The Mouse that Worked

Finally, after three attempts I have a mouse that works now. It was more difficult to install than I anticipated, but I it is now done and I have the ability to left click again. Not having a fully functioning mouse for almost a month was quite frustrating.

Today in Arivaca

Today there were a multitude of events in Arivaca. Most notably the annual House Tour. But, there were about a half dozen other things going on as well. The result was a huge influx of outsiders blocking traffic. I saw plates from Massachusetts, Michigan, Wyoming, Arkansas, Indiana and Nebraska today in town. My uncle and I only attended two events. We went to the library booksale. It is hard to find a better deal than 50 cent hardbacks anywhere in the world. Then we had lunch at the community center. They served Sonora chicken with rice, fruit salad, rolls, lemonade and brownies. It was pretty good. The wind finally died down today so after eating I smoked the hookah for the first time in almost a month. Today's shisha flavor was apple.

Walking the Perimeter with Blaster

Since the start of the year I have been walking around the perimeter of my uncle's property on a daily basis. It is marked by a barbed wire fence to keep out the neighbor's cattle. The distance is 0.42 miles or about 700 meters for my European readers. It takes me about a half an hour due to the rugged nature of the land. Often the dog, Blaster, follows me on these walks. The other day I had to perform emergency field surgery on him when he stepped on a chollo bud. I had to pull the spiked ball out of his paw using only my bare hands. In the last couple days I have taken to walking the perimeter twice a day. During this same time I have noticed that there have been alot more overflights by border patrol. I have no doubt they have increased their presence as a result of the recent armed incursions from across the border.

20 acres is a really small world

It has slowly dawned upon me that my world has been reduced to a 20 acre parcel inhabited by one other human being. More significantly it appears that this situation will probably persist for quite some time. It seems like there are alot of things just out of my reach. For instance there are still two eateries in Arivaca I have not tried. But, they are eight miles away of which four is really rough terrain. I might be able to walk the sixteen miles. I have not attempted it yet. Outside of Arivaca the distances are a bit greater. There are alot of interesting places within 60 miles of here for instance, but I am definitely not up to a 120 mile walk. Lack of physical mobility is an aspect of rural poverty I had not fully considered. Do people in rural areas without cars just remain confined to small areas their whole lives?

Gray Hill Must Die

Between Serenity Ranch and the nearest paved road is about four miles of very rocky and hilly dirt pretending to be a road. In the middle of this journey is an obstacle like no other I have ever seen on a US byway. Gray Hill is a steep and rock strewn protrusion pocked with deep holes. Every time we slowly and bumpily climb up and then back down it in my uncle's truck I proclaim that the monstrosity must be destroyed.

Six Months since I moved to the Desert

It has now been nearly six months since I moved to Arivaca. For most of that time I have been confined to the 20 square acres of Serenity Ranch. Granted I did have a one week furlough to go to London in November, but other than that the furthest I have ventured is Tucson to the north and Nogales to the south. Ironically, most of Nogales and the part I visited is in Mexico yet it is actually much easier to cross the border than to fight Tucson traffic.

During my time here I have written one journal article, rewritten one book chapter and written four encyclopedia articles. All of these pieces will see publication in the next two years. I have also transmitted knowledge in my capacity as a guru to a couple of graduate students. Finally, I wasted an almost equal amount of time applying for jobs reserved for carbon copies of Angela Davis. In total this work averages out to a little less than an hour a day I think. Tenured professors generally write alot less than a published piece a month on average. So I think they probably only work an average of 15 minutes a day in addition to the six hours a week spent in class. At anyrate in addition to the unpaid work enumerated above I have spent the last six months reading, meditating, bonding with the dog and blogging. Most of my reading has been on the history of Arizona. Recently, however, I have taken an interest in Mexican history. My reading habits are largely determined by what is available at the Arivaca library.

In the next six months I hope to figure out a way to generate income. Although Serenity Ranch is beautiful it is also limited. I would like to be able to see some more of the world and talk to somebody other than my uncle. Much of my time on Meditation Rock is spent trying to figure out how I can earn enough to live off with a Ph.D. in history. So far I have not come up with much. My only other goals in the next six months are to continue to lose weight and to finish the book manuscript I am working on. Both of these are pretty
easy to do in Arivaca.

Back

Well my technical problems still persist, but it appears I can blog now. I tried plugging in an external mouse. Its left click does not work either. But, since plugging it in I have been able to substitute a combination of right clicks and enters for most left clicks. For some reason I could not do this before plugging in the faulty external mouse. I am going to try and get a fully working mouse soon. The first one I got had the wrong shape of plug.

Since I have been absent from the internet I have written a little bit on my popular history of the Russian-Germans under Soviet rule. I have also read several books dealing variously with the history of Arizona, Mexico, Tuscon, Geronimo and Nogales. I also read some mystry novels. My uncle and I have taken a great like to the works of James Burke recently. Yesterday I saw a deer outside the kitchen window and today our road runner, Dum-Dum, managed to fly onto my back porch. I still have not figured out an alternative career to academia. Other than that not much has happened here at Serenity Ranch.

Another strange computer problem

I seem to have another strange computer problem. I can not log into Windows. I think my touch pad is broken. I am going to try replacing it with an external mouse. At anyrate it may be a while before I get this problem fixed. Eventually I will get a machine that works.

The Human Cost of Communism part V

Starting in November 1929 the Soviet government began the forced collectivization of agriculture in Kazakhstan. At this time some two thirds of the native Kazakh population were semi-nomadic. Another tenth of the population, some 566,000 people, were totally nomadic. Collectivization required permanently settling these populations onto collective farms. This process involved a great deal of violence against the rural Kazakh population by Communist activists from Moscow and other cities.

Nomadism persisted in Kazakhstan due to the inability of much of the land to support settled agriculture. The Stalin regime settled most of the migratory Kazakh households onto collective farms that lacked sufficient arable land, grazing land, water, shelter, farm implements and other neccessities to support either raising livestock or growing grain. These poorly constructed farms often did not even have adequate housing and bathing facilities for the newly settled nomads. From 1930 to 1932, the Soviet government settled 320,000 Kazakh nomads, but only built 24,106 houses and 108 baths to accomodate them. The new collective farms could not sustain the large Kazakh cattle and sheep herds upon which the rural population depended for food.

Many Kazakhs resisted collectivization by slaughtering their animals to prevent their confiscation by the state. Those not killed often died from lack of shelter, food and water in the new collective farms. Some 90% of Kazakhstan's livestock perished during the 1930s. Cattle declined from 6,509,000 animals to 965,000 and sheep likewise fell from 18,569,000 to a mere 1,386,000. This destruction of Kazakhstan's herds resulted in mass starvation for the native Kazakhs. Between the 1926 and 1939 Soviet censuses their population decreased by 1,321,000 (36.7%). Much of this decline can be attributed to flight out of Kazakhstan to other parts of the USSR, China, Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey to avoid starvation. Nevertheless the loss of human life among the Kazakhs due to this man made famine certainly exceeded a million people, over a quarter of their population.

Sources

Zh. B. Abylkhozhaev, M.K. Kozybaev and M.B. Tatimov, "Kazahstanskaia tragediia," Voprosy istorii, no. 7, 1989, pp. 53-71.

Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine(Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 191-196.

Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs 2nd edition (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1995), pp. 179-186.

Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migration in the USSR,(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), p. 87.

The Dozen Most Important Historical Events in Modern Kazakhstan and Arizona

Recently a number of bloggers have been listing and debating what are the ten most important events in the history of modern France. I personally believe that French history has been done to death and there is nothing more to say on the subject. It has all been written about numerous times in several languages. Other areas of the world, however, have not been so well covered. Below I present what I think are the 12 most important events in the history of modern Kazakhstan followed by a similar list for modern Arizona.

Kazakhstan

1. Russian conquest and settlement
2. 1916 Uprising
3. Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War
4. Demarcation of national borders
5. Soviet promotion of national cadres and culture in the 1920s
6. Collectivization of agriculture and the famine of the 1930s
7. Industrialization
8. Mass influx of national deportees during World War II
9. Virgin Lands Campaign
10. Consolidation of Kazakh cadres under Kunaev
11. Glasnost and Perestroika
12. Independence

Arizona

1. Mexican-American War
2. Formation of the Territory of New Mexico
3. Gadsen Purchase
4. Civil War
5. Formation of the Federal Territory of Arizona
6. The Long Walk
7. Development of the cattle industry
8. Apache Wars
9. Development of the copper mining industry
10. Development of the rail network
11. Formation of the Salt River Valley Water Users' Association
12. Admission of Arizona to the United States as the 48th state

More technical problems

Sorry about the repeat post the other day. My internet connection has been giving me a hard time and I could not get back on to rectify the mistake. Usually I can get on between 1am and 7am, but last night it would not let me on at all. If this erratic ability to get online continues then my blogging will probably be less frequent than it has been.

Guru Pohl's Introduction to the History of the Muslim Orient

This is the first post in what I hope to be another series. It is a highly experimental post so bear with me. It has come to my attention that while highly intelligent that not all my readers have a strong background in Oriental history. So I am taking this opportunity to provide a list of books that I think provide an excellent introduction to this subject for the average lay reader. I have broken down the list by region. Unfortunately, the list is incomplete. I have not yet been able to find suitable books on Iran, the North Caucasus, Azerbaijan, the Volga-Ural region, Eastern Turkestan, Indonesia or Maylasia. If anybody has any additions to add to this list please put them in the comments. It is a work in progress.

Afghanistan

Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 2nd edition (Yale University Press, 2005).

The Arab World

Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Harvard University Press, 1991).

Central Asia

Edward Allworth, ed., Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance: A Historical Overview, 3rd edition (Duke University Press, 1994).

Crimea

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

Kazakhstan

Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs, 2nd edition(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995).

Pakistan

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005).

Turkey

Erik Zurcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., Ltd., 2001).

Things to look forward to next year

This blog will continue to cover items of interest to me, my family, friends and hopefully even one or two strangers in the next year. I don't expect my core group of half a dozen readers to grow too much in the next twelve months. My readership seems to have been pretty stable the last couple of months. Among the topics that I will cover here in the next few months are Arivacanese folk ways, the Great Job Hunt, Stalinist repression and Guru work.

Regarding Arivacanese culture I would like to blog more about music. I have not been able to see much of Arivaca's musical night life yet. I am hoping that when Chris returns from the Land of Frozen Lakes he can give me a lift to some of the evening concerts here. Otherwise I am going to have to start my own concert series in the Chicken Shack.

The job hunt is going to undergo a major reorientation next year. I have now wasted a big chunk of two years applying for jobs for which I realistically had no chance of even getting an interview. I can not say that I did not receive multiple warnings that my research topics were ideologically incompatible with the ruling powers in American academia. As recently as my last trip to London my friend Abdulhadi told me that using my article "Socialist Racism: Ethnic Cleansing and Racial Exclusion in the USSR and Israel" as my writing sample pretty much guaranteed that no US university would ever hire me. In retrospect it appears he was right.

I am going to continue my Human Cost of Communism series. I will put up a new post in the series once every week until it is finished. Right now it looks like it will have 15 posts total. I will also mark each of the major Soviet ethnic deportations throughout the year on their anniversaries. That is another dozen or so posts.

Finally, I remain committed to the idea of transmitting knowledge, a practice now evidently banned at US universities. Guru Pohl renews his vow to help all seekers of knowledge free of charge in the upcoming year. So far my students have been very satisfied with my teachings.

Boots Make the Man

The cowboy boots my uncle got me for Christmas arrived in the mail today. It was difficult to find a place that made boots my size. These boots fit perfectly. Now I have the full set of Arivaca regalia. I have the cowboy hat, the cowboy boots, the tie-dye shirt and the beard.

Life in Arivaca

Today I met the woman who made my tie-dye shirts. Here in Arivaca the tie-dye shirt is one of the most common elements of local fashion. My uncle and I were at the coffee shop on our way back from the dump and post office. In line in front of us to purchase coffee was a woman holding a small puppy. I was wearing a tie-dye shirt. The woman recognized her work and thanked me for purchasing it. People in Arivaca are much nicer and more polite than in the rest of the world.

Human Cost of Communism Part IV

During the years 1937-1938, the Soviet government engaged in a series of campaigns against perceived enemies of the state that resulted in hundreds of thousands of executions. Known as the Great Terror or Great Purges this blood letting constituted the majority of death sentences under Soviet rule. Between 1921 to 1953, a total of 799,455 people tried by Soviet police organs (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD and MVD) received death sentences. The NKVD issued a full 681,692 of these sentences in 1937 and 1938. Over a third of these executions came from the national operations aimed at eliminating agents of specified foreign powers. The "German Operation", "Polish Operation", "Finnish Operation", "Latvian Operation" and similar campaigns accounted for 247,157 death sentences. These executions fell heavily upon Soviet citizens belonging to extra territorial nationalities. These groups constituted only 1.7% of the population of the USSR, but accounted for over a quarter of all arrests and executions during the Great Terror.

The figure for executions is of course incomplete. It only includes executions approved by NKVD boards. It does not include NKVD executions by decree such as those at Katyn, Rivne, Lviv, Lutsk, Tallinn, Tartu, Kharkhiv and other areas in 1940 and 1941. Other Soviet records for instance register the execution of 21,257 Polish prisoners in accordance with a 5 March 1940 decree signed by Beria. The German military later uncovered the bodies of the 4,421 of these detainees shot at Katyn. These executions are not part of the recorded total cited in the paragraph above. The figure also does not include death sentences handed down by regular courts rather than the NKVD. Nor does it include the mass shootings of Soviet soldiers accused of desertion in 1941. In total the Stalin regime probably executed close to one million people, the vast majority of them for alleged political crimes.

Figures cited are found in the works below.

J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), pp. 7-9.

Terry Martin, An Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp.338-339.

G.C. Malcher, Blank Pages: Soviet Genocide Against the Polish People (Surrey: Pryford Press, 1991), p. 168.

Just another day in paradise

Not much is happening in these few days between Christmas and New Years. For the most part things are going really well. The weather is fantastic. I have no outstanding deadlines. Finally, on the positive side of the ledger I am totally isolated from the rest of the world's problems.

For some reason the internet is only allowing me online in the hours between 1 am and 7 am in the morning. This is a little bit irritating. But, it turns out I am not missing a whole lot. I get on average one real e-mail a day. Increasingly, I am finding most other people's blogs to be rather uninteresting right now. Currently, the only ones I have been avidly following are those of fellow Arivacanese bloggers Chris, Sara and Kristin. I know Kristin lives in Estonia, but she is spiritually Arivacanese. Everybody in Arivaca came from somewhere else, but they were Arivacanese before they got here. Some like myself just did not know it.

Come 2006 I think I am going to have to come up with a new job search strategy. Obviously there is no hope of me getting an academic job in the US. I wasted a lot of time and effort this year on stupid applications that never had a chance of garnering an interview. American academics only hire clones of themselves. But, I will leave the hard thinking about creating income out of a Ph.D. in Oriental history to next year.

Operation Ulusy

Today in 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree with the title "On Liquidating the Kalmyk ASSR and Founding the Astrakhan Oblast as a Component of the RSFSR." The decree accused the Kalmyks of mass treason against the Soviet Union and ordered, "1. All Kalmyks living in the territory of the Kalmyk ASSR are to be resettled to other regions of the USSR, and the Kalmyk ASSR liquidated." The following day the NKVD and NKGB began implementing this decree.

Code named "Operation Ulusy" the deportation of virtually all Kalmyks from the Kalmyk ASSR took place during 28-29 December 1943. Nearly 3,000 NKVD and NKGB officers along with over 1,200 NKVD internal troops loaded over 93,000 Kalmyks into cattle cars bound for Siberia. Due to the overcrowded conditions and lack of bathing facilities during transit many deportees became infected with typhus. This disease resulted in a high death rate during the journey. The NKVD itself recorded over 1,250 deaths during transit. Mortality due to poverty related diseases only increased upon arriving in Siberia.

The Soviet government originally dispersed the survivors across Omsk Oblast, Altai Krai, Krasnoyarsk Krai and Novosibirsk Oblast as well as a couple thousand in Kazakhstan. The Stalin regime placed them under special settlement restrictions and assigned them to work on collective farms, state farms, forestry enterprises and industrial artels. Later the Soviet government relocated thousands of Kalmyk special settlers to forestry work in Tomsk Oblast and fishing trusts in Tiumen and Sakhalin oblasts. In exile the Kalmyks lived and labored under extremely difficult conditions. They lacked adequate food, winter clothing, proper shelter and other necessities. In early January 1945, one NKVD report to Beria noted that some 28,000 exiled Kalmyks had no food. Lack of proper sanitation and medical care led to the spread of often fatal epidemics among the deportees. Tuberculosis in particular proved to be a major killer of the Kalmyks exiled to Siberia. Before the end of 1948, the NKVD had registered over 17,000 deaths among the deported Kalmyks. This incredible demographic loss took the Kalmyks decades to make up. Only in the 1970 Soviet census did the Kalmyk population exceed the number counted in 1939 and then only by a little more than 2%.

The Soviet government only released the Kalmyks from the special settlment regime on 17 March 1956. On 11 February 1957, the Soviet government created a Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast in the traditional Kalmyk homeland and allowed the survivors of the deportation and their descendants to return home. On 29 July 1958, the Soviet government upgraded the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast to the Kalmyk ASSR. Neither the Soviet government or the Russian Federation have done much to recognize or come to terms with this horrific crime against humanity.

Academic Relatives

This does not refer to blood relatives I have that work in academia. Although I did have one second cousin who taught at Oxford and my father held positions at University of Queensland and Virginia Tech. No it refers to people with the same lineage of supervisors as me. The Little Professor had a blog post that dealt with this subject a while ago. At anyrate this lineage at one time had great importance. It no longer has any practical influence. If it was still important I would be working at a first rate university now. My Doktorgrossvater is Rashid Khalidi. Unfortunately the days when my supervisor could call up Professor Khalidi and get me a job are long gone.

I bring this up because I got an e-mail today from my Doktorschwester in Turkey. I get so little real e-mail that I can almost justify a blog post for each separate piece. She is the only one of six academic siblings I even know. She started the year before me and finished the year after me. The e-mail, however, reminded me of the post at The Little Professor and got me thinking about the idea of academic lineages. My supervisor did not have alot of influence upon my dissertation. He is an Ottoman historian specializing in 19th century education and I wrote about Soviet deportations. They assigned me to him because two of the three deported peoples in my dissertation had been associated with the Ottoman Empire prior to coming under Russian rule. He pretty much gave me a free hand in writing the thesis. So there is not any geneology of intellectual influence that can be traced from my work back through my supervisor to Khalidi.

Geneological charts, however, have two directions. They show descendants as well as ancestors. Now it is true I do not have any formal students as official advisees to carry on my scholastic genes. Guru Pohl, however, does have a number of informal students whose work does show his influence. In the future I hope to be able to map a huge intellectual dynasty with numerous descendants.

300th Post

This is my 300th post just in time for Boxing Day. Feel free to print it out and box it up for your servants. I have a feeling my half dozen readers probably don't have many servants, but one never knows. We had one slice of the traditional Christmas pizza to box up. But, we don't have any servants here on the ranch. We don't even have an Estonian toad shepherd, the most important of all OTM workers for the super elite of Arivaca. Well at least we don't have to put up with labor unrest from humans. We get enough wildcat strikes from the machinery here, especially the internet connection.