Recent Reading

I recently finished reading The Russian Far East: A History by John J. Stephan. It is a very well written and concise history of the eastern most regions of what is now the Russian Federation. Unlike a great many academic books it is not dry and boring. Instead it presents a compelling narrative of political, diplomatic, military, social and economic developments in the Russian Far East. It does a particularly good job of describing the events and changes from 1917 to 1956. Stephan writes with wit and in plain English rather than academic jargon. I highly recommend this book.

"Shoro - eto sila"

All along the main streets of Bishkek there are beverage vendors. They do not sell lemonade, however. Instead they sell Shoro or Tan. I am not a big fan of Tan, but I have developed a taste for Chalap Shoro. Both of these beverages are basically sour milk with salt and soda water. The word shoro means salted in Kyrgyz. It is definitely an acquired taste. But, it is very refreshing on a hot day. Hence their motto "Shoro - eto sila" which translates from Russian into English as "Shoro - it is strength."

Special Settlers in Kyrgyzstan

Now that classes are over it looks like I will have some free time to do some research this summer. I would like to do something specifically related to Kyrgyzstan. In particular I would like to research the special settlement system in Kyrgyzstan during the 1940s and 1950s. During World War II, Kyrgyzstan became "home" to over 100,000 special settlers, mostly deportees from the Caucasus. In October 1945 the number of special settlers in Kyrgyzstan reached 112,400. (Bugai, doc. 17, p. 237). The Karachais formed the first wave of war time deportees to Kyrgyzstan. The NKVD deported most members of this nationality, 68,938 people from their homeland on 2 November 1943. (Pobol' and Polian, p. 389). By 22 November 1943, 22,721 of these people had arrived in Kyrgyzstan. (Pobol' and Polian, doc. 3.82, p. 402). The Soviet government sent most of the rest of them, 45,500 people, to Kazakhstan (Bugai, doc. 2, pp. 97-98). After resettling the Karachais, the Stalin regime deported Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Meskhetian Turks to Kyrgyzstan during the course of 1944. These people lived in Kyrgyzstan as internal exiles until the late 1950s.

Sources:

N.F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin - Lavrentiiu Berii: "Ikh nado deportivrovat'" (Moscow: "Druzhba narodov", 1992).

N.L. Pobol' and P.M. Polian, eds., Staliniskie deportatsii 1928-1953 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Fond "Demokratiia", 2005).

Internal victim diasporas in the USSR

Americans often think of the Russian Empire as a country of emigration rather than immigration. But, the Russian Empire also took in a lot of immigrants from the late 18th century all the way through to its collapse. Among some of the largest such immigrant groups were Germans, Greeks and Koreans. All three of these initial labor and trade diasporas became victim diasporas in the USSR under Stalin. In 1937, the Soviet government forcibly relocated the Russian-Koreans from the Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Four years later in 1941, the regime brutally dispersed the Russian-Germans from the Volga, Ukraine, North Caucasus and other European regions of the USSR across Siberia and Kazakhstan. Finally, during the mid to late 1940s, the government transplanted a large portion of the Greek population in the Soviet Union from Crimea, the Black Sea coast and Transcaucasia east of the Urals. The USSR seems to have been unique in transforming so many large groups descendant from immigrants into internal victim diasporas.

Reflections on my first year of teaching

I have now finished teaching my first full academic year. Overall it was a very good experience. Most of the students did all of the work and did not plagiarize any of it. I hope that most of them also learned something in my classes.

Learning English

My girlfriend has started taking English language lessons. Almost all of our conversations are still in Russian, but I have been spending a fair amount of time going over English vocabulary with her recently. Her pronunciation is quite good and she is very enthusiastic.

Nationalism, Race and Ethnicity

Today I am trying to work on my syllabus for my Nationalism, Race and Ethnicity course. I would like to stress the development of ethnic categories into national and racial ones in this class. So I will be pointing to case studies where ethnic categories became politicized into national ones and then biologized into racial ones. I am still looking for reading material to assign and would greatly appreciate any suggestions. Below I have listed a couple of the pieces I will definitely be using in the class.

Francine Hirsch, "Race without the Practice of Racial Politics," Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 30-43.

Alaina Lemon, "Without a 'Concept'? Race as Discursive Practice," Slavic Review, vol. 61, no.1 (Spring 2002), pp. 54-61.

Nadim Raouhana and As'ad Ghanem, "The Crises of Minorities in Ethnic States: The Case of Palestinian Citizens in Israel," International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 30, no. 3 (August 1998), pp. 321-346.

Amir Weiner, "Nothing but Certainty," Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 44-53.

Eric D. Weitz, "Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges," Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 1-29.

Eric D. Weitz, "On Certainties and Ambivalencies: Reply to My Critics," Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 62-65.

Oren Yifachel, "'Ethnocracy' and Its Discontents: Minorities, Protests, and the Israeli Polity," Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000), pp. 725-756.

Summer

It is now very hot and humid here in Bishkek. I take the current weather to be a sign that summer is upon us. I have decided to stay here during the summer and go back to the US for Christmas this year. Now that classes are over I can devote my time here to doing things other than teaching. Today I finished revising a journal article for the third time. I hope I do not have to revise it again. I would like to work on other projects.

Randy McDonald's Review of The Liquidator

Randy McDonald has posted a good review of Sidonia Dedina's Edvard Benes: The Liquidator (Mountain View, CA: RPF Publications, 2001). For my own review of the book you can go here.

Afghan Food

Last night I went to a dinner party sponsored by Afghan students graduating from AUCA. The food and hospitality was most excellent. It was probably the best meal I have eaten in Kyrgyzstan.

Surgun

The 18th of May marks the 64th anniversary of Stalin's mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland to Uzbekistan and the Urals. I do not have time this year to write an extended article on this tragedy. So instead I will refer you to the article I wrote about it last year and the one I wrote the year before that. Please feel free to leave comments regarding these events under this blog post.

Almost Done for the Semester

I have now finished and posted final grades for both my Migration and Borders and Political History of the USSR classes. Now I just have to finish observing my Honors students defend their senior theses and confirm grades with my colleague Emir for my Introduction to Comparative Politics course. Then I can start working on syllabi for next semester.

Al-Nakba

A lot of self styled "liberals" and "progressives" in Blogestan have been celebrating the 60th anniversary of Israel recently. The formation of the State of Israel involved the forced expulsion of around 800,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes (Esber, pp. 69-70). While this may be considered a "progressive" outcome in the same sense as Stalin's deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan, it is certainly not a humanitarian one.

Source:

Rosemarie M. Esber, "Rewriting the History of 1948: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Question Revisted," Holy Land Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (2005), pp. 55-72.

Weekend Reading

This weekend I read Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism. I agree with his criticism of historicism, but I think he could have made the argument in one page instead of a hundred and forty. But, maybe this is because I take empiricism to be self evidently superior to dogmatic interpretations according to supposed laws of history.

Victory Day

Today is a holiday in Krygyzstan. Like in Soviet times May Ninth marks the victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany. There are big billboards with sickles and hammers and red stars all over town to commemorate the occasion. In contrast to the Soviet iconography there is also a lot of capitalist activity on the streets as large numbers of vendors peddle bananas, shashlik, ice cream, beer and other goods to merry makers. This clash of socialist symbols and small scale capitalism seems to be typical of many Kyrgyz holidays.

Officially about 70,000 men from Kyrgyzstan died fighting in World War II. Considering that the total population of the Kirghiz SSR at the time was only about 1.5 million, this was a significant percentage of its young and able bodied male population. Kyrgyzstan suffered far greater military losses as a percentage of its population during World War II than did the US.

Better Ratio Today

Today I found one example of plagiarism and I graded eight final papers for Migration and Borders.

And still I find more plagiarism

I have now graded six final papers for Migration and Borders and found three cases of verbatim plagiarism.

Plagiarism Galore

I have now graded four final papers for Migration and Borders and found two blatant cases of verbatim plagiarism.

Plagiarism Again

So far I have graded one final research paper for my Migration and Borders Class and found one case of blatant plagiarism. As in the entire paper from start to finish was lifted from the Internet. This is not a good start. I have 27 more research papers to grade for that class.

Recent Events In My Life

Right now I am mired in grading for classes and it is only going to get worse between now and Wednesday when all my research papers are due. But, a few interesting things have happened to me recently. First in the world of electronic communication I got three interesting messages. First, I got an e-mail last Tuesday from BBC asking me if the British government knew anything about Stalin's deportation of the Crimean Tatars while the operation was occurring from 18 to 20 May 1944. I also got a request this weekend in the comments on an old blog post from a Turkish graduate student at the University of Arizona for a copy of my Ph.D. dissertation. Finally, also this weekend I got an e-mail from an old friend of mine in Sacramento that I had not heard from in over seven years. He wanted to know if I was still alive.

In the real world I got Thursday off and went with the girlfriend to Osh Bazaar to stock up on food. Food prices are rising rapidly here so we wanted to buy things like rice before they became even more expensive. Vegetables are still cheap, however.

Lesson I Learned this Semester

One lesson I learned is not to assign more than four papers total to any one class. I assigned 12 short one page papers to my Migration and Borders class this semester and getting the grades calculated has taken up an enormous amount of time. I am still not through sorting them out.

An Historian Trapped in the Body of a Political Scientist

Today I gave my last lecture of the semester. Now I just have to grade papers. This semester I taught my first history course. Despite being an historian by training I found this course a bit frustrating. I had a difficult time getting students to talk in the class. It almost seemed to me that they lacked passion over the events because they took place several generations ago. I would be curious if any other history professors have encountered this problem and what can be done to remedy it.

Winding up the semester

Last week I finished my last lecture for my Migration and Borders class. I have two more for my Political History of the USSR class. This means that soon I will have a pile of research papers that need to be graded. After which I will take a short break from things related to teaching before designing the syllabi for next semester's classes.

Academic Patches

Evidently research teams working on black budget defense projects get to wear really cool patches. See here for some examples. I think my department should have patches as well. I am thinking of having an AK-47 superimposed upon a globe resting on an open book for our emblem. Our location would be marked on the globe with a red star. Below the picture could be emblazoned the motto "Knowledge is Power."

Crazy Weather

Well today spring is finally back. But, it was still cold this morning and yesterday afternoon it snowed. I hope it does not snow again before November. I have had enough of winter for now.

What Happened to Spring?

Today it has been cold, windy and wet since early morning. During the walk to work it was both raining and hailing. I have never seen hail and rain come down at the same time before. Right now Bishkek's weather is like a really bad winter day in northern California. I hope spring comes back here soon.

I Can See Again

Yesterday I got new lenses for my glasses. My old ones were so scratched up that I could almost see better without them. There is only one lab that I found in Bishkek that can grind lenses for people with astigmatism. But, they did it only two hours and it only cost 500 som. The world looks much clearer now.

New Book on Northwest Caucasus Coming Soon

My good friend Walter Richmond has a new book coming out soon. The Northwest Caucasus: Past, Present, Future is now scheduled to be published by Routledge in July 2008. Up until now there has not been a comprehensive book on the history and politics of this region of the world. So I would strongly urge anybody interested in the Caucasus to go buy a copy of the book. He also cites my second book, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 a number of times. Including Walt's book my citation number is now up to 93. I am getting very close to my goal of 100.

Factors of Emigration Movements in the USSR

This week I covered the Jewish emigration movement in the USSR during the 1970s and 1980s in my Migration and Borders class. Next week I will be covering the German emigration movement in the USSR during the same period of time. It occurred to me today that the reason the Jewish and German emigration movements in the USSR came about and were successful to some degree in the 1970s is that they shared three common characteristics.

First, they had a history of persecution that provided a push factor out of the USSR. The memory of this trauma served to unify and mobilize these groups during the 1970s. In the case of the Germans this persecution took place mainly at the hands of the Soviet government under Stalin. In particular the mass deportation to Siberia and Kazakhstan and the subsequent mobilization into forced labor battalions in the labor army created a strong historical grievance among the Germans. For the Jews the Nazi extermination of their communities in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states had a very similar effect. This memory combined with resentment against various forms of continuing discrimination, forced acculturation and defamation in the years after Stalin's death served as a powerful motive to emigrate.

Second, they had no national administrative territory in the USSR. The Jews had never had a viable national territory in the USSR. The Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Oblast never contained more than a small portion of the Soviet Jewish population. The Germans had received a number of national territories in the 1920s and 1930s, but Stalin liquidated them all. Already before World War II, the Soviet government had eliminated the German national districts in Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Kuban and Siberia. In 1941 shortly after the mass deportation of the Volga Germans, the Stalin regime dissolved the Volga German ASSR. This marginalized the Jews and Germans as ethno-national groups within the Soviet state structure which was a union of 15 national republics with a number of smaller nationalities having lower ranked political divisions. Thus unlike most other nationalities in the USSR Germans and Jews did not have an administrative territory of their own within the USSR. They thus had a marginalized national existence compared to other groups in the Soviet Union. This marginalization created an additional push factor in favor of emigration. Diaspora nationalities simply did not have a place in the Soviet state structure of nationalities. Had the attempt to restore the Volga German ASSR in the mid-1960s been successful the German emigration movement of the early 1970s probably would not have emerged. The lack of a national territory in the USSR meant that issues of national discrimination and acculturation could not be solved within its borders. Hence they sought a solution outside of the USSR's borders.

These first two factors allowed for the creation of large and active emigration movements among the Germans and Jews. This domestic pressure was a necessary, but insufficient factor in the Soviet government's decision to allow emigration. Foreign pressure also played important role.

Finally, both the Jews and Germans had external homelands that encouraged them to immigrate. Other diaspora nationalities with a history of persecution such as the Koreans or Meskhetian Turks did not launch successful emigration movements because their ancestral homelands did not encourage immigration from the USSR. The Meskhetian Turks attempted to launch an emigration movement to Turkey during the early 1970s, but it failed to achieve any success due to the Turkish government's unwillingness to support it. In contrast West Germany and Israel both encouraged immigration from the USSR. The US later also became a destination for Soviet Jewish emigration due to its willingness to accept such immigrants. The US also put considerable pressure on the USSR to allow Jewish emigration and West Germany made German emigration an issue in its relationship with Moscow. Hence there were real diplomatic and economic incentives for the Soviet leadership to allow a limited amount of emigration by members of these two nationalities.

The convergence of all three factors are what account for the emergence and success of the Jewish and German emigration movements. Lots of Soviet nationalities suffered extreme persecution during the 1930s and 1940s, but most had their own administrative territories in the USSR after 1957. Others such as the Crimean Tatars considered themselves native to regions within the USSR even though they now lacked an autonomous territory. Finally, the support of a state both encouraging immigration and able to put pressure on the USSR to allow emigration was necessary for the success of the Jewish and German emigration movements. Hence diaspora groups in the Soviet Union such as Koreans, Poles and Greeks were unable to launch successful emigration movements.

Sixty Years Since Deir Yassin

On 9 April 1948, armed Zionists from the Irgun and LEHI massacred over 100 Palestinians at Deir Yassin outside of Jerusalem. There is a very good piece on this atrocity by one of the leading Jewish anti-apartheid activists and current Minister of Intelligence in South Africa, Ronnie Kasrils. There really is no moral difference between creating a Jewish state in Palestine and creating a White state in South Africa.

hat tip:

Mark Elf at Jews sans frontieres

A scholastic citation in a 2008 article

I just discovered another citation of my first book, The Stalinist Penal System. The book is now over ten years old and yet it is still being cited in 2008. The citation appears in Golfo Alexopoulos, "Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment 1920s-1940s," Comparative Studies in Society and History (2008), 50: 91-117. I am rapidly closing in on a hundred academic citations.

Inflation is still out of control here

It seems like every time I go to the store prices have gone up. Items that I used to buy regularly are now increasing in price almost daily. The only thing that seems to have remained stagnant is the cost of labor. Wages are not increasing.

Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia

Cynthia J. Buckley and Blair A. Ruble, eds., Migration, Homeland and Belonging in Eurasia (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2008) is finally nearing completion. It should be out by fall. I wrote chapter seven, "The Loss, Retention, and Reacquisition of Social Capital by Special Settlers in the USSR, 1941-1960." The title pretty much describes the content of the piece.

State Museum of Fine Art

Today I went to the State Museum of Fine Art here in Bishkek for the first time. My knowledge of fine art is pretty minimal, but I found the paintings from the Soviet era to be quite interesting. The current exhibit of weird stuff from Germany was also well worth seeing.

Technical Problems With Comments

Recently I have been having some technical problems with comments. If you have tried to comment on a blog post of mine recently and the comment has not shown up please try to post it again. I am not sure why the comments are not showing up, but it is not because I am deleting them. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

1941: Volga Germans sent to Siberia and other Russian-Germans to Kazakhstan

Yesterday, I gave a lecture on the 1941 deportation of the Russian-Germans to Kazakhstan and Siberia and their subsequent mobilization into the labor army starting in 1942. One interesting thing I noticed is that the Stalin regime deported most of the Volga Germans to Siberia and most of the Russian-German deportees to Siberia came from the Volga region. The Volga Germans constituted over half of the Russian-Germans deported in 1941 and three quarters of them were sent to Siberia versus a quarter to Kazakhstan. In total Siberia received about half the Russian-Germans deported in 1941 and the other half arrived in Kazakhstan. Most of the Russian-Germans deported to Kazakhstan came from the North Caucasus, Ukraine, Crimea, the Kuban, the Moscow region, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Likewise most Russian-German deportees from these regions in 1941 found themselves sent initially to Kazakhstan rather than Siberia. I had not really noticed this geographical division before.

Registration for Classes

Registration for next semester's classes started today. In the fall I am teaching Democratization and Political Culture again. I am also co-teaching Politics of the Middle East and Politics of Nationalism, Race and Ethnicity. The class on Nationalism, Race and Ethnicity has almost filled up.

Baltic Deportations

Peteris Cedrins at Marginalia has put up an excellent post on Operation Priboi (Russian for Surf) which was the code name for the mass deportations from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that began on 25 March 1949.

Price of Donuts Way Up

I used up most of my four day weekend revising a journal article. Upon finishing this task I have noticed that consumer inflation has reached a ridiculously high level here. In the last week the price of donuts has gone up 20%. Many other goods as well seem to have risen in cost only slightly less.

Nooruz

Today is Nooruz or Persian New Year here in Kyrgyzstan. It takes place every year on the spring equinox. The streets of Bishkek right now are crowded with merry makers and vendors. The weather is also perfect today.

The Accordion Player is back

After months of not seeing the Russian accordion player on my way to work I finally saw him yesterday. I gave him five som and talked to him briefly about the great improvement in the weather. I take it as a good omen that street music has returned to Bishkek along with warmer weather.

My Shoes Finally Arrived!

The shoes my mother sent me from the US many months ago finally arrived here in Bishkek.

Palestine and Academic Freedom

In an hour I will be giving a lecture on the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 for my Migration and Borders class. I probably could not give such a talk in a US classroom without my employer being subjected to pressure to fire me. One need only note the case of Norman Finkelstein.

Busy

Spring break passed me by pretty fast and now it seems I have more work than ever.

Gray/Grey Literature

I learned a new term today. It appears I have been using gray or grey literature without knowing it. I came across the term because somebody recently complemented me on my use of such sources. This prompted me to look the term up. Brian S. Matthews defines gray literature as "documentary material that is not commercially published and is typically composed of technical reports, working papers, business documents, and conference proceedings." A quick Google search in fact shows that there is a large body of literature regarding the use of gray literature. A search for "gray literature" turned up 74,100 hits and one for "grey literature" got around 168,000 hits. Because gray literature has historically been poorly indexed and catalogued as well as difficult to obtain, finding it and using it presents unique problems. Despite these problems I would say that there is a lot of valuable material available to scholars in gray literature. From my brief Internet search on the topic it appears that the scientific and technical fields are considerably more advanced in their use of gray literature than the social sciences. The humanities including history in turn are woefully behind the social sciences in their exploitation of gray literature.

Vesna

Spring has finally arrived in Bishkek. The weather is warm and sunny. I am glad that winter is finally over. It was much colder this year in Central Asia than it was in Arizona last year.

Link to Document Collection on Expulsion of Sudeten Germans

I found this link recently to an English language translation of Dokumente Austreibung der Sudetendeutschen (Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans). It has 370 eyewitness accounts by survivors of this ethnic cleansing. These reports were taken shortly after the events described. I glanced at the first 40 reports and they were all given between 1945 and 1951, most of them in 1945 and 1946. They detail the various murders, robberies, internments in concentration camps and other crimes committed against the Sudeten Germans in 1945 and 1946 during the expulsions.

The Czechs made no distinction between Germans that supported the Nazis and those that did not and brutally murdered many women and children in the process of expelling more than three million people. Even German Communist Party members who had been active anti-fascists did not receive immunity from persecution. (see report number 3). Nor did the blind (see reports numbers 4 and 5) or old women (see reports 9 and 10). On 18-19 June 1945, a group of Czechs murdered 71 German men, 120 women and 74 children in the town of Prerau/Prerov. (Pykel, p. 18). Among the Sudeten Germans robbed of all their property and permanently exiled from their homeland was Righteous Gentile Oskar Schindler. (Hayden, p. 728). There can be no justification for such crimes against humanity.

Sources cited in addition to Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans

Robert M. Hayden, "Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers," Slavic Review, Vol 55, No. 4 (Winter 1996), pp. 727-748.

Piotr Pykel, "The Expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia," in Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, eds., The Expulsion of the 'German' Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War (Florence, Italy: European University Institute, 2004).

International Women's Day

Tomorrow is International Women's Day here in Bishkek and it is a huge holiday. It is even bigger than Valentine's Day. If prices are an accurate indicator it is 1.5 times as important. A single red rose imported from Holland cost 200 som on February 14th. Last night the price was 300 som. The florists love this holiday. It is their single biggest time of the year for sales.

Things I have been talking about in class

These last two weeks my classes have been heavy on lectures about repression and ethnic cleansing. This week in Political History of the USSR I am covering the Great Terror of 1937-1938. In particular I am focusing on the Polish Operation which was the largest of the national operations during those two years. In total it resulted in 111,091 executions. (Morris, p. 760). Last week the class focused on the exile of farmers branded as kulaks to special settlement villages in the Far North during 1930. I have been trying to get the students to see the connections between these two events and the evolution of repression in the USSR from a class basis to an ethnic basis during the 1930s.

In my Migration and Borders class this week I am covering the expulsion of ethnic Germans from East Central Europe. In particular the course is covering the ethnic cleansing of the Sudeten Germans. Last week the course dealt with Stalin's deportation of the Kalmyks to Siberia and their exile under special settlement restrictions from 1943 to 1956. I assigned Elza-Bair Guchinova's article, Deportation of the Kalmyks (1943-1956): Stigmatized Ethnicity. I got some really good feedback from the class on this particular reading. Its emphasis on the experience of the Kalmyks themselves rather than Soviet policy makes it a very accessible piece.

Next week is Spring Break so I have no classes. I still have to work, but I am hoping that it will be more relaxing. A new hookah lounge has opened up near where I live and I hope to try it out before the end of Spring Break.

Source for figures on executions during Polish Operation:

James Morris, "The Polish Terror: Spy Mania and Ethnic Cleansing in the Great Terror," Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 56, no. 5 (July 2004), pp. 751-766.

Plagiarism

I am catching an increasing number of cases of plagiarism. It causes me great psychic pain to fail students. But, this fact does not prevent me from failing students I catch plagiarizing assignments.

German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss scheduled for publication in June 2008

The book German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss is now listed in the Wilfrid Laurier University Press catalog as forthcoming in June 2008. Edited by Mathias Schulze, James M. Skidmore, David G. John, Grit Liebscher and Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach this book contains over 40 chapters on various German diasporas around the globe. One of those chapters is my "Suffering in a Province of Asia: The Russian-German Diaspora in Kazakhstan."

Samsy (more quick and cheap eats)

Samsy are the Central Asian version of Indian samosas. They are not nearly as spicy as their Indian cousins, however. They come stuffed with a choice of lamb, chicken, cheese or mushrooms. I usually get the chicken ones. At 15 som a piece they are undoubtedly the cheapest prepared food available in Bishkek. This morning I ate two while walking to work in the rain.

How do I get less lecturing and more learning in my classes?

On Friday the Chairman of the AUCA Board of Trustees, William Newton-Smith gave a talk on "The Idea of the University" here. One of the things he stressed is that there should be "less lecturing and more learning." I agree with him and would love it if I could find a way to practically implement this goal. One of the recurring problems I have found teaching is getting students to actively engage in class discussion. When they do speak they inevitably ask good questions or make pertinent comments. The problem is that not enough students do this often enough. So I find myself lecturing when I think the students would actually learn more if instead I facilitated a discussion between us. Now one of the problems may be that English is not the native language of any of my students. But, I think there is more going on here. Any comments or suggestions on this matter would be most welcome.

Citation Bibliography Update

I have been updating the list of academic works that cite my writing during the last two days. The list is now up to 90 works of which 45 are books and 45 are journal articles and book chapters in collections. Most are in English, however, the list includes four works in German, three in Russian and one in Italian. Many of the citations are quite recent. A full eight of them are from 2007 and twelve from 2006. My first book is now over ten years old and still being cited in the literature.

Gril' (more fast food in Bishkek)

This is the second entry in my series on fast food in Bishkek. All over Bishkek there are stands selling gril' or whole rotisserie chickens grilled over open flames. The chickens are marinated in some sort of spice mixture and sold with a remoulade sauce and lavash. The latter being a tortilla like bread that soaks up a lot of the greasy juice from the chicken. Since they only serve gril' in units of whole chickens I did not eat my first one until yesterday. I can not eat a whole chicken by myself. But, last night my girlfriend and I ate one together. It was quite tasty, but really heavy on the grease.

Grim Anniversary Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Red Army Day and an official holiday here in Kyrgyzstan where it is called Homeland Defenders' Day. It is also the 64th anniversary of the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush from their homeland in the Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. I wrote a fairly detailed piece on Stalin's ethnic cleansing of the Chechens and Ingush last year. There are still Chechen communities here in Kyrgyzstan that can trace their origins back to this tragic event.

Deaf people in Bishkek

No this post is not about me personally. But, I do prefer the term deaf or more accurately partially deaf to hearing impaired. Rather this post is about the fact that I have seen more people talking in sign language in Bishkek than in any other city I have ever visited. I see people communicating in sign language here almost daily. It seems to me there must be some reason why Bishkek has such a high percentage of deaf people. If anybody has any information regarding this matter I would really appreciate it if you left a comment.

Well that did not last long

It is now snowing again. Looking out the window I see that the snow fall is pretty heavy. I knew the warm weather was too good to last very long.

Radical weather changes

In the last couple of days the weather here in Bishkek has undergone some radical changes. It is no longer freezing cold and the snow has all melted. On top of that it is now raining. The result is the formation of huge muddy puddles covering the sidewalks of Abdrakhmanov (Sovetskaia) Street. The warmer and wetter weather, however, is a welcome relief from the Arctic like climate of the previous weeks.

Gamburger

The most common fast food in Bishkek is the gamburger. It is actually a form of donner kebab rather than a hamburger. The main difference is that the gamburger is served on a kaiser roll rather than in a pita pocket. A minor difference is that it is served with ketchup and mayonaise rather than with chili sauce and garlic sauce. Another minor difference is that they usually put french fries inside the roll along with the meat, sauce and salad. There are gamburger kiosks all over the city. Most places charge 30 som each. I had two for lunch today. They taste pretty good.

Power Outages in Bishkek

We have been having frequent power outages in Bishkek recently. Yesterday, the electricity at work went out. This morning the electricity was out in my flat. It still had not come back on by the time I left for work. I noticed that all of the electricity along Abdrakhmanov (Sovetskaia) between Gorky and Chui was out. I am not sure how much further the outage extended. Fortunately, I have lived in Sacramento and Arivaca so I am used to living for prolonged periods without electricity. Other people may find it more difficult to adapt to the the lack of light and other electrical services.

Happy Birthday Arizona or Love Letter to the Homeland

Today is Arizona Statehood Day. Ninety six years ago Arizona became the 48th state in the USA. Today is also Valentine's Day, a day traditionally associated with expressions of love. Since I can not be in Arizona today I am expressing my love for my adopted state in this blog post. I hope the people of Arivaca all enjoy the holiday.

More Orange Flavored Chocolate from Mars

The other day I found another orange flavored chocolate product from Mars in Ramstor, a large grocery store near my new apartment off of Abdrakhmanov (formerly Sovetskaia) Street. For 64 som I purchased a fairly large box of orange flavored Twixels. These are small Twix bars. Like the orange flavored M&Ms they appear to be manufactured by Mars only for the Russian speaking market. I have never seen them in the US.

Volga German Settlements in Turkmenistan

This came up in my Political History of the USSR class this week and I had to look it up. The first German settlements in the Transcaspian region of the Russian Empire were founded in 1892. Some 50 families from the Volga established the villages of Krestov (near Sarakhs) and Saratov (near Ashgabat) at this time (Krieger, p. 14). In 1904 villagers from the Saratov settlement founded Kozelkov in the region of Bairam-Ali near Merv. Following this move, difficult economic and climatic conditions led to the dissolution of the original Transcaspian Saratov colony (Krieger, p. 85). The 1926 Soviet census counted 1,276 Germans in Turkmenistan of which 595 lived in the rural areas of Merv Okrug concentrated mostly in the villages of Kozelkov and Krestov and another 296 lived in the Turkmen capitol of Ashgabat (Krieger, p. 101). Much larger German populations lived in other areas of Central Asia including 4,291 in Kyrgyzstan, 4,646 in Uzbekistan and 51,102 in Kazakhstan. By 1939 the German population of Turkmenistan had grown to 3,346 versus 2,022 for Tajikistan, 10,049 for Uzbekistan, 11,741 for Kyrgyzstan and 92,571 for Kazakhstan (Krieger, table 1, p. 133). As can be seen from the census figures the German population in Turkmenistan remained quite small compared to the settlements in the northern regions of Central Asia.

Source: Viktor Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh: Iz Istorii Nemtsev Tsentral'noi Azii (Almaty: Daik-Press, 2006).

New Link

I am adding Kristina Gray's Kazakhnomad's Weblog to my blogroll. You might remember that she and her husband Ken came to visit me here in Bishkek. She gave a guest lecture on the Ukrainian Holodomor to my Russian Politics class. Kristina and Ken currently live and work in Almaty Kazakhstan.

Kyrgyzstan Now Has Coins

The other day I got my first sixteen som in loose change. The cashier gave me back two five som coins and two three som coins. I do not think I have ever seen a bill or coin in the denomination of three before.

Two more links on Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe

Eric Schmaltz has translated two important documents regarding Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe into English. The first one is the Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen (Charter of the Germans Expelled from their Homelands) from 5 August 1950. It can be found here. The second document is the Deklaration zur Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen vom 5 August 1950 (Declaration on the Charter of Germans Expelled from their Homelands from 5 August 1950) issued on 6 August 1960. It can be found here. Both of these documents were originally proclaimed in Stuttgart, Germany.

It is Really Cold in Bishkek

It is so cold now that in the morning on the walk between the bus and work my hands feel like they are on fire. I have taken to wearing two pairs of gloves, but this does not seem to have reduced the severity of the chill. I am going to go and see if I can find a really good pair of gloves soon. I would hate to have to leave some fingers behind in Bishkek due to frostbite.

First Week of the Spring 2008 Semester Done

I have finished teaching my first week of classes for this semester. I was not nearly as anxious this semester as last. By now I had figured out that the frequently touted claim that only people who had been TAs in American universities could teach college students was a deliberate falsehood used to deny me a job in the US. So I did not feel as if I was lecturing under a sword of Damocles like I did the first week of last semester.

Link to Review Article on the Forced Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia

My colleague Dr. Eric Schmaltz at Northwestern Oklahoma State University has written an excellent review of Edvard Benes, The Liquidator: Fiend of the German Purge in Czechoslovakia by Sidonia Dedina. He provides a lot of good historical background to the ethnic cleansing of the Sudeten Germans. You can find his review here on the website of the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at North Dakota State University Library. My own review of the book can be found here. I will be spending a week in my Migration and Borders class this semester on the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia.

Orange Flavored M&Ms

I am not sure if they have them in the US or not, but the Mars candy operation out of Moscow produces orange flavored M&Ms. I have found them to be quite tasty. I have also noticed that the Russian M&M bags have cool cartoons on them.

Team Teaching

Today I participated in my first team taught class. It went quite well. I do not anticipate any problems in this class. But, there are a lot of people I do not think I could share a class room with as an instructor.

Back to the Grindstone

Classes for the spring semester officially started today. I only had one class to teach this afternoon. Tomorrow I have two. The first one is at eight in the morning.

Syllabus for Introduction to Comparative Politics

ICP 120
3 Credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University Central Asia
Spring Semester 2008
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.
Emir Kulov, AFP Fellow

Meeting Time: Lecture on Tuesdays at 8:00 am and Seminars on Fridays at 8:00 am, 9:30 am and 11:00 am.

Course Description: This is an introductory course to comparative politics. It will compare and contrast the existing political systems of six different countries. These countries are the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Mexico, the United States and South Africa.

Requirements: The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussions, five surprise quizzes, a mid-term examination and a final examination. The five surprise quizzes cannot be made up. Students that are absent that day will forfeit the 5% of the grade from the quiz. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. Please turn off all cell phones while in class. We will eject any students carrying on cell phone conversations during class from the room. This will count as an unexcused absence. Please see the separate handout on mobile phones. Finally, I (Dr. Pohl) have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: All the readings are contained in the Introduction to Comparative Politics reader and Mark Kesselmann, Joel Krieger, William Joseph (eds.), Introduction to Comparative Politics: Political Challenges and Changing Agendas, Second Edition.

Policy on Plagiarism: Plagiarism will result in a zero on the assignment for the first offense. A second offense will result in a grade of F for the course. Please be sure to cite your sources. Please also see the separate handout on plagiarism.

Grading:

Five surprise quizzes – 25% (5% each)

Mid-term Examination – 20%

Final Examination – 30%

Attendance – 10%

Participation - 15%

Grading Scale:

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

Class Schedule

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

Introduction, pp. 3-25 in Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph.

Weeks Two and Three: The United Kingdom

Richard Rose, pp. 161-212 in reader and Joel Krieger, pp. 28-77 in Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph.

Weeks Four and Five: Germany

Russell J. Dalton, pp. 271-324 in reader and Christopher S. Allen, pp. 134-186 in Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph.

Weeks Six and Seven: Russia

Thomas F. Remington, pp. 373-414 in reader and Joan DeBardeleben, pp. 426-483 in Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph.

Week Eight: Mid-Term Exam

Weeks Nine and Ten: Mexico

Wayne A. Cornelius, pp. 463-513 in reader and Merliee S. Grindle, pp. 378-423 in Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph.

Weeks Eleven and Twelve: The United States

Austin Ranney, pp. 733-777 in reader and Louis DeSipio, pp. 288-319 in Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph.

Week Thirteen and Fourteen: South Africa

Reader, pp. 420-449.

Week Fifteen and Sixteen: Review

Week Seventeen: Final Exam

The New Semester

Yesterday, I finished writing up my last syllabus for my spring 2008 classes. Now I am going through and rereading the assigned texts for my classes. I teach my first class of the new year on Monday at 1:00 pm. It is Political History of the USSR.

Another New Publication Arrives in Print

I went into work today for the first time since Saturday. At the office I noticed a package in my in-box. It was a large envelope containing my two author copies of Deniz Kandiyoti (ed.), The Cotton Sector in Central Asia: Economic Policy and Development Challenges (London: The School of Oriental and African Studies, 2007). I wrote the first chapter in the collection, "A Caste of Helot Labourers: Special Settlers and the Cultivation of Cotton in Soviet Central Asia:1944-1956." The book is the result of an international conference I attended at SOAS on 3-4 November 2005.

Changes for the New Year

Last year involved a lot of changes in my life. I left Arivaca in the summer and moved to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan where I started a job as an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the American University of Central Asia. The end of the year and start of the new one has brought even more changes in my life. My flatmate moved out and returned to the US. In January he will start a Ph.D. program in the UK. Since he has left I have acquired three new things. First, I got a mobile telephone. I had militantly resisted joining the 21st century as long as was humanly possible. Second, I seem to have acquired a new girlfriend. Third, I have found a new apartment much closer to work. Currently, I am in the process of moving my few possessions from the old domicile to the new one. I will be finished in time for the start of the new semester on the fourteenth of January.

Merry Christmas

In case I do not have time to blog between now and December 25th, I wish all my readers a Merry Christmas. I get both Western (Catholic and Protestant) Christmas and Eastern (Orthodox) Christmas off this year. Well I got them both off last year too, but I was unemployed.

The Accordion Player

For most of the fall I walked past an old Russian accordion player on the way to work. I took to giving him four to five som each time I saw him. He always expressed great appreciation. When the weather got cold I did not see him for many weeks. Finally, yesterday it was quite warm and I saw him again. I gave him 10 som this time. Since I have finished all my work for the semester I figured it was a good way to start my Christmas break.

Election Day

Today they are holding parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan. I predict that President Bakiev's party, Ak Zhol, will win a majority of the seats. But, despite the elections, today looks like any other calm Sunday in Bishkek.

Possibly the coolest present ever (R-E-S-P-E-K-T)

Today was the last day of classes of my first semester of teaching. My final class was my Russian Politics course. I brought some snacks and most of the students showed up despite the class being optional. This was a bit of a surprise since the last class for my Democratization course had only four students show up. My last Political Culture class managed to have an even lower attendance with three students responding to my advertisement of free food. But, the biggest surprise was what the students gave me. They presented me with a shirt bearing the university emblem. Beneath it they had written out CCCP (USSR in Russian) and then vertically spelled out the acronym in Russian as Samyi, Samyi, Super, Respekt. The t in Respekt then intersected with Otto written horizontally at the bottom of the shirt. On the back of the shirt many of the students had written personal messages and thank you notes with their signatures. I spent a long time in the desert looking for "just a little bit."

"R-E-S-P-E-C-T"

Quoted material from A. Franklin

Almost Done

The semester is almost over. I am just waiting for 40 more research papers due tomorrow at 5pm Bishkek time so I can finish calculating final grades. Early this week my students filled out their evaluations of me . Today and tomorrow my classes are optional. My students can show up and hang out with me for a while over some snacks if they want. Or they can use the time to work on their research papers. So far most of my students have taken the second option.

Sunday at the office

Today I came into work to meet a student. While waiting for her I read and marked a draft of a research paper by another student. Now that our meeting is over I am going to delay going over any more research papers until tomorrow.

My bank's new building

This morning I went to my bank's new location around the corner from their old place to deposit a big chunk of my last pay packet. The new building is much larger and built like a fortress. They have metal detectors, armed guards and who knows what else. The actual deposit of money is even done underground behind bullet proof glass. So I think my money should be safe.

New Publication Coming Soon I Hope

I finally got my copy edited proofs for my chapter, "Loss, Retention, and Reacquisition of Social Capital by Special Settlers in the USSR, 1941-1960." It is scheduled to appear in Cynthia Buckley and Blair Ruble (eds.), Going Home? Population Movements and Belonging in Eurasia (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008). I have a deadline of 28 December 2007 to make the corrections and return the proofs. So I hope the book finally sees print sometime early next year. The book is the result of two workshops I attended at the Kennan Institute in 2004 and 2005.

From One Semester to the Next

Now that I have nearly finished teaching a whole semester here, I think I have a better grasp on how to manage my time next semester. For one thing I know the subjects I am teaching next semester better than the ones I taught this semester. I also know more what to expect out of teaching here. Because I had been falsely led to believe that university teaching was something on the order of brain surgery or rocket science I started this semester with a lot of unjustified anxiety. I am still not sure why hundreds of people on search committees at universities including several here claimed I was "incapable of ever teaching." I found teaching much easier than working as a barrista.

At any rate I think this next semester I can make some time to do some research. Now that I have an institutional position I might even be able to get some funding to carry out this research. But, even if I fail to get any funding, I have a steady income now and should be able to gain access to Soviet era archives here in Bishkek. Previously I had no money and except for the US and Estonia no country would give me permission to look at any of their archival collections. Having removed the boulder of unemployment from my life everything else looks like a cake walk.

Today's Progress

Today I marked up two student drafts of research papers and wrote one letter of recommendation for a third student. I might have done more if I could have gotten the printer in front of me to work. I was too lazy to switch computer terminals and try another printer.

I Spoke Too Soon

It looks like I have more work this weekend than I thought. I have to grade three first drafts of research papers and write two letters of recommendation for students before Monday now. But, I think I can manage to get it all done tomorrow. That way I would at least have Sunday free.

Some Room to Breathe

It looks like I will finally get some free time this weekend. I have finished grading all the little papers I assigned and the big papers are not due until 14 December 2007. I also finished editing a journal article due tomorrow. I sent it off by e-mail today. As usual it took four times as long to get the citations and references into the proper format as it did to actually research and write the article. Or at least it seemed that way. The only work I have to do this weekend is to look over the draft of a literature review written by one of the honors students I am supervising. I do not anticipate that this will require more than a small part of my weekend.

Less Busy Now

I finally finished grading all the dozens upon dozens of late papers I have received since Friday. A full 70% of the grade for all three of my classes has now been calculated. Most of my students did pretty well. A very small number did not. Now I can finally do things other than grade papers all day and night.

Busy

I have been busy putting together grades. Way too many late papers have come to me in the last week. I finally finished grading everything I have for one out of three classes. Next semester I am not going to be nearly so lenient regarding late papers.

Giving Thanks

In case I do not have time to blog between now and Friday here are my thoughts on Thanksgiving. This year I am thankful to finally have a job and be earning an income after many years of unemployment. I applied for this particular job three years in a row. Had AUCA not fired the people preventing me from being hired here I would still be in Arivaca. Sometimes God works in mysterious ways.

Last few weeks of the semester

Right now I am busy trying to finish up the semester. I have three more weeks of class after this one. Two of those will be devoted to student oral reports. The last one will be a wrap up.

Most of my time right now is devoted to trying to get grades in order. I wish I had a grading assistant. Grading papers is taking up way too much of my time.

Correction

Evidently, I erred in referring to Ruth Derksen Siemens as Dr. Siemens. I misconstrued the phrase "Her PhD studies in the Philosophy of Language at the University of Sheffield, UK investigate letters.." to mean that she had already completed the degree. At her request I have reproduced her clarification of this matter below. I am sorry for any confusion my error may have caused.

To Ellwood and other naysayers

It is very important to read carefully before attacking a person’s credibility. Note that the statement in the website states: “Her PhD studies in the Philosophy of Language at the University of Sheffield, UK investigate letters …”. My research is complete and the “Viva” is scheduled for December 4th at the Bakhtin Centre, University of Sheffield , UK . Responders to my website often refer to me as Dr. Ruth Derksen (as do my students) but I correct this in my communication with them.

It is also important to rise above the petty slandering and remember the millions of innocent victims who died in the mines, forests, and industrial sites of Stalin’s Gulag. They deserve our energy, our time and resources. Let’s together demonstrate a higher moral standard.

Ruth Derksen Siemens

Political History of the USSR Syllabus

ICP 255
3 Credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University Central Asia
Spring Semester 2008
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.

Meeting Time: Monday and Wednesday 1:00 pm.

Course Description: This course is an introductory survey course to the political history of the Soviet Union. It will cover the 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 collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror, World War II, and the reforms of the Khrushchev era. Special emphasis will be given to the multinational nature of the Soviet Union. In particular the course will pay attention to how different nationalities in the USSR experienced and remembered the events covered in class.


Requirements: The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussions, short writing assignments, and a research paper. For each of the four weeks with supplemental reading assignments, students will be required to submit a 600 to 800 word summary and analysis of the material along with one question for class discussion. These supplemental readings are the four pieces by Long, Viola, Krieger and Khazanov. These papers are all due in class on the Wednesday of the week during which the material is discussed. Students will also have to complete a 1400 to 2000 word research paper on the history of their family in the USSR. Students may substitute a research paper on a different subject in consultation with the instructor. This paper is due the last week of class. All late papers will lose one letter grade for each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. Please turn off all cell phones while in class. I will eject any students carrying on cell phone conversations during class from the room. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.


Readings: The primary text book for this class is Geoffry Hosking’s, The First Socialist Society: The History of the Soviet Union from Within (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). In addition to this book there are four short readings by James Long, Lynne Viola, Viktor Krieger and Anatoly Khazanov that will be provided to the students by the instructor.

Policy on Plagiarism: Plagiarism will result in a zero on the assignment for the first offense. A second offense will result in a grade of F for the course. Please be sure to cite your sources.

Grading:

Four short papers - 60% (15% each)

Written research paper –20% (Due last day of class)

Class participation – 20%


Class Schedule

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

Week Two: The Bolshevik Revolution.

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

Week Three: War Communism

Chapter 3 in Hosking, pp. 57-92.

Week Four: The 1920-1921 Famine

Read: James W. Long, “The Volga Germans and the Famine of 1921,” Russian Review, Vol. 51, no. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 510-525.

Week Four: Nationality Policy during the 1920s

Chapter 4 in Hosking, pp. 93-118.

Week Five: Economic Transformation in the 1930s.

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

Week Six: Destruction of the “Kulaks”

Read: Lynne Viola, “The Other Archipelago: Kulak Deportations to the North in 1930,” Slavic Review, Vol. 60, no. 4 (winter 2001), pp. 730-755.

Week Seven: The Great Terror

Chapter 7 in Hosking, pp. 183-204.

Week Eight: The USSR on the Eve of the Great War

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

Week Nine: World War II

Chapter 10 in Hosking, pp. 263-295.

Week Ten: World War II Continued

Read: Viktor Krieger, “Patriots or Traitors? – The Soviet Government and the ‘German Russians’ After the Attack on the USSR by National Socialist Germany” in Karl Schlogel, ed., Russian-German Special Relations in the Twentieth Century: A Closed Chapter? (New York: Berg Publishers, 2006), pp. 133-163.

Week Eleven: Late Stalinism

Chapter 11 in Hosking, pp. 296-325.

Week Twelve: Khrushchev

Chapter 12 in Hosking, pp. 326-362.

Week Thirteen: The Era of Stagnation

Chapter 13 in Hosking, pp. 363-401.

Week Fourteen: Nationality in the USSR after World War II

Chapter 14 in Hosking, pp. 402-445.

Week Fifteen: Nationality in the USSR after World War II Continued

Read Anatoly Khazanov, “People with Nowhere to Go: The Plight of the Meskhetian Turks,” (chapter 7) in After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 192-210.

Week Sixteen: The End of the Soviet Union

Chapter 15 in Hosking, pp. 446-501.

Week Seventeen: Research paper due and concluding remarks.

Letters from Mennonite Special Settlers

Dr. Ruth Derksen Siemens has put together an impressive web site based upon letters written by the Regher family during the early 1930s. The OGPU (Soviet political police) exiled the Reghers from their home in Ukraine to a special settlement village in the northern Urals in 1931. Despite their punitive internal exile they continued to correspond with family members in Carlyle, Saskatchewan. Incredible as it sounds, hundreds of such letters from Russian-German Mennonites banished to special settlements made it to relatives in Canada during the 1930s. You can visit the web site here. I urge all my readers to go check out her web site. She also has both a book and a film documentary coming out early next year based upon these letters. Kyrgyzstan at one time had a fairly large Mennonite population including Maria Regher who settled here with her surviving children after being freed from the special settlement in the Urals in 1956. She died here in 1976. If not for the work of Dr. Siemens she and her family would have been completely forgotten like millions of other victims of Stalinist repression.

hat tip: Michael Miller

New Publication Finally in Print

In 2003 I wrote an article on the Soviet deportation of whole nationalities for an encyclopedia on European migration. I am not sure when the English language version of this work will be published. The German language version of the book, however, has been publicly available since 7 November 2007 . My article, "Deportierte in der Sowjetunion im und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg" appears on pages 458 to 463 of the Enzyklopadie Migration In Europa: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer. The work is published by Ferdinand Schoningh out of Paderborn in cooperation with Wilhelm Fink in Munich. It has been a long time coming, but it looks really good. I am aware by the way that I have left out the umlauts in the German words and names above.

We Have Snow in Bishkek

This morning when I woke up it was snowing. A couple of hours later when I went to work it was still snowing. It is not too cold, but the muddy slush on the ground makes walking on the streets of Bishkek even more dangerous than usual.

Another Guest Lecturer

On Monday Greta Uehling spoke in front of my Political Culture class on the return of Crimean Tatars to Crimea. The talk went very well. I think my students were all quite disappointed today when it was only me lecturing in front of them with no pictures to show.

Migration and Borders Syllabus

ICP 329.5
3 credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University of Central Asia
Spring Semester 2008
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.


Meeting Time: Tuesday and Thursday 11:00 am

Course Description: This course will cover the topic of cross border migration. It will concentrate primarily upon the movement of people across international borders. However, it will also briefly cover the role of internal state borders with regards to forced migration in the USSR during the 1940s. The class will deal with various types of international migration in the 20th and 21st centuries including labor migration, forced migration and ethnic “return” migration. The course will emphasize the effects of state policies upon migrants in both countries of emigration and immigration. Case studies will be drawn from the US-Mexican border, Europe, the USSR and its successor states, and Palestine.

Requirements: The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, an oral report and a research paper. For each of the twelve weeks with reading assignments, students will be required to submit a 150 to 200 word summary of the material along with one question for class discussion. Students will also have to complete a 2500 to 3000 word research paper comparing and contrasting two case studies of migration. The paper is due the last week of class. In the two weeks prior to this deadline each student will be required to give a short oral presentation on the subject of their paper followed by a short question and answer session. Late papers will lose one letter grade for each day they are late. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. Please turn off all cell phones while in class. I will eject any students carrying on cell phone conversations during class from the room. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Plagiarism Policy: Plagiarism will result in a zero on the assignment for the first offense. A second offense will result in a grade of F for the course. Please be sure to cite your sources.

Grading:

Twelve short papers – 36% (3% each)

Written research paper – 20% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 10%

Class participation – 34%


Class Schedule

Week one: Introduction and review of the syllabus.

Crossing the Border

Week Two: Read “Border Crossings and the Transformation of Value and Valuers” (chapter six) in Hasting Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1999), pp. 107-127.

Week Three: Read “Frontiers and Migration” (chapter five) in Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 127-150.

Labor Migration

Week Four: Read Thomas J. Espenshade, “Unauthorized Immigration to the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 21 (1995), pp. 195-216.

Week Five: Read “Europe’s Immigrant Integration Crises” (chapter one) in Patrick Ireland, Becoming Europe: Immigration, Integration and the Welfare State (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), pp. 1-26.

Ethnic Cleansing

Week Six: Read “Forced Migrations: Prehistory and Classification” (chapter two) in Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), pp. 17-48.

Week Seven: Read Elza-Bair Guchinova, “Deportation of the Kalmyks (1943-1956): Stigmatized Ethnicity” (chapter seven) in Uyama Tomohiko, ed., Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, Slavic Eurasian Studies, no. 14 (Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), pp. 187-221.

Week Eight: Read Introduction and Piotr Pykel, “The Expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia” (chapter one) in Steffen Prausser and Arfon Rees, eds., The Expulsion of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War (Florence, Italy: European University Institute, 2004), pp. 1-20.

Week Nine: Read Rosemarie M. Esber, “Rewriting the History of 1948: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Question Revisited,” Holy Land Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (2005), pp. 55-72.

Ethnic “Return” Migration

Week Ten: Read “Did they jump or were they pushed?” (chapter one) in Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 3-22.

Week Eleven: Read “18 May 1944: The Deportation of Crimean Tatars” (chapter one) in Forced Migration Project of the Open Society Institute, Crimean Tatars: Repatriation and Conflict Prevention, (New York: Open Society Institute, 1996), pp. 11-28.

Week Twelve: Read Laurie P. Salitan, “Domestic Pressures and the Politics of Exit: Trends in Soviet Emigration Policy," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 4 (Winter, 1989-1990), pp. 671-687.

Week Thirteen: Read Rainer Ohliger and Rainer Munz, “Minorities into Migrants: Making and Un-Making Central and Eastern Europe’s Ethnic German Diasporas," Diaspora, vol. 11, no. 1 (2002), pp. 45-83.

Student Research

Week Fourteen: Review

Week Fifteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Sixteen: Student oral presentations continued.

Week Seventeen: Written version of the research paper due and concluding remarks.