More on Russian-German Gulag victims

Below is another memory book entry regarding ethnic Germans who perished in the Viatlag camps. Between 1938 and 1956 a total of 2,309 Germans, mostly Volga Germans, perished from hunger, disease and shootings in the Viatlag complex. Of this number only 540 were ever convicted by Soviet courts, the vast majority, 1,487 were special settlers and members of the labor army. Another 282 died while still under investigation before being convicted (Berdinskikh, p. 394). The single greatest year for mortality was 1942 with 1,185 deaths among ethnic Germans in Viatlag (Berdinskikh, p. 398). This year also saw 2,265 Russian-German deaths in Bogoslav, 302 in Tagillag and 925 in Usollag (Krieger, pp. 145-146). A recorded total of 11,874 Russian-Germans conscripted into the labor army died in NKVD camps during 1942 (German, table 4, p. 180). Some of these victims have been identified and their fate has been published in various memory books such as those for Viatlag. Mikhail Suprun and Aleksandr Dudarev were attempting to assemble a memory book for the ethnic Germans in the camps and special settlements of Arkhangelsk Oblast before the FSB confiscated their research. On 20 March 1949 there were 11,275 Russian-German special settlers in that region. Among this group were 809 Russian-Germans deported as kulaks during the early 1930s, 9,300 forcibly repatriated from Germany in 1945 and 1946 including 385 that had joined Andrei Vlaslov's Russian Liberation Army, 835 mobilized into the labor army, and 295 non-Germans sent into internal exile with German family members (Zemskov, pp. 127-128). Documenting the indivdual fate of these men and women is an important historical project which the Russian government currently seeks to make illegal.

Bezel

Albert Viktorovich

Born 1901 in city of Kamyshin (Pushkin Street, Building 20) Stalingrad/Volgorad oblast (Rossiia), German, citizen of USSR, white collar class background, education – 4 grades (Krasnokutsk gymnasium 1916), non-party, book keeper, white collar worker (chief book keeper city housing administration and reconstruction office), lived in city of Engles(?) Volga German ASSR, married, 1 child (son), convicted, sentenced in January 1941 by Supreme court of the Volga German ASSR under article 109 UK RSFSR (abuse of his official position, violating financial discipline) to 6 months forced labor with deduction of 25% of salary, sentence served in place of residence, served in RKKA (28 May – 10 October 1941, technical-quartermaster 2nd rank, active army, Western front, 320th artillery regiment), removed to reserves and exiled as a “person of German nationality”, place of settlement (from 17 November 1941) – Rossiia, Krasnoiarsk krai, city Minunsinsk, Lenin Street, building 160, labor army man, mobilized 25 January 1942 by Minunsinsk district military command, arrived in Viatlag 16 February 1942 from Krasnoiarsk, used for book keeping work in the financial section (12th lumber preparation detachment),confined under guard 16 July 1943 by chekist-operative section of Viatlag after being accused of “counterrevolutionary crimes” (“anti-soviet agitation”), sentenced 29 January 1944 by Special board of the NKVD USSR under article 58 point 10-2 UK RSFSR (“anti-soviet defeatist agitation”) to eight years of deprivation of freedom, started sentence 16 July 1943, was to finish sentence - 16 July 1951, died 25 March 1944 of tuberculosis of the lungs and alimentary dystrophy of the third degree, 12th camp point, station Ima (branch No. 15), rehabilitated 13 October 1989, archive personal file - No. 2515-m. (Reproduced in Berdinskikh, pp. 360-361.)

Sources:

V.A. Berdinskikh, Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov sovetskoi Rossii (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005).

A.A. German, "Mobilizovannye sovetskie nemtsy v lageriakh NKVD i na khoziaistvennykh ob'ektakh drugikh narkomatov v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny," in Stranitsy Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (k-60-letiu pobedy): Doklady Akademii Nauk, No. 3, 2008.

Viktor Krieger, “Einsatz im Zwangsarbeitslager,” in Alfred Eisfeld, ed., Von der Autonomiegrundung zur Verbannung und Entrechtung. Die Jahre 1918 und 1941 bis 1948 in der Geschichte der Deutschen in Russland (Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, 2008).

V.N. Zemskov, Spetsposelenty v SSSR, 1930-1960 (Moscow: Nauk, 2003).

Fall Break

This next week is fall break. I am going to try and catch up on everything during this time since I do not have any classes to teach. This includes all those letters of recommendation I need to write for students.

Another Memory Book Entry

Here is another memory book entry taken from the same source as the one in my previous post.

Gaan

Genrich (Gennadii) Davidovich

Born 1917 in village of Mannheim (Mannheim – Mainskoe) Gnadenfliur canton(Federovsk district/?/) Volga German ASSR – Saratov Oblast (Rossiia) German, citizen USSR (according to him a citizen of Germany), from poor peasant class, education middle specialist (Krasnokutsk agro-technical school, Volga German ASSR 1937), candidate member of VKP (b) [All Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)] since 1939, agronomist, white collar worker (participating agronomist in Gnadenfliur machine-tractor station Volga German ASSR 1937-1940), married, lived in place of birth, from August 1940 – in RKKA (Red Army soldier 518th rifle regiment 129th rifle division), from 18.07.41 – in German POW camp, from 20.07.1941 – in German army (translator for commander of 733rd artillery division), captured and placed in POW camp 02.02.1943 by section of the RKKA at the Stalingrad front, arrested 17.04.1943 by Dubonsk district department UNKVD [Administration of Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs] Stalingrad oblast, sentenced 30.07.1943 by the military tribunal of the Stalingrad garrison under article 58 point 1-b UK RSFSR (treason to the motherland by military personnel) to 10 years deprivation of freedom and five years deprivation of rights with confiscation of property, began sentence 20.04.1943, was to finish sentence on 20.04.1953, arrived in Viatlag 09.01.1944 from Stalingrad (Volgograd), employed as a lumberjack (5th and 8th camp points), classified on 31.07.1945 as 4th (“nonworking”) category of work suitability (a traumatic injury to the spleen) died 14.08.1945 from tuberculosis of the lungs ([technical medical terms I do not understand in English yet alone Russian]), 4th camp point (“sangorodok”) settlement Polevoi-2, grave No. O-12, archive personal file - No. 74759 (26 pages).

Source:

V.A. Berdinskikh, Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov sovetskoi Rossii (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005), doc. 2, pp. 415-416.

Entry from a Memory Book

Since The Guardian ran an article on Thursday about the Russian government's persecution of Suprun and Dudarev the story seems to have gone viral. Almost all the new links are based on the article in The Guardian so I am not going to link to them. Instead I am going to provide some examples of exactly what got Suprun in trouble with the Russian government. He was compiling a memory book of the ethnic German victims of the Gulag labor camps and special settlements in Arkhangelsk. Memory books have been published in Russia before. They are nothing more than collections of basic biographical data of Stalin's victims. Sometimes they merely reproduce the information contained in the personal files of the victims. The entry below on Filipp Martinovich Ganzen (Genzen) was first published in a memory book dealing with ethnic Germans in Viatlag, Martirologa "Nemtsy v Viatlage", compiled by V. I. Verem’ev. It was later reproduced in V.I. Berdinskikh, Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov sovetskoi Rossii (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005), doc. 1, pp. 412-413. The translation below is my own and I have attempted to stay as close as possible to the literal rendering of Soviet jargon and euphemisms as possible. For instance alimentary dystrophy is a fancy way of saying starvation. The swelling form of alimentary dystrophy is the familiar image people my age have of children starving to death in Ethiopia during the 1980s as a result of that country's communist government emulating Stalin's agricultural policies.

Ganzen (Genzen)

Filipp Martinovich

Born in 1904 in the village of Mariental/Sovetskoe Mariental canton/Sovetskogo district Volga German ASSR/Saratov oblast (Rossiia), German, citizen of the USSR, from working (artisan-peasant/?/) class, education – four grades (1912-1916), non-party, fireman (chief of fire fighters), married, 3 children (two daughters and a son), lived in place of birth, exiled in September 1941 as “a person of German nationality”, place of exile – village of Uralka (?) Ordynsk village soviet Tiukhtetsk district Krasnoiarsk krai (Rossiia), labor army man, mobilized 23. 01. 1942 by Tiukhtetsk district military command, arrived in Viatlag 16. 02. 1942 from Krasnoiarsk, employed in fire fighting and general work (9th lumber preparation detachment), sentenced 28.01.1944 by permanent session of the legal board for criminal affairs of the Kirov oblast court in Viatlag under article 59 point 6 UK [criminal code] of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic] (failure to carry out labor duties) to 6 years deprivation of freedom and three years deprivation of rights, sentence started - 28.01.1944, was to finish sentence on 28.01.1950, on the determination of the legal board for criminal affairs of the Supreme court of the RSFSR of 23.03.1944 the sentence was annulled, the case was declared closed, he was freed from punishment on 24.04.1944, transferred to category of “labor mobilized”(in “work columns”), declared an invalid on 10.01.1944 (swelling form of alimentary dystrophy), died 01.07.1944 from alimentary dystrophy of the 3rd degree (swelling form) with diarrhea, 1st camp point, settlement Rudnichnyi, grave No. G-50, archive personal file – No 1180-m/77452.

(Card of special registration of Viatskogo ULIU. Archive)

Source:

V.A. Berdinskikh, Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov sovetskoi Rossii (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005), doc. 1 pp. 412-413.

Restaurants

The Chinese restaurant behind the university has closed. So recently I have been eating at an Azerbaijani kebab place not far from work. It is very good, but the menu is quite limited. In fact every time I have been there I have had the kofte kebab and shish kebab combination. It is probably the best place in town for grilled meat. I just can not eat kebabs everyday the way I can Chinese food.

Chon Bash for Two Days

The rest of the full time faulty in the ICP department were away today and yesterday so I got to be Chon Bash (Kyrgyz for Big Head). Fortunately, nothing beyond the means of my meagre administrative skills popped up. The most difficult decision I had to deal with was where to eat lunch.

More News Stories on Suprun and Dudarev

The following links have some more information on the ongoing attempt by the Russian government to suppress the research of Mikhail Suprun into the repression of Russian-Germans by Stalin during the 1940s.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jfpRI3pTnVJalXXbhQcyQmmOx5Kg

http://barentsobserver.com/-take-action-in-the-suprun-case.4643640-16180.html

http://yourfreedomandours.blogspot.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/15/russia-gulag-historian-arrested

Another Good Sign: Berlin Takes Action Regarding Suprun

The German government has now officially complained to Russian President Medvedev about the political persecution of Suprun and Dudarev. The Russian government is seeking to imprison Suprun for up to four years for his research and writing on Stalin's repression of ethnic Germans in the USSR during the 1940s. The article below from The Moscow Times has more information on the case and the recent actions by the German government.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/news/article/387359.html

A Small Important Victory in Reclaiming History

The attempt by the grandson of Joseph Stalin to sue Novaya Gazeta for libel after they correctly characterized the late Soviet dictator as a "bloodthirsty cannibal" has failed. This is a very important victory for human rights activists and others seeking to prevent Russia and other post-Soviet states from sliding back into absolute dictatorships. The New York Times has a good article on the trial with lots of great links at the url below.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/stalins-grandson-loses-defamation-suit/?hp

The False Charges of Treason Against the Deported Peoples Part II

Several years ago Karachai demographer D.M. Ediev pointed to a solid piece of evidence that the charges of wholesale treason against the Balkars came after the decision to deport them had already been made. On page 27 of his book, Demograficheskie poteri deportirovannykh narodov SSSR (Stavropol': StGAU "AGRUS", 2003) he quotes from telegram No. 6160 sent by Beria to Stalin on 25 February 1944. The archival citation for the telegram is GARF "Special File" of Stalin. Fond R-9401 s/ch. Opis 2. Delo 64. 1944: List 163. This document had been reproduced earlier by N.F. Bugai in a redacted form that did not indicate that the deportation had been decided upon before Beria began looking for "evidence" that the Balkars had collectively "betrayed the motherland."

Redacted Bugai version:

"I familiarized myself with the material on the conduct of the Balkars at the time of the offensive by the German-Fascist military in the Caucasus, and after their expulsion..." (Ediev, p. 26).

Full version reproduced by Ediev:

"In connection with the proposed exile of the Balkars from the North Caucasus, I familiarized myself with the material about their conduct during the time of the offensive by the German-Fascist military in the Caucasus, and after their expulsion..." (Ediev, p. 27). [Note that the italics were added by Ediev for emphasis.]

Source: D.M. Ediev, Demograficheskie poteri deportirovannykh narodov SSSR (Stavropol': StGAU "AGRUS", 2003).

The Current Status of Students from Turkmenistan

The few Turkmen students still here will probably all finish out this academic year at AUCA. This means that a large number of them will graduate. However, it looks like the Turkmen government will continue to ban those AUCA students still in Turkmenistan from coming to Kyrgyzstan to complete their educations. This ban appears at this point to be indefinite. It also appears very likely that no further Turkmen students will be allowed to leave their country to attend AUCA in the foreseeable future. I find this most unfortunate. Some of my best students have come from Turkmenistan. Their absence will make AUCA a less intellectually diverse place.

Jonathan Brent on the Rehabilitation of Stalin

The article by Jonathan Brent linked below provides a good background to the recent moves towards rehabilitating Stalin in the Russian Federation.

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/117239.html

Links on the Suprun Affair

Here are a list of news articles on the Russian government's political persecution of Professor Mikhail Suprun and Col. Dudarev. The first article is in English, the second one in Russian and the third one in German.

http://www.cdi.org/russia/Johnson/2009-186-25.cfm

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/109/02.html

http://www.ornis-press.de/staatsfeindlich-forschung-zu-russlanddeutschen-schicksalen.1184.0.html

FSB Arrests Historian of Stalinist Repression Against Russian-Germans

On 13 September 2009, the FSB arrested and interrogated Mikhail Suprun of Pomorsky State University of Arkhangelsk in connection with his research on Stalin era repression of Russian-Germans. They seized his computers and databases as well as a large number of books and documents. He was working on creating a memory book for the Russian-German victims of the Gulag's labor camps and special settlements in Arkhangelsk. Assisting him in this endeavor was Aleksandr Dudarev, the Head of the Information Center of the Arkhangelsk MVD, who provided Suprun with access to the relevant archives. The Russian government intends to prosecute both Professor Suprun and Col. Dudarev for their research into Stalinist repression. The official charges against Suprun are "divulging personal information" that is collecting the names and other biographical data of individual Russian-Germans repressed by Stalin for publication. He is also charged with urging Dudarev to abuse his authority by granting him access to the Arkhangelsk MVD archives. For more information see the links below.

http://www.khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1254770164

http://www.khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1254517948

Walt Richmond on the False Charges of Treason Against the Deported Peoples

My colleague Dr. Walt Richmond left the following comment on my last post, but its detail and importance certainly merit it having a more prominent place on this blog. I will post later on some additional evidence that the decision to deport the Balkars was made by the Stalin regime before they formulated the false charges of treason against the entire nationality. But, in the meantime please read Dr. Richmond's piece. The italicized part of this post is from Dr. Richmond.

There was also a lot of disinformation concerning the Balkars' deportation. From the original draft of my book, which unfortunately I had to significantly edit:It had long been assumed that the notion of deporting the Balkars was first proposed in January 1944. Additionally, in his memoirs Z. Kumekhov, First Party Secretary of Kabardino-Balkaria, asserted that he vehemently opposed the deportation, which he only learned of on 25 February. However, Balkar historian Khadzhi-Murat Sabanchiev has recently illuminated the process through which the decision to deport the Balkars was made. On 20 February NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria arrived in Grozny to supervise the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush. At the same time two documents were prepared in Nalchik. The first described the location and numbers of the Balkar population. The second stated that despite the all the efforts made by the Communist Party to help the Balkars a portion remained hostile to Soviet power, and that agents had informed the Party of a counter-revolutionary movement among Balkar nationalists. Therefore, the note concluded, it was necessary to deport the entire Balkar nation. The notes were signed by Kumekhov, local NKVD Chief K. P. Bziava and local NKGB chief S. I. Filatov. Beria signed the second note on 24 February, and on the same day reported to Stalin that during the occupation “the Balkars were negotiating with the Karachays about the unification of Balkaria and Karachay,” 1227 “bandits” had been arrested, and that “362 people fled from Balkaria with the Germans.” It should be remembered first that 1227 represented three percent of the 1939 population of Balkaria (assuming all the arrestees were Balkars) and 362 was less than two percent of the entire number of people who fled the North Caucasus with the Nazis. It seems that Beria had already decided to have the Balkars deported and was merely looking for “a suitable cause,” as Stalin had phrased it a quarter century earlier prior to the deportation of the Cossacks. These three “facts” apparently suited Beria as sufficient, for in the same telegram he recommended the deportation of the Balkar nation as soon as the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush was completed. Stalin replied affirmatively the next day. On 26 February Beria issued Prikaz (Order) 00186 entitled “On Measures to Resettle the Balkar Population from the Kabardino-Balkar ASSR.” In the order he recommended transferring one raion to North Ossetia instead of Kabarda. This proposal was rejected; Elbrus and Prielbrus raions were transferred to Georgia and the remainder to Kabarda, which was renamed the Kabardin ASSR.

References:

Bugai, Nikolai. "Deportatsiia: Beriia dokladivayut Stalinu," Kommunist 3 (1991), pp. 101-12.

Pohl, J. Otto. Ethnic Cleansing in The USSR, 1937-1949. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Sabanchiev, Khadzhi-Murat. “Vyselenie Balkarskogo Naroda v Gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny: Prichiny i Posledstviia,” Murad Esenov, ed. Tsentral’naia Asiia i Kavkaz. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.ca-c.org/datarus/sabanch.shtml (Accessed 10 April 2006).

The False Charges of Treason Against the Deported Peoples Part I

Most scholars as opposed to Stalinist hacks have long maintained that the decision to deport the Kalmyks, Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Crimean Tatars had very little to do with the official Soviet claim that these people were guilty of mass treason and collaboration with the Nazis. Even the exaggerated and unsubstantiated charges made by Beria only accused 10% of the Crimean Tatars of serving in German units. A report from Kobulov and Serov to Beria on 22 April 1944 claims that 20,000 Crimean Tatars deserted from the 51st army in 1941. A direct translation of their message reads, "20 thousand Crimean Tatars deserted in 1941 from the 51st army as it retreated from Crimea." (Bugai 1992, doc. 2, p. 131). This claim was made despite the fact that the NKVD's own Section for the Struggle Against Banditism had only verified 479 cases of desertion and shirking of military service from the Red Army in Crimea for all nationalities versus 1,666,891 for the Soviet Union as whole for the years 1941 to 1944. (Bugai 1992, p. 286). Beria then repeated the claims of Kobulov and Serov in a message to Stalin with some alterations on 10 May 1944. His report states, "From sections of the Red Army in 1944 deserted more than 20 thousand Tatars who betrayed the Motherland, and went over to serve the Germans with arms in their hands and fought against the Red Army..." (Bugai 1991, p. 107). It is probable that Beria meant 1941 rather than 1944 since the information appears to have come directly from the earlier communication by Kobulov and Serov. The source for the 20,000 figure is unknown, but is probably an exaggeration. Soviet intelligence reported a total of 15,000 Crimean Tatars serving in eight German organized battalions in April 1942. (Bugai 2002, doc. 30, p. 62) In contrast the German enlistment records for these battalions show only 9,255 Crimean Tatars serving in them. (T.S. Kulbaev and A. Iu. Khegai, pp. 206-207). A number of these men died during the war and and others retreated to Germany with the Wehrmacht and avoided forced repatriation to the USSR. Which means that over 90% of the Crimean Tatars deported by the NKVD on 18-20 May 1944 were completely innocent. Since the vast majority of the deportees, more than 80% were women and children, this is not surprising. (Williams, p. 336) The condemnation of nearly 150,000 innocent women and children to eternal exile in Uzbekistan and the Urals as special settlers for the alleged crimes of 20,000 men represents one of the most disproportionate collective punishments ever carried out. Despite its immense brutality this crime still has a great many defenders among Russians and others seeking to rehabilitate the Stalin regime today.

Sources:

N.F. Bugai, ed., "Deportatsiia: Beriia dokladyvaet Stalinu..," Kommunist, no. 1, 1991.

N.F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin - Lavrentiiu Berii: "Ikh nado deportirovat'": Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii. Moscow: "Druzhba narodov", 1992).

N.F. Bugai, ed., Deportatsiia narodov kryma: Dokumenty, fakty kommentarii (Moscow, Insan, 2002).

T.S. Kulbaev and A. Iu. Khegai, Deportatsiia (Almaty: Deneker, 2000).

Alexander Statiev, "The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942-1944: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 6, no. 2, Spring 2005.

Brian Glyn Williams, "The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars," Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 37, no. 3 (July 2002).

Blogger Again Available

For some reason the university blocked all blogger related web pages between Thursday and today. But, now they seem to work again without any problem. I am not sure what the deal was.

Survey Reports that the Majority of Central Asian Youth are Pro-Stalin

Vechernii Bishkek had an interesting article this Friday. It seems that a group called "Evraziiskii Monitor" did a survey of 20 to 35 year old respondents throughout the former Soviet Union and the Baltic States on their opinions of various historical figures. A full 61% of the youth in Kyrgyzstan had a favorable opinion of Stalin versus only 35% in Russia. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan fell in between Kyrgyzstan and Russia with 53% of young people having a positive view of Stalin. In contrast to the young peoples' enthusiastic support of Stalin only 27% of the youth in Kyrgyzstan had a favorable opinion of Andrei Sakharov. So much for inculcating a democratic political culture in Kyrgyzstan.

Source:

Vechernii Bishkek 25 September 2009, p. 15.

Genocide and Intent

The issue of genocide is one that has suffered from a severe narrowing of Raphael Lemkin’s original conceptions and constricted interpretations of the already watered down and politically deformed Genocide Treaty. At the heart of the matter is the claim that instances where deliberate state actions which directly lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of people belonging to racialized ethnic groups are not genocide because the element of “intent” is missing. In the case of the USSR this has led to Arseny Roginsky one of the founders of Memorial in Moscow to remark with regards to Stalinist terror that there are only victims and no crimes. The mass deaths caused by Stalin's deportation of whole nationalities are thus portrayed as purely accidental with no moral or legal responsibility accruing to the Soviet government for causing what were the inevitable consequences of their deliberate actions. Of course intent in such cases is always interpreted in an extremely narrow manner which makes it a synonym for motive or goal. That is the primary purpose of an action must be the extermination of a targeted group and that actions which inevitably have the effect of killing off large portions of specific nationalities undertaken for other reasons thus do not constitute genocide. This interpretation of the word intent is very different from the meaning of the word in Anglo-American common law. Under this definition it is not necessary for death to be the sole object of an action for it to be intentional. Rather it is only necessary for death to be the foreseeable consequence of a voluntary action for it to legally count as intentional. It is quite obvious that moving an entire national population numbering hundreds of thousands of people and consisting mostly of children, the elderly and the disabled in the middle of war time to desolate deserts and frozen taiga will result in a large percentage of them dying. This is exactly what happened during World War Two with the various nationalities deported by Stalin.

The defense that the deportation orders called for the local Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Siberian and Uzbek authorities to provide food, housing and other necessities for the deportees does not morally or legally absolve the Stalin regime of these deaths. The regime knew on the basis of previous deportations that the local authorities in Siberia and Central Asia did not have sufficient resources to provide enough housing, food, clothing and medicine to the deportees to prevent a large minority of them from dying. Rather these provisions appear to have been put in the deportation orders as a way of deflecting responsibility for any problems arising due to the deportations such as the spread of contagious diseases, housing shortages, and unemployment from the central government in Moscow to the regional authorities. Indeed in every single case the local authorities repeatedly reported a severe lack of food, housing, clothing, shoes, soap and medicine and consequently mass deaths due to malnutrition and disease among the deportees shortly after the first trainloads arrived.

FLG also has a post on his blog to which I have posted a comment. If anybody else picks up this discussion and links to me please let me know in the comments.

New Publication in Journal of Genocide Research

The new special topic issue (Volume 11 issue 2 and 3) of the Journal of Genocide Research dealing with New Perspectives on Soviet Mass Violence is now out. It includes the article I co-wrote with Eric J. Schmaltz and Ronald J. Vossler, "'In our hearts we felt the sentence of death': Ethnic German recollections of mass violence in the USSR, 1928-1948," pp. 323-354. The abstract of the article is reproduced below.

Abstract:

This article seeks to examine the mass violence unleashed by Joseph Stalin and his regime against the USSR's ethnic Germans. It endeavors to comprehend how Soviet policies of repression progressed and intensified to the extreme detriment of this nationality group. It covers the tumultuous period between 1928 and 1948, when Soviet policies overall coarsened considerably, from the implementation of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan to the government decree banishing several Soviet peoples in their virtual entirety, including the ethnic Germans, to “eternal” exile east of the Urals. This process shifted from class-based reasons to ethnic ones as the 1930s progressed. The increasingly racialized nature of Soviet mass violence targeted the ethnic Germans as a large diaspora community ethnically linked to Nazi Germany, a country perceived as an ideological and military threat. During Stalin's war against the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s, ethnic German villagers at times felt compelled to conduct mass protests and even revolts against the authorities. Meanwhile, both an emerging ethnic German elite and ordinary German farmers and workers wrote about worsening conditions under Stalin. Besides petitioning the Soviet government, they delivered letters and various writings to friends and relatives by way of a vast underground network at home and abroad, and their relatives sometimes answered in return. A growing body of Soviet archival records and academic literature treating the Stalinist period has generally validated and expanded upon what the ethnic group as early as the 1920s and 1930s had exposed about mass terror under Stalin's regime.

Very Cool Movie Credits

If you want to see something supremely cool go to the credits of Under Jakob's Ladder and scroll down until you reach the position of Historical Consultants. Then scroll down to the part where it says, "The Producers Gratefully Acknowledge..." I am listed not once, but twice in the credits of a movie that is sure to become a cult classic.

New Trailer for Under Jakob's Ladder

The Moon Brothers have just finished their new trailer for their soon to be released movie Under Jakob's Ladder. For those who have not been paying attention it is a movie that revolves around the religious persecution of ethnic Germans in Ukraine during the Stalin era. This is a topic Hollywood has steadfastly avoided. So I urge everybody to spread the word about this new film.

Dying really revived Michael Jackson's Career

Since Michael Jackson's untimely death I have heard his music play all over Bishkek including on my girlfriend's radio. Before he died I never heard his music played here. It is a good thing Madonna is still in good health.

Fall is here

Well it has finally cooled down somewhat in Bishkek. I hope with the colder weather that the insects that have devoured my hands and arms go someplace other than my apartment. I count eight insect bites on my right hand alone.

Weekend

Well, I did not see anything resembling a Graffiti Festival this weekend. I did see lots of police, but I managed to avoid them. I also saw lots of weddings about town, but nobody invited me to any of them. But, mostly like every other weekend I prepared for class and did other work related activities.

Fellow Americans

Last night at the request of Kyrgyz Concept I joined a group of American and Canadian tourists for dinner at local Georgian restaurant. Most of the people were retirees enjoying their freedom from work to travel the world. I had a lot of fun answering their questions about life in Kyrgyzstan. I definitely would do it again.

Grafitti Festival

Our university web site every so often has information on local events that just makes my mind boggle. Evidently Bishkek will be hosting the "First International Festival of Street Art 'Graffiti' "on August 30-31. I might put up a post about it on Tuesday if it is at all interesting.

More nuttery from America's most racist professor

I live and work in a country where the majority of the population is nominally Muslim. I have not had too many problems with most of the people here. The vast majority of them are very nice people. I certainly do not see them as fundamentally different from Christians and Jews in the US and Europe. My girlfriend and her kids are Muslims. I do not see how they are threats to the existence of Western civilization. Yet for some reason some professors at American universities entertain genocidal fantasies against a racialized Muslim collective. Imagine if he advocated similar policies against Black or Jewish people? But, American academia is perfectly content to allow the propagation of hate against politically incorrect groups such as Muslims, Palestinians including the Christian ones and ethnic Germans including women, children and anti-fascists.

First Day of Classes

Today we had our first day of classes for the semester. I only had one class to teach. Tomorrow I have three.

The Last Train West

The Stalin regime forcibly deported almost all of the Russian-Koreans living in the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the fall of 1937. The total number of deportees is usually given as 171,781 people. This figure comes from a report by Yezhov to Stalin and Molotov noting that the deportations had been completed on 25 October 1937 and involved the resettlement of 95,256 Russian-Koreans to Kazakhstan and 76,525 to Uzbekistan. It further noted that an additional 700 Russian-Koreans that had been deported within the region as kulaks years earlier still remained in special settlements in Okhotsk and Kamchatka. These last remaining Russian-Koreans were scheduled for deportation on 1 November 1937 (Li and Kim, doc. 52, pp. 114-115). Most secondary sources do not further note what happened to these last 700 Russian-Koreans living in the Soviet Far East. In actuality the number of remaining Russian-Koreans later deported from the Soviet Far East numbered 816 and they departed the region for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on 3 November 1937 (Document reproduced in V.D. Kim, pp. 76-77). This final wave of deportees brought the total number of Russian-Koreans deported by train from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to 172,597 people.

V.D. Kim, ed., Pravda-polveka spustia (Tashkent: "Ozbekiston", 1999).

Li U He and Kim En Un, eds., Belaia kniga: O deportatsii koreiskogo naseleniia Rossii v 30-40x godakh (Moscow: "Interprask", 1992).

Some Very Good News on the Turkmen Front

The student who was going to return to Turkmenistan because the Turkmen government was threatening his family just came to see me. I thought he came to ask about the reference letter which I was just starting to write. Instead he told me that he would be staying at AUCA to finish his degree. He informed me that the official making the threats against his father has himself been removed and that he did not anticipate any further problems. So I will be seeing the student in class later this week.

I am not sure about the Turkmen students still in Turkmenistan. But, I did receive an e-mail from one of them recently. She informed me that she wanted to continue her education at AUCA and believed she could be here by the end of September or the start of October. So maybe by then the problem will be resolved.

Thoughts on Turkmen Students

Well it does not look like there is much I can do to help my Turkmen students trapped in Turkmenistan. It does not even look like there is much I can do to help those still here to stay here. The Turkmen student I mentioned in my last post on the subject asked me to write him a letter of reference, but other than that there is not really anything I can do to assist him. The Turkmen government is being completely unreasonable and its actions are seriously disrupting the lives of these young people. If anybody has any ideas about steps I could take to help these students complete their educations please let me know.

How come I get so few comments?

I get very little feed back in the form of comments on this blog. If you are a regular reader let me know what type of posts you enjoy. As it stands I have no idea why anybody other than my parents and a few friends read this blog.

Sometimes even Terry Martin makes a mistake

Last night I reread Terry Martin's, "The Russian Mennonite Encounter with the Soviet State 1917-1955," The Conrad Grebel Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter 2002). It is overall a very good summary of the history of the Mennonites under Soviet rule. But, I did find one area of confusion which upon further investigation seems to have troubled other scholars. The Soviet regime divided the deported Russian-Germans categorized as special settlers into a number of sub-categories. One of these sub-categories was "mobilized." That is Russian-Germans conscripted to work in the labor army or "mobilized work columns." While the labor army existed such a category is rather straight forward. But, the category persists in Soviet records after the abolition of the labor army in 1945-1946. That is after the Stalin regime abolished the guarded zone around their barracks, reclassified them as special settlers and granted them the formal right to reunite with their families (Berdinskikh 2005, doc. 3, p. 332 and Bugai, doc. 50, pp. 77-78 and 51, p. 78) . Martin states that the category "mobilized Germans" consisted of labor army "veterans that did not go to the exile settlements - usually because they had no family to return to - and instead continued to work in their Trudarmei job." (Martin, p. 50). I looked this up in V. I. Berdinskikh's Kandidat Nauk dissertation and he described the category as those discharged from the Red Army and then sent to the labor army (V.I. Berdinskikh 2002, p. 55). While there were many former labor army veterans that remained tied to their former places of employment and many former Red Army soldiers sent to the labor army neither of these define the term "mobilized German" after 1946.

Rather the term refers to those Russian-Germans who were conscripted into the labor army from among the population already living east of the Urals in 1941 and hence not special settlers at the time of their mobilization. I found this definition in four primary source documents reproduced by V.I. Berdinskikh in Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov sovetskoi Rossii (doc., 3, pp. 332-333, doc. 7, p. 338, doc. 8, p. 340 and doc. 9, pp. 342-343). When the Soviet government reclassified all labor army veterans as special settlers those that had been deported simply resumed their former legal classification. These people were added back to the contingent of "exiled" Russian-Germans. But, those inducted from Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, the Urals and Far East were not special settlers in 1942 and 1943. They became the new contingent of "mobilized German" special settlers after the elimination of the labor army.

It is hard to judge exactly what the split is between "mobilized" and "exiled" that were allowed to return home versus those attached to their former labor army jobs. But, it does appear that a sizable number of those not allowed to reunify with their families were in fact those Russian-Germans conscripted into the labor army after being deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. One of the documents mentions 26,219 such people working in Moscow, Tula, Gorky, Stalingrad and Kubishev oblasts (Berdinskikh 2005, doc. 3, p. 332). So those remaining in central Russia working in industrial enterprises consisted of a large number of "exiled" rather than "mobilized" Germans.

It is unclear to me why the category of "mobilized" did not include those who had been deported, removed from the special settlement registers during their service in the labor army, and then reclassified as special settlers upon demobilization. It is even more unclear why the category of "local" Germans did not include those Russian-Germans from east of the Urals mobilized into the labor army during the war. But, Soviet accounting categorized labor army veterans that had lived in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Urals prior to 1941 as their own sub-contingent.

V.I. Berdinskikh, Osobennosti formirovaniia infrastruktury sistemy spetsposelenii v SSSR 1930-1940-x gg. (Kandidat Nauk dissertation, Viatskii State Humanitarian University, 2002).

V.I. Berdinskikh, Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov sovetskoi Rossii (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005).

N.F. Bugai, Iosif Stalin - Lavrentiiu Berii: "Ikh nado deportirovat'": Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992).

Terry Martin, " The Russian Mennonite Encounter with the Soviet State 1917-1955," The Conrad Grebel Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, (Winter 2002), pp. 5-59.

Update on the Turkmen Student Situation

The Turkmen government is still preventing about 130 students from leaving Turkmenistan to continue their education here at AUCA. Around 20 Turkmen students have gotten here. Most of them got here by coming before the Turkmen government started denying exit visas to AUCA students. Others got here by lying to the Turkmen authorities. But, it is unclear how many of them will be staying. The Turkmen government obviously will not renew passports of students to enable them to continue to study here. Even more ominously one student told me that he was returning to Turkmenistan because the government was threatening his father with arrest. Just to make sure the student knew they were serious they had already had the man fired from his job. It looks like the current batch of Turkmen seniors here may be the last Turkmen students to graduate from AUCA and even then there may be very few of them.

A New Semester

Next Monday classes start again. Right now the halls of the school are in complete chaos as dozens of freshmen run about signing up for classes. Fortunately, I have finished writing all my syllabi.

Unexpected Visitor - General Petraeus

Yesterday the head of CENTCOM, General David Petraeus, stopped by our office unexpectedly. It was mostly just a big media event and I did not get to personally meet the man. But, it is the closest I have physically been to anybody of any major importance in many years.

New Syllabi

As can be seen from the two posts below, I have now finished typing up my syllabi for the Fall 2009 semester.

Syllabus for American Presidency

American Presidency
AMS 228
3 Credits
American Studies
American University of Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.

Course Description: This course will cover the history of the executive branch of the US government and focus on the person of the president from George Washington to Bill Clinton. Among the topic covered will be the relationship between the president and other branches of the federal government in particular Congress, the role of the presidency in the US rise to global power and lasting legacy of particular presidential policies.

Requirements: The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, an oral report and a research paper. Students will be required to write two 600 to 800 word reflection papers. The first reflection paper will be on the relative historical importance of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to the US presidency. The second one will be on the lasting importance of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its subsequent influence, both positive and negative on later presidential administrations. Students will also have to write a 1400 to 2000 word research essay on the enduring legacy of one US president since World War II. The paper is due the last week of class. In the four weeks prior to this deadline each student will be required to give a short oral presentation on the subject of their paper followed by a short question and answer session. Late papers will lose ten percent each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: All the readings are contained in the course Packet. The main text for the class is Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-1993 (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2nd edition, 1994). Supplementary readings will be taken from Richard A. Watson and Norman C. Thomas, The Politics of the Presidency (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2nd edition, 1988) and Michael Nelson, ed., The Presidency and the Political System (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 4th edition, 1995).

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them for the assignment. If I catch them a second time I will fail them from the class. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than five words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, endnote or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, endnote or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.

Grading:

Two short papers – 30% (15% each)

Written research paper – 30% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 15%

Class participation – 25%

Grading Scale:

100-96 = A
95-91 = A-
90-86 = B+
85-81 = B
80-76 = B-
75-71 = C+
70-66 = C
65-61 = C-
60-56 = D+
55-51 = D
50-46 = D-
45 and lower = F

Class Schedule

Week One: Introduction to the course and review of the syllabus.

Week Two: The Constitution and Historical Overview

Milkis and Nelson chapter 2, Watson and Thomas chapters 2 and 5, and Nelson chapter 7

Week Three: George Washington

Milkis chapter 3

Week Four: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams.

Milkis chapter 4

Week Five: Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan.

Milkis chapter 5

Week Six: Abraham Lincoln

Milkis chapter 6

The first paper is due at the end of the week.

Week Seven: Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin A. Harrison, Grover Cleveland again, and William L. Mckinley.

Milkis chapter 7

Week Eight: Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft

Milkis chapter 8

Week Nine: Woodrow Wilson

Milkis chapter 9

Week Ten: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover

Milkis chapter 10

Week Eleven: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower

Milkis chapter 11

The second paper is due at the end of the week.

Week Twelve: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter

Milkis chapter 12

Week Thirteen: Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder

Milkis chapter 13

Week Fourteen: Bill Clinton

Milkis chapter 14

Week Fifteen: Wrap up and conclusion. The final paper is due at the end of the week.

Syllabus for Conflicts in the Caucasus

Military Conflicts in Asia: Conflicts in the Caucasus
ICP 410.3
3 Credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University of Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.

Meeting Time: Tuesday room 308 and Friday room 216 at 3:35 pm

Course Description: This course will cover the five major military conflicts that have erupted in the Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These conflicts are the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh, the two wars in Chechnya between pro-independence forces and the Federal government of Russia, and the conflicts between the Georgian government and secessionist movements in Abkhazia and Ossetia. The class will focus on the roots of these conflicts in the Russian Empire and USSR and concentrate on the historical, ethnic and geographic factors involved in sustaining continuing hostilities.

Requirements: The grade for this course will be based upon one geography test, two oral presentations and two papers. At the end of the third week I will administer a test on the political geography of the Caucasus. Students will be asked to identify the various political units of the Caucasus and their administrative capitals on a map. This test will form 10% of the total grade. Most of the course will be centered on student presentations. To this end students must give two oral presentations on a single conflict in the Caucasus. These reports are to be based upon written reports due exactly one week after the oral presentations. Presentations must be given on the day for which they are assigned. For the first set of reports students must have at least three sources for the oral presentation and five for the written paper. The first report and paper should provide a basic historical background to the conflict. This information should include the participants, their motives and goals, and the key events of the conflict. The oral presentations should be at least ten minutes long and no longer than fifteen minutes. The first written paper should be between 2000 and 2500 words. The second oral report should have at least five sources and the second paper ten sources. The second report and paper should expand upon the first one and deal with the reasons behind the prolongation of the conflict, international involvement in the conflict, and possible solutions to the conflict. The second oral report should also be between ten and fifteen minutes. The second written paper should be between 2500 and 3000 words. Finally, students are expected to actively participate in asking questions and commenting on the presentations of other students. Late papers will lose ten percent each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: Each week that there are presentations the students presenting are responsible for selecting the possible readings for the class. For the first presentation they should select three articles. For the second presentation they should select five. All presenters are to provide me with a list of their selected articles the week before their presentation. That way I can read the articles and judge whether they are appropriate. I will then assign at least one of the articles provided to me by the presenters to the entire class to read each week. Please only select academic journal articles. The easiest way to do this is to use JSTOR and EBSCOhost. Please avoid submitting articles posted on the internet that have not first been published in a peer reviewed academic journal. Providing me with appropriate articles a week in advance will form a significant component of the grade for the oral presentations. Failure to provide me with the requisite number of articles a week before the presentation will result in a 10% reduction of the grade for the oral report.

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them for the assignment. If I catch them a second time I will fail them from the class. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than five words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, endnote or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, endnote or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.


Grading:

Geography Test: 10%

First Oral Report: 10%

First Written Paper: 20%

Second Oral Report: 20%

Second Written Paper: 30%

Class Participation: 10%

Grading Scale:

100-96 = A
95-91 = A-
90-86 = B+
85-81 = B
80-76 = B-
75-71 = C+
70-66 = C
65-61 = C-
60-56 = D+
55-51 = D
50-46 = D-
45 and lower = F


Class Schedule:

Week One: Introduction to the course and review of the syllabus

Week Two: Geography, Ethnicity and History of the Caucasus

Week Three: Geography Test

Week Four: First presentations on Nagorno Karabakh.

Week Five: First presentations on the First Chechen War.

Week Six: First presentations on Abkhazia.

Week Seven: First presentations on the Second Chechen War.

Week Eight: First presentations on Ossetia.

Week Nine: Review of material presented so far.

Week Ten: Second presentations on Nagorno Karabakh.

Week Eleven: Second presentations on the First Chechen War.

Week Twelve: Second presentations on Abkhazia.

Week Thirteen: Second presentations on the Second Chechen War.

Week Fourteen: Second presentations on Ossetia.

Week Fifteen: Wrap up and conclusion. The final paper is due at the end of week fifteen.

Summer is almost over

Summer is almost over. During this brief time I finished correcting the proofs for two journal articles that should be coming out in print in the next couple of months. I also wrote the first draft for a third journal article. I just finished writing it up this afternoon. Finally, I put together the syllabi and readings for two classes. I still have to write up two more syllabi next week. Now that I have got the draft of the last article done I can spend all day Monday working on the syllabi.

Are Bessarabian Germans still Russian-Germans after 1917?

I know the Bessarabian Germans are generally considered Russian-Germans because they settled the territory after it became part of the Russian Empire in 1812. Also like the Volga Germans (22 July 1763) and Black Sea Germans (20 February 1804) they received a guarantee of privileges and rights from the Russian government on 29 November 1813. But, I view the Bessarabian Germans in many ways as more similar to the Baltic Germans than the Volga Germans and Black Sea Germans. In particular the modern history of the Bessarabian Germans is much closer to that of the ethnic Germans from Estonia and Latvia than it is to those from the Volga and Black Sea regions. Like the Baltic Germans and unlike the ethnic Germans living in the Volga region, Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Crimea, Siberia and other parts of the Russian Empire, the Bessarabian Germans never came under Soviet rule for any appreciable length of time.

Instead the Bessarabian Germans came under Romanian rule in January 1918 and thus avoided the horrors of collectivization, dekulakization, famine, and mass executions that afflicted the rest of the Russian-German population in the 1930s. In 1940 after the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia the German government evacuated almost all of the 95,000 ethnic Germans from the territory to areas under German control. The German government also evacuated the ethnic Germans from Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia during this time. The Bessarabian Germans thus never experienced the mass deportations, special settlement regime and conscription into the labor army that defined the creation of a modern Russian-German identity. The historical experience of the Bessarabian Germans during most of the 20th century thus differs considerably from the ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Union. The history of the Bessarabian Germans since 1940 is instead much closer to the Volksdeutsche communities evacuated from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Eastern Poland at this time.

Given the huge divergence between the Bessarabian and other Russian-Germans in 1917, I think it might be more useful historically to think of them as a separate group after this time. Their experience from 1917 to 1940 has more in common with Germans living in Transylvania than those living in Ukraine. After 1940 they come under German rule and in the post-war period they resemble the expellees and refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia far more than they do the Russian-Germans living in Kazakhstan and Siberia. So I would propose that the term Russian-German really should only apply to the Bessarabian Germans for the period of 1813 to 1917. After that they become a separate group from the Russian-Germans whose modern history and identity revolves around persecution in the USSR under Stalin.

Sources for further reading:

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

Prauser, Steffen and Rees, Arfon, eds., The Expulsion of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War (Florence, Italy: European University Institute, 2004).

Schmidt, Ute, "Germans in Bessarabia: Historical Background and Present-day Relations," South-East Europe Review, March 2008, pp. 307-317.

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).

Newspaper Interview

Today I was interviewed by a journalist for a paper in the Netherlands.

New Link - Poemless

I have added a new link to this blog. Poemless as per the name has only prose and no verse.

More article proofs

I just finished correcting the proofs for another journal article today. It now should be a while before I receive any more proofs to edit. Tomorrow I will get back to working on the first draft of a journal article on the Soviet treatment of Russian-Germans during World War II as an example of apartheid.

More on the Turkmen Student Situation

Today I saw three of the five Turkmen students at AUCA that have managed to make it out of Turkmenistan. Keeping track of the news it does not look like too many more will be joining them.

Turkmen Student Update

A source who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this link to a story in Chronicles of Turkmenistan: Publication of Turkmen Initiative of Human Rights. It looks like the government of Turkmenistan is prohibiting all Turkmen students from leaving the country to attend foreign non-state schools. This ban includes the American University of Central Asia.

Creating New Scholars

I think of my primary calling in life as transferring knowledge. I am not sure if knowledge wants to be free, but I feel compelled to share it. My great hope is that I can share enough knowledge with certain young people that they can then go on and do much better scholarship than me. When this happens I will have obtained the coveted Guru status that all true scholars desire. Those people who do not aspire for their students to become better scholars than themselves are obstacles to social process and selfish bastards. So I was thrilled when a student starting a Kandidat Nauk degree at another university asked me today if I would be his dissertation advisor. I do not even know if they are going to pay me for this work and honestly I do not care. This will be my first experience of supervising a doctoral level thesis.

Afghan Hat

John Couper just returned from a trip to Afghanistan and brought me back a very cool flat topped hat similar to that worn by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir. For more information on Massoud and a photograph of him wearing the hat go to the link below.

http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/asmasood.html

Here is a better picture of Massoud in color this time. It also has a short explanatory note about the hat which is known as a Pakol.

http://www.anusha.com/pakol.htm

Trapped in Turkmenistan

It appears that all but four Turkmen students studying here at AUCA are trapped in Turkmenistan. The government is not letting them out to complete their education. Further, it is insisting that the male students perform their mandatory military service before they are allowed to leave the country. This means that when the new semester starts in a few weeks many of the students signed up for my classes will be involuntarily absent.

August

It is now August and things are still slow. I am still coming into work everyday Monday through Saturday and plugging along at my journal article. It is not due until the end of October so I should finish it way ahead of time.

Street Beverages

Right now it is quite hot in Bishkek. Walking in this heat makes me thirsty. Fortunately, there are plenty of beverage vendors on the streets here. Most of them are set up like lemonade stands, except they do not sell lemonade. Instead they sell Shoro and Tan which are drinks made from sour milk, kvas which is made from bread, sherbet which is made from dried apricots and occasionally iced tea flavored with either mint, lime or peach. I especially like Shoro and kvas both of which have a slightly sour taste. They are definitely different from the overly sweet sodas that dominate the soft drink market in most other countries.

Simple Pleasures - Walking

I walk to work and back everyday. One reason is because I enjoy it. An even bigger reason is that I would rather be waterboarded than ride on another marshrutka. They are indeed that uncomfortable. Time spent walking is never time wasted. There are many, many hours in my life that I feel that I have squandered. But, none of those hours were spent walking.

Life in the Slow Lane

The university is pretty much deserted now in the few weeks before classes start again. Things are pretty slow. I do not have any pressing article deadlines right now. I have been plodding along on one article dealing with issues of race and migration with regards to the Russian-Germans, but other than that I do not have much work to do until classes start. So despite not getting out of Bishkek this summer I had a fairly enjoyable summer. One key lesson I learned early on in Arivaca is that happiness is about enjoying what you have and where you are in the present.

Election Results

Bakiev, the incumbent president won yesterday's elections. The Internet has a lot of stories of complaints about the election by opposition leaders. But, none of the Kyrgyz people I actually deal with on a day to day basis seem to care that much about the elections. I think political apathy is a lot more wide spread in Kyrgyzstan than it is in the US or UK.

Presidental Elections Today

Today the Kyrgyz Republic is holding its presidential elections. Except for some television cameras outside the polling place near my flat I have not noticed anything different from yesterday.

A clean desk

Today I have not gotten much done at work. The last two days of proof editing used up a lot of my motivation to be productive. My big accomplishment this morning was to finish cleaning up the desk I am using.

Proofing Done

I finally finished editing the proofs of the article with the help of one of my co-writers today. It took a little longer than expected, but it is finally done. The article should be out next month.

Proof Corrections

I spent most of today at the office correcting the proofs for a journal article that should appear in print in August. Most of the corrections were in the end notes rather than the text itself. I will post the abstract for the article when it comes out in print.

Russian Politics Syllabus

Russian Politics
ICP 250
3 credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, PhD

Course Description: This is a course covering the political system of the Russian Federation. In particular it will examine the political geography of the state as an ethno-territorial federation. The course will start with a review of the history of the USSR followed by specifically looking at the formation and solidification of the RSFSR, the administrative territory that became the Russian Federation. It will then cover such issues as the ethnic structure of the Russian Federation, political culture, transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy, and human rights.

Requirements: The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, an oral report and a research paper. Students will have to write two short papers during the semester. These papers should focus on the assigned readings and be from 600 to 800 words. Students will also have to complete a 1400 to 2000 word research paper on some aspect of Russian politics. The paper is due the last week of class. In the two weeks prior to this deadline each student will be required to give a short oral presentation on the subject of the paper followed by a question and answer session. Late papers will lose one letter grade for each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. Please turn off all cell phones while in class. I will eject any students carrying on cell phone conversations during class from the room. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking clearly and loudly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: All the readings are contained in the course packet

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing I will give them a zero for the assignment the first time. If I catch a student plagiarizing a second time in the class I will fail them from the class. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying of from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than four words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F for the course and be recommended for expulsion from ICP. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.


Grading:

Two short papers – 30% (15% each)

Written research paper – 30% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 15%

Class participation -25%

Grading Scale:

100-96 = A
95-91 = A-
90-86 = B+
85-81 = B
80-76 = B-
75-71 = C+
70-66 = C
65-61 = C-
60-56 = D+
55-51 = D
50-46 = D-
45 and lower = F

Class Schedule

Week One: Introduction to the course and review of the syllabus.

General History of Russia and the USSR

Week Two Read: “Legacies: The Burdens of Russian and Soviet History” (chapter one) in Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 21-44.

Week Three Read: “Cracks in the Foundation: The Post-Stalin Years” (chapter two) in Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 47-83.

Week Four Read: Yuri Veselov, “Changing Trust in the History of Soviet Society,” in Heiko Schrader, ed., Trust and Social Transformation: Theoretical approaches and empirical findings from Russia (Munster: Litverlag, 2004), pp. 55-78. The first short paper is due at the end of the week.

The Formation, Structure and Ethnic Nature of the Russian Federation

Week Five Read: Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 414-452.

Week Six Read: “What is Rossia? Identities in Transition” (chapter twelve) in Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 246-271.

Week Seven and Eight Read: “Rebirth of the Russian State” (chapter two) in Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 38-93.

Week Nine Read: Michael McFaul, “Lesson’s from Russia’s Protracted Transition from Communist Rule,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, no. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 103-130. The second short paper is due at the end of the week.

Past Repression and Current Human Rights: is there a Link?

Week Ten: Read Arseny Roginsky, “The Embrace of Stalinism” at

http://www.opendemocracy.net/russia/article/The-Embrace-of-Stalinism

“Epilogue: Memory” in Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 505-514 and Conclusion of Lynne Viola, Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 183-193

Week Eleven and Twelve: Read “Our New Middle Ages, Or War Criminals of all the Russias” (chapter two) in Anna Politkovskaya, trans. Arch Tait, Putin’s Russia” Life in a Failing Democracy (NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), pp. 25-80.

Student Research

Weeks Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Sixteen: Final research paper due and concluding remarks.

POST 1000

This is the 1000th post on this blog. It seems like a lot. But, over a period of almost five years it is not really much. A lot of blogs do 1000 posts a year or more.

Post Number 999

This is my 999th post to this blog. Right now I am the only person in the office. I might be the only faculty member at the university. It seems I am the only person still working in the summer. I am trying to clean up the desk I have been using, put together syllabi and write a journal article. All of these things are getting done slowly.

Story on Arivaca

Almost all the stories about Arivaca published in the Tucson media are extremely negative. All they ever report are the few spectacular crimes that occur on average once a year. So it was nice to see this somewhat positive piece from the Tucson Weekly.

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/arivaca/Content?oid=1242330

More on Google Scholar

It turns out Google Scholar is also pretty good in German. It is almost as good getting full text journal articles, scholarly dissertations, government reports and whole books in German as it is in Russian. So why is it so lousy in getting any PDF files containing full text documents in English? Also can anybody tell me how good Google scholar is in other languages? How is it in Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French and other languages? Does it bring up a lot of useful full text PDFs in these languages like it does in Russian and German or does it draw a blank like it does in English?

Google Scholar

While Google Books is much worse in Russian than in English it turns out that this is not the case with Google Scholar. To the contrary, Google Scholar is infinitely better in Russian than in English. It has a lot of full text journal articles. The number of scholarly journal articles available in their entirety on Google Scholar in Russian is much, much greater than on Google Scholar in English. I have even found whole scholarly books and dissertations on Google Scholar in Russian. This all after only about thirty minutes of searching. Who knows what I might find if I knew what I was doing.

Google Books

Google Books is a great resource, but unfortunately very few books seem to have the limited preview option which allows you to look at some of the actual pages inside the book. While the number of English language books that have this option is small the number of foreign language books that have it is minuscule. Apparently only a couple of books in German and practically no books in Russian have the limited preview option on Google Books. Does anybody else have this problem or is it just the subject matter that I am researching?

Yet another faculty member leaves

My friend John Couper of the Journalism department is leaving AUCA to take a job at KIMEP in Almaty Kazakhstan this next semester. John was an important figure in helping organize the faculty union here. I found his insights on union issues extremely helpful. Indeed now that he is leaving the university, the union will be short one negotiator. I am sad to see John go, but I totally understand his reasons for refusing to stay here. I wish him the best of luck in Kazakhstan. There are now by my count only three people with PhDs left teaching at AUCA. Since May we have lost fully fifty percent of the PhDs that taught here full time in spring 2009.

Arivaca Memories

Although I had no job, money or girlfriend my two years in Arivaca were two of the best in my life. Despite being out in the desert I actually had very good access to research materials. Mary Kasulaitis and Jeanne Ferris at the local Arivaca library had an uncanny ability to get material on inter-library loan. I also had a lot of free time. That meant that I could get a lot of writing done. I also could get a lot of reading done. Every Sunday I would spend all day out in the Chicken Shack smoking my hookah and reading. The weather in Arivaca was almost always conducive to such activities. Finally, the natural beauty of Arivaca and the friendly nature of its people is something I have never found elsewhere. I do not miss having no money or girlfriend, but I do miss Arivaca.

More than two years since I left Arivaca

It has now been over two years since I left Arivaca. Although I am glad I came to Bishkek I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like if I had not gotten a job in Kyrgyzstan and had instead remained in Arivaca. It certainly would have been different.

First, I think I would have probably given up looking for a university job since no amount of academic publishing seemed to get me even an interview without teaching experience. I am still not sure why teaching experience is considered so much more important than publishing by search committees. After all the entire PhD. program is geared towards research and writing, not teaching. So if I had stayed in Arivaca I would have had to figure out some sort of career outside the university. I have no idea what this possibly could be since a PhD in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies has limited applicability outside of academia.

Second, the only purpose of academic writing is to help one's CV for academic jobs. So if one has no chance of getting any academic job interviews due to a lack of teaching experience it makes no sense to do any academic writing. It does not pay much. In fact academic journal articles pay absolutely nothing. Not to mention the fact that most are read by fewer than ten people. Academic books can make a little bit of money, but not much. So my writing would have moved to more popular and profitable outlets. I had already started along this path with Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. I did not make any money off of that writing either, but at least I did not have to wrangle with footnotes. I would have no doubt continued along the path of more popular writing if I had stayed in Arivaca. I probably would have started doing some serious, but non-academic writing about local issues such as the history of the US-Mexican border in that region of Arizona.

But, fortunately I did get a job teaching purely by accident. So I managed to escape unemployment and gain some teaching experience. Looking back on it, however, it really was completely a matter of luck and I missed being stuck in Arivaca by a very narrow margin.

Almost Five Years and 1000 Posts

I do not often blog about blogging. However, this August will be the five year anniversary of this blog. By that time it should have a 1000 posts. Currently this is post 991. So I should be able to make it. Granted at an average of 200 posts a year this blog is much less prolific than most. But, five years is also longer than many blogs last. I plan on continuing the blog, but the average number of posts per a year will probably decline. Between teaching, writing academic publications and other obligations I just do not have the time and energy to update the blog that often.

Kyrgyzstan is calm, but neighboring Xinjiang is not

For the last couple of days there have been serious race riots in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang province of China, between the ruling Han Chinese and the Uighur natives. The Uighurs are a Turkic Central Asian people that speak a language closely related to Uzbek, but written in Arabic script. Like other Central Asians they are mostly Sunni Muslims. There is a fairly large Uighur population in Kyrgyzstan. Many of them are the descendants of refugees that fled to the Soviet Union during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. The New York Times has a fairly good article on the recent clashes at the URL below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world/asia/08china.html?_r=1&hp

This article from the Wall Street Journal provides the immediate background for the current violence between Chinese and Uighurs.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124699285048707143.html

Syllabus for Political Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia

Political Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia
ICP 349
3 Credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University of Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.

Course Description:

This course focuses on political violence both by the state and by non-state actors in Central Asia during the Soviet era. The class will emphasize the political goals and changes sought by these actors through the use of violence. Specific episodes of political violence covered include the “Basmachi” revolt and its suppression, violence against women in response to the Hujum, collectivization, national deportations, GULag camp uprisings, ethnic conflict in the Fergana Valley and Islamic terrorism. By examining these events the course will seek to evaluate the success of violence by the Soviet state and others in achieving their political goals. Did violence achieve these goals or not? Could these goals have been satisfied without the use of violence? In which of these cases if any was the use of violence ethically justifiable?

Requirements:

The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, an oral report and a research paper. Students will be required to write three 600 to 800 word reflection papers. They will also have to write a 2500 to 3000 word essay on one specific case of political violence in Central Asia. The paper is due the last week of class. In the four weeks prior to this deadline each student will be required to give a short oral presentation on the subject of their paper followed by a short question and answer session. Late papers will lose ten percent each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: All the required readings are contained in the course packet.

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations:

I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them for the assignment. If I catch them a second time I will fail them from the class. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than five words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.


Grading:

Three Short Papers – 45% (15% each)

Written research paper – 30% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 15%

Class participation – 10%

Grading Scale:

100-96 = A
95-91 = A-
90-86 = B+
85-81 = B
80-76 = B-
75-71 = C+
70-66 = C
65-61 = C-
60-56 = D+
55-51 = D
50-46 = D-
45 and lower = F

Class Schedule:

Week one: Introduction to the course and review of the syllabus.

Weeks Two and Three: The “Basmachi” Revolt and its Suppression

Olcott, Martha B., “The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan 1918-24,” Soviet Studies, vol. XXXIII, no. 3, July 1981, pp. 352-369.

Ritter, William, S., “The Final Phase in the Liquidation of Anti-Soviet Resistance in Tadzhikistan: Ibrahim Bek and the Basmachi, 1924-31,” Soviet Studies, vol. XXXVII, no. 4, October 1985, pp. 484-493.

Marshall, Alexander, “Turkfront: Frunze and development of Soviet counter-insurgency in Central Asia,” in Tom Everett-Heath, ed., Central Asia: Aspects of Transition (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 5-29. The first short paper is due at the end of week three.

Week Four: The Hujum and Violence against Women in Uzbekistan

Kamp, Marianne, “The Counter-Hujum: Terror and Veiling,” chapter eight in The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 186-214.

Weeks Five and Six: Collectivization, Dekulakization and Famine in Kazakhstan

Olcott, Martha Brill, “The Collectivization Drive in Kazakhstan,” Russian Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, April 1981, pp. 122-142.

Ertz, Simon, “The Kazakh Catastrophe and Stalin’s Order of Priorities, 1929-1933: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives,” Zhe: Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Vol. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 1-14.

Shayakhmetov, Mukhamet, trans. Butler, Jan, “Deportation,” chapter fourteen in The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin (New York: Overlook/Rookery, 2006), pp. 121-132. The second short paper is due at the end of week six.

Weeks Seven and Eight: Deported Peoples

Comins-Richmond, Walter, “The deportation of the Karachays,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 4, no. 3, 2002, pp. 431-439.

Williams, Brian Glyn, “The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 3, July 2002, pp. 323-347.

Pohl, J. Otto, “A Caste of Helot Labourers: Special Settlers and the Cultivation of Cotton in Soviet Central Asia: 1944-1956,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., The Cotton Sector in Central Asia: Economic Policy and Development Challenges (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2007), pp. 12-28.

Weeks Nine and Ten: The Kengir Camp Uprising

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., trans. Willetts, Harry, “The Forty Days of Kengir,” chapter twelve in The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1992), vol. III, pp. 285-331.

Barnes, Steven A., “’In a Manner Befitting Soviet Citizens’: An Uprising in the Post-Stalin Gulag,” Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 823-850. The third short paper is due at the end of week ten.

Week Eleven: Ethnic Violence at the end of the USSR

Mirkhanova, Malika, “People in Exile: The Oral History of Meskhetian Turks (Akhyskha Turkleri),” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1, April 2006, pp. 33-44.

Tishkov, Valery, “’Don’t Kill Me, I’m a Kyrgyz!’: An Anthropological Analysis of Violence in the Osh Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, No. 2, May 1995, pp. 133-149.

Week Twelve: Post-Soviet Political Violence and Terrorism

Horsman, Stuart, “Themes in official discourses on terrorism in Central Asia,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2005, pp. 199-213.

Weeks Thirteen through Sixteen: Student Presentations. The final paper is due at the end of week sixteen.

Summer Activities

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

Two new publications coming soon

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

Lazy Weather

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

Another faculty member leaves

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

Then there was one

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

Interview with Walter Richmond on Circassians

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

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

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

It gets light early here

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

Summer Time

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

Hail Storm

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

Sunday Times Book Review of Remember Us

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

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

Eyewitness accounts of the Surgun

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