units went from house to house and rousted the still sleeping victims and informed them that the Stalin regime had decreed that they were traitors to the Soviet Motherland. This false and slanderous accusation carried a sentence of permanent banishment from Crimea to Uzbekistan as special settlers. Evicted from their homes the Crimean Tatars had only a short time to gather a few possessions with them into exile. The NKVD men then escorted them to cars and trucks and drove them to rail stations for deportation from their homeland. They rapidly stuffed the Crimean Tatar deportees into train wagons meant for the transportation of livestock. An average of 50 people found themselves crowded into each of the small wooden boxes. Thousands of families became separated during this process as the soldiers placed mothers and children in separate wagons. In a period of three days the NKVD had completed loading the vast majority of the Crimean Tatar population into cattle cars.

In total the NKVD herded over 180,000 people on train echelons bound for Uzbekistan. Women and children constituted over 80% of these deportees. Some 25,000 Crimean Tatar men had earlier gone to the front to fight in the Red Army against Nazi Germany. Eight of them had even received the title Hero of the Soviet Union for their valor in this struggle. The survivors of this conflict later found themselves stripped of their arms and sent to special settlements in Uzbekistan to join the rest of the Crimean Tatar population. The Soviet government forcibly mobilized another 11,000 Crimean Tatar men into forced labor battalions during the deportations and sent them to various sites in Russia and Kazakhstan. In total the Stalin regime forcibly resettled nearly 200,000 Crimean Tatars.

The day after completing this task, the NKVD diverted over 30,000 Crimean Tatar deportees from their journey to Uzbekistan to the Urals. These special settlers worked in lumber preparation and cellulose and paper factories. The cold and wet climate here combined with poor housing, lack of warm clothing and insufficient nourishment led to poor health. Numerous outbreaks of dysentery, mange and eczema plagued the Crimean Tatar exiles in the Urals. Only the most limited and primitive medical care existed to treat such ailments. As a result uncounted thousands perished here.

The remaining 150,000 plus Crimean Tatars continued on to Uzbekistan. They traveled for weeks in extremely unsanitary conditions. Each wagon had only a hole or bucket to serve as a toilet. The deportees had very little water for either drinking or washing. The train wagons thus quickly became infested with lice. Outbreaks of typhus and other diseases afflicted the exiles in transit. A lack of sufficient food exacerbated their ill health. Official Soviet records show an average of only 340 grams of food issued a day for each deportee while on the trains, a ration guaranteed to bring death sooner rather than later. Since the journey to Uzbekistan took an average of three weeks and those sent to Mari-El did not arrive until July many Crimean Tatars died along the way. The NKVD threw those that perished by the side of the railway tracks thus depriving them of a proper burial. The difference in the number of Crimean Tatars deported and those arriving in their assigned places of exile exceeded 6,000 people.

The Stalin regime sent the Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan during a known malaria epidemic despite the fact that the USSR had no extra drugs to fight the disease at the time. Their immune systems weakened by malnutrition and hunger the deportees died in droves from this illness during their first years of exile. The NKVD registered over 26,000 deaths among Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan in less than a year and a half. Most of these people died in agony from malaria.

The Soviet government placed the Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan under special settlement restrictions and used them for hard labor in construction, mining, manufacturing and agriculture. The special settlement restrictions saddled the deportees with an onerous set of legal liabilities. They could not leave their assigned settlement without special permission from their local NKVD commandant and had to report to this commandant and register on a regular basis. These NKVD commandants administered a separate legal system over the Crimean Tatars and denied them equal rights with most other Soviet citizens. To enforce this legal inferiority the Crimean Tatars had to carry special identification documents noting their unequal status on the basis of their nationality.

The Soviet government did not remove the special settlement restrictions from the Crimean Tatars until 28 April 1956, over three years after Stalin’s death. Even then it did not lift the false accusation of treason against all Crimean Tatars until 5 September 1967. The ban on the vast majority of Crimean Tatars from returning home to Crimea remained effective into the late 1980s. For decades the Crimean Tatars engaged in peaceful demonstrations, petitions and other forms of protests against this ban. Only after 1987, however, could large numbers of Crimean Tatars again live in Crimea without being expelled back to Uzbekistan by the Soviet authorities. Today over half of the Crimean Tatar population of the former USSR lives in Crimea where they are engaged in a peaceful struggle to achieve full national, civil and political rights.

Research

Since I have arrived in Arivaca I have been reading alot more than at any time in life except when I did the MA at SOAS. I actually found the MA harder than the Ph.D. The one year MA required that I read about a book a day and most of the material was completely new to me. The doctorate by contrast only required me to write about a half a page a day and I was already very familiar with the subject matter. In the last week I have finished reading Charles Allen's Soldier Sahibs and Tom Bissell's Chasing the Sea. The Allen book is on the British military exploits in the 19th Century in the Punjab, Kashmir, Afghanistan and the North West Frontier Province. Chasing the Sea is a travel book by a former Peace Corp Volunteer in Uzbekistan that manages to incorporate a lot of Central Asian history and do it well. I have been reading alot of popular history and travel literature dealing with Central Asia, Afghanistan and Siberia recently. Almost all of it is better written and more informative than most of the English language academic literature recently published on the history of these regions.

I have not got anything written in the last couple days on the book project. But, I did find some stuff on the Volga Germans from 1917 to 1920 thanks to Viktor Krieger's Russian language website. It might be enough to get a rough draft of Catherine's Grandchildren finished. At anyrate it will help considerably. I also found some interesting stuff on his website regarding the demography of the Russian-Germans under Soviet rule and the 1979 riots by ethnic Kazakhs against creating a German Autonomous Oblast in Kazakhstan. These last events are a pretty minor part of my chapter on the 1970s. They are never the less an interesting example of just how messed up Soviet nationality policies really were in practice.

Other Stuff

Well I still have not heard anything on the job. I wrote an e-mail to the last person who interviewed me today asking about my status. I think they are deliberately ignoring me at this point. I wish academics were not such cowards. If they are not going to give me the job they should tell me.

I voted for the first time in Arivaca today. It was for two county bond issues. Neither of which fund anything remotely close to our community. Instead it is more pork for Tucson. I of course voted against both measures.

I made some progress this last couple of days on Catherine's Grandchildren. It is now up to 120 pages. I definitely need to do a little remedial research on the years 1917 to 1920 to finish it properly. But, other than those three years I have a pretty complete narrative of Russian-German history in the USSR from 1921 to 1987. As far as I know it is the first work on the subject in English for a general audience that makes use of the vast array of Russian and German language sources published since 1991. It also makes use of some archival research I did in Tartu Estonia.

Reviving the Blog

I think I am going to try and revive this blog from some of its current morbidity. I am going to start posting at least one serious historical post a week. Thursday the 18th is the 62nd anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars so I will put up a special post in memory of this crime against humanity on that day. I will also resume my Human Cost of Communism series. I am going to try and entice an audience from people interested in these subjects who do not normally read blogs.

The Writing Life

Recently, I have slowed down a bit on writing Catherine's Grandchildren. It has not progressed past 118 pages yet. I hope to rectify that soon. The basic narrative text is almost finished. It is just the years of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War that still have big gaps. I may have to wait until I can get somewhere with more library resources before I can do a really satisfactory job on the years 1917 to 1920. I will try and get what I can finished here first. Then I can get it into better shape when I visit my parents in California and can visit some of the libraries near them.

I am thinking that my next writing project dealing with deported peoples will probably be on the Kalmyks. Two of the last three graduate students that contacted me for assistance were researching the group. So I know there is some interest out there.

It is now officially Hot in Arivaca

The weather forecast predicts that today's high will break 100 degrees for the first time this year in southern Arizona. I made the walk back to Serenity Ranch in 97 degree heat yesterday without any discomfort. So I do not think 100 should present any problems.

I still have not heard anything about the job overseas. I did, however, get an e-mail from a friend in Alexandria, Virginia today. Any day that I get e-mail actually addressed to me personally is a good day. I am lucky if I average one real e-mail for every 20 listserve announcements.

Still Waiting, Writing and Walking

I still have yet to hear about the job. It has now been 18 days since the last interview. Since the job is in a country on a different continent it is important that I hear soon. If they wait to tell me in July that only gives me a month to make all the preparations for leaving the US for two years. If they are not going to give me the job they should tell me soon as well. I am currently having to postpone finishing other plans while I wait.

Catherine's Grandchildren is up to 118 pages now. I am currently writing about the events that led to the declaration of the Volga German Workers' Commune by Lenin on 19 October 1918. It was the first autonomous national territory in Soviet Russia.

It has gotten up into the 90s, but I am still walking a little over five miles a day. It is not too bad now that I am used to the unpaved roads and heat. Walking in Arivaca gives me plenty of time to think about my future.

Today's Update

Well I still have not heard about the job despite sending an e-mail asking about my status yesterday. That is probably not a good sign. If I do not hear anything by next Tuesday I will e-mail them again.

Catherine's Grandchildren is still rolling along. It is now up to 117 pages. This morning I started writing about the numerous massacres of Mennonites in Ukraine by Nestor Makhno's anarchist followers during the fall of 1919. I should be able to complete a rough draft of the entire manuscript before the end of the month.

Happy VE Day Everybody

In honor of Victory in Europe Day I will be starting up the grill for the first time this year. I am grilling hot dogs tonight. The weather has decided to cooperate with these plans. It is not too hot and there is a slight breeze to wave the US flag.

In other news I am still waiting to hear on the job that interviewed me. I sent them an e-mail today. I hope to hear one way or the other by the end of the week. If I get the job I will take it for at least two years, probably longer. If they do not hire me I still need to know soon so I can get on with the rest of my life. If I do not get this job I do not think I will be wasting any more postage trying to get a position at a US university. I got a rejection today in the mail from a job I applied to long ago telling me they had hired a woman who has not even finished her Ph.D. yet. When an ABD at a US university trumps the fastest recorded Ph.D. at SOAS and multiple publications I have to conclude it is a hopeless cause I embraced.

I am writing a couple pages of real work a day now. Usually before 8 AM. I have now written 116 pages of Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. I really only have the years 1917, 1918 and 1919 to finish. I finished up the chapter on the 1980s. Compared to the 1970s the first half of the 1980s was a much less active time period for the group. There was one well publicized demonstration in Moscow's Red Square on 31 March 1980 demanding the right to emigrate. Other than that there was not much protest activity. It was also a pretty short chapter since I only went up to 1987. In that year the Soviet government decided to allow unlimited emigration out of the USSR. Most of the Russian-Germans left for Germany in the next 15 years. The 1989 Soviet census counted just over 2 million Russian-Germans. During the 1990s over 1.5 million Russian-Germans settled in Germany. This trend has continued at a slower pace into the current decade. The 1987 removal of the restrictions on emigration out of the Soviet Union essentially announced the end of any significant Russian-German population in Russia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

I got a couple e-mails from the graduate student I helped right before Christmas recently. He has sent me another graduate student at a different institution to help. As always Guru Pohl welcomes all seekers of knowledge.

Worthwhile Writing While I Wait

I still have not heard from the job. I am going to send them an e-mail if I still do not know by Tuesday. Other than waiting I am just about finished with the manuscript for Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. I am aiming for 125 pages. Currently it is at 109 pages. I have only the sections on 1917-1920 and the 1980s to finish. I finally started writing the portion on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War this week. I am not sure what I am going to do with the manuscript. It is too short for a book and too long for an article. It is targeted at a general rather than an academic audience. If anybody would like to review the work with this in mind send me an e-mail and I will consider sending you a copy.

My current activities

I had my second interview on Sunday. I am still waiting to hear the results. Thanks to everybody who e-mailed me wishing me luck. Besides waiting patiently to hear about the job I have been reading, writing and walking. Recently I have been reading about Siberia, the Second Chechen War (1999 on) and Mennonites. My current book manuscript is up to 105 pages now. I still need to complete the chapter on the 1980s and I have not even started the chapter on 1917 to 1920. I skip around alot when I write long pieces. Other than that the work is almost done. I am not sure what my next writing project will be yet. This summer I should have two book chapters and a journal article come out in print. In the fall I have an encyclopedia article scheduled for publication. I will post the details when they come out.

Good News

It looks like I made it through the first cut on the phone interview. Now they want to set up a second phone interview. So it looks like I am still in the running for the job. In other good news the book from the Woodrow Wilson Center to which I contributed a chapter will be published soon. The film project which I will be working on as an advisor should also get underway shortly.

Happy Easter

In the unlikely event anybody other than myself reads this blog then I would like to wish them a Happy Easter. My uncle and I will again have the traditional Holiday pizza to celebrate. The weather is just about perfect now here in Arivaca.

I got a job interview yesterday

Yesterday I got a call from overseas to interview me for the university teaching job which recently shorlisted me. The call came unexpectedly, but I think I did okay. One thing that I thought strange was the interviewer said I was "overqualified." If I am overqualified for this job then I am definitely qualified for the 100 plus other jobs I applied for that did not interview me. In fact most did not even acknowledge me with a rejection. Instead they just ignored me. For some reason US universities don't count professional publications or British degrees. They would rather hire an ABD with no publications who was a TA at a third rate US institution provided the applicant is a Marxist and not a white male. If I get the job I will again leave the US for at least several years. If I do not get it I will refocus my job search. One thing that is evident is that my work is respected far more in foreign countries than it is in my homeland.

The Woodpecker is Dead

My uncle shot and killed the woodpecker this morning. He will bother us no more. I hope that his execution deters future woodpecker assaults.

Current Writing Projects

Today I got a rejection from a job I had forgotten I had even applied for. Of course with over a hundred applications sent out in the last two years that is not surprising. I sent one last academic application off on Tuesday. I do not think I will be sending anymore out. I do not like bothering three separate people in three different countries to waste their time and effort to write letters for jobs which I have no real chance. In fact I would probably be better off if I had spent the money I wasted on postage applying to academic jobs at the Casino del Sol/Casino of the Sun, an enterprise of the Pasqua Yaqui nation near Tucson. I certainly would not be any worse off.

So I have resigned myself to engaging in more productive activities than job applications recently. I have been getting a page done a day on my latest book manuscript. It is up to 95 pages now. I am currently finishing up the chapter on the 1960s and the movement by a small group of Russian-German activists to convince the Soviet government to restore the Volga German ASSR. Last night I completed the section on the second Russian-German delegation to Moscow during the summer of 1965 and its two meetings with the Soviet leadership. Like the first delegation earlier that year these meetings did nothing to address the grievances of the Russian-Germans in the USSR.

Currently, I am pretty free to pursue the book manuscript since I have no deadlines until 15 of July 2006. I have a paper due for a conference in Canada in August due then. I have written the paper already and just have to edit it fit their format before I send it off. The conference is on German diasporas and my paper is on the Russian-German diaspora in Kazakhstan. In 1989 there were almost a million ethnic Germans in the Kazakh SSR. In a number of oblasts they constituted over 15% of the population. Karaganda Oblast was over 20% ethnically German. Now the Russian-German population of Kazakhstan is less than 200,000 due to emigration.

Recent Doings

Recently I have been reading alot about the "Great Game" between Tsarist Russia and Great Britain during the 19th Century. It has expanded my background knowledge about the areas bordering Soviet Central Asia considerably. Most notably I have been reading alot about the history of Afghanistan, Tibet and the northern regions of British India. The history of British exploration and espionage in the region is quite interesting.

I have also started working on my current book project again. The one on Russian-Germans under Soviet rule meant for a general rather than academic audience. It is up to 93 pages. I wrote three pages yesterday. Currently I am writing up the section on the 2 January 1965 meeting between the first Russian-German delegation and Mikoyan in Moscow. The delegation itself was formed at a seminar the previous year in Bishkek (then Frunze) Kyrgyzstan. The activists forming the delegation requested that the Soviet government restore the Volga German ASSR. Despite strong arguments supporting such a course of action the regime refused to make any concessions on this issue.

Other than that I am still waiting to here from the job that shorlisted me recently. I could have greatly improved my ratio of applications to shortlists if I had only applied to jobs outside the US. I am also still walking about 15 miles a week over unpaved roads. I figure if nothing else it has to be good for my health.