Creating a Whites only Soviet Far East

The Russian-Koreans became the first Soviet nationality deported in their entirety to internal exile in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Today is the 68th anniversary of the decree initiating this ethnic cleansing. On 21 August 1937, the Soviet Council of Peoples Commissariats (SNK) and Central Committe of the Communist Party passed resolution 1428-326ss. This decree carried the title "On the Exile of the Korean Population from Border Districts of the Far East Territory." Joseph Stalin and his close associate Vyacheslav Molotov personally signed this document. This order authorized the forced relocation of nearly 75,000 ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. On 8 September 1937, the SNK passed resolution 1539-354ss titled "On Resettleing the Koreans." This second decree expanded the area to be cleansed of Koreans to include the entire Soviet Far East. By 25 October 1937, the NKVD had deported over 171,000 ethnic Koreans from this region to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Officially only 700 Koreans remained in the Soviet Far East. The NKVD arrested and deported another 19,000 ethnic Chinese from the region at the same time. The result was to make the Soviet Far East an almost completely White and Slavic inhabited territory.

The Russian-Koreans or Koryo Saram as they refer to themselves came under administrative exile and NKVD surveillance in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. They also endured substandard material conditions due to a lack of proper provisions of housing, food and medicine by the local authorities. This deprivation led to thousands of deaths. Some calculations place the number excess deaths among the Russian-Koreans as a result of the deportations at nearly 30,000 or over a sixth of the population.

The Soviet government officially justified the deportation by pointing to the infiltration of the Korean population in the USSR by ethnic Koreans working as spies and saboteurs for the Japanese. Many Korean families had members on both sides of the Soviet-Manchurian border and frequent border crossings made inserting agents into the USSR easy. In point of fact Japanese intelligence did indeed operate in the Soviet Far East and did make use of a small number of ethnic Koreans and Chinese for this purpose. By forcibly removing all ethnic Koreans and Chinese from the Soviet Far East the Stalin regime made it impossible to hide such spies among the local population. After the deportations any Asian caught in the Soviet Far East would physically stick out as being a foreigner and hence a presumed spy. The espionage charge, however, was only the final catalyst in a longer process.

The Soviet regime had found it difficult to integrate the Koreans into the Soviet system. Their culture had roots and links outside of Soviet control. Hence they could never be made into a fully Soviet nationality. The foundation of their history lay in Korea not the USSR. Their concentrated presence on the Soviet border and preservation of an independent culture presented a potential threat of allowing anti-Soviet elements to enter the USSR. The Soviet government had hoped during the 1920s and early 1930s that the cultural autonomy and economic achievements of the Koryo Saram would inspire pro-Soviet uprisings in Korea. By 1937, the Stalin regime instead feared that Korean guerrillas and political activists fleeing Japanese rule to the Soviet Far East would contaminate the local Korean population with bourgeois nationalist sentiments.

The insufficient land available for Korean farmers in the Soviet Far East combined with racist attitudes by local Russians led to the creation of class of landless Korean renters in conflict with Slavs. The creation of an aggrieved and impoverished class of Koreans in the Soviet Far East made the threat of a center for bourgeois nationalist opposition arising among the population much greater. The Soviet policy of promoting non-Russian nationalities in local administrations further magnified this potential. The Posets Korean national district and an additional 105 Korean village Soviets in the Far East provided a Korean piedmont that could be exploited by local and emigre Koreans towards this aim. The Korean communities in the USSR formed an extension of the Korean population in Korea and Manchuria. Initially the Soviets hoped to promote socialist revolution in Korea by pointing to the success of the Koryo Saram. The porus border between the two states, however, threatened to Asianize the Soviet Far East and the Russian Koreans rather than Sovietize Korea.

By dispersing the Russian-Koreans to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan the Soviet regime prevented the emergence of a concentration of nationalist Koreans using local Soviet institutions to push for genuine autonomy and closer ties to their homeland. Such closer ties would probably include the use of Soviet territory as a platform to attack the Japanese Empire. A move that could very well provoke unwanted retaliation by the Japanese. The removal of the Koreans to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan ended the fuzzy demographic lines between the USSR and the Japanese Empire. A clear demarcation between the White Slavic Soviet Far East and the Asian areas of the Japanese Empire now clearly existed. The deportations allowed the Soviets to clearly define and seal this border as a defensive measure against influences from across the Manchurian and Korean borders.

Much of the same reasoning underwrote later Soviet deportations of other extra-territorial nationalities. These groups included the Russian-Germans, Russian-Greeks and Russian-Finns. The Stalin regime thought that their historical ties outside the USSR could be exploited by their ethnic kinsmen abroad to promote real political autonomy. Hence in some of the most brutal preventive measures in world history, the Stalin regime forcibly dispersed these nationalities across Soviet Asia to ensure the security of its borders.

Today's modest accomplishments

My big project today was pretty easy. It is after all Saturday. I wrote up the rough draft to an abstract for a conference in Canada in August 2006. I will edit it and polish it up in the next couple of days. I have already written the paper. I have an unpublished paper that fits into the conference perfectly that I wrote for the V. German case. So hopefully I have done all the work to earn myself a trip to Canada next year and get another book chapter published.

The septic tank people came today. They emptied the tank which they had a bit of problem finding. My uncle brought this house from a guy who left in mid-renovation, there is stuff all over the place, because his ex-wife's alimony demands required him to sell it. He left no map for the septic tank. They did, however, find it close to where my uncle thought it was. So that potential problem has no been solved in advance.

Tommorrow I will post on the Soviet deportation of the Russian-Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It will be the 68th anniversary of the deportation decree. Next week, the 28th will be the 64th anniversary of the decree ordering the deportation of the Volga Germans. It will receive a special entry.

Life without TV

Since I have moved to Arizona I have watched no television. It is too remote to get cable and getting a dish does not appeal to me. I would much rather read and write. Television is generally an unecessary distraction. There have been a few very good dramas to come out in the last few years, but they do not really outweigh the amount of air time devoted to garbage. But, even the best dramas such as those produced by HBO are still taking time away from more edifying and productive pursuits. I have found as I have gotten older that I much prefer books as a medium over television and movies. I can read them at my own liesure, they are highly portable and still remain the single best way to transfer information from one human being to another. The demise of the book has been predicted for a while. But, I think books will probably outlast alot of other forms of content provision. Maybe someday future archeologists will ask what people saw in the little picture box. Why didn't they read books instead? Okay that is probably too optimistic. But, here in Arivaca we have already achieved paradise so I am waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

New Links

I have added some new links over on the left side of the blog in the last week. They are a rather eclectic bunch. Randy McDonald is a Canadian who occasionally has really good posts on Eurasia. Kathryn Tomlinson of Flying Fish is a British woman I have met three times all in different countries. First in Ankara, then NYC and finally London. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the Meskhetian Turks. I disagree with her on alot of things, but I find her work useful. Recently she has been living in Banda Aceh and writing about the conflict and peace negotiations there. Mark Elf is also a British citizen as well as a self described anti-zionist Jew. His Jews sans Frontieres blog has alot of good stuff on the issue of Palestine. Go check them out and tell them I sent you.

Pleasant surprise

Today I submitted a blog entry to another carnival. I sent the entry titled "What I would teach if they let me Part II" to the host of the newly organized Teaching Carnival. Later this afternoon when I got an e-mail from the host I was quite positive that it was a rejection. After all I do not have any teaching experience, my blog is obscure with few readers and I write mostly about topics of interest to few people in the blogosphere. I also believe there is an exclusionary clique around the most popular academic bloggers. A clique with very negative views of people like me. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to get an e-mail from the host of the Teaching Carnival thanking me for my submission rather than the instant rejection I fully expected. Of course the carnival may still exclude my entry when it runs. But, at least I did not get an automatic rejection.

Another day in paradise

Well, we did not get around to fishing in the cistern. I got one job application done this morning. Then I took a mid-morning to early afternoon siesta. It has gotten really hot here. Or at least that is the excuse I am going to use here to justify sleeping rather than working for a big chunk of the day.

I am going to grill jerked chicken again tonight. I noticed today when putting it in the marinade that the bottle holds a lot more sauce than I initially thought. It might be able to do as many as 16 pieces of chicken, twice as much as I first calculated. It is always nice to get little bonuses like that.

Also no illness in the family, no stress from annoying co-workers, no rapidly approaching deadlines (the nearest one is October 15th), no need to toady to tenure committees and no spouse to divorce. Here everything exists in a natural state of blissful harmony. I have nothing, but good news to report.

Plans for the day

It is another warm and sunny day in Arivaca today. We are going to transfer some fish from the open water cistern near the well to the pond today. The cistern catches the excess water pumped from the well to the water tank. It is connected to some hoses that run down to the corrals. Inside the cistern are lots of little fish put there to eat mosquito eggs and larvae. The plan is to move some of them to the very large pond in the back of the property. We hope the fish along with the large number of tadpoles the toads left in the pond will eat enough bugs to prevent us from being eaten alive. The mosquitos here carry West Nile Fever so it is a rather serious concern.

Aside from that I intend to try and fill out at least one more job application and work on some abstracts for conferences for the summer and fall of 2006. I am very happy to be free of having to format any footnotes for the time being. Fortunately, none of my next few projects involve any footnotes at all.

One Arab Palestine from the River to the Sea

Given the extreme difficulty of the Israeli government in getting 8,000 settlers to leave the Gaza Strip there is no possibility of them persuading the more than 400,000 colonists to leave the West Bank. In my opinion the two state solution has been dead since 1993 and the assasination of Rabin. In 1988 the PLO ceded its claim to 78% of historic Palestine to Israel. The Israelis claimed that such a compromise was insufficient and they needed more land, continued control over water and control of the borders. Even after the withdrawl from Gaza is complete the Israelis will still control the border with Egypt. The Palestinians can not give up more than the 78% of Palestine the Israelis controlled in 1966. The Israelis will never give up East Jerusalem whose borders they have enlarged to include a big chunk of the West Bank.

Already including Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the 1948 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship there are about as many Palestinians under Israeli rule as non-Arabs (a very significant number of first class Israeli citizens are Russians of Christian heritage not Jews). This does not even include the descendents of the 750,000 or so Palestinians the Israelis expelled or terrorized into fleeing in 1948 and the 300,000 refugees from 1967. Given their high birth rates the Palestinians will soon be a significant majority in the areas under Israeli rule. The Gaza withdrawl may buy some time, but it is not a solution to the Palestinian question anymore than South Africa's creation of similar resource poor independent Bantustans was a solution to its racial problems.

The Gaza Strip and a few cities in the West Bank with little water, arable land or control of their own borders does not constitute a viable state. Black South Africans and most of the international community rejected the Bantustans as a permanent just solution to dividing the land and resources of South Africa. Likewise the Palestinians and the world outside the US can not morally accept the permanent creation of a walled in Palestinian Bantustan. An entity that would be without access to sufficient resources to physically support its population yet alone the millions of Palestinians born in exile and have no control over its external borders. A completely sovereign Palestine with total control over its borders and water resources in all of the territory of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem was the minimum the Palestinians could accept. By rejecting this deal the Israelis killed the idea of a two state solution.

The fact is that Palestinians today probably form a slight majority of the population of the territory that formed Mandatory Palestine. This edge will increase substantially in the next couple of decades. Even in the pre-1967 borders of Israel, Palestinians currently are 20% of the population and they will easily reach 25% in a few decades. When a significant and verifiable Arab majority does emerge in historic Palestine the pressure to treat Israel like South Africa and Rhodesia will be quite strong in parts of Europe including the UK. Movements for divestment and sanctions will start to have some effect in some European countries.

The Israelis will be forced to make a choice at this point if not sooner. Either they can cut a deal like the South African government did and live as equal citizens in a multi-ethnic Palestine. This means that things like entrusting 92% of the nation's land to an organization holding it on behalf of "all of the Jewish People" and prohibiting its sale or lease to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship will have to end. It also means that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will have to be given the right to vote in elections for a government ruling all of historic Palestine. In practice this would mean the creation of an Arab Palestine from the River to the Sea with a Jewish minority protected by international covenants. The other alternative is to attempt to continue to rule in an oppressive and discriminatory manner over the Palestinian majority. Eventually this will probably lead to a scenerio like Algeria with the expulsion of most of the non-Arabs from Palestine.

Things have not looked good for the Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. Since Sharon provoked the Al Aqsa Intifada things have gotten even worse for a large number of Palestinians. But, in the long run by avoiding complete expulsion from their lands they have managed to gain a long term demographic advantage. Eventually the ratio of Arabs in Palestine to non-Arabs will reach the tipping point. The ability of an unpopular ethnic minority to rule over a hostile native majority in the Arab world has been quite limited in recent times.

Things are really good here in Arivaca

Well, looking at the misfortunes of alot of other bloggers I can not complain at all. I am living in the most beautiful spot on earth. It is very serene here and I have pretty much everything I could want. I have a grill. I have lots of room to stretch out and write. My office has a front and a back porch. Nobody bothers me. I have lots of books. I have an internet connection. It is pretty cool. I really like having the space. As a former urban dweller I am not used to having much personal space. I might decide to go native. You will know if I start wearing a big cowboy hat and tie dye shirt.

Getting back on the roll

The cotton paper is finished and submitted to the people back at SOAS. I got a late start today, I did not start actually working on it until about ten am. But, I got it all done and sent off by half past noon. I did not get a whole lot of other work done today. I did some preliminary organizing for one of my encyclopedia articles and I completed one job application. However, I think now that the ordeal of getting the citations sorted out for the last paper are over I can start cranking again. By next Friday I hope to have at least one more encyclopedia article done as well as half a dozen job applications and some conference abstracts.

I love the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the greatest library in the world. I have done more research there than anywhere else. It has alot more books and is much prettier than the new British Library over on Euston. Indeed I am quite sure it has more books than any other library in the world. Unlike alot of other national libraries the Library of Congress is in fact an international library. Its collection of Russian language materials is simply awesome. Even out here in Arivaca I find the Library of Congress invaluable. I just tracked down three obscure sources from the North Caucasus and Crimea using the Library of Congress online catalogue. I only had partial citation data for the works. It took me a grand total of fifteen minutes. Absent the web resources of the Library of Congress it would have taken me hours of hard labor. Now I can finish filling in the citations for my cotton paper.

Footnote fetish

Okay, when I get up in the morning I am going to finish the cotton paper. Writing it was not too hard, but editing it has taken up two whole days now and is growing tedious. The drudgery of getting footnotes in order is one of the reasons I would like to do more popular and less academic writing. I really like the new practice in popular histories of providing short historigraphical essays for each chapter at the end of the book rather than using footnotes. So instead of citing each individual fact, the author provides a description of the important literature on the subject of the chapter that serves to provide suggestions for further reading.

In academic writing, however, the footnote is one of the most important of all fetishes. I average a bit on the high side at four a page. But, I think that is because like fetishes in magic, footnotes are used to invoke protection from powerful evil forces, sometimes called critics. Since I do not have an academic position and for a long time in my writing career did not even have a graduate degree, the footnote was the only talisman I could use to summon protective spirits. Even then it was only partially succesful. Oh well, at least I do not have to deal with any Theory. That stuff is real black magic.

Citations are my bane

Well despite the best of intentions I did not finish the cotton paper today. I typed up the corrections and reformatted the text. But, Central Asian Survey uses a real wierd citation system I have never seen before. I had written the paper using my usual system thinking that it would be easy to convert. It has not been. I have been going through each of my 84 citations and altering them to fit the journal's system. Actually they have more than one system. Journals from the West are to be cited in one way and those from Russia and other former Soviet states and Eastern Europe another. About 75 of my citations are from Russian language sources, but the other ten are Amercian and German. So I have to make sure I don't cite them like the others. I am going to finish it tommorrow I hope. At anyrate, it will still be almost a month early.

The roll did not last

Today was not nearly as productive as yesterday. I edited the cotton paper and wrote one page on Catherine's Grandchildren. I also got the details on six job applications and wrote to two of my three references. That took me just about all day due to my inherent laziness. I finished at about four and then put the chicken in the marinade and read some fiction. It was a lot hotter today than yesterday and I just could not work up the same motivation I had yesterday.

Tommorrow I am going to type in the corrections for the cotton paper and send it off. It will be about a month early. I want to get it finished and out of the way before I do any more of the encyclopedia articles. I am also going to try and get at least one of the job applications done. I should probably get the Canadian abstract done since I have finished the paper for that conference already. I am hoping that the complete and total lack of any social life out here in the desert will inspire me to be more productive.

Starting Academic Job Search Again

On the advice of people older and wiser than me I am going to again apply for lecturships in history for one more season. Then I may very well throw in the towel and go back to making coffee. I do not have alot of optimism that I am doing anything other than wasting paper, postage and the valuable time of those writing me letters of recommendation. It seems that by not getting a stupid TAship I have no hope of ever getting even an adjunct position. At anyrate I found six openings to apply for this fall for jobs starting next fall. But, I really think I need to find a career in which I can do things like research and write that does not require that I have gotten a magical TAship. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get any usuable advice on this matter. If I stayed at the Cafe I could have been a saucier by now.

Kazakhstan's problematic geography

I finished the first draft of the cotton paper and one problem I noticed is changing geographic terminology. Today the term Central Asia (Tsentralnaia Aziia in Russian) refers to the five nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. But, historically the Soviet government recognized that Kazakhstan is not really Asian. It is instead Eurasian both in geography and population. Soviet sources thus made reference to Kazakhstan and Middle Asia (Srednei Azii). The term Middle Asia sounds horrible to me. So when writing about the region in the past tense I have generally preferred the construction Kazakhstan and Central Asia. This was a favored translation among many other people writing in English as well. Although it is seen less often today.

This terminology made particular sense when writing about northern Kazakhstan which blends into the adjacent areas of Russia without any natural geographical borders. Northern Kazakhstan under Soviet rule became heavily populated by Russians and other European nationalities such as Ukrainians, Russian-Germans and even a small ethnically Polish population. There was not much difference between the north eastern parts of Kazakhstan and the south western parts of Siberia in either landscape, climate or population. So it justifies itself in my mind as a seperate geographic region from Central Asia.

Southern Kazakhstan on the other hand is Central Asian in landscape, climate and population. The paper I just finished deals with southern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. I suppose historically I could call the whole region Central Asia, referring to a specific geographical region in terms of natural features. But, my inclination is to only do this in the title or if it is clearly a reference to the area in terms of landscape and climate. I will continue to denote the political borders in the text using the terminology that existed at the time. That is Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

Historian, Horticulturist and Cook

Today was a pretty productive day. I spent the morning in the huge spartan room that I use as an office. It has two porches, two lap top computers and a CD player. It unfortunately only has two small tables and it needs three. The lap top I use for the internet has a small stand. There is also a rather beat up table outside on the back porch that has recently been pounded by the monsoons. I do not have a table for the lap top I use for writing. So I laid on my stomach and typed with my sources spread around me a semi-circle. This is not a comfortable position from which to work.

I finished up a rough draft of my cotton paper for London. I cranked out five pages today. It turned out longer than I thought. It ended up being 24 pages rather than the 20 initially planned. I wrote alot more on the legal and administrative development of the special settlement regime from 1941 to 1949 than I anticipated. But, since most of this stuff has never been published in English and exists only in scattered and obscure Russian language document collections I thought it was important to include. I pretty much finished the paper by lunch, but had to take a lunch break. Primarily because my back was bothering me from not having a table to work on.

The property is green with all kinds of flora right now. It does not look like we live in the middle of a desert. My uncle thinks we should take advantage of some of the natural crops growing on the land. Actually he would like to not have to ever go to the grocery store again. I have identified some of the edible ones and may try cooking some of them up. Among the native foods that have sprung up here are mesquite bean, prickly pear and now we have discovered squash vines. I think I will cook up some prickly pear paddles on the grill soon. I have to first figure an easy way to remove the stickers and skin. If it is too much trouble the first time around there will only be a second time around if they turn out really good.

In the South West it is not possible to live without "propane and propane accessories". That is a grill. I cooked up some great chicken thighs tonight. I was going to have it last night, but I found out that the refrigerator is too cold to defrost poultry from the freezer. So I defrosted the chicken today and used one of Lawry's 30 minute marinades, the Baja Chipolte and Lime one, to flavour it before grilling. It turned out really good. We ate it with rice and salad which my uncle always has around in great abundance. Given that the marinade bottles can accomodate eight pieces of chicken and cost $2.50 each at Safeway they are great deal. Dinner tommorrow will be similar except I will try the Jamaican Jerk marinade with papaya juice.

History Carnival Watch

The History Carnival is up now and I have gotten the e-mail address for the next host. I am quite sure the entry will be rejected, probably without any stated reason. I have some ideas of the blog posts that I will be sending in to future History Carnivals to be rejected due to my lack of "coolness." They will be written in the order listed below.

Creating a Whites only Soviet Far East: The Deportation of the Russian-Koreans

Soviet Apartheid: The Special Settlement Regime and Racial Exclusion

The small CD collection of the totally unhip

I have a really small music collection. This is partially because I am unemployed and poor and can not afford to buy many albums. It is also partially due to constantly moving about and not being able to permanently acquire large collections. It also is a result of not being much of a music person. Part of this is that I have a pretty severe hearing loss dating back to birth. Another part is that being outside the hipster scene I just do not value it as a status symbol. But, I have collected a few CDs in London and northern Virginia that I brought with me to Arizona. I have a total of seven. They are a bit eclectic and no doubt mark me as being completely uncool and unhip and hence never to have an entry in the History Carnival. But, for anybody interested they are listed below.

Various artists - Momo Arabesque
Blondie - The Best of Blondie
Bruce Cockburn - You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance (Live at Madison, WI)
Guns N Roses - Appetite for Destruction
Rick James - The Ultimate Collection
Various artists - The Rough Guide to Rai
Various artists - The Rough Guide to the Music of Turkey

Things I would Teach if they let me part II

Deported Nationalities in Kazakhstan and Central Asia

Course Description:

This course will examine the history of Stalin’s deportation of whole nationalities from the Caucasus and other regions west of the Urals to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. In particular it will focus on the Russian-Germans, Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks exiled to special settlements in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan during World War II. The course will cover the development of Soviet nationalities policies during the 1920s and 1930s, the planning and conduct of the deportations, the changing legal and material conditions of the deportees, their struggles for rehabilitation and return and finally, post-Soviet conditions. Among other factors the course will look at the roles played by geography, language, economics, religion, memory and gender in the historical development of the deported nationalities in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Special attention will be paid to the differences between the deported national groups in regards to cultural retention and political mobilization. The course will seek to ascertain the root causes of these variations. A comparative approach will be followed throughout the course.

Things I would Teach if they let me part I

Introduction to the History of Kazakhstan and Central Asia Under Russian and Soviet Rule


Course Description:

This course is an introductory survey course to the history of present day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. In particular the course will concentrate on the era of Soviet rule from 1917 to 1991. The course will treat the area chronologically and emphasize the political, economic and social changes it experienced under Soviet rule. Among the topics that will be examined are the development of territorialized national identifications, the political subordination of the region to Moscow, the radical transformation of the territory’s economy and ecology and the changing social roles played by Islam and women in recent history. These topics will be covered in the course of examining the important political events in Soviet history and their impact on Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Among these events are the Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, demarcation of internal Soviet borders along national lines, collectivization, industrialization, the assault on religion, the Purges, World War II, the Thaw and finally Glasnost and Perestroika. The course will emphasize a comparative approach and concentrate on the historical similarities and differences between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two largest nations in the region.

Life on the ranch

Actually, it is an ex-ranch. The horse corrals are empty. Other than my uncle's dog all the fauna is wild. The torrential rains from the monsoons have turned the desert green. There is a big pond in the back and several streams. The toads evidently came to spawn. There are thousands of tadpoles in the water and hundreds of small toads hopping onto the land. Unfortunately, the well is solar powered so despite constant rain we have a water shortage. Now that it has stopped raining we should be okay soon.

We have alot of mesquite trees and I have been looking into prehaps doing something with the beans. They are a traditional staple food of several native nations in Arizona. It looks like they will be ready to pick at the end of September. We also have some vines which I think may be either melon or squash. I got some rosemary, basil and tarragon to grow inthe Arizona room to go along with the tomatoes and chilis already there.

I have been getting one to two pages done every day on my cotton paper and should be finished soon. It just needs a couple more pages. Then I will get on the four encyclopedia articles I still have to write due in October. Right now I do not have many job applications to fill out.

Writing for the Common Man and Woman part I

Dr. Camicao asked me to blog on this subject. I am currently writing a book aimed at a popular audience on the history of Russian-Germans in the USSR. So I am in the middle of this experience. I am going to try and illuminate what I think the differences are between this type of writing and the academic writing I have done in the past. I am going to have to do it in parts I decided since it is a rather large task. In many ways it is easier than writing academic work. You do not need to include lots of transliterated footnotes for one thing which really makes a difference in the speed you can write. I average over 1000 such footnotes in a book length academic text so this alone is a relief. In other ways, however, you have to think differently. You are not writing for specialists and alot of what you assume is common knowledge is not and has to be explained clearly. More importantly, the interests of the lay reader and the Ph.D. are often quite different. This is the core issue I will be addressing below.

The first and probably most important thing in writing for a popular audience rather than academic specialists is picking a topic that is of general interest. The extremely narrow subject matter of most academic writing has no real appeal beyond the Ivory Tower. A history of Soviet administrative law in Uzbekistan is not going to attract many general readers. A history of the Soviet GULag might very well as Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag: A History demonstrates. An important part of picking a viable topic is to relate to the common reader. This ties into what I have written about putting the human back into humanities. The writer needs to relate the humanity of the reader with the humanity of the subject and bridge their cultural differences. This means dealing with what is important to the average reader. People are interested in such things as family life, work, education, religious practices and sports because these are important things in their own lives. I think alot of American academics really discount the role religion has continued to play in peoples lives even in the "secular" twentieth century. Because they themselves are not believers they do not properly respect and address the fact that billions of other people both now and in the past have been sincerely religious. The other aspects of everyday life are easier to deal with for most academics.

My own topic is the history of an ethnic minority group in Eurasia, the Russian-Germans, during the twentieth century. Among the topics I have dealt with have been how they lived both during relatively prosperous times and during times of extreme persecution. I have focused on what happened to them and how they reacted rather then on why the Soviet government acted as it did or how it implemented its policies. For a general work, theory is almost worthless, what is important is creating a coherent narrative based upon empirical facts. It is also important to show the subjective experience of these people to their circumstances. They rather than the Soviet government or the NKVD or GULag camp structure are the focus of the history. Hence, I find this type of writing fits my recent inclinations regarding scholarship well.

I will continue writing on this subject later. In the next post on this topic I intend to address the challenges of reducing such academic encumberances as excess statistical data, acronyms and other jargon and explicitely engaging with other scholars. Later posts will deal with structuring content, style and other aspects of writing for a non-academic book.

Things to look forward to

For the two to three people who read this blog below is a list of topics that I will be covering in the near future here.

The process of writing a book for a popular versus an academic audience.

Adjusting to life in Arivaca.

The 68th anniversary of the deportation of the Russian-Koreans.

The 64th anniversary of the deportation of the Russian-Germans.

Things I would teach if they let me.

They may not appear in any particular order and it may take a few weeks to get through them all as other things intervene. But, I promise to have at least one entry on each of them.

History Carnival update

Well, it has not even been a full day and I have already gotten an e-mail from the current History Carnival host rejecting my entry as too "technical." At least I have progressed from simply being ignored to getting rejection letters. But, honestly not even I expected to be proven right about the unwritten parameters of acceptability for the History Carnival so fast. Maybe some day one of the hosts will specifically tell me what these parameters entail and why I will never meet them. In the mean time I am three for three with twenty three submissions left.

History Carnival Experiment

I just submitted the blog entry below, "Why it is Russian-German and not German-Russian" to the History Carnival. I predict that like my previous entries "Russian-Germans as a racial catagory" and "Happy Manifesto Day" that it will be rejected without any stated reason. Despite the fact that each of these carnivals, XII, XIII and XIV have different hosts I do not think it matters. The "hip" academic history blogs seem to have formed some sort of exclusionary clique. People with ideas that do not fit into their rather politically correct definition of "cool" get ignored. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I live in the real world and can see the creation of a blog wall between the "haves" and "have nots."

Why it is Russian-German and not German-Russian

The term Russian-German is a translation of the German Russlanddeutsche and Russian rossiskie nemtsy. In both these cases the word Russian refers to the territory of Russia or historically the Russian Empire which would include Ukraine, parts of Poland, Bessarabia and other areas outside the Russian Federation. It does not refer to Russians as a nationality. This is clear in the original German and Russian versions. In German you have Russland vs. Russe and in Russian you have rossiiskie vs. russkie. A more acurate, but really awful sounding English translation would be Russia-Germans. The translation Russian-Germans is standard in most literature outside the US and corresponds to the designation of other immigrant groups in the former USSR such as Russian-Koreans, Russian-Greeks and Russian-Finns.

In the US you often see the term German-Russians. If this is translated back into either German Deutschlandrusse or Russian germanskie russkie it describes an ethnic Russian living in Germany. Although many native born Germans view the Spaetaussiedler arriving from Kazakhstan, Siberia and Central Asia as Russians rather than Germans this is not why the term is used in the US. Rather it is a poor attempt to impose an American system of ethnic classifications upon Eurasia. I wrote earlier of Americacentrism distorting American views of other places and this is a prime example. The term German-Russian is meant to correspond with the term German-American. But, it does not. The American in German-American does not refer to the territory of America. Rather historically a German-American was a person in the process of assimilating from being completely German to being totally American. It was a temporary hybrid ethnicity of the second generation. In the 1960s and 1970s a number of activists in various white ethnic communities sought to freeze this assimilation process in order to use the ethnic symbolism of their ancestral origins as a tool for political mobilization. Hence the permanent existence of such catagories as Jewish-American, Irish-American and Cuban-American. Almost nobody in the US calls themselves a German-American. People of German heritage in the US are nearly totally assimilated and identify themselves as merely Americans.

The situation of people of German descent in the US is radically different from that in the former USSR. Since 1938 the catagory German has been an inherited and immutable legal catagory. It has been stamped on all passports, identification documents and other records of people biologically descended of German speaking immigrants to the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Regardless of how much they acculturated or adapted to Russian culture they legally remained Germans, a status they inherited at birth from their parents. Only in the case of the children of mixed nationalities did an individual have an opportunity to partially escape from this racialized legal catagorization. In the case of mixed parentage, a child had to choose the nationality of one of his parents when he turned 16. Otherwise nationality in the USSR was in effect a racial catagory determined by biological descent and not subject to change. This legal catagorization and the discrimination that went along with it created a pyschological identification of being German among Russian-Germans that were totally acculturated and would have otherwise become assimilated into the Russian nationality. Voluntary assimilation in the USSR and most Post-Soviet states was never an option like it was in the US. Legally a Russian-German was always completely German in his essence no matter how well acculturated.

In Response to Dr. Camicao

In a comment on my entry "On Expanding my Knowledge Base as an Orientalist" Dr. Camicao asked why I did not think I will ever get an academic position. The short answer is that despite having two published academic books and a number of peer reviewed journal articles I have no teaching experience. I have applied to dozens of jobs and have been rejected for all of them in the last year. Among those rejecting me were a number of adjunct positions. So it was not as if I was trying to get anything more than an entry level position. Of the few rejections that have given reasons this has been the one. I have never taught in a formal classroom setting, not even as a TA. Despite what others may claim, academia values teaching much more than they do publications. In fact I do not think American academia puts much weight at all to publications by themselves. They will never hire a person with a strong publishing record and no teaching experience over somebody with teaching experience and a weak publishing record. A person with teaching experience and no publications can always get published. Especially since many publishers use blind peer review and hence judge articles solely on their merit. This is not the case regarding teaching experience. To get a position that involves teaching you have to have had such a position previously. Such job selections are not blind. They know who you are and will use anything they can against you.

I will also repeat what I wrote in a comment to Frank. I could not get into graduate school in the US even with two published academic books. In the UK where publications are important I got into SOAS with no problem. For US academia publications are completely irrelevant. What counts is that you have people on the inside supporting you. I know that a great many people have gotten tenure track jobs without having any books published. Many of these people have then gotten tenure with only one book, almost always a revised version of their Ph.D. dissertation. With all due respect even Dr. Camicao got tenure with only one book published. He obviously originally got the position on the basis of something other than writing books.

I could not even get into an MA program in the US despite having two academic books published. Books that have been well cited and favorably reviewed by academics working in my field. A lot of this work is rather narrow. But, some more popular scholary works have also cited me extensively. If you look in Anne Applebaum's pulitzer winning Gulag: A History you will find me in the index and endnotes. Richard Overy's The Dictators also cites me extensively. So it is not as if I was writing mere hackwork that is long on quantity and short on quality. It is that the real priorities of US academia lay elsewhere.

I do not see any way ever around the catch-22 of having no teaching experience. No matter how many books, journal articles and other academic pieces I publish it will not change this basic fact. It is clear from the hiring record of academia that a TAship is considered a greater asset by selection committees than any number of scholastic books. I initially took up academic writing as a hobby and greatly enjoy it. My real jobs while doing this were stuffing envelopes, making sandwiches and brewing coffee. By technical training I am a barrista. So I will continue to do some academic writing. Mostly, because I enjoy travelling to conferences. My main writing focus in the future, however, I think is going to be for a more popular audience. I have a little over 50 pages written of my first non-academic book and I am finding it more enjoyable to write for real people rather than the Ivory Tower crowd.

Smoking narghile with toads in Arivaca

Note that the title is smoking narghile with toads not smoking toads in the narghile. It was merely mint flavored maassel, not toad flavored. As much as I like exotic things, I have refrained from toad smoking. In Queensland it is evidently a major drug problem. Given the poor state of toad smoking addicts there I have no desire to join them.

The other night I was out on the Gazeebo smoking narghile and reading Sacred Clowns by Tony Hillerman when the toads visited me again. I think they might be the same toads. There was a small one and then two big ones. They came to eat the moths drawn by the Christmas lights.

The toads are only some of the strange animals living here. There are also lizards that run on their hind legs, bats, snakes and jack rabbits. That only covers the creatures I have actually seen. I still have not seen any scorpions or rattlers.

The plants are also exotic. There are lots of Cacti. The prickly pears with their bright purple fruit which makes a very tasty glaze are everywhere. Then there are the short barrel cacti pointing south west with their yellow and red flowers. Finally, there are the great big pipe organ cacti.

I really like the landscape of this region of the South West. I have been able to get a fair amount of writing done early in the morning. I usually write one page a day on my cotton paper and two pages a day on Catherine's Grandchildren. I think the natural ecology has been helpful in increasing my writing output.

Rehabilitating the term Orientalist

Over the next couple of days I am going to try and catch up on those blog posts I promised, but have not yet written. This is one of them. There is also the one on why it is Russian-German and not German-Russian. After that I will post some new stuff on Arizona and life here in Arivaca.

The term Orientalist today has a negative connotation and is often used as a term of abuse as a result of the influence of Edward Said and his academic followers. Said wrote Orientalism in 1977, a book which seeks to tar most European and later US scholarship on the Arab world as being essential parts of colonial and imperial projects. The book has a lot of flaws. Not the least is its reduction of European scholarship down to the UK and France. For some reason the large body of scholarship existing in Germany, Hungary and Russia merited almost no attention in the book. Probably because none of these states ever had Arab colonies, protectorates, mandates or even military bases. Hence since there were no overt German or Hungarian colonial projects in the Arab world there must not have been any attempt to study the region. In the Saidian universe the only reason westerners would study the Orient would be so they could exert direct domination over it. This is rubbish.

Orientalist should be a neutral term to describe somebody who studies the peoples and lands of the Orient. There are other better terms for people who acquire knowledge of the Orient for the purposes decried by Said. Imperialists, colonialists and hegemonists are some that spring to mind. Of course the most bigoted and racist commentators on the peoples of the Orient do not call themselves Orientalists, they call themselves Zionists.

Contrary to politically correct dimwits in the US, Oriental does refer to people as well as rugs. It should be noted that the proposed replacement term for Oriental, Asian is totally inadequate. The Orient is not the same as Asia either geographically or in terms of racial catagories developed in Europe. The most famous source of Oriental rugs is Iran. There is no doubt that Iran, both in terms of location and people is Oriental. Neither its location or people are generally considered Asian. Usually Iran is considered part of the Middle East which is part of the Orient, but not part of Asia. Persians as well as Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Turkomen, Baluchis, Arabs and other ethnicities in Iran are all Oriental in terms of European discourses on culture. None of them are Asian in terms of race. Even the US federal government specifically states that for purposes of Affirmative Action that Iranians are white. So lets not have any more deculturated third generation Americans of Korean descent tell me that Oriental refers to rugs not people. No, it refers to both and much more.

The Orient is much larger geographically than Asia. North Africa, the Balkans, Crimea, and the North Caucasus are all historically part of the Orient. They are not parts of Asia. Indeed the stupidity of the term Asia is quite apparent when it is noted that part of Istanbul (the new modern and less Oriental part) is in Asia and part in Europe. Are Turks from Thrace such as Mustafa Kemal, Europeans and Greeks from Izmir (Smyrna) Asians? What is one to make of the fact that most of Russia is geographically in Asia? Such divisions make no sense. Historically, the Ottoman Empire which spread across three continents was considered Oriental by European scholars. Likewise those areas and people of the Russian Empire that had cultures based upon Islam were Oriental. If one goes by geographical or racial catagories instead of cultural ones then you get a bizzare system of classifications. One that does not reflect the actual divisions between peoples and cultures that have historically existed in Europe, Asia and North Africa.

So I am an Orientalist because I study the people and lands of the Orient. I can do so without thinking that the Oriental is inferior or that he is other than fully human. Contrary to Said, I can be both an Orientalist and a humanist.

One Year Old

Believe it or not this blog has been around for a year now. Of course it still has less than 40 posts. Mostly because I got tired a couple of times of writing stuff I was very sure nobody at all was reading and took long breaks. Then I finally got a comment and it inspired me to try and keep it going in the hopes that I might get a couple of readers. I do not think it will ever get too many readers, but I do not have a problem writingor speaking for small audiences. I think it is better to have one sincerely interested reader than a large number of people looking to see what is trendy. One thing I have noticed is that a lot of other blogs have lots of links. The source of these links varies, but there is a definite elitism involved. The carnivals are an example of this. I have entered postings to a couple. Only the Carnival of Liberty IV posted a link to the article I submitted. It was the blog on the Human Cost of Cotton. Other carnivals have like many academic jobs rejected me without even sending notice. The absolute worst has been the History Carnival which has rejected me a couple of times now despite different hosts. I am pretty sure there is a clique involved around which blogs are acceptable and which are not. I am not sure how much my political stances play into it. Although I am sure they do. At any rate I intend to enter the History Carnival every two weeks for a year just to see if I am right. I am quite sure they will reject every single entry. But, if they do I will have the satisfaction of knowing I was right. Many academic bloggers, particularly those in history are just as bad as the cliques around people like Ivan Tribble. Indeed their hypocrisy makes them worse.

A new settler in the South West

I have now been in Arivaca for two days. It is quite interesting. This is only the third time I have been to Arizona and the first time in the southeastern quadrant. The flora and fauna is very interesting. I love the cacti flowers. Most of them now are purple or yellow. I also like the cold blooded critters. Last night several toads each larger than the first kept hopping up to me as I grilled shish tavuk. I have always found amphibians to be fascinating.

I am trying to pick up on the history and cultural strands of the region. I found a basic primer on Arizona history in the living room and have been reading it in the mornings before breakfest and writing. I am now up to the Civil War.

There are some Russian-German Mennonite settlements in northern Mexico not too far from here. They came from Canada during the early 1920s. I may take a research trip down there some time.

Now in Arizona

Well, I made the trip across VA, TN, AR, TX, NM and finally into AZ. I will start posting regularly again now that I have access to an internet connection. I think I may have two maybe even three occasional readers.

I will certainly have plenty of time to write out here. The distractions are minimal. I have to finish up my cotton paper and slavery encyclopedia articles. Then I can get back to working on book projects.

Going to Arizona

I am going to Arizona on Thursday, 28 July 2005. I will be away from an internet connection for a while. I will be back here in about two weeks. See you then.

Putting the Human back in Humanities

Dr. Camicao at Academic Splat has gotten me thinking about the future direction I would like to see for historical scholarship. I think that the human element definitely should take center stage. I have been increasingly moving in this direction myself for a while. My own writing has evolved from a heavily "scientific" style influenced by German and more importantly Russian models of historical production to a more humanistic emphasis. I think that good scholarship should seek to synthesize both the objective facts of history as well as how humans subjectively experienced these events. It is this human element that makes history interesting. A lot of historical writing even when sympathetic to the people under study tends to overemphasize the details of the external forces acting upon them to the exclusion of their subjective experience. I myself have been guilty of this in the past. In my more recent writing I have tried to strike a greater balance towards situating the human element in the center of the narrative. When I did my upgrade from M. Phil. to Ph.D. my committee noted that I showed a lot of sympathy towards my historical subjects and their subjective views, but that it was appropriate and not over the top. That is they thought that objective scholarship did not require a sterile approach. It certainly never requires a moral neutralism which was something I was never guilty of employing and reject as a perversion of objectivity.

Since I finished writing my thesis I have moved even more in the direction of putting the human element back into the historical narrative. In May 2004, I attended a conference in Beirut on Violence in the Middle East where one of the main themes to emerge was in fact the need for all humanities to do this. That is center the common humanity of the subject in our scholarship while recognizing the distinctly different ways various cultures express that humanity. Now that I am starting to write some non-academic material I think the challenge is to bridge the differences between the culture of the reader and the historical subject to show this common humanity and illuminate the differences in its expression. This is the task I think that should lay before humanity scholars.

I am going to continue on this theme in my next post which will deal with the topic of Orientalism. Or why I am an Orientalist and why followers of Edward Said in post-colonial studies should stop sullying the term. I have decided I am going to tackle my use of the term as an identifier before somebody points out that it is usually used as an insult in the humanities.

Expanding my knowledge base as an Orientalist

One of the very serious flaws cultivated by academic historians is moving everything down to a microscopic level. Hence you get monographs written on individual villages, single commercial commodities, solitary military battles and other exceedingly narrow topics. Many of which are of absolutely no interest to anybody outside a narrow group of specialists. Often lost in this ever proliferating publication of minute details is any sense of the broader outlines of history. I am trying to break away from this overspecialization and expand my knowledge base to see how different regions influence each other.

I have realized that like most other people dealing with the Caucasus and Central Asia I have approached it largely from the vantage point of the former colonial power of Russia and the USSR. I think that this Eurocentrism may have also been a problem for people dealing with other areas of Asia and Africa in the early years of independence as well. I have been trying to approach the region as an Orientalist rather than a Russianist or God forbid a Sovietologist. Hence I am very glad that my degree and my supervisor are actually in history of the Near and Middle East which is where most of the Muslim regions of the former USSR belong. I have also found that my work gets a much better reception from the Near and Middle East studies people than the Soviet studies people. Primarily because most of the Soviet studies people, particularly in the US, have romanticized the USSR and are still unwilling to properly criticize it. Certainly not to admit that it practiced racism or that it can be compared to regimes such as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. In contrast the Near and Middle East studies people recognize that Russia and the USSR were colonial empires not substantially different from France and the UK in a number of key aspects. They also had ready analogies to understand Soviet ethnic cleansing in the experience of the Armenians in 1915 and the Palestinians in 1948. In contrast most Eurocentric and Russocentric scholars have vehmently resisted the idea of comparative history for ideological reasons.

Approaching Central Asia and the Caucasus as part of the greater Middle East rather than parts of an undifferentiated Soviet Russia of course has required me to attempt to broaden my knowledge base. I have realized that my knowledge of a number of relavent subjects is weak. Below I have listed some of the areas of my knowledge I am looking to expand.

Countries and regions geographically adjacent to Soviet Central Asia that have had important cross border influences. Most notably Iran, Afghanistan, Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Pakistan. I have done a little bit of reading in the last year on Afghanistan and Iran. I am very much looking for a good book on the history of Pakistan and the relationship the north western parts of the country have historically had with Afghanistan and Central Asia. Also a good book on Eastern Turkestan that deals with the region from the vantage point of Central Asia rather than Beijing.

The theology and social history of Islam in its various forms. I am particularly interested in how Sufiism fit itself to various anti-colonial struggles. Political Islam has taken alot of forms and the Wahhabist brand now receiving attention in the US has historically not been the most popular. Particularly in Islamic areas outside the Arab world.

The influence decolonization and civil rights movements had on subject peoples in the USSR. I think the common wisdom that there was no influence from such events as the Algerian revolution is bunk. I know for a fact having read a lot of Samizdat material that both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks compared themselves to the Palestinians in the 1970s. Despite the best efforts of the Soviet government, the USSR was not a totally isolated bubble immune from the trends that shaped the history of the rest of the world. They could not keep all information of the outside world under control. It did seep through and the existing evidence shows that it did have some effect. Unfortunately it looks like I will probably have to write this last history myself since it is vehmently rejected by reigning orthodox opinion.

Happy Manifesto Day

On this day in 1763, Tsarina Catherine II issued a manifesto inviting all Christian foreigners to settle in the Russian Empire and receive a litany of rights and benefits out of reach for the vast majority of the world's population. The Tsarina granted the new settlers free land, freedom of religion, 30 years tax exemption, interest free loans, communal autonomy and eternal freedom from military conscription. Most of the people who took advantage of this offer came from the German speaking states in Central Europe and they initially established compact colonies on the lower Volga. By 1769, around 23,000 German colonists had established residency in the Volga region of the Russian Empire in response to Catherine II's invitation. In a rare instance of history, one woman created an entire ethnic group with a single royal decree. She is the metaphorical grandmother of the Russian-German people.

In subsequent years, Germans settled other regions of the Russian Empire. Most notably the Black Sea coast of of what is now Ukraine and what was the Crimean Khanate until 1783. The first German settlers to this region arrived in 1789. Hundreds of thousands more Germans immigrated to the Russian Empire during the next century. By 1897, nearly 1.8 million Germans lived under Tsarist rule. In the 1870s, Tsar Alexander II began to revoke the rights granted to the German colonists by Catherine II. Most notably he subjected them to military service starting in 1874. Declining political, economic and social status prompted a huge wave of Russian-German migration to the New World in the late 19th and early 20th century. By the late 1930s over 1 million Russian-Germans lived in the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. While a somewhat greater number still remained in the USSR.

The history of the Russian-Germans in the USSR is detailed in other posts on this blog. It is a story of great suffering and endurance. By 1989 there were over 2 million Russian-Germans in the USSR. In the next decade over 75% of them resettled in their ancestral homeland of Germany. Today the millions of people of Russian-German descent live spread amongst the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and other countries in Eurasia and Latin America. All of these people can trace part of their heritage back to a single decree issued by Catherine II on this day in 1763. For the record my great grandparents on my father's side were ethnic Germans from Volhynia in Ukraine who came to North America near the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. So to everybody of Russian-German descent in the Americas, Europe and Asia, Happy Manifesto Day.

The Human cost of cotton

There is a reason why the US used slave labor to cultivate cotton in the years before the Civil War. It is not only backbreaking labor to harvest it by hand, but it is also very unhealthy. The pollen fills the air and causes lung, eye and skin ailments. Trachoma and other eye infections plagued the deportees sent by Stalin to work on cotton farms in Central Asia during the 1940s. Cuts and scrapes became rapidly infected and septic from the dust and pollen. Children in particular were prone to eye and skin infections. These conditions combined with an untreated malaria epidemic and famine like food shortages killed tens of thousands of Karachais, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks and Russian-Germans in Southern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Unfortunately, the brutal exploitation of humanity to produce cotton in Central Asia has not ended. Uzbekistan is one of the world's largest producers of cotton. The state controls the cotton industry and pays the farmers a small share of the world price for cotton. Islam Karimov's dictatorship profits greatly from this exploitation. One of the largest labor contingents in Uzbekistan is in fact not paid at all. Children are involuntarily sent to help with the cotton harvest by local officials during hours that they should be in school learning. A child can pick up to 30 kg of cottton a day. After the harvest, the Uzbek state then sells the cotton to Cargill which ships it to China to produce cheap textiles for the US and European markets. Similar conditions including the large scale use of child labor also exist in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Just something to think about when getting dressed in the morning.

Links as new technology

I figured out how to do links. Definitely not standard issue technology for Orientalists like myself. Certainly more complicated than the cave drawings I use in most presentations. But, it appears to work and I have added my first link, Camicao at Academic Splat. I anticipate that it will shortly be linked to this site in return. Since I believe in reciprocity, anybody who adds a link to my blog, let me know. You can just put the notification in one of the comments and I will add a link on this site to your blog.

Meskhetian Turks and historiography

Today, I got through the section of the cotton paper on Meskhetian Turks. They are a hard group to write about historically because of a lack of sources. Until fairly recently most of them were illiterate. Hence compared to groups like the Russian-Germans and Crimean Tatars they have left a much smaller written record about themselves. There are a few memoir pieces written in Russian in such works as Tak eto bylo, but I have not found much else signficant.

There are of course the Soviet records, but alot of the document collections on various deported groups have been compiled by scholars from the nationalities themselves. Having either a state structure in the Russian Federation such as the Kalmyk Republic or a foreign patron such as Germany or South Korea helps alot in terms of having resources to publish these document collections. The Meskhetian Turks have no state structure in Georgia, their historical homeland, and the Turkish Republic has not taken an active interest in them the way the German and South Korean governments have with their respective kinsmen. Further, none of the various Meskhetian Turk communities around the world are in a position to promote historical research. They are still victims of ongoing persecution in Krasnodar Krai, Russia. Since the recent revolution their status in Kygyzstan has been precarious. Even 16 years after the Fergana pogrom they still maintain a low profile in Uzbekistan. Those in Turkey suffer from poor economic conditions and an ambigious legal position. Finally, those that have come to the US are very recent immigrants still adjusting and trying to integrate into their new surroundings in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and upstate New York.

Oral history would be helpful here. Unfortunately, I like most historians who do not specialize in Africa have no clue how to do such research well. What I have found helpful have been the works of anthropologists dealing with subjects that use oral history. After one discards the worthless academic jargon there is usually alot of good stuff left. When I was writing my doctoral thesis I found a couple of anthropology dissertations and books that contained good oral history data on the various deported peoples. For the Meskhetian Turks, I found Kathryn Tomlinson's Ph.D. thesis at UCL quite informative. I do not know when it will see publication as a book. It is one I would like to own. Last I heard she was in Sumatra.

Thank you to my new readers

I would like to thank both Camicao and Academic Coach for stopping by and leaving polite comments. Out of four people who have left comments on this blog other than myself, three have been intelligent, polite and constructive people. One was an awful Scottish troll who was extremely rude and called me all kinds of names. I had to close comments on the post. He, however, linked it to a post on his blog where it attracted libels in his comment thread from others not only against myself, but the School of Oriental and African Studies, my supervisor and my Ph.D. examination committee. I thus purged the entry and all comments to it in order to minimize this type of unacceptable behavior. I am very glad that my two latest commentors are very different from David McDuff and people like him who are totally lacking in civility and manners.

Crimean Tatars

I got another two pages on the cotton paper done today. I am making very good progress. I think I can get it sent off before I migrate to Arizona.

Today I wrote some on the Crimean Tatars. In a mere three days, the 18th, 19th and 20th of May 1944, the Soviet NKVD forcibly deported over 180,00 Crimean Tatars from their homes to special settlements in the Urals and Uzbekistan. At the time of the deportations, Uzbekistan was experiencing a full blown epidemic of malaria. The Crimean Tatars had no immunity to this disease. The Soviet Union had no stockpiles of anti-malarial drugs either for prophylactic or treatment purposes at this time. Internal Soviet reports make it clear that the regime knew that there was a malaria epidemic in Uzbekistan and that there were no anti-malarial drugs in the USSR or means to import them. Despite this fact they deported over 150,000 Crimean Tatars to malaria infested areas of Uzbekistan. Over 15% perished from this disease in less than a year.

I have grown tired of trying to fight with people who try and minimize these types of crimes because the victims were Muslims and not Jews and the perpetrators were mostly Russians and not Germans.

Pakhta Aral

I have started writing my paper for the cotton conference on 3-4, November 2005. As is standard for my writing pace, I will do a page a day until I get it done. Some days I might do more than a page. But, one page is the minimum quota. Since I am going to try and keep it short, about 20 pages and it is not due until mid-September I have plenty of time to write it and revise it before sending it off.

I don't write in the order the paper appears. I find it much easier to skip around, writing the part that interests me at the moment rather than try and fight writers block. As I result I almost always get my one page done in less than two hours no matter how lazy and uninspired I happen to be that day.

I got through three pages on the Karachais in the Pakhta Aral region tonight. Really chilling stuff. Of course all the exile settlements had severe food shortages and massive deaths, but some stick out. For the Karachais Pakhta Aral appears alot in the memoir literature as the deadliest region of banishment. It was a vast open air desert concentration camp almost completely devoid of food for the few men and many women and children confined there. The NKVD sent these people there to die solely on the basis of their ancestry. Whole families died out from hunger and malnutrition related diseases during the years 1943 to 1948. A great many Western academics still seek to minimize this crime compared to other crimes committed further west. The Muslim Karachais are a politically incorrect people. They are the wrong ethnicity and religion to deserve our collective sympathy. Likewise their killers lack the proper ethnicity and ideology to garner our collective condemnation. Undoubtely, Scottish trolls will attack me and call me names for pointing this out again. But, I still think there is something almost uniquely horrible in condemening people to starve to death. Even if they are Muslims and hence "unworthy victims."

Future Writing Projects

Now that I have posted on the ghosts of writing past and writing present I suppose I should say something about the ghost of writing future. My big future project is of course the current general history book I am working on, Catherine's Children: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. I am not sure what I will do once I finish it. There are a number of projects I would like to eventually tackle, but alot depends on being in locations where I have access to resources. If as I suspect I will be far away from any decent libraries and archives then my choices will of course be limited. But, still there are a number of projects I would like to take on eventually if the opportunity presents itself. Some of these are narrow academic projects. I will only write another academic book, I have written three already, if I get a position in a university, think tank or other such place. If I go back to working in a coffee shop for the rest of my life then I am going to write for a broader, more appreciative and most importantly more profitable market. At anyrate the list of possible future books is below.

A book on the forced repatriation of Russian-Germans back to the USSR in 1945 and 1946. This book could either be written in an academic style or as a popular work. Either way it would require access to the archives in DC and probably London as well. There also may be some stuff in the Estonian archives. VOMI moved some Russian-Germans from the outskirts of Leningrad to Estonia in the process of evacuating them to the Warthegau. Some did not make it out of Estonia before the Soviet reoccupation. The NKVD forcibly sent these evacuees to labor camps and special settlements in the Urals, Siberia and Tajikistan. I did at one point during the writing of my dissertation contact the US archives about their holdings on this subject. They told me that they had a huge amount of material on the forced repatriations. Nobody has gone through it since Mark Elliot made use of some of it in the mid to late 1980s to write Pawns of Yalta. Dr. Elliot himself proved to be delightful exception to the rule of rude and unhelpful American academics when I contacted him by e-mail. He was quite cordial and willing to provide assistance.

A book on the Russian-German emigration movement in Estonia during the early 1970s. I found a considerable amount on this subject in the Estonian Supreme Court archives in Tartu. In particular the activities of Bergmann, Oldenberger, Fast and Schulz. Their 1974 trial became an international event due to Sakharov's appeals to West Germany publicizing the case. I think this book could also be either popular or academic. It would, however, require another trip to Tartu. So it would have to be researched in June. Estonia in February was almost beyond my ability to endure, particularly Tartu.

A history of the Karachai and Balkar peoples. This would probably have to be an academic book. These two related Turkic peoples have a rather small population and remain rather obscure to all, but specialists on the Caucasus. Despite this I think they would make a good academic study that could take advantage of alot of good, but spread out research in Russian. There is to date very little at all written on the history of these peoples in English. A short academic monograph would be a possibility if I get some sort of university affiliated job.

A history of the Meskhetian (Ahiska) Turks from 1829 to 1989, that is from the time of the Russian conquest of Meskheti-Javakheti to the time of the Ferghana pogrom. This would be difficult without archival access in the former Soviet states. I used almost every published source in Russian to write the section of my dissertation dealing with the Meskhetian Turks. It still turned out to be less than 80 manuscript pages, double spaced. I tried without success to contact associates in Russia and Azerbaijan about getting access to archives. In particular I wanted to look at the Memorial archives in Moscow. As usual I got no help what so ever from anybody I asked regarding gaining access to these archives. People I contacted in Moscow, Almaty, Baku and even the US were less than helpful if they even responded. Some people like the American I contacted regarding the Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland library and archvies in Stutgardt were downright rude. Although not as ill mannered as certain Scotsmen. Estonia was the one exception to this rule of blocking my entry to foreign archives. As a US citizen I of course have the legal right to look at my own government's archives. Well those that are declassified at any rate. I do not see this problem of access being solved anytime soon. I am not among the chosen that get to do such things.

A general history of Kyrgyzstan. Other than Martha Olcott's book on the Kazakhs there are no good national histories in English of any of the Central Asian states. I would concentrate on the territory of modern day Kyrgystan rather than the ethnic Kyrgyz. Thus I would cover the Russian, Russian-German, Russian-Korean, Meskhetian Turk, Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Karachai, Dungan, Uigher and Uzbek populations that have lived in Kyrgyzstan as well. The book would focus primarily on the years of Tsarist and Soviet rule and conclude with independence in 1991. I am not sure if there would be any demand for a popular book on this subject. It might have to be an academic work due to the obscurity of the topic for most people.

A comparison of Soviet and Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing and racial exclusion. This book would definitely have to be a very carefully footnoted academic work due the subject matter. I have already made all the basic points regarding connections, similarities and differences in a peer reviewed journal article scheduled for publication in May 2006. What would be necessary would be to fill out this skeletal work. That would definitely require access to a very good library. I would also prefer to collaborate on this work with somebody who has a deeper background in Palestinian history than myself including an ability to read Arabic.

Well that is six possible books. I could probably write four of them if I stayed here in the DC area. I am not sure if any of them are possible to write in the wastelands of southern Arizona, hundreds of miles from any suitable libraries.

Things Still to Write

OK, the previous post dealt with material written and awaiting publication. Although in one case the piece in question has been in print for a year. This entry deals with stuff that still needs to be written that has been assigned due dates.

In order of nearest due date, I have the following three projects. First up is the paper for the SOAS conference on Cotton in Central Asia. They accepted my abstract and want the first draft of the paper in September. Second up are the remaining four articles for the encyclopedia on modern slavery. They are due in October. Finally, I have an abstract due in November for a conference in Canada.

I am not as enthusiastic about any of these short pieces as I am about the non-academic book I am writing. I have almost 50 pages done. I think it will probably be my most widely read piece to date. Academic publishing just has so few readers. It is now an accomplishment to sell 1000 copies of a scholastic book. An academic journal with that big of circulation is relatively large. But, of course most copies end up on the library shelf unread. The only publication with fewer readers is this blog.

Wacky Ways of Academic Publishing

I have been trying to make sure all the projects I have in the pipeline to be published are on their way. So I have been e-mailing editors in the US, UK, Germany and Estonia. Some of the projects are going quite smoothly. The book on border changes being issued by Tartu University is right on schedule with no problems. The chapter I wrote did not require any major revisions from its original form. The Kennan Center book is hopelessly behind. Some people still have not submitted the draft of their chapters due 1 April 2005. My dissertation is still being considered for publication as a book by a British publisher 1 year after I sent them the manuscript. For about nine months they refused to respond to my e-mail until informing me that they were waiting on an outside reviewer to submit his report. I once reviewed an article for an academic journal and I had a six week deadline. What is this year thing? That covers publications in the form of books.

The encyclopedia on European migration has been delayed due to problems with the translated German version. For some reason they want to issue both the English and German versions at the same time. They did send me the information to fill out so they could wire my 200 Euros into my bank account in March 2006 when they submit it to the printer. I finished writing the first draft of this article in summer 2003 and the final one in fall 2004. If I had to rely on rapid payment from publishers to eat I would starve to death in short order. I just sent in the contract for five short articles for an encyclopedia on modern slavery. They do not pay any money, but I figured it would give me exposure to a new audience. I have written one of the articles and I sent it electronically to the editor yesterday. That covers encyclopedia articles.

The biggest surprise came from the world of academic journals. In early summer of 2004, the editor of Ukrainian Quarterly requested a copy of a paper I gave on Crimean Tatars at that year's ASN (Association for the Study of Nationalities) Convention at Columbia University. I was in London at the time and sent him an electronic copy of the paper. I also informed him it was already available online at the International Committee for Crimea website (http://www.iccrimea.org/surgun/pohl-asn-2004.html). I then did not hear from him again for almost a year. Last month I wrote the editor inquiring as to when it would be published. He requested I send him the paper again. I sent it again and did not hear from him until yesterday. He informed me that my article had been published in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue, a year ago, not long after I initially sent it. I had a publication I did not know about for a year. That is a slightly pleasant surprise.

The other journal article I have scheduled for publication will come out in May 2006. It will probably be the most controversial piece I ever get to publish in a peer reviewed journal. It is on the connections and similarities between Soviet and Israeli ethnic cleansing and policies of racial exclusion. I expanded a bit on the paper I delivered on the same topic at the Violence in the Middle East Conference at Lebanese American University in Beruit in May 2004. It went over well among the mixed audience of Americans, Brits, Lebanese and one German woman. Given the reaction of people like the Scottish troll who earlier defaced one of my comment threads, I suspect it will not be so popular outside the Middle East.

Why the 1950s were more Radical than the 1960s.

The general wisdom is that the 1960s were the most radical decade in terms of political upheaval in the post-war period. It is often contrasted with the allegedly conservative 1950s. This view is put forth by a lot of former 1960s radicals like Todd Gitlin, Mark Kurlansky and David Horowitz. But, from an international viewpoint it appears that the 1950s were far from conservative and were in many ways more radical than the following decade. Further much of what was considered radical in the 1960s only occurred because it built upon a foundation developed in the 1950s.

The most important development in the world after the end of World War II was undoubtedly decolonization. This process really reached the tipping point in the 1950s with the 1960s being mostly follow through. Significant violent revolutionary movements for independence occurred in Indochina, Algeria and Kenya. The 1950s saw the defeat of a significant colonial power, France, militarily by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu. In contrast while winning the war, the North Vietnamese never won a single battle against the US during the 1960s. They just wore out our political ability to keep fighting much as the Algerians did to the French in the 1950s. In other areas of the world political revolutions or coups implementing radical policy changes took place in Cuba, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Guatamala during the 1950s. Far fewer such revolutions took place in the 1960s. The only revolution of the 1960s that comes close to Cuba in terms of radical change was in the politically insignficant nation of South Yemen. The emergence of the Third World which for people outside of Europe and North America represented a radical change from the last century of colonial rule really took place in the 1950s not the 1960s.

The British Left and Its Ideological Blinders

The Price of Occupation
By Tariq Ali
The Guardian UK
Friday 08 July 2005

" The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little to the everyday lives of most Europeans does not mean the anger and bitterness they arouse in the Muslim world and its diaspora is insignificant. As long as western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge."

This quotation sums up alot of problems with the British Left as represented by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Stop the War Coalition and other spinoffs of the same Trotskyite base. They are so confined by anti-western bias that they are unaware that they are only making half points. The Islamic world contrary to Ali and others does not just destest western capitalist imperialism and military occupation of Muslim peoples. It also hates military occupations by other foreigners. Not listed in Ali's list are the occupations of Chechnya, Kashmir and Eastern Turkestan. All of which have also engendered terrorist resistance as a result of non-Muslims occupying and oppressing Muslims. But, the case of Chechnya is probably most glaring because Russia is a Western colonial power. Yet, Ali deliberately exlcudes Chechnya from his list of Muslims fighting against occupation. Far more Chechens, about 100,000 (10% of the population) have been killed by the Russian occupation in the last ten years than the Israelis have killed Palestinians. This of course does not justify Israeli barbarity, but certainly one can oppose both Israeli and Russian attrocities. Because Russia has historically been hostile to the US it seems to get a free pass from the British Left to practice scorched earth policies, Latin American style dissapearances and old style imperial rule over Muslims in the Caucasus.

This is a real blind spot on the Left in the UK and it makes it hard to take them seriously regarding issues like Iraq and Palestine. One gets the very distinct impression that the British Left is only pro-Palestinian because the US government is pro-Israeli and not because the Palestinian cause is right. Indeed when the Israelis forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1947 and 1948, almost all of the self-identified British Left along with the American Left and the Soviet government strongly supported the Zionist cause. The British Left would now like to bury the history of this previous support, but it really does show a strong track record of ignoring attrocities in the service of ideology.

Future Attractions

Alright, on the very small chance that somebody other than myself is reading this blog, here are some of the topics I will cover in the near future.

Why the 1950s were more radical than the 1960s

The British Left and its ideological blinders.

Why it is Russian-German and not German-Russian (Hint: the Russian and German language translations of this second term would mean an ethnic Russian living in Germany.)

Russian-German Round-Up

These thoughts are more speculative, but prehaps somebody can shed some light on them. That is if anybody reads this blog. :-)

Russian-Germans in South America

By WWI there were about 250,000 Russian-Germans in Brazil compared to about 150,000 in Argentina. Yet the literature on Russian-Germans in Argentina is much much greater than on those in Brazil. My LOC subject search came up with one book in Portuguese on Russian-Germans in Brazil. But, it was only published in 1997. There were over a dozen books on Russian-Germans in Argentina. Why this discrepency?

Russian-Germans in Azerbaijan

My reading suggests that the Russian-German communities in Azerbaijan may have fared among the best of the settlements during the 1920s. It also suggests that this was due to two factors. First, the Azerbaijanis unlike the Russians and to a lesser extent the Ukrainians had no anti-German prejudices. Hence they allowed more real autonomy for the "Konkordiia" villages that formed its German national autonomous raion. Second, the highly religious Russian-Germans benefitted from living in a predominantly Muslim area. The assault on religion in Islamic areas of the USSR did not begin until 1928, several years after its initiation in Christian majority areas. They could thus maintain their religious life to a much better extent than Russian-Germans in places like Ukraine and Siberia. This is just a preliminary conclusion, but it seems logical.

This going to conclude my short series on Russian-Germans for now. I will undoubtedly return to the subject in the future. Especially, if I have any requests. I might also cover other ethnic groups in a similar manner.

Communities of Faith and Survival

It has occurred to me that the brotherhoods and fellowship circles that developed among Russian-German Lutherans, Mennonites and Baptists in Kazakhstan in the 40s and 50s resemble sufi brotherhoods. More specifically they appear to have been formed for the same reasons and filled the same social function as the Chechen sufi brotherhoods. The fact they were both formed at roughly the same time by deportees in Kazakhstan adds weight to this observation.

In both cases communities of faith adapted to survive severe repression. Repression that was based both upon their ethnicity and religious beliefs. These adaptations are not unique to the USSR. Early Christians in the Roman Empire also organized informal and underground circles of believers to maintain their communal religious existence. Suffism has a long history of being adopted by Muslims of many different nationalities as a way of resisiting foreign oppression. Sufis have been associated with anti-colonial movments in places as diverse as the Caucasus, West Africa and Indonesia. The clandestine meeting of lay believers to maintain their traditions of worship by Russian-Germans and Chechens kept their communities alive despite the annihilation of formal religious infrastructures including Lutheran pastors and the ulema. The Catholic Church with its reliance upon trained and ordained clergy in a specific heirarchy found it much more difficult to adapt in exile. The belief of a personal relationship with God and a priesthood of all believers by the pietically influenced Russian-German Lutherans, Mennonites and Baptists proved more durable. Especially as the various brotherhoods moved closer to the organization of the Mennonite Brethren under the pressures of exile. Likewise Muslims also believe in a personal relationship with God and the Umma is a community not a flock. Of all the Abrahamic religions Islam has prehaps proved the most flexible in surviving in hostile surroundings due to this non-hierarchial structure. It is probably thus not surprising that under extreme pressure that Christian practices among the Russian-Germans came to more closely resemble Islamic ones.

Russian-Germans as a Racial Catagory

The real problem of the Russian-Germans in the USSR after 1955 was not lack of territorial autonomy. But, rather the complete prohibition on legal assimilation in the Soviet system which led to a situation of acculturation into Russian societywithout acceptance into it. They were going to lose their German culture in the USSR no matter what in my opinion. But, the discrimination on the basis of being descended of German immigrants could be solved by losing their German legal catagorization. Allowing the catagorizing of acculturated Germans as Russians would have probably led to psychological assimilation as well. The immutable nature of being classed as Germans served as an artificial marker. It left them in a position similar to Blacks in this country during earlier times. No matter how much they adopted Sovietways they could not attain equality with other citizens.

The autonomy movement leaders in the mid-1960s were mostly Party members and they endorsed the nationality structure established in the USSR. They wanted a return to the policies of the USSR during the mid-1920s at the height of korenizatsiia(nativization). But, the violence of the dispersal and cultural repression during WWII pretty much shattered the German communities. They were much more fragile than other deported groups such as the Chechens or Crimean Tatars due to being a much less cohesive group and having far more recent roots in Eurasia. Restoring and maintaining a living German culture was a longshot even with restored autonomy. Even the deported nationalities that returned to restored autonomous territories lost alot of their former culture as a result of the exile. Most notably they found it very difficult to maintain their native languages against the assimilationist pressures to adopt Russian. The primary language of the Chechens and Kalmyks is today Russian.

Achieving legal and social equality could have been done for the Russian-Germans by one of three ways in my view. The first was within the Soviet system. That is to restore the Volga German ASSR and national raions to protect the Germans living in these territories from discrimination. This was the solution of the 1960s activists. It had problems already in the 20s and 30s. Not the least is that most Russian-Germans did not live in the Volga republic. The second was what the activists of the 1970s advocated and what became the accepted solution in the 1990s. That is mass migration out of Eurasia to Germany. This also has problems in that having lost their German culture they are considered Russians in Germany and face a new wave of discrimination. One that acculturation in a few generations, however, will hopefully end. What was never considered by Russian-German activists was a true civil rights revolution. That is the removal of official mandatory nationality classifications. At the very least going back to the pre-1938 practice of allowing free choice of nationality rather than making it hereditary. Even allowing an entry of Soviet might have helped some. But, nobody in the USSR could think outside of essentialist and primordial catagories of nationality that allowed for no change over generations. This put stigmatized nationalities in the same kind of bind as visible minorities in the west. They were always going to be marked as such.

Russian-German Historiography (first in a series)

Well, I have been trying to make the most of my short time with the LOC. I was there 12 hours today reading up on the mass of Russian language literature that has come out in the last five years on the Russian-Germans. I was pretty well set on the 1940s due to my dissertation. But, the stuff on the 1920s is just humungous. I have been trying to plow through it, but man there is alot. Not much of the information is in English either. There seems be a natural split in the scholarly literature. Stuff based upon archives in the former Soviet states is almost all in Russian. A lot of its boring academic stuff, but alot of it is also pretty fired up about the injustice of Stalinism. Some of its written by Russian-Germans, some is written by Russians. But an increasing amount is written by Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs and other natives of areas where Germans once lived. These works are fascinating in that they provide a viewpoint that most people do not even consider exists. Although historical analogies are sometimes slippery imagine a history of American slavery told by Indians. That is kind of what the Kazakh scholarship is like. The Germans play the Blacks, the Kazakhs the Indians and the Russians the Whites. Of course some Indians did own slaves and some Kazakhs mistreated Germans, more so now that they have independence. This point is totally ignored by Kazakh scholars, but everybody has their biases.

The German language stuff is based mainly on interviews of settlers from Kazakhstan and Siberia. Most of it deals with integrating them into German society. But, a fair chunk is an attempt to get the stories from those who survived the Stalin era before they perish from old age. But, very little on the 20s or 30s. However, I suspect that the older German tendency towards sociology will become dominant. So most new exciting historical scholarship on the group will be in Russian and much of it will be by people who are neither German or Russian in any sense.

Some thoughts and the future

Allright, first I just want to say that having lived in London for almost three years and gotten my MA and PhD just down the block from the Russell Square tube station I found the news of the Al Qaeda attack on London disturbing. I hope everybody I know in London is okay. I wrote Habbash (not his real name), my best friend there to make sure he was ok and tell him I am again returning to London in November.

Other things I have planned. I am going to do a series of posts on Russian-Germans. Since I have been reading and writing alot of the group recently, I thought I would throw out some random thoughts. Alot of these are too abstract and academic to be incorportated into the general history I am writing. But, they do flow from that narrative. I have posted many of these pieces already on the GWA listserve, but I want them all in one place so I am going to put them up here. Also my folks can catch them here. I know they occasionally read this blog. Among such topics covered will be the new Russian-German historiography, Russian-Germans as a racial catagory in the USSR, comparison of Russian-German protestant brotherhoods and fellowships to Chechen sufis and other good stuff.

Gassing and Shooting vs. Starvation and Disease

Post Removed due to attracting libelous attacks by British trolls.

In Response to Kurt b

I think Kurt b's comment on my post regarding Stalin and Hitler sums up what unfortunately has become the common wisdom. But, it really is special pleading and most people do not accept the argument with regards to other events. The fact that the USSR was hypocritical and engaged in subterfuge and deception counts against it rather than for it. Likewise the blatant honesty of the Nazis is a tiny redeeming factor in their favor. The anger at Nixon over Watergate had a lot more to do with the dishonesty surrounding the coverup than the actual break in. The fact that the USSR claimed to be acting in favor of lofty goals such as national equality while practicing ethnic cleansing and racialized discrimination makes these practices worse not better. Nobody ever denied the racist nature of Nazi Germany. Not even Holocaust deniers claimed that Hitler's regime was free of anti-semitic practices. Yet, there are a very large number of extremely powerful people in American academia who deny the existence of racially motivated state crimes by the Soviet Union.

Update

I noticed that somebody left a rather thoughtful comment regarding my Hitler vs. Stalin post. It was posted under my post on other blogs. Oh well, at least one person read this blog so its inspired me to add a few more posts.

The good news is that Vladimir, Katya, Pavel and Oksana German all got political asylum. Given the discriminatory nature of US asylum law I can only attribute it to divine intervention. It is some powerful miracle to make a federal judge see the truth.

The bad news is I am still unemployed and the academic hiring season is over. I am going to go out to Arizona and live on my uncle's ranch until I can think of a new career option. One that does not involve working at a coffee shop, I hope. I am trying to take full advantage of the LOC while I am still in the DC area. Out at my uncle's place it is an hour drive to Tuscon.

I have a few writing projects going on. The big one, I have 42 pages written is to write a popular history of the Russian-Germans under Soviet rule. I am going to call it Catherine's Grandchildren I decided today. I had originally thought prehaps Splinters of the Fatherland, but very quickly dismissed it. The term Fatherland unfortunately has taken on too much political baggage. It is hard enough to get any sympathy for people descended from German speakers as it is. Even though the Soviet government admitted that the charges of treason against the Russian-Germans were false in 1964 I still encountered Americans, Canadians and Israelis that still took the old Stalinist line on the internet in the 1990s. Actually I encountered a lot of them on usenet. I no longer bother to pay attention to such people. It just makes my borderline bloodpressure go over to the wrong side.

Other writing projects are a few encyclopedia articles for a project on modern slavery. They are due in October. I also just got accepted with some support (meals and lodging) for a conference on cotton in Central Asia at my alma mata, SOAS. The papers will be published in a special topic issue of Central Asian Survey. Now I need to go to the LOC and find out enough to write more than the 500 word abstract I submitted. That paper is due soon, September.

All right I am going to try and address my one comment in my next post.