63 Years Since GKO Order 5859ss

On 11 May 1944, Stalin signed GKO Order 5859ss ordering the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean peninsula of its entire Crimean Tatar population. An English language translation of the order can be found here. On the basis of this decree the Soviet NKVD deported nearly 200,000 Crimean Tatars from their ancestral homeland to remote areas of Uzbekistan and the Urals on 18-20 May 1944. In Uzbekistan and the Urals they languished under the harsh legal restrictions of the special settlement regime until 1956. In the first few years of exile more than one in four Crimean Tatars perished due to the extremely poor material conditions forcibly imposed upon them by the Stalin regime. For more information go to this page of the web site maintained by the International Committee for Crimea.

The Tower and its poorly chosen location

The location of the Arivaca tower is problematic for many reasons. Dr. Richard Conway, a local geologist has an analysis of why the proposed location of the tower is a worse choice than alternatives further away from town. Mary Kasulaitis has a list of the current activities that the tower would disrupt if built in its proposed location. For some reason it seems the US government has chosen the absolute worst spot to construct the tower.

New Link

In the spirit of reciprocity I am adding a link to Marginalia a blog written by Peteris Cedrins of Daugavpils Latvia. It has a lot of interesting stuff on the politics and history of Latvia. I encourage all my readers to go take a look at it.

More on the Arivaca Tower

The construction of a 98 foot tower on the edge of Arivaca is extremely unpopular among most residents of the town. Unfortunately, I could not attend the 30 April 2007 meeting at the Community Center regarding the tower. An article about the meeting, however, can be found here. It nicely summarizes some of the main concerns the people of Arivaca have about the tower. For more information on the tower from a local perspective see this article.

Arivaca in the News: The Tower

Yesterday the front page of the Arizona Daily Star had a story on Arivaca. It concerned the tower DHS is building outside of town. As I walked back to the library from the post office I noticed Channel Four News interviewing Roger, the owner of the Mercantile. Mary, the librarian tells me the story has also made NPR and Channel 13 News. I guess Arivaca is famous now.

Manuscript status

I have finished adding all the new text to the manuscript of the current draft of Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. It is now 175 pages (50,000 words) long. This is about exactly half as long as my PhD dissertation. In the next couple of weeks I am going to edit it and get it ready for publication.

Music Recommendation

I have not blogged much recently because things have been hectic here. But, I did discover a new musical artist the other week. Like everything else I am way behind the curve on this discovery. I do not know enough about music to write a competent review. So I will just have to make this a recommendation. Cesaria Evora's Sao Vicente issued by Windham Hill Records in 2001 has been playing on my CD player for the last few weeks. It is my first exposure to the music of Cape Verde and I like it a lot.

Free Review Copies of The Liquidator

If any scholars would like a copy of Sidonia Dedina, trans. Rudolf Pueschel, Edvard Benes: The Liquidator: Fiend of the German Purge (Mountain View, CA: RFP Publications, 2001) to review please contact me. My e-mail address is pohlcat [the at sign] rocketmail [the dot] com. If the request is legitimate I will forward your information to the publisher and have them send you a copy to review free of charge.

Another Progress Report

This morning I got another three pages written for Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. The manuscript is now up to 168 pages of text. This morning I was writing about the connections between the Russian-German emigration activists in Estonia and Karaganda Oblast Kazakhstan during the early 1970s. I am going to try and completely finish updating the chapter on the 1970s this weekend.

Review of Anya Ulinich's Petropolis

Originally hailing from Moscow, Anya Ulinich has written a debut novel that capture both the absurdity and tragedy of life in the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia and among the Russian speaking “Jewish” immigrant communities in the US. In Petropolis, published earlier this year by Viking, she traces the life of Sasha Goldberg, a quarter Black woman from the small Siberian town of Asbestos 2.

Despite her name, Goldberg’s Jewish identity is entirely psychological and impressed upon her by her parents to draw the attention of other people away from her obvious African ancestry. She identifies herself as Jewish despite having no religion and knowing nothing about Judaism until after she leaves Russia. It is only in the US that she learns for the first time about matzos, kosher kitchens and Jewish holidays. Even by the loosest racialist definition she is not Jewish. Her mother was a Russian gentile and her father the son of a Russian gentile woman and an African father. The name Goldberg comes from the couple that adopted her father. Other than their name these people retained no traces of Jewish religion or culture. Yet because of her name and presumably line five on her internal passport Sasha Goldberg considers herself to be Jewish rather than Russian or Black.

This is the first of many absurdities depicted in the book that accurately reflects the legacy of Soviet rule. Soviet nationality policy classified an untold number of culturally Russian atheists with gentile mothers as Jews based solely upon their father’s surname. Under Jewish religious law the child of a gentile mother and Jewish father is not Jewish by virtue of his or her parentage. This is only the case if the child’s mother is Jewish. Yet Soviet nationality policy pretended that atheists who spoke only Russian and knew only a Sovietized Russian culture belonged to the same ethnic culture as the Yiddish speaking enclaves that used to exist in the Pale of Settlement. US refugee policy and Israel’s Law of Return have replicated this absurdity. All three states adopted a legal definition of who is a Jew almost identical to the racial definition used by the Nazis.

Sasha Goldberg leaves the dreary and ultimately hopeless town of Asbestos 2 for Moscow and then America. In the US she encounters more Soviet inspired absurdities as she runs the gamut of the stereotypical experiences of Russian speaking immigrants. She starts out as a mail order bride in Phoenix and makes her way to Chicago and finally New York. She is a sympathetic if unlikely protagonist. Most of the people she encounters during this journey including her own father are in contrast quite repulsive. The Russian speaking “Jewish” immigrants have maintained many of the social pathologies that marred life in the old Soviet Union years and even decades after arriving in the US. The native born American characters have their own set of undesirable traits. The one outstanding exception to these unsavory people that Sasha Goldberg keeps encountering is Jake Tarakan. A young man afflicted with cerebral palsy, Jake is one of the few characters in the book that is not emotionally or morally stunted. His illness is instead merely physical. The interactions between Jake and Sasha are especially well done. These two characters complement each other very well.

Petropolis is a highly entertaining and quirky novel. It depicts the experience of Russian speaking “Jewish” immigrants and their descendants in the US in an unusual light. She does not reduce them to nothing more than the totally innocent victims of perpetual anti-Semitism as have a great number of American born writers. Instead Ulinich portrays them in a more sophisticated and less positive manner. Sasha Goldberg in particularly is developed as a fully human character. While such an approach is extremely politically incorrect in America today it does make for interesting reading. I hope Ulinich’s next novel is as good as her first one. If you are looking for something a little bit offbeat to read go check it out.

What I am writing instead of this Blog

The manuscript for Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans Under Soviet Rule is now up to 165 pages. This morning I wrote about the underground activities of unregistered Russian-German Baptist congregations in Alma-Ata (now Almaty) Oblast Kazakhstan during the 1960s. I intend to work some more on the book this weekend. I have a lot of material on the Russian-German emigration movement of the 1970s I want to add. I have written a fair bit about the movement in Estonia and Karaganda Oblast Kazakhstan. But, I have written very little about the movement in other areas of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Apparently there were very close connections between the activists in Estonia, Kyrgyzstan and the Jambul and Alma-Ata oblasts of Kazakhstan. Two of the most prominent Russian-German activists in Estonia during the 1970s, Viktor Trenkenschuh and Peter Bergmann, had both previously lived in Kyrgyzstan. A fairly high level of coordination thus existed between activists in Estonia and those in Kyrgyzstan and adjacent regions of Kazakhstan. I was pretty excited about finding an Estonian-Kyrgyzstan connection.

Correction

It has been pointed out to me that the German version of Prerov is Prerau not Preschau as I originally wrote in my review below. I have now corrected the error.

Review of Sidonia Dedina's Edvard Benes: The Liquidator: Fiend of the German Purge

The literary works inspired by World War II era atrocities are not well balanced. In the Anglophone world there are literally thousands upon thousands of books dealing with the Holocaust. In contrast only a handful of works have been written or translated into English on the almost equally brutal treatment of ethnic German civilians by the governments of the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The English translation of Czech journalist Sidonia Dedina’s Edvard Benes-Der Liquidator by Rudolf Pueschel is thus a welcome addition to this small collection. The English language version of this work is Sidonia Dedina, trans. Rudolf Pueschel, Edvard Benes: The Liquidator: Fiend of the German Purge (Mountain View, CA: RFP Publications, 2001). It is an historical novel dealing with the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Czechoslovakia from April to July 1945.

The native German population in Czechoslovakia when Berlin surrendered on 8 May 1945 exceeded three million people. During the spring and summer of 1945 the newly established government in Czechoslovakia under Edvard Benes instituted a brutal campaign of wild expulsions against the country’s ethnic German population. The Czechs rounded up ethnic Germans into internment camps and confiscated their property before expelling them from the country with only 60 kilograms of possessions. These initial wild expulsions permanently uprooted more than 700,000 Germans from Czechoslovakia. They also involved considerable violence. On 18-19 June 1945 an anti-German pogrom in Prerov/Prerau killed 71 men, 120 women and 74 children. The Czech authorities enforced a series of measures meant to humiliate and demean its German population as a stigmatized population. They required Germans not already interned in concentration or labor camps to wear white armbands with the letter “N” for Nemec, the Czech word for German. The Czech authorities also banned Germans from using park benches, sidewalks, public transportation, trains and telephones and attending restaurants, cinemas and theatres during this time. The wild expulsions from Czechoslovakia involved a complete denial of civil and human rights to the victimized German population. These expulsions as well as the ones in Poland and Hungary received the official approval of the US, USSR and UK at the Potsdam conference starting on 17 July 1945. The pertinent line from Article XIII of the treaty arising from this conference reads, “the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be undertaken.” This treaty, however, also required that the transfer of ethnic Germans be conducted in an orderly fashion. The conditions for German expellees thus improved somewhat during the second stage of the expulsions, but still remained extremely inhumane.

The wild expulsions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia organized by the Benes government in the spring and summer of 1945 form the subject matter of Dedina’s The Liquidator. Although the author describes the book as an historical novel it is in fact based upon a great deal of investigative research and adheres closely to the actual events of the time. She provides detailed descriptions of a number of horrifying atrocities committed by Czechs against Germans after the end of World War II. These crimes include the death march of some 30,000 ethnic Germans from Brno/Brunn into Austria at the end of May 1945. Another particularly stunning example of Czech brutality against German civilians occurred in Usti nad Labem/Aussig an der Elbe on 31 July 1945. Here Czechs massacred dozens of German men, women and children. Although well documented elsewhere, Dedina’s depiction of these events is particularly vivid and powerful.

Dedina’s novel focuses on two opposite poles. The first locus of the book is on Benes and his henchmen. She seeks to illuminate the motives and mechanisms behind the government’s policy of ethnically cleansing Czechoslovakia of its centuries old German population. The second locus of the book is on the victimized Germans themselves. Here she aims to provide the reader with an insight into minds of a people suddenly deprived of their property, homeland, civil rights and human dignity. In between the space of these two extreme positions of perpetrator and victim she explores the moral ramifications of collective punishment and racial revenge. These ramifications are still relevant today. Unlike Germany the Czechs have never come to terms with the crimes against humanity perpetrated in their name during 1945 and 1946. Like its larger Slavic cousin Russia the Czech Republic remains a country in denial about the truth of its contribution to human misery in the twentieth century.

For further reading see the following works.

deZayas, Alfred, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans: Background, Execution, Consequences 2nd revised edition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

deZayas, Alfred, trans. Koehler, John, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

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

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

Ther, Philip, and Siljak, Ana, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East Central Europe: 1944-1948 (Lanaham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

Wanted: Mo Better Blogging

Recently I have been finding very few interesting blog posts. Does anybody have any suggestions on new blogs I should check out? Please feel free to plug your own blog in the comments.

All Quiet on the Border

Literally nothing has happened in Arivaca recently. The town is very quiet and calm. I know a lot of people like it that way, but I am currently bored senseless. I suppose now would be a good time to finish up my book manuscript. There is nothing else to do here right now.

Cited in a Russian language article in a Japanese Journal

I just noticed that volume 24 (2006) of Acta Slavica Iaponica has a Russian language article that cites my second book. This brings my total number of academic citations up to 78. I may reach my goal of 100 citations sooner than I anticipated.

Another Scholastic Citation

The number of individual books and journal articles to cite my research is now up to 77. Today I discovered another one. Jongsoo James Lee's, The Partition of Korea after World War II: A Global History (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) cites my second book, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 a couple of times. The citations are regarding the Stalin regime's fall 1937 deportation of the Russian-Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Links in Support of Finkelstein

Ernie Halfdram has now put up a post in support of Finkelstein at The Bureau of Counterpropaganda. He also left a couple of other links in my comments during the last few days to other sites. The first one is an academic petition in support of Finkelstein's tenure. I doubt any professors read this blog, but if any do I encourage them to add their support to this effort. The other is a blog devoted specifically to the issue of Finkelstein's tenure. I think that is important for all people who believe in intellectual freedom to oppose the attempt to deny Finkelstein tenure based solely upon the fact some people do not like his criticisms of Israel.

Happy Easter

To all my readers I wish you a happy Easter tomorrow. I am still not sure what I am going to do for Easter dinner yet. I do not have any ham, lamb or other traditional Easter main course to cook.

Another Person Expresses Solidarity with Finkelstein

Yesterday I posted my support for Professor Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University in his current struggle for tenure. Those seeking to deny him tenure are doing so for purely political reasons. Since that post my friend Abed has put up his own post in defense of Finkelstein on his blog. As Abed has noted in his post, Finkelstein is definitely somebody worth defending.

In Defense of Finkelstein

Most American academics will go out of their way to be unhelpful to you at best. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Norman Finkelstein. The few times I have contacted him by e-mail he has responded promptly and been helpful. He is also one of the few academics doing honest research. It was from reading him that I discovered that the Labor Zionists under Ben Gurion had modeled their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in part upon the Soviet deportations of the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars. It was also from Finkelstein that I learned that Joseph Schechtman had studied the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II precisely to provide a template for dealing with the Palestinians. Yet, because he does not tow the standard left Zionist line that predominates in American academia he has found his livelihood under constant threat. The current attempt by Alan Dershowitz and others to deny Finkelstein tenure at DePaul University is despicable. He certainly deserves tenure far more than Dershowitz does.

Mark Elf of JSF has put up what I hope is the first of several posts in defense of Finkelstein. If anybody else puts up anything else along these lines please let me know and I will link to it. For all the academic whinging about academic freedom I see very few US professors going to bat for Finkelstein. It is kind of like they only believe in freedom for ideas they support.

Book Review of Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

What follows is a review of Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears published earlier this year by Riverhead Books. This is the first work of fiction I have reviewed here. Most fiction I read is genre rather than literary and merely entertaining. But, this book was exceptional. When Dinaw Mengestu came to the US as a two year old child in 1980 nobody knew he would end up writing a great piece of American literature. But, that is precisely what he has done with this novel.

The novel centers around the life of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant shop keeper in Washington DC. He and his two friends, Ken from Kenya and Joe from Congo, provide the reader with a view of the world from a position suspended between America and their African homelands. This novel has a rare combination of both profound thought and humor. Just in case there are any leftists reading this review it should be noted that this book is definitely not politically correct. The Ethiopian communist regime of Mengistu, Jimmy Carter and most of all rich white American left-wing feminist professors come off looking very bad. On the other hand the African immigrants are all portrayed as flawed, but deeply sympathetic characters. This is a description that also fits the image of both the United States and city of Washington DC as depicted in the novel.

This is the best debut novel I have read in many years. Mengestu has an eye for detail that renders a very accurate description of the city of Washington DC. He also managed to create a character and narrator in Sepha Stephanos that I found myself emphasizing with on a number of levels. So if you want a short, entertaining and emotionally powerful novel to read go check it out. I am very much looking forward to Dinaw Mengestu's second novel.

The weather here is now officially hot

Today's high is projected to be 92 degrees Fahrenheit. But, it is already hotter than that in the shade according to the thermometer in front of the library. This morning I drank nearly 2 quarts of water in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to walk to the intersection of Universal Ranch Road and Arivaca Road. Of course it is only going to get hotter from here on out. It was not this hot this early last year.

Page by Page

I have not been as productive recently as I would have liked. But, I did get two more pages of Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans Under Soviet Rule written on Monday. The manuscript is now up to 162 pages. Other than that I have not done any substantial writing in the last few days.

65 Years Ago on the Leningrad Front

On 3 April 1942 the Leningrad Front Military Soviet issued a resolution ordering the removal of all Russian-Finns in the Soviet armed forces from the front and their transfer to NKVD labor battalions and columns. These forced labor detachments became formally incorporated into the labor army with GKO (State Defense Committee) Resolution 2409 of 14 October 1942. This resolution subjected all male Soviet citizens aged 17 to 50 of Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian or Italian nationality to conscription into the labor army on the same basis as the Russian-Germans inducted under the authority of GKO resolutions no. 1123 and 1281. The Russian-Finns and others inducted into the labor army endured the same brutal conditions and high death rates from malnutrition, disease, exposure and over work that Stalin had earlier inflicted upon the Russian-Germans.

Source:

Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European Press, 2004), p. 139 and pp. 347-348.

The Russian-Germans in Tajikistan

By 1999 almost all of the 30,000 Russian-Germans that had been recorded as living in Tajikistan in 1989 had left. Although large scale German settlement in the Russian Empire dates back to 1764, the migration to Tajikistan took place much later. It is almost entirely a product of events that took place near the end of World War II.

Tajikistan unlike other eastern areas of the USSR such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Altai Krai and Omsk Oblast did not receive any appreciable voluntary settlement by ethnic Germans from the Volga, Ukraine and northern Caucasus in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Nor did Tajikistan serve as a destination for Russian-Germans deported to special settlements during the collectivization of agriculture or the cleansing of the Soviet border regions during the 1930s. The 1939 Soviet census lists only 2,022 ethnic Germans in Tajikistan, the smallest concentration of any Soviet republic except Armenia with only 433 Germans. The growth of the Russian-German population in Tajikistan prior to this date is difficult to track. The 1937 census did not count Russian-Germans in the four Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. The 1926 census gives a combined figure of 4,646 for both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The separation of the Tajik ASSR from the Uzbek SSR and the upgrading of this territory to the Tajik SSR only occurred in 1929. The vast majority of the Russian-German population, however, must have been in Uzbekistan proper. This larger republic had a Russian-German population of 10,049 in 1939. The Russian-German population of Tajikistan thus remained quite small until the events of World War II. (For comparative census data on Russian-Germans from 1926, 1937 and 1939 see Krieger, table 1, p. 133).

Tajikistan also did not serve as a major destination for the Russian-Germans deported from the European areas of the USSR during the fall of 1941. The NKVD initially sent almost all of these deportees to Kazakhstan and Siberia. The official report from 25 December 1941 lists a total of 856,168 Russian-Germans deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia by rail. On 1 January 1942, the NKVD officials in these regions reported that 799,459 Russian-Germans had arrived in these regions. The vast majority of the missing 56,709 deportees presumably died during transit to their new destinations from typhus, gastro-intestinal diseases and other illnesses. The poor sanitary conditions in the train wagons used to relocate the Russian-Germans made this massive mortality inevitable. Out of the nearly 800,000 Russian-Germans deported east of the Urals in 1941, the NKVD authorities reported that 385,785 had arrived in Kazakhstan by 1 January 1942. Already by 25 November 1941, their counterparts in Altai Krai, Krasnoiarsk Krai, Novosibirsk Oblast and Omsk Oblast had recorded the arrival of 396,093 Russian-German deportees. Thus nearly all the surviving Russian-Germans deported in 1941 ended up in either Kazakhstan or Siberia. (For statistical information on the 1941 deportations see Bugai, docs. 43 and 44, pp. 74-75 and Milova, doc. 9, pp. 63-69 and doc. 47, pp. 147-148).

The Russian-Germans in Tajikistan did not arrive in this impoverished corner of Asia until 1945-1946. During 1941, the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht into the USSR saved some 350,000 Russian-Germans from deportation to Kazakhstan and Siberia. The vast majority of these people spared from Stalin’s ethnic cleansing in 1941 lived in Ukraine. During 1942-1944, the German military evacuated most of these Russian-Germans westward. At the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union rounded up those Russian-Germans that had escaped deportation in 1941 and sent them to work under special settlement restrictions in the Urals, Siberia, Soviet Far East and Tajikistan. In total the Soviet Union received 203,796 Russian-Germans including 69,782 minors under 16 repatriated from areas formerly under Nazi rule. Soviet forces apprehended 195,191 of these men women and children in Germany. American and British soldiers forcibly turned over many of these displaced Russian-Germans to Soviet forces in accordance with the Yalta Accords. Only about 100,000 Russian-Germans in Germany avoided repatriation to the USSR. Tajikistan for the first time became a center for the exile of Russian-German special settlers due to the forced repatriations. (For the number of Russian-German repatriates see Bugai, doc. 45, pp. 75 and 76 and Berdinskikh, doc. 8, pp. 339-343.)

The Stalin regime sent the repatriated Russian-Germans judged physically incapable of heavy labor to cotton kolkhozes in Tajikistan. Here they suffered from a lack of proper housing, food, sanitation and medical care. A report from Peoples Commissar of Health Miterev to Malenkov on 24 January 1946 noted that extremely poor material conditions for special settlers in Kurgan-Tiubin Oblast Tajikistan had led to excessive mortality. They lived in appalling sanitary conditions and suffered from famine like food shortages. Each person received only 200 grams of wheat or barley a day, their accommodations lacked floor coverings and roofs and they completely lacked soap and linen. The unhealthy conditions of work in the cotton fields also contributed to the health problems of the Russian-Germans in Tajikistan. The dust and pollen caused numerous infections of the lungs, eyes and cuts and scrapes especially among children. Trachoma, a debilitating eye disease that can cause blindness, became especially wide spread among the Russian-Germans assigned to cotton farms in Tajikistan. These miserable conditions afflicted tens of thousands of Russian-Germans. By 1948 the number of Russian-Germans special settlers in Tajikistan had reached 18,184 people. This number had grown to 27,879 of which 17,770 consisted of repatriates by the summer of 1950. Thus a little less than ten percent of the Russian-Germans forcibly repatriated back to the USSR ended up in Tajikistan. (For a reproduction of the report from Miterev to Malenkov see Bekirova, chapter 2, p. 3, for a personal account from a Russian-German repatriated from Germany to Tajikistan see Daes, pp. 141-150, for statistical data on the number of Russian-Germans in Tajikistan see Eisfeld and Herdt, doc. 312, p.319 and doc. 341, p. 361)

During 1954 to 1956, the Soviet government dismantled the special settlement regime, officially releasing deported and repatriated Russian-German adults from this legal disability on 13 December 1955. The Russian-German population in Tajikistan grew slowly after this date reaching a high of 38,853 in 1979. It then shrunk down to 32,678 from 1979 to 1989 and completely collapsed due to emigration from 1989 to 1999. A significant Russian-German population only lived in Tajikistan for about a half a century.

The Russian-German population in Tajikistan consisted mostly of people forcibly repatriated back to the USSR after being evacuated to Germany from Ukraine by the German military during World War II. Their initial years of life in Tajikistan involved great physical hardship and persecution. They lived as special settlers on cotton kolkhozes and lacked both material necessities and human rights. In the 1990s the survivors of the repatriations and their descendents almost all left Tajikistan due to that country’s civil war.

Sources:

Bekirova, Gul’nara, Krymskotatarskaia problema v SSSR (1944-1991) found at http://www.kirimtatar.com/Books/Bekirova/krpr2.html downloaded on 2 January 2005.

Berdinskikh, Viktor, Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov sovetskoi rossii (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005).

Bugai, N.F., ed., Iosif Stalin – Lavrentiiu Berii. “Ikh nado deportirovat’,” Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992).

Daes, Nelly, Gone Without a Trace: German-Russian Women in Exile translated by Holland, Nancy (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2001)

Eisfeld, Alfred and Herdt, Viktor, eds., Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956 (Koln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1996).

Krieger, Viktor, Rein, Volga, Irtysh: Iz istorii nemtsev tsentralnoi azii (Almaty: “Daik-Press,” 2006).

Milova, O.L., ed., Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-1950-e gody). Chast’ 2. Deportatsiia nemtsev (Sentiabr’ 1941-Fevral’ 1942 gg.)

More Progress on the Book Manuscript

This morning I got up and wrote another two pages on Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. The manuscript is now up to 160 pages. I am still filling in material on the more than 75,000 Russian-Germans (about 25,000 of them Mennonites) living in Siberia prior to 1941. Today I wrote about their role in the Russian Civil War. I should finish adding all the material on the Siberian Russian-Germans to the book manuscript before the end of this week.

Recent Progress on the Book Manuscript

Right now I am working on finishing up the second draft of Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule. Yesterday I started revising the manuscript. Since then I have written another six pages of text bringing the total up to 158. I have mostly been adding material on the Russian-German communities in Siberia prior to World War II, particularly those in the regions of Slavgorod and Omsk. The history of these settlements during the first four decades of the 20th Century is quite fascinating.

Arivaca Film Exposition

Saturday I went to the Second Annual Arivaca Film Exposition. Like last year, I could only stay and watch the day program since getting home in the dark is a problem on unlit and unpaved roads. Unlike last year, dramas rather than documentaries dominated the schedule. There was only one documentary out of four films in the day program this year. It was on the music scene in Tucson during the 1980s and 1990s. This was a subject I knew nothing about. Now I should be able to correctly answer any trivia question on the topic. I liked last year's program better. It had an emphasis on documentaries dealing with important local political issues such as immigration and water resources. But, my tastes are probably in the minority.

63 Years Since the Deportation of the Kalmyks from Rostov Oblast

The Stalin regime deported over 90,000 Kalmyks from the Kalmyk ASSR to Siberia on 28-29 December 1943. Significant Kalmyk communities, however, remained in Rostov and Stalingrad oblasts. In the spring and summer of 1944, the NKVD conducted a series of deportation operations to forcibly resettle these Kalmyks to Omsk Oblast and Sverdlovsk Oblast. The removal of those Kalmyks that had migrated west of the Kalmyk Steppe to live in Rostov Oblast took place first. On 11 March 1944, the SNK passed resolution no. 5475rs ordering that all the Kalmyks living in Rostov Oblast be deported to Omsk Oblast. Three days later on 14 March 1944, Beria issued NKVD decree no. 00276 providing instructions for the implementation of this operation. Eleven days later the Soviet security organs ruthlessly executed these orders. On 25 March 1944, the NKVD and NKGB rounded up and deported a recorded total of 2,684 Kalmyks from Rostov Oblast to Omsk Oblast. Hence they joined the vast majority of the Kalmyk population in Siberian exile. In early June a similar operation would remove the Kalmyks living in Stalingrad Oblast to Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals. The Soviet deportations unlike many other cases of ethnic cleansing sought the total removal of ethnically defined populations from their homelands.

Sources

N.F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin – Lavrentiiu Berii. “Ikh nado deportirovat’,” Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992), doc. 2 , p. 85, doc., 4, p. 86, doc. 8, p. 89 and doc. 15, pp. 93-95.

I think I could do more with this blog

I do not think this blog is living up to its full potential. I believe its primary deficiency is its small number of readers. It would be a great platform if I could up my readership from the current six people who occasionally read it to about a dozen regular readers. Does anybody have any ideas about how to do this?

I had a job interview this morning

I had my first job interview in over a year this morning. I think it went better than the other three interviews I have had since I got my Ph.D. Out of over 100 jobs I have applied to since earning my doctorate I estimate only about half of them have even bothered to send me rejection letters. I am too lazy to go and count the exact number. So I am pretty happy to have actually gotten an interview this year. If they offer me the job I will take it.

Current Big Project

My current big project is to finish editing and revising Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule by June. I have put off working on the manuscript for a while due to other obligations. I intend to get back to getting it into publishable form in the next couple of days.

New Links

I have added two new links. The first is in accordance with my policy of reciprocity. I recently discovered that TOL/neweurasia now has a link to this blog. The second link is a favor to a friend. Cassandra Clifford runs the Children's Blog and I encourage anybody interested in issues relating to the human rights of children to go visit it.

St. Patrick's Day in Town

There were a lot of events in town today. I went and listened to Chris O'Byrne play guitar and fiddle accompanied by Ari Ellis and Cliff Hope on percussion. Most of his stuff is bluegrass, but he had a few Irish tunes. Then I partook in sampling the various chilies prepared for the Arivaca Volunteer Fire Department chili cook off . I liked the Hawaiian one the best. Finally, I saw a presentation sponsored by the local library and the Arizona Humanities Council on Teresa Urrea. It was a lot less stressful than last Saturday.

New Personal Record: Six Miles in 90 Minutes

This morning before it got too hot I walked to town in a mere 90 minutes. That is an average speed of 4 miles an hour or one mile every fifteen minutes over unpaved roads. My usual time is about 120 minutes or only 3 miles an hour. For somebody whose health was an absolute wreck five years ago I think today's walk was a pretty good accomplishment.

Chinese-Jewish Fusion Food or Kosher Szechwan

Last night I cooked up a new dish which combined kosher egg noodles with Chinese spices. First boil the water to cook the noodles. Then add the package of noodles and cook according to the instructions on the package. At the same time chop up and fry in a wok one medium onion, one large clove of garlic, one inch of fresh ginger root, one Serrano chili pepper and five miniature carrots. Cook these ingredients over medium heat. In a small bowl combine three tablespoons of hosein sauce with three tablespoons of ketchup and two teaspoons of chili oil. After boiling the noodles add them to the wok and pour the sauce over them. Then cook while stirring until the sauce is evenly distributed over the surface of the noodles. This dish turned out to be surprisingly tasty.

Update: I have corrected the spelling of "poor" to "pour." Normally, I would not note this correction. But, it was pointed out to me by Kristin in the comments and since English is not her native language I think she deserves some credit for this. I am pretty sure that there will never be a day when I am correcting errors in Estonian language posts. So I am pretty impressed.

Ethnic Cleansing in Central Europe 1945-1946

During 1945 and 1946 some 14 million Germans from Central Europe and the Balkans permanently lost their traditional homelands due to a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing. Estimates of the number of ethnic German refugees and expellees to perish as a result of this forced migration range up to two million people, most of them women and children. At the International Conference on International Borders and Migration I hosted on Saturday, Rudolf Pueschel spoke about the forced expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from what is now the Czech Republic. After the defeat of Germany in the spring of 1945, the new authorities in Czechoslovakia forcibly expelled over three million ethnic Germans from Bohemia. More than 200,000 of them died in the process of this ethnic erasure. Soviet and Polish forces expelled millions more Germans from lands that are now part of Poland into the current borders of Germany. My friend Abed left a link in a recent comment on my blog to this article dealing with this colossal crime.

New Link

In the spirit of reciprocity I am adding a link to ClioWeb. I did not have time to do this Friday when I first noticed that Jeremy Boggs, a Ph.D. student at George Mason University had a link to my blog. As always my standard linking rules are in effect. If you link to my blog I will link to yours. If you delink to me I will likewise remove my link to you. I believe that this is the only fair way to manage my blogroll.

The Conference Went Very Well

There was a time not too long ago when I fully expected that all the outside participants would drop out leaving me without any presenters other than myself. This did not happen and all the presentations and question sessions went very well. The people of Arivaca have given me very positive feedback on the conference. They have all said that they found it both an informative and an enjoyable experience. Since I had prepared myself for the possibility of a complete disaster I think the conference turned out to be an overall success. In retrospect organizing and hosting a conference without any institutional backing was a pretty crazy idea. But, it turned out much better than I had any reason to expect.

The final day before the conference

Greta Uehling is definitely coming to the conference. Chris and I will be picking her up at the airport this evening. I have keys to the hall. My paper is finished and ready to go. All that is left regarding preparation is to set up the screen and pick up the final items for the two coffee breaks. Also I have a little bit of good news not related to the conference. I got short listed for an academic post today.

Last minute conference organizing

I am making last minute arrangements now. I am picking up the keys to the hall today. Then during the next two days I need to take care of such mundane things as making sure people get here from the airport. I also need to finish preparing my own talk. But, that is almost done. I am hoping that everything goes smoothly. I would hate for my first experience as a conference organizer to be a disaster.

Conference Update

Well the conference preparation is moving right along. It looks like Greta Uehling may very well be able to make it to the conference. She is currently negotiating with the airlines to try and get a ticket. I really hope she can make it.

Conference Organizing

To my half dozen readers, sorry for the lack of posts recently. I have been quite busy making the final preparations for the International Conference on International Borders and Migration. I originally referred to this event as the Big Idea, but now I think the World's Smallest Academic Conference might be more accurate. Initially 18 people expressed interest in the conference. I then had an 80% drop out rate including four in the last two months. I am particularly dismayed that everybody from the University of Arizona in Tucson dropped out in January. Fortunately, the remaining four participants including myself cannot drop out at this point. I have rented the hall and publicly committed myself to the conference. The other three people have all made their travel and lodging arrangements. So next week there will be a conference.

Ivy League Gang Affiliations

It appears that clothing with Ivy League university monograms have become popular apparel with street gangs. According to this post by Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy the favored school for gang bangers is Dartmouth College. But Harvard has a strong following among the Bloods. I am pretty sure that SOAS being a British institution with a symbol that looks like it came from the Lebanese flag will never have to worry about this problem. So I do not think I will have to worry about being shot for wearing the wrong gang colors. But, I would say that wearing a Harvard sweat shirt now in a Crips neighborhood is probably asking to be killed.

It Has Been 63 Years Since the Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush

On the morning of 23 February 1944, the NKVD began the systematic round up and deportation of almost the entire Chechen and Ingush nations from their mountain homeland. In the course of a week 19,000 NKVD, NKGB and SMERSH operatives leading 100,000 NKVD internal troops herded over 387,000 Chechens and 91,000 Ingush into 180 train echelons bound for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Stalin regime dispersed over four fifths of these mountain peoples across the vast flat plains of Kazakhstan. Here the unfamiliar climate, poor housing, inadequate food and a lack of medical care killed tens of thousands of them during the next couple of years. The NKVD also placed them under special settler restrictions that reduced them to the status of state serfs with no freedom of movement. The Soviet government only released them from this bondage on 16 July 1956. The deportees took advantage of this new freedom to return home to the Caucasus. Finally on 11 February 1957 the regime in Moscow finished recreating the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, despite refusing to return significant portions of its previous territory. The culture, traditional way of life and even the physical existence of the Chechen and Ingush nations came under extreme pressure during their years of exile. The deportations and years of special settlement are traumatic events in the collective memory of the Chechens and Ingush and form an important part of their national narrative.

The initial round up of the Chechens and Ingush involved considerable violence on the part of the Soviet security forces. They arrested over 2,000 people and confiscated over 20,000 firearms. More notably they perpetrated a number of massacres during the operation. The most notorious of these occurred at Khaibakh. Here the NKVD herded over 200 Chechens into barns and other buildings and then set them on fire. This atrocity has become a particularly important symbol in the long litany of Chechen suffering.

The NKVD stuffed the deportees into train wagons meant for the transport of livestock or freight, not humans. On average about 45 people shared each car. They had only a bucket or hole in the floor for a latrine and little food or water. Outbreaks of typhus and other diseases killed many people before they even arrived in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The material deprivation and deaths from infectious illnesses such as typhus would only increase in the areas of special settlement.

In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan the Chechens and Ingush lived and frequently died in conditions of extreme poverty. They lacked adequate housing, food, clothing, shoes and access to medical care. Hunger, cold and disease afflicted them daily. Repeated epidemics of typhus resulted from the unhygienic and cramped living conditions forced upon the deportees. In combination with chronic malnutrition this disease proved extremely deadly to the Chechen and Ingush exiles.

The Chechens and Ingush suffered truly staggering losses as a result of the deportations and poor material conditions in exile. D.M. Ediev, a Karachai demographer, estimates that the deaths in excess of normal mortality among the Chechens between 1944 and 1952 at over 125,000 or more than 30% of their total population. The Ingush had a somewhat lower mortality rate with a little over 20,000 excess deaths or a little over 20% of their population. (See Ediev, table 104, p. 294) Stalin thus killed a portion of the Chechen population roughly equal to the percentage of Jews in the world to perish in the Holocaust. The Ingush lost a segment of their population proportionately as large as the Gypsy deaths at the hands of the Nazis.

Despite its massive scale there is little public awareness in the English-speaking world of Stalin’s racially motivated crimes against the Chechens, Ingush and others. In large part this is because the Russian government and Russian people unlike Germany have not come to terms with these monumental crimes. They have been greatly aided in this refusal to admit wrongdoing by the US government, academia and media.

Sources:

N.F. Bugai, ed., “Deportatsiia: Beriia dokladyvaet Stalinu,” Kommunist, no. 1, 1991, pp. 101-112.

D.M. Ediev, Demograficheskie poteri deportirovannykh narodov SSSR (Stavropol’: ‘Argus’, 2003).

Imaginary Course Number Four: Deported Nationalities in Kazakhstan and Central Asia

Texts:

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

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

Bachmann, Berta, trans. Duin, Edgar, Memories of Kazakhstan: A Report on the Life Experience of A German Woman in Russia (Lincoln, ND: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1983).

Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

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

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

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

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

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

Weitz, Eric D., A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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, Karachays, 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.

Course Requirements:

This course will consist primarily of seminar discussions of the assigned reading. Unless otherwise noted, students are to read the entire book named in the assignment. At the end of every two weeks each student will be required to submit a 400 to 500 word comparative review of the week’s reading. This review should highlight the similarities and differences in both the subjects and the viewpoints of the works being examined. These short critiques will form a substantial part of the final grade. Each student will also be required to write a 3000 to 3500 word research paper on one of the nationalities deported to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. This paper is due at the end of week nine. Please submit a copy of this paper to each student as well as the instructor. The class will discuss these papers during week twelve and thirteen of the course. Plagiarism will result in failing the course and notification of the Dean.

Grading

Five Short Critiques 30% (6% each)
Final Research Paper 50%
Oral Participation 20%


Schedule

Week 1 Introduction and Course Organization

Weeks 2-3 Concepts and Parallel Cases of Ethnic Cleansing and Racial Exclusion

Naimark and Weitz

Weeks 4-5 Nationality Policies in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s

Martin

Weeks 6-7 Deportations

Pohl and Polian

Weeks 8-9 Life Under the Special Settlement Regime

Bachmann and Uehling

Weeks 10-11 Unrehabilitated Nationalities: Russian-Germans, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks

Alexeyeva chapters 7-9, pp. 137-174, Allworth, and Sheehy and Bohdan

Weeks 12-13 Conclusion

Student research papers

Lunch at the Red Rooster Cafe

Today after finishing hours of footnote typing I did some less mind numbing work. I went with my organizing assistant for the International Conference on International Borders and Migration, Chris O'Byrne, to the Red Rooster Cafe for lunch. After making sure that the food was up to proper international standards I reserved lunch at the large table for the participants of the conference on 10 March 2007. I wish all my work was as enjoyable.

The Footnote: There Has to be a Better Way

I just spent nearly nine hours during the last three days correcting or more accurately standardizing 68 footnotes for a paper that will be published as a chapter in an anthology. Most of the work was in making sure that periods, commas and parentheses all corresponded to the Chicago Style. In particular I found having to provide the full publishing information each time a work was first cited as a footnote to be an exercise in redundancy. The Chicago Style requires a works cited page which already has all this information. Thus I think providing the author's name, the title of the work and the page number should be sufficient for all the footnotes. If a reader wants to know the city of publication, the publishing house or the date of publication he can look the source up by name and title on the works cited page. But, for some reason the people who came up with the stylistic guidelines for the Chicago Style wanted me to spend hours copying and pasting publishing minutia from the works cited page to the footnotes. I am not sure why this replication is deemed necessary, but it caused me to spend over a full work day engaged in mind numbing drudgery.

I realize that for academic work there really is no substitute for the footnote. Although as I note above I think they should all be simplified with the full publishing information limited to either a works cited page or a bibliography. But, for popular works I find footnotes to be annoying. Unless it is an outrageous claim I do not generally bother checking the citations in works aimed at a non-scholarly audience. A number of people have told me they like footnotes because they serve as lists of suggested further reading. I agree that lists of suggested further reading are helpful, but I think that there are better ways than footnotes to provide them. Right now for my popular history, Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans under Soviet Rule, I am dispensing with footnotes in favor of having a short bibliographical and historiographical essay on each chapter at the back of the book. These essays will deal with the major sources I used in writing the chapter. Due to the nature of the book's intended audience I will be giving special emphasis to those sources available in English. I think that this is a better way to provide information both on the book's source base and give readers suggestions for further reading on the topic.

Imaginary Course Number Three: Introduction to the History of Kazakhstan and Central Asia Under Russian and Soviet Rule

Texts:

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

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

Nove, Alec and Newth, J.A., The Soviet Middle East: A Communist Model for Development? (New York: Praeger, 1967).

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

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.

Course Requirements:

This course will consist of lectures and discussions based upon the assigned reading. At the end of each week every student will be required to submit a 200 to 300 word long summary of the week’s readings. This summary should include the main points and themes addressed by the author. These summaries will count significantly towards the final grade for the class. Each student will also be required to write a 2000 to 2500 word long research paper on one of the weekly topics covered in class. This assignment is due the first day of the last week of classes. Plagiarism will result in failing the course and notification of the Dean.

Grading

Twelve Short Summaries 36% (3% each)
Final Research Paper 50%
Oral Participation 14%

Schedule

Week 1 Geography, Peoples and Cultures

Chapter 3 in Allworth, pp. 92-130

Week 2 The Russian Conquest

Chapters 4 and 5 in Allworth, pp. 131-171

Week 3 Tsarist Rule

Chapters 6 and 7 in Allworth, pp. 172-206

Week 4 The Bolshevik Revolution

Chapters 8, 9 and 10 in Allworth, pp. 207-265

Week 5 Demarcation of National Borders the 1920s

Chapters 1 and 2 in Martin, pp. 1-27 and pp. 56-74

(Note these page numbers refer to the edition published in London)

Week 6 Promotion of National Cadres and Cultures in the 1920s

Chapter 4 in Martin, pp. 125-181

Week 7 Collectivization and Industrialization in the 1930s

Chapters 11 and 12 in Allworth, pp. 266-348

Week 8 Political and Cultural Changes in the 1930s

Chapter 13 in Allworth, pp. 349-396

Week 9 World War II: “Human Dumping Grounds”

Chapter 2 sections 2-4 and chapter 3 sections 1 and 2 in Polian, pp. 123-157 and 181-194

Week 10 Post-war Economic Development

Nove and Newth (read whole book)

Week 11 The Era of Stagnation

Chapter 17 in Allworth, pp. 527-572

Week 12 Glasnost and Perestroika

Chapter 18 in Allworth, pp. 573-607

Week 13 Conclusion

Correction

Very soon after I posted my last blog entry I got an e-mail from Greta Uehling expressing regret that she would not be able to attend my conference due to a schedule conflict.

First Arivaca International Conference on International Borders and Migration

On 10 March 2007, I will be hosting the first Arivaca International Conference on International Borders and Migration. The conference will have four presenters from outside the community who will address various aspects of international migration. It will be open and free to the public and take place at the Arivaca Community Center from 9:00 am to 5pm. There will be two coffee breaks and a break for lunch. I have reserved 20 minutes of time for questions and comments from the audience for each speaker. I hope to preside over a lively discussion between the invited speakers and the audience.

My goal with this conference is to examine the role of migration across international borders in a comparative global context. It will thus deal with migration in Europe as well as the Americas. I will give a short introductory paper on the history of international migration. My goal is to frame the topic in a global perspective and encourage the audience to think about the connections, similarities and differences of various migrant flows. I hope that this exercise will allow the listeners to place the talks by our invited guests into a coherent conceptual framework. Rather than just viewing these case studies as isolated movements of people I want people to think about them as parts of larger historical and international trends.

The first invited paper by Dr. Rudolf Pueschel will deal with the long-term environmental and social consequences of the expulsion of the German population from north Bohemia in Czechoslovakia in 1945 and 1946. The forced removal of the German communities from north Bohemia and their replacement with Czech settlers greatly altered the landscape, architecture and economic use of the region. Among other changes the ethnic cleansing of the Germans from north Bohemia led to massive environmental degradation. Unlike the other invited papers, Dr. Pueschel will be dealing with effects of emigration rather than immigration. The impact of losing population rather than gaining it due to migration has been unduly ignored.

Next, the conference will deal with the influx of illegal immigrants into the various countries of the European Union. Professor Richard Griffiths of Leiden University will talk about the efforts of the European Union as a whole to control entry across its borders by illegal immigrants seeking work. Specifically he will discuss the European Union attempts to police the English Channel, the coast of Southern Italy and the eastern border of Germany. This paper will thus provide a detailed and comparative look at the interconnections between the flows of illegal immigrants into different countries.

Professor Chris Quispel also of Leiden University will talk about illegal immigration into the Netherlands. He will deal with the reasons for illegal immigration into the Netherlands, the policies of the Dutch government regarding these immigrants and the opinions of the Dutch citizenry towards them. The Netherlands will thus serve as an individual case study for this conference regarding illegal immigrants in the European Union.

The final paper will cover immigration into the US. Dr. Greta Uehling will speak about the smuggling of children into the US. She will discuss how the US government deals with unaccompanied minor children coming into the US illegally. Among topics she will cover are the differences in US treatment of such children depending upon their country of origin. In particular she will be comparing how US authorities deal with children from Latin America versus those from Asia. Her paper provides a detailed analysis of a little discussed aspect of US immigration policy.

I hope that this event stimulates a lively discussion of the various issues involved in international migration. In particular I hope it encourages people to think about these issues in a broader perspective. The current mass flow of illegal immigrants into the US across the Mexican border is not unique. It is part of a larger set of international and historical trends. It can be better understood when viewed in this perspective.

Imaginary Course Number Two - Mehmet’s Grandchildren: The Islamic Peoples of Eastern Europe and their Ottoman Roots

Texts

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

Finkel, Caroline, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (NY: Basic Books, 2006).

Gammer, Moshe, The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule (London: Hurst and Co., 2005).

Malcolm, Noel, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: NYU Press, 1996).

Wilson, Andrew, “Politics in and Around Crimea: A Difficult Homecoming,” in Allworth, Edward, ed., The Tatars of Crimea: Return to the Homeland, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

Course Description

This is an introductory course to the history of the various Muslim nationalities living in Eastern Europe. In particular it will cover the Bosnian Muslims, the Crimean Tatars and the Chechens. These nationalities all adopted Islam under Ottoman influence and later came under the rule of Christian empires. The course will thus start with a survey of the long history of the Ottoman Empire. It will then examine the history of each of the nationalities chronologically from their ethno-genesis through to modern times. Particular emphasis will be given to the 19th and 20th centuries when these peoples all lived under first Christian and then communist rule. During this time these nationalities became reduced to national and religious minorities within much larger states dominated by Slavs of Christian heritage. These states saw integrating these Muslim nationalities as a problem and pursued various policies ranging from granting them broad cultural administrative autonomy to conducting ruthless repression and ethnic cleansing against them. This class will examine the relationship between these nationalities and their rulers in Belgrade and Moscow in the historical context of the slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the subjugation of much of its Muslim population to European colonial rule.

Course Requirements

This course will consist of lectures and discussions based upon the assigned reading. At the end of each week every student will be required to submit a 200 to 300 word long summary of the week’s readings. This summary should include the main points and themes addressed by the author. These summaries will count significantly towards the final grade for the class. Each student will also be required to write a 2000 to 2500 word long research paper on one of the Muslim nationalities in the Balkans, Caucasus or Crimea. This assignment is due the first day of the last week of classes. Plagiarism will result in failing the course and notification of the Dean.

Grading

Twelve Short Summaries 36% (3% each)
Final Research Paper 50%
Oral Participation 14%

Schedule

Week 1 Introduction and Course Organization

Section One: The Ottoman Empire

Week 2 The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire

Chapters 1-5 in Finkel, pp. 1-151

Week 3 Expansion and Consolidation of the Empire

Chapters 6-9 in Finkel, pp. 152-288

Week 4 “The Sick Man of Europe”

Chapters 10-16 in Finkel, pp. 289-554

Section Two: The Balkans with Special Emphasis on Bosnia

Week 5 Bosnia in the Middle Ages and under the Ottomans

Chapters 1-9 in Malcolm, pp. 1-135

Week 6 Austrian Rule, WWI and WWII

Chapters 10-13 in Malcolm, pp. 136-192

Week 7 Communist and Post-Communist Rule

Chapters 14-16 and Epilogue in Malcolm, pp. 193-272

Section Three: Crimea

Week 8 The Crimean Khanate and the Tsarist Era

Chapters 1-10 in Fisher, pp. 1-108

Week 9 The Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Union

Chapters 11-25 in Fisher, pp. 109-202

Week 10 Return to Crimea

Wilson

Section Four: The Caucasus with Special Emphasis on Chechnya

Week 11 Tsarist Subjugation

Chapters 1-9 in Gammer, pp. 1-118

Week 12 Soviet Rule and After

Chapters 10-15 in Gammer, pp. 119-221

Week 13 Conclusion

Research paper due in first class of the week.

95 Years of Arizona Statehood

On 14 February 1912 Arizona became the 48th state to join the USA. We had been a federal territory since 24 February 1863. Somewhat ironically Arizona became a state exactly 50 years after it was recognized as a territory within the Confederacy by Jefferson Davis on 14 February 1862. Despite the importance of 14 February 1912 in Arizona history there seems to be very little recognition here that today is anything other than Valentine's Day. It is tough being an historian in a world that cares only about the present.

GKO Order 1281ss - 14 February 1942

The conscription of deported Russian-Germans under the terms of GKO Order 1123ss quickly depleted the number of able-bodied men between the ages 17 and 50 among this population. Despite exhausting this labor pool, the Stalin regime still only managed to mobilize 93,000 out of a planned 120,000 Russian-Germans for the labor army. The Stalin regime thus soon expanded the category of Russian-Germans eligible for conscription into the labor army. Over 50,000 local Russian-German men aged 17 to 50 that had not been subjected to deportation lived in the Russian Far North, Urals, Siberia, the Russian Far East, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia. GKO Order 1281ss of 14 February 1942 signed by Josef Stalin ordered that these men be “mobilized into labor colonies for the duration of the war and transferred to the NKVD USSR for use in constructing rail roads.” This induction campaign followed the same procedures as the one conducted under GKO Order 1123ss in January 1942.

This second labor draft took considerably longer than the first one. The decree established a deadline of 25 March 1942 for the Peoples Commissariat of Defense to complete this mobilization. The Soviet authorities, however, only completed this task in late April. The induction netted over 40,000 Russian-Germans out of the more than 50,000 members of the target population. The transfer of these men to labor army work sites took place on unhygienic trains with insufficient potable water and edible food. Outbreaks of gastro-intestinal diseases killed large numbers of these men during transit. The NKVD removed 270 corpses of men to die from this cause from one train on 21 April 1942 and another 49 on 13 May 1942.The survivors initially became attached to nine separate labor army work sites. The NKVD assigned nearly 18,000 of these men to rail construction and most of the remainder to build industrial complexes in the Urals. This second mobilization brought the number of Russian-Germans in the labor army up to over 120,000 men.

Sources:

N.F. Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v robochie kolonny…I. Stalin”: Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), doc. 18, pp. 39-40, doc. 19, p. 41, doc. 38, pp. 61-62, doc. 40, p. 64, doc. 47, pp. 70-71, doc. 210, pp. 282-283.

A.A. German and A.N. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR trudovoi armii (1941-1955) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), pp. 57-59 and table 5, p. 67.

Updated Schedule for Conference on International Borders and Migration

This is an updated list of presentations that will be at the International Conference on International Borders and Migration I will be hosting at the Arivaca Community Center on Saturday 10 March 2007. The conference will start at 9 am and go to 5 pm. There will be two coffee breaks and a break for lunch.

Introduction and Overview

"International Migration in Global and Historical Perspective" - Dr. J. Otto Pohl (Arivaca, AZ)

International Migration and Europe

"Ethnic Cleansing, and Social and Environmental Ruin in Czechoslovakia" - Dr. Rudolf Pueschel (Mountain View, CA)

"Crossing the Borders of 'Fortress Europe'" - Professor Richard Griffiths (Leiden University, the Netherlands)

"The Opening of the Dutch Borders. Legal and Illegal Migration to the Netherlands 1945-2005" - Professor Chris Quispel (Leiden University, the Netherlands)

Immigrants and the US Border

"The International Smuggling of Children: Coyotes, Snakeheads, and the Politics of Compassion" - Dr. Greta Uehling

Imaginary Course Number One: Introduction to the History of the Soviet Union

Texts

Allworth, Edward, “Mass Exile, Ethnocide, Group Derogation” in Allworth, Edward, ed., The Tatars of Crimea: Return to the Homeland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

Khazanov, Anatoly, “Meskhetian Turks in Search of Self Identity,” Central Asian Survey, vol. 11, no. 4, 1992.

Hosking, Geoffry, The First Socialist Society: The History of the Soviet Union from Within (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Krieger, Viktor, “Patriots or Traitors? – The Soviet Government and the “German Russians’ After the Attack on the USSR by National Socialist Germany” trans. by Venner, Catherine in Schlogel, Karl, Russian-German Special Relations in the Twentieth Century: A Closed Chapter? (New York: Berg Publishers, 2006).

Long, James, “The Volga Germans and the Famine of 1921,” The Russian Review, vol. 51 (Oct. 1992).

Martin, Terry, “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism,” in Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin, Terry, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Merridale, Catherine, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

Werth, Nicolas, “The Mechanism of a Mass Crime: The Great Terror in the Soviet Union” in Gellatey, Robert and Kiernen, Ben, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Course Description

This course is an introductory survey course of the history of the Soviet Union. It will cover political, economic and social changes in the USSR from the time of its founding until its collapse. Important political events that will be covered include the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Terror, World War II, and the reforms of the Khrushchev era. Special emphasis will be given to the role of World War II in Soviet history and the multinational nature of the USSR. In particular the course will cover how different nationalities in the Soviet Union experienced and remembered the Second World War.

Course Requirements

This course will consist of lectures based upon the assigned readings and two assigned papers. The first paper will require the student to trace the development of one aspect of Soviet government policy such as nationalities, agriculture, industry or the penal system from the 1920s through the 1930s. It should be between 1500 and 2000 words and is due at the start of week nine. The second paper will require library research in addition to the assigned class readings. For this paper students should pick one Soviet nationality and discuss their collective memory of World War II. The paper should be between 2500 and 3000 words and is due at the start of week fourteen. Plagiarism will result in failure of the course and notification of the Dean.

Grading

First Paper 25%
Second Paper 50%
Class Participation 25%

Schedule

Week 1 Introduction

Week 2 The Bolshevik Revolution

Chapters 1 and 2 in Hosking, pp. 15-56

Week 3 War Communism

Chapters 3 in Hosking, pp. 57-92 and Long

Week 4 Nationalities in the 1920s

Chapter 4 in Hosking, pp. 93-118 and Martin

Week 5 Economic Transformation in the 1930s

Chapters 5 and 6 in Hosking, pp. 119-182

Week 6 The Great Terror

Chapter 6 in Hosking, pp. 183-204 and Werth

Week 7 The USSR on the Eve of the Great War

Chapter 8 and 9 in Hosking, pp.205-260

Week 8 Work on First Paper

Week 9 The Nazi Invasion of the USSR

First paper due at start of class. Chapter 10 in Hosking, pp. 263-295, Chapters 1-4 in Merridale, pp. 1-152, and Krieger

Week 10 Victory over Germany

Chapters 5-11 in Merridale, pp. 153-388

Week 11 Political and Economic Changes in the USSR after World War II

Chapters 11-13 in Hosking, pp. 296-401

Week 12 Nationality in the USSR after World War II

Chapter 14 in Hosking, pp. 402-445, Allworth, and Khazanov

Week 13 Work on Second Paper

Week 14 The End of the Soviet Union

Second paper due at start of class. Chapter 15 in Hosking, pp. 446-501

Week 15 Conclusion

Imaginary Syllabi

Since I have never taught any courses all of the syllabi I have submitted for job applications along with my CV are purely imaginary. That is they only exist in paper form and have never been executed in a classroom setting. Since only one of the more than 100 institutions I have applied to has ever given me an interview I think that I am probably not providing the selection committees with what they want to read. I doubt that I will ever get to teach any of these courses, but maybe somebody can get some use out of my syllabi. At any rate I am going to start posting a few of them here in the hopes that maybe somebody can offer me some constructive criticism. I will post the first one later today.

Diamond Jubilee

I found the 75th scholarly work to cite one of my publications today. The winner is Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge, 2006). It cites my article "Stalin's Genocide against the 'Repressed Peoples'," Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 267-293. I hope to be celebrating 100 academic citations in the not too distant future.

Spicy Tomato and Rice Soup with Homemade Croutons

Sunday I made a delicious soup from tomato juice, rice, olive oil, garlic, chilies, onion, black pepper and sourdough bread. First I made the croutons. I cut up a few pieces of sourdough bread. The end pieces work best for this purpose. Then I fried them in olive oil in my wok. I fried the bread using high heat until the pieces were nice and golden. They resembled miniature pieces of fried slice. Then I scooped them out and drained them on paper towels. Next I chopped up one onion, three cloves of garlic and three Serrano chilies and cooked them in the oil using medium heat. When the onion turned translucent I added a small bowl of cooked rice to the wok and fried it. Then I turned the heat down to low and added 64 ounces of tomato juice and fresh ground black pepper. I cooked the soup on low heat, stirring every few minutes until the concoction started to bubble. At this point I turned off the stove, ladled the soup into a bowl and added the croutons. I made four bowls worth. I ate two on Sunday night. This was probably a mistake since the rice makes the soup very hearty. Yesterday, I had another bowl. Tonight I will eat the last bowl. All I have to do is make some more croutons. You can do a lot with a wok, not just Asian food.

Almost Diamond Jubilee

I have now verified 74 different scholastic publications that cite my published work. I found two new citations today, one journal article and one book. Interestingly enough both of these citations are by women.

Thai Food Website

A commenter left the address for this site here, but the link did not work. I am posting the correct link to this site. It has a lot of very tasty looking Thai recipes and videos on how to cook them. Just looking at the pictures of the dishes makes me hungry.

Super Simple South East Asian Sweet, Sour, Spicy and Salty Sauce

I think the title of this post deserves some sort of award for best alliteration. But, the topic is a serious one. Last night I tried out the wok and made some fried rice flavored with fish sauce, Serranos, garlic, lime and sugar. Various versions of this sauce exist throughout mainland South East Asian cuisines. One sees it in Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian cooking. Usually it is either used as a dipping sauce or poured over rice. I prefer to mix it in the rice during the final stages of frying. The concoction I whipped up was quite simple. I dissolved three sugar cubes in hot water. For some reason we had no loose sugar. I then added one sliced Serrano, one minced clove of garlic, the juice of two limes and three tablespoons of fish sauce. I stirred up the sauce and then mixed it in my frying rice. When this sauce is used for dipping it usually has shredded carrots in it. Since I already had chopped carrots in the fried rice I skipped on this particular garnish.

Cooking in Arivaca

Recently, I have been cooking a lot of rice and chili and rice and salsa for dinner. These are really simple and tasty recipes. Just cook up an onion and four serrano peppers in olive oil then add cooked rice and then either a can of chili or a jar of salsa. I have been cooking these dishes regularly in our wok. So much so in fact that our old wok had to be retired to the graveyard of dead woks out in the back yard. Today, my uncle purchased a new big 14" diameter carbon steel wok. He also got some Thai fish sauce. So I am going to start doing some South East Asian style dishes in the wok. If anybody wants to come by for dinner let me know. I can cook a lot food in the new wok.

"On the Organization of Detachments of Mobilized Germans in Camps of the NKVD USSR"

On 12 January 1942, Beria issued Prikaz No. 0083, “On the Organization of Detachments of Mobilized Germans in Camps of the NKVD USSR.” This decree came in direct response to GKO Order 1123ss and established the work and living conditions of the Russian-German labor army men sent to Gulag camps. The decree instructed the labor camps receiving mobilized Russian-Germans to provide them with living accommodations segregated from the prisoner population. In practice they did not always receive separate living quarters from the convicts living in the camps. The decree then ordered the incoming men be divided into detachments of 1500-2000 men, further divided into colonies of 300 to 500 men and finally organized into brigades of 30 to 100 men. The labor army conscripts came under Gulag discipline and supply norms for food, clothes and other goods. Special boards of the NKVD received the authority to try all cases of discipline violation, refusal to work and desertion among these men. Punishment for such infractions ranged up to execution by firing squad. In order to prevent such problems the decree ordered the various camp administrations with labor army detachments to organize a clandestine network of agents among the Russian-German inductees. The imposition of Gulag rations and administration upon the labor army had extremely negative consequences for the Russian-German conscripts. Their legal status and material conditions became almost indistinguishable from that of prisoners. This deprivation of civil and human rights resulted in the death and permanent incapacitation of hundreds of thousands of Russian-Germans.

Source:

N.F. Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v robochie kolonny…I. Stalin”: Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), doc. 39, pp. 62-64.

I think this might be why I am unemployed

Evidently I do not have the proper background to teach today's college courses. Political history has largely been abolished in favor of other things. Go here to see what type of garbage passes for higher education today.

hat tip: Nathanael Robinson of Rhine River

The Labor Army: GKO Order 1123ss

The Soviet State Defense Committee issued GKO Order 1123ss “On the Orderly Use of German-Resettlers of Conscript Age 17-50” on 10 January 1942. Signed by Joseph Stalin this decree provided the legal basis for the first mass induction of Russian-German civilians into the labor army. It made all able bodied Russian-German men between 17 and 50 deported to Novosibirsk Oblast, Omsk Oblast, Krasnoiarsk Krai, Altai Krai and Kazakhstan eligible for mobilization into work colonies for the duration of the war against Germany. The NKVD estimated that this population numbered between 125,000 and 130,000 men. The decree called for the mobilization of 120,000 of them into labor detachments to fell trees (45,000), build metallurgy factories (35,000) and lay rail lines (40,000). The Stalin regime began the military style conscription of these men into forced labor brigades immediately.

The Peoples Commissariat of Defense (NKO) sent draft notices to the Russian-Germans called up for labor service. They were required to report to specified collection points with winter clothing, bedding, eating utensils and ten days worth of food. The NKO then turned the draftees over to the NKVD and NKPS (Peoples Commissariat of Transportation). The call up itself lasted 20 days and the NKVD and NKPS had until 10 February 1942 to deliver the inducted men to their assigned work sites. Special boards of the NKVD had the authority to try those who failed to appear at the collection points. The punishment for such disobedience included the death penalty. Despite this power, the initial draft of Russian-German men into the labor army failed to meet its goal by almost 30,000 people. It only inducted 40,000 men to work in six lumber camps and 28,000 to work on four construction sites in the Gulag. It mobilized another 25,000 Russian-German deportees to work on seven NKPS railway projects. The total number of Russian-Germans conscripted into the labor army between 10 and 30 January 1942 fell just short of 93,000 men. The NKVD and NKPS then transported most of these men by rail to Gulag camps in the Urals.

These men joined the nearly 21,000 Russian-Germans already conscripted into work colonies by the NKVD in Ukraine or discharged from the Red Army and sent to Gulag camps as “labor mobilized Germans” during the fall of 1941. The Stalin regime condemned these men to forced labor in Gulag camps without charge or trial, but rather on the basis of their German ancestry. The Soviet government did not count these men as prisoners despite the fact that they lived in conditions almost identical to those of convicts. Rather it publicly represented this system of forced labor aimed at a specific ethnic group as an alternative to military service. The men and later women subjected to this modern form of slavery referred to the institution as the labor army or in Russian trudarmiia a contraction of trudovaia armiia.

Sources:

N.F. Bugai, ed., “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v robochie kolonny…I. Stalin”: Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), doc. 18, pp. 39-40, docs. 30-36, pp. 53-60, doc. 39, pp. 62-63, doc. 47, pp. 70-71.

A.A. German and A.N. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941-1955) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), pp. 48-56.

It Has Been 65 Years Since the Mobilization of Russian-Germans Into the Soviet Fishing Industry

On 6 January 1942, the SNK and Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued decree 19ss “On the Development of the Fishing Industry in the Basins of the Rivers of Siberia and the Far East.” As a result of this decree the NKVD forcibly relocated for a second time over 66,000 deported Russian-Germans from the more southern regions of Siberia north to catch fish along the icy shores of the Yenisei, Ob, Indirka and Lena rivers. This forced migration north took place from January 1942 to October 1943. It included the resettlement of over 15,000 Russian-Germans from southern Novosibirsk Oblast to Narym Okrug and 9,000 from southern Omsk Oblast to Khanty-Mansi Okrug and Yamalo-Nenets Okrug. On 24 October 1942, the Stalin regime issued decree 1732 mobilizing Russian-Germans to work in the fishing industry along the coasts of the White and Barents Seas. The total number of Russian-Germans assigned to fishing camps in northern Siberia and the Arctic eventually reached over 80,000. This second deportation thus swept up more than one fifth of the Russian-Germans banished to Siberia.

The Russian-German deportees assigned to the fishing camps had to build their own shelter. They received no construction materials from the Soviet authorities for this purpose. Only mud and straw could be readily found along the banks of the icy rivers where the NKVD had abandoned them. Most of the deportees thus built small mud huts in an effort to provide some small amount of protection from the elements. These primitive domiciles proved incapable of keeping out rain, snow or the overflow of the rivers. They lacked heat, light and ventilation. Families lived under extremely compact and unsanitary conditions. In Krasnoiarsk Krai, Russian-Germans working in the fishing industry only had an average of 1 cubic meter of living space per a person. The overcrowded and filthy huts proved to be breeding grounds for infectious diseases. The refusal of local officials to quarantine the sick greatly exacerbated this problem. Illness killed many of the Russian-Germans sent to develop the Soviet fishing industry during 1942.

The Russian-Germans working in the fishing camps lacked proper clothing and footwear to protect them from the cold. They frequently suffered from frostbite and many cases were so severe as to require the amputation of feet or legs. Others died from gangrene. The icy water of the Siberian rivers froze the very flesh of the exiles.

Lack of food even more so than a lack of warm shelter and clothing, however, proved to be the greatest problem faced by the Russian-Germans assigned to the fishing industry. The Russian-Germans worked for fishing trusts. These trusts issued work brigades with bread rations in exchange for delivering set quotas of fish. A full ration consisted of 600 grams of bread a day. Most of the Russian-German work brigades, however, could not fulfill the high quotas established by the fishing trusts. The men and women in these brigades thus received only a minimum ration insufficient to sustain them or nothing at all. Hunger killed numerous Russian-Germans living along the banks of the northern Siberian rivers. In particular large numbers of children died from undernourishment during the winter of 1942-1943. The next year their material conditions deteriorated even further. On 1 November 1943, the fishing trusts struck many Russian-Germans from their supply lists thus leaving them without any means to acquire bread. Thousands of Russian-Germans thus suddenly found themselves desperately struggling to find food in the sparse habitat of northern Siberia.

Ida Bender, the daughter of the famous Russian-German national activist Dominic Hollmann, worked in a fishing camp at Iskup along the shore of the Yenisei in northern Krasnoiarsk Krai. She described the conditions and work as extremely difficult.

Ewald and I became fishermen in a work group of four: with a young girl and a supervisor named Diener. We were assigned a boat and a drag-net, even though we knew nothing about fishing. We were instructed to head out to the left bank of the Yenisei and begin fishing. We built a crude shelter out of branches and lived there during the week. Each day we repeatedly cast and pulled in the net harvesting tugun, similar in appearance to herring and barely larger than the middle finger, preserving them in a few barrels. By the end of the day, we were wet from the waist down and extremely tired. We dried out our clothes and ourselves around the campfire while we cooked a soup from the fish. Every week we delivered our catch across the river and brought our bread ration for a few days, a meager six-hundred grams per a person daily. (Bender, p. 57).

Her experience was by no means unique. Many Russian-Germans lived and worked under these conditions in the fishing industry in Siberia for years. Many did not survive and died of hunger, disease, exposure and drowning. Many of those that did survive lost limbs or otherwise suffered permanent physical disabilities. It still remains impossible to tabulate the total losses inflicted upon the Russian-Germans mobilized into the Soviet fishing industry by the Stalin regime.

Sources

Ida Bender, trans. Laurel Anderson, Carl Anderson and William Wiest, The Dark Abyss of Exile: The Story of Survival (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2000), p. 57.

V.I. Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri (Topchikha: Topchikhinskaia tip., 1995), vol. II, pp. 101-106.

N.F. Bugai, ed., “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v robochie kolonny…I. Stalin”: Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), doc. 195, p. 264.

A.A. German and A.N. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941-1955) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), pp. 40-42.

A Special Thanks to Jimmy Madigan

The other day I got a quarter of a kilo of Al Amir mint flavored shisha from Jimmy Madigan. I have not yet tried this particular brand. Chris and his sister Mary were supposed to come over today to take it out for a test smoke. They have rescheduled tea and hookah for tomorrow. I also made a cool sign in my rudimentary Arabic to put on our gate to announce the occasion.

Soviet Dentistry 65 Years Ago

I do not have a copy of the original Russian text of this document. Rather I have a German translation from the Russian. So the English translation I have prepared below has in fact been translated twice. The translation from German to English is mine. Alfred Eisfeld and Victor Herdt made the original translation from Russian to German.

Guidelines for the GULAG NKVD USSR for the removal of gold dental work from dead prisoners in corrective labor camps (4 January 1942)

1. The gold dental work of dead prisoners is to be removed.

2. The removal of the gold dental work is to be assigned to a commission consisting of representatives from the medical service, the camp administration and the finance section.

3. After the removal of the gold dental work the commission is to make a record in two copies of the number of removed units (crowns, teeth, hooks, bridges, etc.) and their exact mass is to be noted.

4. The record is to be signed by all of the above named representatives. A copy of the record is to remain in the documents of the camp medical service, and the second together with the removed gold dental work to be transferred to the camp financial section. The gold is then to be transferred to the appropriate section of the state bank, the receipt for the gold from the state bank is to be enclosed with the first record.

Source: Alfred Eisfeld and Victor Herdt, Hrsg., Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche in der Sowjetunion 1941-1956 (Koln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1996), Dok.. 140, S. 144-145.

Learning Arabic

This year is starting off kind of slow. But, I think slow and steady is better than rapidly burning out. I have decided for the third year in a row to try and teach myself the Arabic alphabet. I think I tried too hard at first in 2005 and 2006 and grew frustrated at my lack of progress and thus gave up too early. This year I am going at a slower pace and as a result I am retaining more of what I have studied. My modest goal is to be able to read newspaper headlines and street signs in Arabic by 1 January 2008. I think the key is to make sure I learn a little bit each day.

New Addition to Blog Roll

I have added Sean's Russia Blog to my links. I have a strict policy of reciprocity regarding links. If you link to me I will return the favor. If you delink from me I will likewise remove you. I think this is only fair.