My Blog Readership has expanded 25%

Well, I just got a very nice e-mail from Agnes of the Islands so I do indeed have a reader in Sweden. She pointed out that I had originally written her handle down wrongly as Anges and thus misidentified her as male. I am sorry for any problems this may have caused anybody. I think that this blog may have as many as half a dozen regular readers now. At one time I think it was down to my mother, father and other uncle. I doubt it will ever get up to the dozen or so regular readers it had at its height again. But, five or six regular readers would be respectable. Especially since it appears that a couple of them live in Europe.

New Link

I have a strict policy of reciprocity regarding blogroll links. If you link to me I will link to you. If you delink me I will respond in kind. I just found out that a blogger by the handle of Agnes of the Islands has me on her blogroll. The site can be found here. The site is mostly in Swedish so I can not read it very well. It does, however, have some posts in German which I can read.

Big Idea almost has enough presenters to work

I want to keep my one day conference small so I can manage it properly. Right now I have heard from nine people expressing an interest in venturing to Arivaca to present papers. That would work out to three panels with three papers each. Strangely, even though I expected alot of proposals on Latin American immigration into the US, I have only received one. I have gotten four proposals for topics related to immigration into the European Union. I just got two proposals from European universities this morning. I think I am going to cap the number of presentations at 15. I want there to be time to discuss all of them in a single day without too much of a rush.

One Week Left In California

I have one more week in California before I return to Paradise. I have managed to eat quite a bit of ethnic food not available in Arivaca in my month here so far. Among the cuisines I have availed myself to are Cajun, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, Mexican, Thai and Vietnamese. I also found a nearby hookah lounge. The prices are reasonable and the furniture, pipes and tobacco are all first class. But, evidently California law prohibits the serving of hot beverages such as mint tea and Turkish coffee in smoking lounges. What type of stupid law bans mint tea in a shisha den? California liberals are almost uniquely stupid.

I have also taken advantage of the libraries here in Orange County. I checked out five books from the University of California, Irvine. So far I have finished reading three of them. I should finish the fourth either tonight or tommorrow. Out of the five books I checked out from UCI, three deal with the Russian-Germans during the years 1917 to 1920. Two of the books are on the Volga Germans and one is on the Mennonites. So I should be able to complete Catherine's Grandchildren without any problem now. The other two books are on the Kalmyks and Chechens. It is clear that the Stalinist deportation of all of these peoples has its roots in the 19th century. The Soviets like the Tsars failed to subordinate and assimilate these people through less radical means into the limited roles it had reserved for them in the empire. Hence the Stalin regime felt that only through the physical destruction of their traditional communities and cultural institutions could it fit them into the mosaic of "Soviet Peoples." Forcibly scattering them across Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia greatly diminished their numbers through excessive deaths and reduced birth rates. The survivors then experienced a greatly accelerated process of acculturation into a Russian speaking Soviet society. Thus the Soviet government deliberately decreased, dispersed and diluted these "politically incorrect" peoples.

I also checked out five books from the Mission Viejo Library. I have read about half of each of them, but have not finished any of them yet. I want to get the ones from UCI done first. Two of the books from MVL are on Pakistan, one is on Polish deportees to the USSR under Stalin, one is a general history of Russia in the 20th century and the last one is a history of the Russian Civil War. I will start plowing through them this weekend.

When I get back to Arizona I will start to get back into the swing of writing things other than blog posts. I am going to finish up Catherine's Grandchildren. I am also going to once again seriously pursue getting my Ph.D. dissertation published as a book. Finally, I am going to write a few academic journal articles just to keep my name out there. I do not think it will ever result in getting a lectureship, but I want the tenured pinkos in North American universities to know that I am still outpublishing them in refereed journals even without any research budget. I recently sent out a query to an English language journal in Italy about doing an article on the deportation of Romanian Volksdeutsche to Soviet labor camps at the end of World War II. That is enough writing projects for right now. The rest of my free time will be devoted to organizing the conference on international borders and migration I will be hosting.

The Big Idea Keeps Growing

It looks like I now have seven people willing to come out all the way to Arivaca to deliver a paper for my conference on international borders and migration. The interested parties come from as far away as London and Tashkent. They are affiliated with such prestigious institutions as Princeton University, LSE and the University of Arizona. At this rate I think I can get all the preliminary organizing for the conference done before the end of the summer.

Brazil 3 Ghana 0

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

Italy 1 Australia 0

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

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

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

The Big Idea is Rolling Along

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is my last post on the German Diaspora Conference

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

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

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

Ghana 2 US 1

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

Another Book Review Excerpt

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

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

Book Review Excerpt

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

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

Hollywood Take 3

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

Spain 3 Tunisia 1

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

It looks like some people do read my writing

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

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

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

Ukraine 4 Saudi Arabia 0

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

US 1 Italy 1

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