Sixty Five Years Since the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

On 18 May 1944, the Soviet NKVD began the systematic round up and deportation of nearly the entire Crimean Tatar population from their ancestral homeland to Uzbekistan and the Urals. Early in the morning armed troops of the NKVD started knocking on the doors of Crimean Tatar houses and informing the inhabitants that they were to be deported. The official explanation given for this mass uprooting of women, children, elderly, Red Army veterans and even members of the Communist Party was the false claim that the Crimean Tatar nationality had collectively betrayed the Soviet Union and collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. The Soviet government did not repeal the last legal vestiges of this false charge until 7 March 1991 (Bugai, pp. 16-18). The authorities gave the deportees only a short period of time to pack. They had to abandon the vast majority of their movable as well as immovable property. Even more importantly they lost access to the natural and cultural resources of their national homeland.

On the first day of the operation, the Soviet security organs took 90,000 people to train stations of which 48,400 began their journey eastward (Bugai, doc. 11, p. 138). The following day the number of Crimean Tatars transported to rail stations increased to 165,515 of which 136,412 had been loaded onto train echelons bound for Uzbekistan (Bugai, doc. 12, p. 138). Finally on 20 May 1944, the NKVD completed the operation. They reported loading a total of 180,014 Crimean Tatars into 67 train echelons of which 63 with 173,287 deportees were already on their way to their new destinations (Bugai, doc. 13, pp. 138-139). On the same day the NKVD also reported mobilizing 11,000 Crimean Tatar men for forced labor, bringing the total number of Crimean Tatars removed from Crimea to 191,014 (Ibid.). A total of 23,000 soldiers and officers of the internal troops of the NKVD and 9,000 operative workers of the NKVD-NKGB participated in this operation (Bugai, doc. 21, p. 144). The NKVD succeeded in ethnically cleansing Crimea of its indigenous population in a mere three days.

The NKVD transported the Crimean Tatars in overcrowded and filthy train wagons to desolate areas of Uzbekistan and the Urals. They lacked sufficient food, water, medicine and hygiene to maintain their health. Many fell ill and thousands perished on the journey. By 4 July 1944, a total of 151,604 Crimean Tatars had arrived in Uzbekistan and 31,551 in the Urals (Bugai, doc. 20, p. 144 and doc. 16, p. 140). In these new locations they lived and worked under special settlement restrictions. Due to a lack of sufficient food, housing and medical care in the face of a severe malaria epidemic thousands died shortly after arriving in Uzbekistan. In the first eight months of exile in Uzbekistan a recorded total of 13,592 Crimean Tatars or 9.1% of the total population perished (Ibragimov, doc. 26, p. 68). The following year another 13,183 Crimean Tatar special settlers died in Uzbekistan bringing the death toll for the first twenty months up to 26,775 people or 17.8% of the population initially deported to Central Asia (Ibid.). This catastrophic loss of life occurred as a direct result of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to regions which the Soviet government knew were suffering from a malaria epidemic and had insufficient extra housing, food and most importantly anti-malarial drugs to prevent mass deaths among the deportees.

Stalin's ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars 65 years ago represents one of the worst violations of national and human rights during the 20th century. The Soviet regime deprived an entire nation of its homeland and reduced them to a caste of helot laborers under extremely punitive conditions. Indeed the material conditions of the Crimean Tatar special settlers proved to be lethal and decimated the population in Uzbekistan in less than a year. Please join with me and others for a moment of silence at noon, 18 May 2009 where ever you are to remember the victims of this crime against humanity.

Sources:

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

Ibragimov, Ayder, ed., Krimskii studii: Informatsiini biuletin, no. 5-6, September-November 2000.

For more information on the deportation of the Crimean Tatars see the following posts from 2006 and 2007.

Grades for the semester finished

Today I finished calculating and posting grades. I had three classes with a total of 68 students and each of them had to submit a final paper. It took me all weekend to read through them all.

Victory Day

Tomorrow is Victory Day. This holiday marks the defeat of Nazi Germany 64 years ago. Here in Bishkek there are lots of billboards up with Soviet iconography and praise to the Red Army and the surviving veterans of World War II. Most of the veterans pictured on the posters seemed to have served in tank units.

Update on Under Jakob's Ladder

I just got this comment on a post I did almost a year ago.


Hello. I am actor Peter Iasillo and I play the part of Vovik, one of the detainees/prisoners in this film. Mann and Robert Munoz (aka The Moon Brothers) are doing an outstanding job of producing and directing this film. Jeff Stewart (BBC's "The Bill") as Jakob is very convincing and a joy to work. I am very grateful to the brothers for casting me and giving me the opportunity to break out of my horror movie mold.

Research Opportunities

It dawned on me yesterday that there is a lot more opportunity in Kyrgyzstan than in the Russian Federation to study the deportation of nationalities under Stalin. This is for two main reasons. First, relatively little has been written about the experience of deportees in Central Asia compared to the central policy of forced removal formulated in Moscow. In particular, Kyrgyzstan as a location of research on the life of special settlers has been neglected in favor of Siberia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This means the history of special settlers in Kyrgyzstan remains a largely unexplored area of research. Second, the political climate in Kyrgyzstan is much more favorable for the conduct of such research than in the Russian Federation. My student research team and I have not encountered any political obstacles in the course of our project on the Karachai deportation. In contrast the Memorial offices in St. Petersburg were raided by the police on 4 December 2008. They confiscated eleven hard drives containing a large amount of scanned documentary evidence of Stalinist crimes. These included a number of letters written by special settlers, interview transcripts of victims of Stalinist repression and other material .

May Day

Today is officially International Workers' Day, one of the many Soviet holidays still celebrated in Kyrgyzstan. Walking down Chui Prospekt this morning I noticed a small communist rally complete with flags of the Kyrgyz SSR, red banners and photographs of Lenin and Stalin. They also had a band playing loud music.

In Solidarity with William I. Robinson

I do not personally know Dr. Robinson. I am also not familiar with his scholarship. All I know is that he is a tenured professor of sociology at University California of Santa Barbara of Jewish heritage who is being threatened with termination for criticizing Israel's recent atrocities in the Gaza Strip. His crime is drawing parallels between the Israeli policy of starving the Gaza Strip with the Nazi policy of starving the Warsaw Ghetto. Two students complained to the ADL about his comparison and they in turn pressured the University Administration. The Univeristy is now forming a faculty committee to explore whether he should be disciplined before a standing committee. The ADL presumably wants Robinson to be stripped of his tenure and fired. Unfortunately, the administration of the university seems to be heading down this path. This is the most blatant violation of academic freedom in the US I have ever seen. If not even tenure can protect what I would consider a perfectly reasonable criticism of Israeli state terrorism then we Americans really should stop pretending there is any such thing as academic freedom or freedom of speech at American universities. I fully expect the usual suspects, professors who are progressive except Palestine, to either remain silent in the face of this outrage or to actively support the ADL's efforts to eliminate freedom of speech for American scholars.

Hat Tip: Mark Elf and Crew at JSF

Karachai Presentation Results

I think the presentation by my student researchers regarding their oral history project went well. Fewer people showed up than I expected. Evidently a lot of people were giving final exams early and this conflicted with the time of the presentation. This means I have a lot of snack food left over.

First Karachai Presentation Today

Today my three students researching the oral history of the Karachais deported to Kyrgyzstan will give their first formal presentation on the subject. I stopped by Ramstor this morning to buy snacks for the audience. I am very much looking forward to this event.

Noise, Noise, Noise

All day today there was extremely loud music blaring from the parking lot in front of the school as part of the celebration of the founding of Bishkek. Unfortunately, it is not a day off and I had to try and work through the awful racket. During my Politics of Genocide class I had to ask my students to shout their presentations so that they could be heard over the amplified drum music blaring outside. It was almost impossible to teach over the noise. As head of the local union here at AUCA I have inserted Bishkek Day as an additional paid holiday into the draft of our next contract. If we can get the administration to agree to it, my students and I will not be wasting our time a year from now.

Last Class of the Semester

Today I gave my last lecture of the semester. It was a brief summary of Soviet history from Brezhnev's replacement of Khrushchev as Secretary General of the CPSU until the collapse of the USSR. Tomorrow and the next day will all be devoted to student presentations. Then classes are over. Final papers are due on May eighth.

First Plagiarist of the Semester

I caught my first plagiarist of the semester. He was extremely blatant and copied numerous whole passages from the Internet without attribution. I am going to be lenient and only give him a zero for the assignment rather than fail him for the class. I knew my plagiarism free streak was too good to be true.

Only One Week of Classes Left

Next week is the last week of classes for the semester. My students in Politics of Genocide and Migration and Borders have to finish up their final oral reports. In Political History of the USSR I have one lecture and one seminar left on the Gorbachev years. After next week we have finals week. I do not give final exams, but all my students have to submit a final research paper by May eighth.

Tired

Today I taught two classes, peer reviewed a third and attended a long committee meeting.

Grading Papers

Even though I have pretty much solved the plagiarism problem and the overall quality of student writing has improved immensely, I still hate grading papers. I have a big stack of papers from Migration and Borders and Political History of the USSR to finish grading. I am not looking forward to grading almost 70 research papers come May eighth.

Return to Sadovaya

Yesterday, Orthodox Easter, my student research team and I returned to the village of Sadovaya. We went to examine the Muslim cemetery there. There are a number of Karachais buried in the cemetery along with Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Dungans and Chechens. Many of the Karachai graves had elaborate granite headstones with engraved pictures of the deceased, various symbols and writing in both Arabic and Cyrillic scripts. Quite a few of these markers belonged to individuals that had been deported to Kyrgyzstan from the Caucasus in November 1943. It was a beautiful day and the caretaker was extremely helpful. I found the small cemetery to be quite idyllic. Overall it was definitely worth seeing.

The incredible shrinking number of PhDs at AUCA

When I first started working at AUCA in August 2007 there were eight faculty in the International and Comparative Politics Department of which four of us were full time with PhDs. The next semester the total number of faculty in the department increased to nine of which five were full time with PhDs. At the start of my second year this ratio plummetted dramatically. This academic year out of ten faculty members only two of us are full time with Ph.Ds. Other departments have even fewer people with doctorates. This is one of the primary reasons why I doubt AUCA will ever get accreditation in the US. But, now I hear the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic is making noise about revoking local accreditation due to the extremely small number of instructors with terminal degrees.

The Host

Today with two other faculty members and one student I had lunch at the new Indian restaurant. It was absolutely fantastic. I can not remember when was the last time before today that I had Indian food.

Miss Kuritsa

Yesterday when I came home from work I noticed a small cardboard menu stuck in my apartment door. It was from an outfit called Miss Kuritsa which specializes in fried chicken. The menu has fried chicken with sauce, fried chicken without sauce, hamburgers and corn dogs. They also deliver to your door free of charge. The girlfriend was quite impressed by the idea of delivered food. We ordered one big order of fried chicken with sauce, two small orders of fried chicken without sauce and three corn dogs. It came to 550 som or about $13.25. It tasted pretty good and we still had a lot left over after dinner. I hope she and the boy do not eat all of the leftovers before I get home from work.

The Sun is Shining

It looks like the sun has finally returned to Bishkek.

Rain

For the last two days it has been raining almost nonstop. I feel like I am back in England. I hope the sunny weather returns to Bishkek soon.

More on Volga Germans in Turkmenistan

The descendants of the Volga Germans that settled in the Sarakhs region (Krestov) near Ashgabat in Turkmenistan managed to avoid deportation in 1941 due to already being located in a remote area of Soviet Central Asia. However, like many Russian-German communities in Central Asia they experienced severe repression later in the 1940s. In the case of the Russian-Germans living in Sarakhs raion, Ashgabat Oblast, Turkmen SSR this repression came at the end of 1948. In December of that year, the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) of the Turkmen SSR requested that 64 Russian-German families be deported from this district. In response the central Soviet government mobilized all those capable of physical labor from these families for construction work on the Chelyabinsk metallurgy complex in the Urals. The Stalin regime forcibly resettled the remaining 310 ethnic Germans from Sarakhs, those judged to be incapable of physical labor due to illness, disability or age, to Tomsk Oblast in Siberia.

Source: N.F. Bugai, L. Beria -I. Stalinu: "Soglasno vashemu ukazaniiu..."(Moscow: "AIRO XX," 1995), p. 46.

Another Turkmen Dinner

Last night my girlfriend, her son and I had dinner at the apartment of some students of mine from Turkmenistan. The food was very good and both my girlfriend and the boy had a good time. As long as they are happy I am happy.

New Teaching Techniques that Work

Last year I was a bit frustrated by my inability to motivate really good class discussions in my Political History of the USSR class. Since history is my field I felt particularly perplexed at my failure to instill a passion for the subject in my students. This year I have been much more successful in sparking interesting and insightful discussions in the class. One technique that has been especially helpful is passing out short primary source materials and asking students to comment on them. On Thursday I passed out the following two documents*:

Council of Peoples' Commissariats of the Union of SSRs Resolution No. 35 of 8 January 1945 "On the Legal Status of Special Settlers" signed by Molotov and Chadaev

Ukaz of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 26 November 1948 "On the Criminal Penalties for Flight from Places of Obligatory and Decreed Settlement of People, Exiled to Distant Regions of the Soviet Union in the Period of the Fatherland War" signed by Shvernik and Gorkin.

I then asked the students how these acts which clearly discriminate against whole groups of people defined by their nationality could be reconciled with the 1936 Soviet constitution which prohibited both collective punishment and discrimination on the basis of race or nationality. What ensued was one of the best class discussions I have ever seen. I basically just conducted an hour long group dialogue on issues of political legitimacy, propaganda, the various motivations for people fighting in the Red Army, the political uses of memory and history, and of course national repression and Soviet state building. The best thing about teaching at AUCA has been watching the very tangible improvement in critical thinking skills exhibited by my students. I have seen remarkable academic growth in many students that have taken multiple classes from me.

*The copies of the documents I passed out were in the original Russian. I have translated the identifying information in the documents into English for purposes of this blog post.

Creating Good Labor - Management Relations

Last week the leadership of the local faculty union here at AUCA had two productive and friendly meetings with the administration. The establishment of an ongoing dialogue between the union and the administration is a very positive development. As chairman of the local union organization I feel that we have been able to successfully articulate our concerns to the administration. Considering that we did not even exist as an organization in October, this is a significant accomplishment.

Next Semester's Classes

This week we had registration for classes. I will be teaching a total of four classes next semester. Three of these are in International and Comparative Politics and one is in American Studies. The course names are listed below.

Political Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia

Conflicts in the Caucasus

Russian Politics

American Presidency

Why Palestine is a Conservative Cause

I will return to this topic later in more detail. But, I am finally going to put down my main ideas as to why I think Palestine is a conservative cause. The reasons are fairly straightforward and I believe much more coherent than the reasons given by former Marxists and leftist "neoconservatives" in support of Zionism.

The Palestinian population in 1947 consisted overwhelmingly of traditional agrarian communities composed of practicing Muslims and Christians. They had strong family values and traditions rooted in their religious beliefs. They also had deep roots in the land and long established local communities. Their daily way of life and world outlook thus fit the definition of conservative perfectly.

The Zionist movement in contrast was led by self described atheists and socialists such as David Ben-Gurion who were intent on radically transforming the demographics, landscape and economy of Palestine along revolutionary lines. The Labour Zionists were heavily influenced by the model of the USSR under Stalin and openly cited the NKVD's violent deportation of the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars as models for removing the native Arab population of Palestine. In this endeavour they initially received the support of the USSR and socialist bloc which recognized the ideological similarities between Labour Zionism and Soviet socialism under Stalin. This assistance included heavy arms in violation of a UN arms embargo, military training and diplomatic support in the UN. The resemblance between Stalin's uprooting of the traditional communities of the Volga Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars and the Zionist expulsion of the Palestinians is thus not coincidental. They share common ideological roots and the Zionists borrowed many of the techniques of ethnic cleansing from the Soviet Union. Thus the Zionist movement was in contrast to Palestinian society the antithesis of conservative. It was radical, socialist and atheist rather than traditional and religious like Palestinian society.

It is thus not surprising given the radical socialist roots of Israel that most of its supporters have traditionally been Marxists and other self described leftists. Indeed one often sees the term "progressive except for Palestine" on the Internet. This term is used to describe leftists, usually Americans, who support Israel's ongoing repression of the Palestinians. But, Palestine has only become a "progressive cause" fairly recently. In the US most critics of Israel such as Patrick J. Buchanan have been traditional conservatives. Looking at modern Israel's origins in 1947 and 1948 this makes perfect sense.

Statement of Purpose

This blog generally does not deal too much with the meta issues of blogging itself. After all I am not a philosopher. Instead I have a degree in history and work in a political science department. Nonetheless, I have given some thought as to the purpose of this blog recently.

First, it is a public journal of sorts. That is it records some of the events of my life including my teaching and research. In the past when I have tried to keep a written journal that was not public I always quit after a couple of months. This blog is almost five years old. Being public it also provides information to my family and friends. For a long time I think my parents were my only readers. I think I may have one or two more regular readers now.

Second, it is a place that allows me to develop short written pieces on topics that interest me. Thus it serves to further distill and condense my thoughts on various subjects. The ability to provide brief summaries is one of the skills I try to impart to my students as well.

Finally, it provides a place for me to post important documents such as syllabi, article abstracts and research proposals. Viewers can get a general idea of the type of professional teaching and publishing I have done by reading through the archives of this blog. I do not have another web site.

Happy in Bishkek

These pictures are a bit old. They are from a dinner party in Bishkek last semester. I am the guy in the sweater with glasses. I have since cut my hair and lost some weight. The woman in the black dress is my girlfriend, Oksana.

Returning Refugees and Deportees

On JSF there has been some recent discussion in one of the comment threads about the mass return of nationalities deported by Stalin to their historic homelands in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a precedent for the return of the Palestinian refugees. The question of scale has been raised. I believe there are about 4 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside of historic Palestine. This is certainly greater than the total number of deportees in the USSR that returned to the Caucasus, Kalmykia and other regions during the Khrushchev years. But, the numbers involved were still quite sizable.

Between 1941-1948, the Stalin regime forcibly deported 3,266,340 people from their homelands to eastern regions of the USSR (Bugai, doc. 48, pp. 264-265). A total of 2,303,279 of these exiles came from the eight nationalities deported in their entirety (Ediev, table 109, p. 302). That is the Russian-Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. By 1 January 1954, the total number of special settlers had declined to 2,760,471 (Bugai, doc. 62, pp. 277-278). The largest group of deportees, the Russian-Germans were never allowed to return to the Volga, Ukraine and other European areas of the Soviet Union in large numbers. The Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks also remained banned from returning to their homelands during most of the Soviet period.

The Chechens and Ingush were the largest group to return home from exile in the eastern regions of the USSR. Between 1957 and 1961, a total of 384,000 Chechens and 84,000 Ingush returned to the North Caucasus leaving only 34,000 Chechens and 22,000 Ingush in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The vast majority of these returnees, 432,000, returned to the Chechen and Ingush ASSR. This increased the territory's population to 892,400. The remaining 36,000 returned to their ancestral villages in Daghestan and North Ossetia (Bugai, doc. 66, pp. 281-282). Thus nearly 90% of the Chechen and Ingush population had returned from exile in Central Asia to the North Caucasus in less than five years.

So I do not have an example of millions of refugees or deportees returning home. But, there is an example of hundreds of thousands of internal exiles in the USSR returning home during Khrushchev's reign. Of course one major difference between Israel and the USSR is that the return of the Chechens and Ingush to a restored Chechen-Ingush ASSR did not threaten the existence of the USSR as a socialist state. The return of an equal percentage of Palestinian refugees to their ancestral homeland would undoubtedly doom Israel as a Zionist project.

Sources:

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

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

International Crisis Game

This weekend I helped supervise an International Crisis Game here at AUCA. It was a simulation of a future Israeli assault upon Gaza and involved students from universities here in Bishkek, Osh State and KIMEP in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I was the supervisor for the teams representing Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It was fun, but exhausting. Saturday's session ran from nine in the morning until six at night. Most importantly, however, I think the students participating learned a lot about how international relations work from the event.

Sixty Years since Operation "Priboi" (25 March 1949)

Sixty years ago the Stalin regime embarked upon the massive deportation of people from occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia accused of being kulaks, bandits and nationalists as well as members of their families. Between 25 March and 30 March 1949, the MVD rounded up and placed on train echelons bound for Siberia over 90,000 people. According to one report by MVD chief Kruglov of 18 May 1949, the exact number of people deported during this operation reached 94,779 of which 25,708 were adult men, 41,987 women and 27,084 children. The largest contingent of deportees came from Latvia with 42,149 people (13,624 families) followed by Lithuania with 31,917 people (9, 518 families) and Estonia with 20,173 people (7,488 families). The Soviet government classified these exiles as special settlers and placed them under the same legal restrictions they had earlier imposed upon the Russian-Germans, Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. The MVD dispersed these deportees to work on collective and state farms, mining gold and felling trees in Krasnoyarsk Kray, Novosibirsk Oblast, Tomsk Oblast, Omsk Oblast, Irkutsk Oblast and Amur Oblast.

Initial Location of Deportees

Krasnoyarsk Kray- 13,823 people (3,671 families)

Novosibirsk Oblast - 10,064 people (3,152 families)

Tomsk Oblast - 16,065 people (5,360 families)

Omsk Oblast - 22,542 people (7,944 families)

Irkutsk Oblast - 25,834 people (8,475 families)

Amur Oblast - 5,451 people (2,028 families)

Source:

N.F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin-Lavrentiiu Berii: "Ikh nado deportirovat'": Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii (Moscow: "Druzhba narodov", 1992), doc. 19, pp. 201-203.

Sadovaya (More Interviews with Deportation Survivors)

On Friday I went with my student researchers to the village of Sadovaya to interview more Karachai survivors of the 1943 deportation. Sadovaya is about 35 kilometers outside of Bishkek. They interviewed seven more people, four women and three men. The trip was very productive and the people we talked to were very nice and cooperative. This research project is working out much better than I anticipated. The students involved are very motivated and skillful and the Karachai community of Kyrgyzstan has been extremely helpful and friendly. I definitely would like to organize similar student research projects on other groups in the future.

Update: One of the students involved has written an account of our trip to Sadovaya on her blog.

My very cool Nooruz gift

Today I found this comment on my blog from one of my former students. It came just in time for Persian New Year. I was so touched that I have decided to give it a proper post of its own.

Dear Dr. Pohl,

If you do not mind, I took my Sunday to read your Blog from the year of its creation until the semester we have met. I remain to be your reader from 2007 and on. You struggled for couple years. I am sorry you have been denied to realize your goals for such a long time. I just wanted to tell you, as your student, that You did prove them wrong concerning your teaching ability. You have set up an example of an academic who KNOWS his field. I am thankful to you that you have shared your expertise with me and my fellow students in class of Political Culture, and Borders & Migrations. I am also thankful that you have become more than an instructor to many of your students and have facilitated us to grow to our potential. You have added invaluable academic reputation to the International and Comparative Politics department of AUCA by pushing ICP students to think broader and deeper through a unique perspective.Thank You!!!

Respectfully,

Farhad

Nooruz

Today it is nice and warm again. It is also Nooruz or Persian New Year. There are all kinds of festivities going on in the center of town. My girlfriend, her son and I will be partaking in some of them in a short while.

Hazelnut Flavored M&Ms

Today I found and purchased a green bag of M&Ms at the university's snack bar. Marked on the bag was a notification that it had hazelnut flavoring. Like the orange flavored M&Ms which I have not seen in many months, I have only seen the hazelnut flavored M&Ms in Kyrgyzstan. At any rate I found the hazelnut flavored M&Ms to be very tasty.

Snowstorm

It has been snowing heavily here in Bishkek since early this morning.

Similarities between Kyrgyzstan and Uganda

Today I saw Klaus Schlichte from the University of Magdeburg give a fascinating talk on the similarities between Kyrgyzstan and Uganda. In addition to political similarities he also noted that synergistic combinations of native and foreign influence were prominent in music and fashion. In Uganda people combine revived indigenous traditions with Imperial British ones. In Kyrgyzstan people combine reinvigorated native elements with Soviet ones. I had not really thought about these cultural aspects before, certainly not in a comparative manner.

Back from spring break

Last week was spring break. So I did not have any classes. This week I have had three classes so far. In my Politics of Genocide course I played the Dead Kennedy's Holiday in Cambodia. I thought it was a creative pedagogical tool. But, I am not sure if they got anything out of the song or not. In my Migration and Borders class I covered the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Finally, in my Political History of the USSR class I covered the years between 1938 and 1941. In particular, I covered the Soviet annexation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Eastern Poland, and Bessarabia.

Still the Most Racist Thing Ever Posted on the Internet

Despite the passage of over a year this blog post is still the most racist thing ever posted on the Internet. The fact that the poster is a professor at an American university says much about the acceptability of anti-Arab racism among US academics. If the post had been about Jews rather than Palestinians he would have been fired from his job and blacklisted from ever working in a US educational institution again.

More Interviews with Survivors of Stalin's Deportations

Today we did in depth interviews with two Karachai survivors of the deportation. They went very well. One of the interview subjects was seven at the time of the deportation and had a very harrowing story of the deportation to Central Asia and life under the special settlement regime. Next Friday we are going out to do some more interviews with other Karachai survivors.

Spring is Back

It was warm enough today that I did not wear a coat to work. The beverage vendors have also set up along the sidewalk. So I think this means spring will be staying this time around.

Spring has Gone

This weekend it got cold again. On Sunday night and Monday morning we had a snow storm. The weather here is completely unpredictable.

65 Years Since the Deportation of the Balkars

In 1944, the Soviet government celebrated International Women's Day by forcibly deporting almost the entire Balkar population to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Omsk Oblast in Sibera. A Turkic people closely related to the Karachais, the Balkars lived primarily in the Karbardino-Balkar ASSR located in the Northwest Caucasus. Starting on 8 March 1944 and finishing the following day, the NKVD loaded 37,713 Balkars onto 14 train echelons bound for Central Asia and Siberia (Bugai, doc. 29, pp. 113-114). The Stalin regime placed the exiled Balkars under special settlement restrictions identical to those that it had imposed upon the deported Russian-Germans, Kalmyks, Karachais, Chechens and Ingush. By October 1946 the Balkar population had been reduced to 32,817 due to deaths from malnutrition and disease (Bugai, doc. 25, pp. 244-245). The Balkars remained confined by the special settlement restrictions until 28 April 1956 (Bugai, doc. 57, p. 273). Only in 1957, however, could they return to their mountain homeland in the Caucasus. During 1957 and 1958, 34,749 Balkars returned home (Bugai, doc. 64, pp. 279-280). The Stalin regime's ethnic cleansing of the Balkars on International Women's Day in 1944 clearly violated the commitment to both women's and workers' rights embodied in the holiday.

Source:

N.F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin - Lavrentiiu Berii: "Ikh nado deportirovat;": Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii (Moscow: "Druzhba narodov," 1992).

International Women's Day

Sunday is March 8th, International Women's Day. Here in Kyrgyzstan it is like a super sized version of Valentine's Day and Mother's Day combined. But, its recent commercialization should not obscure its labor and socialist roots. It was originally intended as a day to promote better pay and conditions for women working in industry. The first Women's Day was officially celebrated in the US on 23 February 1909. It made it to Europe in 1911 when it was first observed on March 8th. Promoted heavily by the German socialist, Clara Zetkin, it became an official Soviet holiday in 1922.

Source:

Temma Kaplan, "On the Socialist Origins of International Women's Day," Feminist Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 163-171.

Cambodia

For some reason my Politics of Genocide class seems to have taken a great interest in the events that transpired in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979. Most of the students in the class want to write their final research paper on Cambodia. I hope it is not because they admire Khmer Rouge education policy with its brutal killing of teachers.

Russian Theater

Tuesday I went to the Russian Theater for the first time to see a play. The play was titled Fantazii i tol'ko. It was in a small room in the back and the boundry between the stage and the audience essentially did not exist. The play itself was interesting and well worth the 200 som I paid for my ticket.

5 March 1953

Fifty six years ago today Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died. His regime killed millions in man made famines, firing squads, labor camps and special settlements. Only Hitler and Mao had comparable records of mass murder in the 20th century.

65 Years Since the Demobilization of Karachais from the Red Army

On 3 March 1944, the GKO (State Committee of Defense) issued Order No. 0741 removing the Karachais from the Red Army and sending them to live under special settlement restrictions in Central Asia. In total the Soviet regime demobilized 2,543 Karachais from the Red Army and sent them into internal exile with only the clothes on their backs. Here they joined the remainder of the Karachais deported from their North Caucasian homeland on 2 November 1944.

Sources:

N.F. Bugai, L. Beria -I Stalinu: "Soglasno vashemu ukazaniiu..."(Moscow: "AIRO XX," 1995), p. 63.

N.L. Pobol' and P.M. Polian, eds., Staliniskie deportatsii 1928-1953(Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Fond "Demokratiia", 2005), p. 390.

New Link - Farhad Kerimov

I have added a new link to Farhad's Notes, a blog run by a former student of mine. He is currently in Chicago on a study abroad for a year program. His blogroll consists entirely of current and former professors at AUCA.

Update: 6 March 2009

It appears that his blogroll now includes his girlfriend as well. She is not a professor or former professor at AUCA. She is still a student here.

New York Times Post on the Marienburg Massacre

The New York Times of all places has an excellent article on the massacre of German civilians in what used to be Marienburg East Prussia and is now Malbork Poland.

Spring has come early

Today is the last day of February and it looks like spring is already here. Yesterday it was quite chilly and snow fell all day. But, today it is sunny and warm and almost all of the snow has melted.

This Week in Class

This week we discussed Stalinist deportations in all three of my classes. In Migration and Borders we covered the exile of the Kalmyks to Siberia by Stalin from 1943 to 1957 as a case study of forced migration. In my Politics of Genocide course we discussed the deportation of the Russian-Germans, Karachais and Crimean Tatars as three examples of Soviet genocide during the 1940s. Finally, in my Political History of the USSR class we discussed the mass deportation of farmers branded as "kulaks" to special settlement villages in the Soviet Far North in 1930. In this last class we discussed the relationship between dekulakization, collectivization and industrialization. Between the three classes we covered a pretty good representative sample of Soviet mass deportations during the Stalin regime.

Link to Slate Article on Crimean Tatars

Yesterday Slate published an excellent article on the Crimean Tatars by Joshua Kucera.

Student Reaction to Through the Red Gate

Last week I showed Through the Red Gate to my Political History of the USSR and Migration and Borders classes. The week before that I showed it to my Politics of Genocide class. Overall I got a very positive response to the film from all three classes. Generally, they thought it was a very moving and informative documentary.

To the Thieves at KavkazCenter.com

I am shocked to find that the article I wrote and published on the Chechen and Ingush deportation time stamped 2:45 am, 23 February 2009 was reproduced in its entirety except for the sources and my name on the KavkazCenter.com website. Their time stamp is 15:29, 23 February 2009. I wrote the piece and publishing it without my permission and failing to put my name at the end of it is a crime in most countries. It is also morally theft and prohibited in the Koran. I doubt that the thieves at KavkazCenter.com will apologize to me, but their behavior is unacceptable.

Translation of Two Reports from Beria to Stalin

State Committee of Defense
Comrade Stalin

Reporting on the progress of the operation to exile the Chechens and Ingush as of this morning 24 February, so far taken from population points have been 333 thousand 739 people, of this number were loaded into train echelons 176 thousand 950 people. In the second half of the day of 23 February in almost all districts of Chechno-Ingushetii fell abundant snow, this has created difficulties in the transportation of people, especially in the mountainous districts.

Beria 24 February 1944

State Committee of Defense
Comrade Stalin

The operation to exile the Chechens and Ingush is proceeding normally. Up until the evening of 25 February were loaded into train echelons 342 thousand 647 people. From the loading stations have been dispatched to places of new settlement 86 echelons.

Beria 26 February 1944

Source:

N.F. Bugai, ed., “Deportatsiia: Beriia dokladyvaet Stalinu,” Kommunist, no. 1, 1991, pp. 103-104.

65 Years Since the Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush

Sixty five years ago, Stalin and his henchmen celebrated Red Army Day by rounding up and deporting virtually the entire Chechen and Ingush population from the Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Codenamed Operation Chechevitsa (Lentil), the forced removal of the Chechens and Ingush required the services of 119,000 members of the NKVD and SMERSh (Bugai doc. 14, p. 106). Many of these men had previously participated in the deportation of the Kalmyks and the Karachais. On the first day of the operation, Beria reported that by 11:00 AM the NKVD had evicted 94,741 people from their homes and loaded 20,023 into train wagons (Bugai, doc. 11, p. 103). In total the operation lasted until 29 February 1944 (it was a leap year) and involved the forced resettlement of 387,229 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush (Bugai, doc. 13, pp. 105-106). In a mere week the Stalin regime ethnically cleansed nearly half a million people from the Caucasus.

The Chechens and Ingush made the long journey to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in unsanitary, unheated and unlit cattle cars. The NKVD had stuffed between 40 and 45 people into each wagon (Bugai, doc. 31, pp. 114-115). These overcrowded conditions in the train cars greatly facilitated the spread of disease. Typhus afflicted many of the deportees enroute. Those that perished had to be left along the rail lines without a proper burial since the NKVD shot any deportees that strayed more than five meters from the train wagons. (Bugai, doc. 16, p. 107).

In exile in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan the Chechens and Ingush lived in extreme poverty in the years following the deportations. They lacked adequate housing, food, clothing and medicine. Large numbers of the deportees perished from malnutrition and diseases such as typhus in the first years of exile. According to the demographer, D.M. Ediev the excess mortality among these two nationalities from the years 1944 to 1952 totaled 125,500 Chechens and 20,300 Ingush. These figures represent 30.76% of the Chechen population before the deportations and 20.3% of the Ingush population (Ediev, table 104, p. 294).

The deportees also came under the restrictions of the special settlement regime. They had to report at least once a month to a special commandant of the NKVD. They also could not leave the confines of their assigned residence without permission from this commandant. They remained confined to restricted areas of exile (Bugai, doc. 10, p. 231). The NKVD controlled the residency, movement and employment of the special settlers.

The Soviet government did not free the Chechens and Ingush from the special settlement restrictions until after Stalin's death. On 16 July 1956, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet freed the Chechens and Ingush from the special settlement regime, but did not allow them to return home or petition for the return of property lost during the deportations (Bugai, doc. 59, pp. 274-275). The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to restore the national autonomy of the Chechens and Ingush on 24 November 1956. The Supreme Soviet did not recreate the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and restore the legal right of the Chechens and Ingush to live in their historic homeland until 9 January 1957. These decisions became finalized as Soviet law only on 11 February 1957 (Documents reproduced in Aliev, pp. 49-55). Despite this partial rehabilitation there has never been any full public accounting of this crime against humanity.

Sources:

Ismail Aliev, Reabilitatsii narodov i grazhdan, 1954-1994 gody: Dokumenty (Moscow: RAN, 1994).

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

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

See also my post on the subject from two years ago.

Red Army Day

Today is Red Army Day in Kyrgyzstan. The government has renamed it Defenders' Day, but it is still the old Soviet holiday to celebrate the formation of the Red Army by Leon Trotsky in 1918. It has evolved in Kyrgyzstan into a kind of Men's Day to serve as a counterpart to International Women's Day on March Eighth. The women in our department got us pizza for lunch on Friday and gave each of the men in the department a card and a handkerchief as a gift.

Circus

On Saturday I went to the circus with my girlfriend and her two kids. It was my first time going to the circus in Bishkek and I was surprised at how expensive it was. It cost 550 som ($13.50) for each ticket including the one for the five year old. The average working class salary here in Bishkek is less than 4000 som ($100) a month. Then the idiot Russian woman working at the cashier window sold us tickets with the wrong date stamped on them. They said 22 February 2009 instead of 21 February 2009. This caused a problem when she sold the same seats with the correct date to another group of people. When even the circus is corrupt and incompetent you know you have a problem. But, since the price of tickets was such that they could only sell about two thirds the seats of the tiny one ring auditorium, we managed to find some empty seats to occupy. The show itself was fairly entertaining. I liked the Russian clowns a lot. They were pretty funny.

Oral History of the Karachai Community in Kyrgyzstan: Remembering the Deportations 65 Years Ago

On 2 November 1943, Soviet security forces forcibly resettled almost the entire Karachai population of nearly 70,000 people from their North Caucasian homeland to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Less than 69,000 survived the trip of which over 45,000 arrived in Kazakhstan. The NKVD settled the remaining nearly 23,000 deportees in Frunze Oblast, Kyrgyzstan. The Soviet government then dissolved the Karachai Autonomous Oblast and divided its land among other administrative territories. It also changed many of the geographical place names of within the region. It completed this ethnic cleansing by sending the Karachais living outside their national oblast or serving in the Red Army to join the rest of their kin in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In exile in Central Asia the Karachais came under a series of legal disabilities that separated them from most other Soviet citizens. Classified as “special settlers” the Soviet regime imposed severe restrictions on the residency and movement rights of the Karachais. They also lived in conditions of extreme poverty and thousands died prematurely of malnutrition, disease and exposure. In the years after Stalin’s death there arose a movement by Karachai activists to lobby Moscow for the right to return to their former homeland. The Soviet government allowed the Karachais to return home to the Caucasus only after 1957. They, however, did not restore the borders of the Karachai Autonomous Oblast. Instead the Soviet government created a Karachai-Cherkess Autonomous Oblast by combining most of the former territory of the Karachai Autonomous Oblast with the Cherkess Autonomous Oblast. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the Karachai population in exile in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan opted to return to their ancestral homeland during the next few years. By 1960 over 80% of the Karachai population lived in this new administrative region. For more than a dozen years virtually the entire Karachai population lived as exiles and second class Soviet citizens in Central Asia far from their Caucasian homeland.

Not all the Karachais, however, returned to the Caucasus. A significant number remained in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Relatively little has been written specifically about the experience of the Karachai special settlers in Kyrgyzstan and their relationship to the local authorities and population. Thus we have formed a group consisting of three students and one faculty advisor to study the following question regarding the Karachai special settlers in Kyrgyzstan from the Caucasus during the years 1943 to 1961. How did the legal structures of the special settlement regime implemented by the authorities in the Kyrgyz SSR affect the day to day life of these deportees in relationship to the surrounding population? We are particularly interested in issues of economic integration, social capital, physical segregation, ethnic discrimination and political mobilization. This study will focus on the life experiences of the deported Karachais and will make extensive use of interviews with survivors. Published archival material, memoirs and scholarly literature on the deportation will supplement the information gathered by the group in the course of interviewing survivors of the deportation. We have already made preliminary contact with five interview subjects. This study will result in a scholarly journal article on the exile experiences of the Karachais in Kyrgyzstan. The group will also present its findings at a round table discussion at American University of Central Asia and at the student conference on migration sponsored by the Social Research Center. Further publication based upon this project may also result if substantial new material is unearthed.

Good News

The student research project I am supervising, Oral History of the Karachai Community in Kyrgyzstan: Remembering the Deportations 65 Years Ago, received a grant of $450 today. This money will allow us to conduct interviews of the survivors of Stalin's ethnic cleansing of their Caucasian homeland on 2 November 1943. I am hoping we can fill in some of the gaps in the historical record that are not addressed in the archival documentation.

More Union Work

Today I met with the national head of the Union of Educators and Scholars of the Kyrgyz Republic. It went well. Right now we are trying to get a meeting with the head of the Board of Trustees of AUCA. Finally, on a very positive note, I got a preview of a forthcoming article on the union in the student newspaper. It is extremely favorable to our position.

Interviewing Survivors of Stalin's Deportations

Currently I am supervising a student research project on the history of the Karachais deported to Kyrgyzstan by Stalin in winter 1943-1944. Today, I went with the three students involved in the project to the Assembly of Peoples of Kyrgyzstan to get make contact with the Karachai community here. It was our good fortune that they were holding a meeting at the same time that we arrived. We met with five survivors of the deportation and got their contact details. We will be arranging a more formal meeting and meal with them soon. They were very friendly and helpful. My students are very excited about this project.

Hampshire College

Hampshire College in Amherst has now become the first US institution of higher education to divest from Israel. The school is famous for a couple of reasons, but one of them is that it hosts the National Yiddish Book Center. The conflict between certain elements of the Jewish Diaspora and Zionism is not new. But, the presence of such a symbolic institution of the cultural history of the Jewish Diaspora at Hampshire certainly highlights this conflict. In the larger scheme of things it looks like the movement for Palestinian human rights is finally starting to get some support in the US.

Translation of NKVD Report on Labor Army Conscripts in Kyrgyzstan

NKVD USSR, Moscow -
Chief of Section on Special Settlements
Colonel Comrade Kuznetsov

11 January 1946

In the matter of providing information on the number and movement of mobilized German men and women, working on the construction of hydroelectric stations and industries in Frunze Oblast of the Kyrgyz SSR as of 1 January 1946.

We report, that in the fourth quarter of 1945 on the construction site of the Voroshilov hydroelectric station left 20 people, of this number demobilized due to age were two people and deserted 18 people, arrived 17 people (transferred from the construction site of the Alamedin hydroelectric station).

During this time on the construction site of the Alamedin hydroelectric station left 61 people, from them: demobilized due to age - 23 people, deserted 41 people, arrived - 4 people (returned deserters).

All deserters from the construction sites of Voroshilov and Alamedin hydroelectric stations until their mobilization lived in sovkhozes and kolkhozes in Frunze Oblast, in connection with unsatisfactory material-living conditions on the construction sites - lack of necessary shoes and clothes for work in winter time, finally, naturally, they left the construction sites for places, where their relatives lived. In connection with this significant flight the chief of the UNKVD of Frunze Oblast lieutenant-colonel comrade Martynenko pointed out that there was a lack of a security regime at the places of work of mobilized German men and women and proposed the return of all fugitives to the construction sites.

On creating the necessary living conditions at the construction sites of the hydroelectric stations for mobilized Germans we refer the question to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) and Council of Peoples Commissars of the Kyrgyz SSR.

Chief of the Section on Special Settlements of the NKVD of the Kyrgyz SSR

Neverenko

Chief of the 4th Section of the Section on Special Settlements

Major Kuz'min

Source: N.F. Bugai, ed., "Mobilizovat' nemtsev v rabochie kolonny...I. Stalin": Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), doc. no. 238, pp. 307-308.

Looking for Forced Labor Projects from the Stalin Era in the Chui Oblast of the Kyrgyz Republic

Today I came across a reproduction of an NKVD report dated 11 January 1946 about two hydroelectric stations in Frunze Oblast built by Russian-Germans mobilized into the labor army. What follows is a quick English language summary. I will post a verbatium translation of the document tomorrow. I do not have time right now.

The report notes that 59 Russian-Germans working on the Voroshilov and Alamedin hydroelectric stations deserted their construction sites and went to live with relatives during the last quarter of 1945. These forced laborers had all lived in sovkhozes and kolkhozes in Frunze Oblast prior to their conscription into the labor army. The report claims that poor living conditions, especially a lack of shoes and clothes for winter conditions, motivated their flight. The report then notes the response of the chief of the UNKVD of Frunze Oblast, Martynenko. He pointed out the lax security regime at places where Russian-German men and women mobilized into the labor army worked. He also proposed that all the fugitives be returned to their places of work. The report concludes by noting that the question of living conditions for labor army workers at the construction sites had been referred to the party and state authorities of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic.

Source: N.F. Bugai, ed., "Mobilizovat' nemtsev v rabochie kolonny...I. Stalin": Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), doc. no. 238, pp. 307-308.

Frunze Oblast is now Chui Oblast. It is the oblast that surrounds Bishkek. That means that the Voroshilov and Alamedin hydroelectric stations must be fairly close to me. If anybody knows exactly where these structures are located could you please let me know? You can either e-mail me or leave a comment on this blog.

Electric Shock Baton Update

Evidently the girlfriend got to try out the electric shock baton on some drunk guy Saturday night. She did not give me any more details about the use of the weapon.

Electric Shock Baton

Normally, after I get paid each month, I buy my girlfriend a piece of jewelry. Yesterday, I had the following conversation with her.

GF: I don't want a pendant.

GF: I don't want a bracelet.

GF: I want an electric shock baton.

Me: What for?

GF: Work. (she is a security guard) It's dangerous at night.

Me: How much does it cost?

GF: 5000 som ($125)

Me: No problem.

Closing Time

The big news here in Bishkek is President Bakiyev's recent announcement that the US must leave Manas air base. Far less reported, but more important to my girlfriend and her kids, is the fact that Panfilov Park has been closed for reconstruction since October. It is scheduled to reopen in spring.

Reading List for the Holodomor

The USSR in the 1930s

Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor)

Politics of Genocide


Michael Ellman, “Discussion Article: Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933 Revisited.” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 59, No. 4 (June 2007), pp. 663-693.

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/ellman1933.pdf

Michael Ellman, “The Role of Leadership Perceptions and of Intent in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1934.” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 57, No. 6 (September 2005), pp. 823-841.

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/ellman.pdf

Jacques Vallin; France Mesle; Serguei Adamets; Serhii Pyrozhkov, “A New Estimate of Ukrainian Population Losses during the Crises of the 1930s and 1940s.” Population Studies, Vol. 56, No. 3 (November 2002), pp. 249-264.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0032-4728%28200211%2956%3A3%3C249%3AANEOUP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S

Genocide Class

So far this semester my genocide course has been my favorite. The intellectual level of the discussions have been quite high. Among other topics these discussions have addressed issues of international law, the intellectual infrastructure of racism, historiographical disputes and the problems of reconciliation and justice. So far we have covered Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, the 1904 massacre of the Hereros in Namibia, and the Armenian Genocide. Next week we will be covering the 1932-1933 Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor).

Strange Weather Again

For the last few days it has been unseasonably warm in Bishkek. In fact the weather has been springlike. This morning it was quite warm. All this changed this afternoon. For the last few hours there has been heavy snowfall.

Union Work

Last semester I got elected head of the newly formed AUCA local of the Union of Educators and Scholars of the Kyrgyz Republic. Today I had my first formal meeting with the administration. Tomorrow we will have our first general membership meeting.

Link to Jews sans frontieres

I noticed today that Jews sans frontieres has added me to their blog roll. So I am returning the favor. Mark Elf and crew have been doing an excellent job of covering events in Palestine for years now. Thanks a lot for the link.

I am not sure if it an act of war or a crime, but it is irritating.

In response to FLG's question as to whether the Russian attacks on Kyrgyzstan's Internet infrastructure are cyberwarfare or cybercrime I have the following answer. It is a big pain in the ass is what it is. During the time the Internet was barely working I had to submit three online recommendations for students for MA programs at Central European University in Budapest. It took me all day to get the applications to go through. Other professors here at AUCA had the exact same problem. Under normal circumstances I should have been able to do them all in less than an hour.

This might explain why the internet has been so slow recently

Evidently Russian hackers have been hitting Kyrgyzstan with denial of service attacks. See the article below for more details.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/158517/kyrgyzstan_off_net.html?tk=rss_news

Another New Link - Schaun and Rachel Wheeler

Schaun Wheeler and his new wife Rachel have a new blog. Schaun did much of the research for his dissertation in Kyrgyzstan and spent a lot of time hanging around AUCA. So far there is not much up on their blog, but I hope that changes soon.

New Link - Seamus O'Sullivan

My colleague Seamus O'Sullivan who used to teach in the American Studies department across the hall is now working at American University of Afghanistan. He has maintained a very interesting blog for some time, but I have neglected until now to link to it. Despite my previous neglect, I encourage everybody to check out his blog Intransigent in Kabul.

Things I have done this week

In addition to teaching three classes, I have had an unusual amount of extra work this last week. For instance, I have written a half a dozen letters of recommendation for students. It seems as soon as I finish one letter another one arrives for me to do. Currently, I have about a half a dozen more left to finish. I have also edited an academic encyclopedia article, given a guest lecture for another professor and helped put together a grant proposal. I hope next week things will settle down for a little while.

The Shelves of Ramstor

It appears that my fears of impending food shortages were unfounded. Last night when I went to Ramstor I noticed that they had more meat and lots of eggs. Their stock of milk products, however, was still significantly below their normal level.

Afghanistan

My Afghan sources have recently informed me that the country has become extremely dangerous. The country is also evidently experiencing real not foreshadowed food shortages. After over seven years of fighting, US military forces have still not managed to bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan.

Food Shortages

I have noticed for the last week that the big modern Ramstor supermarket near me has had dwindling supplies of meat, milk products, and toilet paper. They are completely out of eggs. I hope this does not foreshadow a return to Soviet era shortages.

Solving Third World Problems

Since I have arrived back in Bishkek I have had to solve a number of third world problems. To date this has included restoring electricity to my flat, recovering my lost luggage from London, and getting a new stove. On the last point I believe that the old stove, an Elektra 1001, dated back to the building's initial construction in 1985. It still had CCCP prominently stamped on it. At any rate it refused to come back on with the rest of the electrical appliances last week. I think I now have all of my third world problems, except for the broken window, fixed for the time being.

New Book Published

My new book, Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans Under Soviet Rule is now available for purchase from the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. You can order it from here. The book is $15 for members and $20 for nonmembers. This post is purely for noncommercial and informational purposes since I do not receive any money from the sale of this book.

The Dollar is Way Up

Yesterday I exchanged $100 US for Kyrgyz som. I got back over 4000 som. Just a couple of weeks ago it was only 38 som to the dollar.

GAZA and SOAS

It appears that lots of interesting things have recently been happening at the School of Oriental and African Studies where I did both my MA and Ph.D. SOAS Students in Solidarity with Gaza occupied the Brunei Suite in the Brunei Gallery for several days. They have their own blog recording their recent actions. For more news on what has been happening at SOAS in the last few days see Solomon's Mindfield. Things are not nearly so active here at AUCA. But, I did notice that students have put up a few signs and two collection boxes for the victims of Israel's assault upon Gaza.

Hat Tip: Mark Elf at JSF

Article on Stalinism

Russian historian, Arseny Roginsky, has written an excellent article in English on the continuing legacy of Stalinism in Russia.

Mass Grave Unearthed in Malbork/Marienburg

Polish excavators recently unearthed 1,800 corpses of German civilians murdered by the Red Army in 1945 in what is now Malbork Poland. Previously this city was named Marienburg and was part of East Prussia in Germany. This massacre took place as part of a larger ethnic cleansing of some eight million Germans from the eastern territories of Germany in 1945 and 1946. Der Spiegel has the full story in English at the address below.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,600216,00.html

The New Semester Begins

I got back to Bishkek yesterday okay, but my luggage did not. It is still on holiday in London. When I got back I found out we had no electricity in my flat. But, I managed to get that fixed yesterday. Today I taught my first class of the new semester, Politics of Genocide. Tomorrow I teach Political History of the USSR and Migration and Borders. Despite lots of little third world problems, life in Bishkek is very good. I have an enjoyable job, a wonderful girlfriend, and a conveniently located apartment.

Going back to Bishkek

This afternoon I am flying back to Bishkek. My three week vacation in the US went really fast. I had a great time.

Migration and Borders Syllabus

Migration and Borders
ICP 329.5
3 credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University of Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.


Meeting Time: Tuesday and Thursday 10:50 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. Students will be required to write three 600 to 800 word reflection papers. They will have to write one paper on each of the three types of migration covered in this course: labor migration, forced migration and return migration. Each of these papers should engage with one or more of the readings assigned for the topic. They will also have to write a 2500 to 3000 word essay on one specific case of migration. The paper is due the last week of class. In the five 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 ten percent each day they are late. Please see the separate handout on late papers. 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. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. 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: All of the required readings are included in the course packet.

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them from the course and recommend to the chairman of the ICP department that they be expelled from the program. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying of from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than four words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F for the course and be recommended for expulsion from ICP. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.


Grading:

Three Short Papers – 45% (15% each)

Written research paper – 30% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 15%

Class participation – 10%

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

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. The first paper is due Thursday.

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. The second paper is due Thursday.

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 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. Watch the documentary, Through the Red Gate. The third paper is due Thursday.

Student Research

Week Thirteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Fourteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Fifteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Sixteen: Student oral presentations continued.

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

Political History of the USSR Syllabus

Political History of the USSR
ICP 255
3 Credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University Central Asia
Spring Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.


Meeting Time: Tuesday and Thursday 2:10 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. There will be two short 600 to 800 word papers due. The first one will be on collectivization and dekulakization. The second one will be on some aspect of World War II in the Soviet Union. 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 ten percent for each day they are late. Please see the separate handout regarding late papers. 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. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. 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 a number of shorter readings that will be provided to the students by the instructor.

Plagiarism Policy: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them from the course and recommend to the chairman of the ICP department that they be expelled from the program. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying of from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than four words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F for the course and be recommended for expulsion from ICP. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.

Grading:

Two short papers - 40% (20% each)

Written research paper –30% (Due last day of class)

Class participation – 30%

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.

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 Five: Nationality Policy during the 1920s

Chapter 4 in Hosking, pp. 93-118 and read Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 414-452.

Week Six: Economic Transformation in the 1930s.

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

Week Seven: 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. Watch the video, Through the Red Gate. The first paper is due on Thursday.

Week Eight: The Great Terror

Chapter 7 in Hosking, pp. 183-204 and read 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.

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

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

Week Ten: World War II

Chapter 10 in Hosking, pp. 263-295.

Week Eleven: 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 Twelve: Late Stalinism

Chapter 11 in Hosking, pp. 296-325 and read Nicolas Werth, “The ‘Chechen problem’: Handling an Awkward Legacy, 1918-1958,” Contemporary European History, no. 15, 2006, pp. 347-366. The second paper is due on Thursday.

Week Thirteen: Khrushchev

Chapter 12 in Hosking, pp. 326-362.

Week Fourteen: The Era of Stagnation

Chapter 13 in Hosking, pp. 363-401 and read H.M. Joo, “Voices of Freedom: Samizdat,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 56, No. 4, June 2004, pp. 571-594.

Week Fifteen: Nationality in the USSR after World War II

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

Syllabus for Politics of Genocide

Politics of Genocide
ICP 425
3 Credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.

Meeting Time: Monday and Wednesday 9:25 am

Course Description: This course will focus on genocide in the 20th century. The first weeks will cover the theoretical and legal aspects of genocide studies. From the third week to the tenth week the class will focus on specific case studies. The exact emphasis of each week’s reading will be determined by the students. I have only provided broad categories based upon perpetrators rather than victims. Within these categories students will choose the exact material covered with my approval.

Requirements: This course will revolve around class discussion based upon readings chosen by the students. Each week from week three to week ten, students will lead discussion on readings they have chosen. All readings must be approved by me at least a week before the scheduled discussion. All the students in the class and not just those presenting that week are required to read these selections. The students leading discussion must submit a written paper between 1500 and 2000 words on the subject on the same day. Every student will be required to select class readings, lead discussion and submit a paper on the readings once. In addition all students will be required to write a 3000 to 3500 word research paper on one case of genocide. They will be required to give an oral presentation on this research in one of the last five weeks of class. All late papers will lose ten percent for each day they are late. Please see the separate handout regarding late papers. 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. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. 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: I will provide students with the readings for week two. For all other weeks, the readings will be selected by the students. The students doing the selection should make sure that the readings are available to the entire class. The easiest way to do this is to select journal articles from JSTOR or EBSCOHOST.

Plagiarism Policy: Policy on Plagiarism and Citations: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them from the course and recommend to the chairman of the ICP department that they be expelled from the program. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying of from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than four words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F for the course and be recommended for expulsion from ICP. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.

Grading:

First Paper – 20%

Leading Class Discussion – 10%

Final Paper – 30%

Final Oral Report – 15%

Class Participation – 25%

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.

Week Two: Theory and International Law

Read: Robert M. Hayden, “Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers,” Slavic Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter 1996), pp. 727-748, Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 1-40, and Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, “The Study of Mass Murder and Genocide,” in Gellately and Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3-26.

Week Three: The Colonial World

Week Four: The Ottoman Empire

Week Five: The USSR in the 1930s

Week Six: Nazi Germany

Week Seven: The USSR in the 1940s

Week Eight: Cambodia

Week Nine: Yugoslavia

Week Ten: Rwanda

Weeks Eleven to Fifteen: Student Oral Reports.

New Link

In the interest of reciprocity I am adding a link to Fear and Loathing in Georgetown to my blog roll.

Pay It Forward

Today I was in Borders Books buying a few more tomes before returning to Bishkek. I was in the history section holding two large books when an older gentleman approached me. The books by the way were Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2009 and Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. He asked me if I intended to purchase the books I was holding. I informed him that I did indeed intend to buy them. The man then told me he was going to do me a favor. Not wishing to be rude I politely listened to him. He took out a sheet of paper with official Borders writing on it and said he had a discount of 40% on any single book purchased. He said he would give it to me if I later did a favor for a stranger. I readily agreed and he handed me the sheet. The book by Kiernan cost $40, so I saved $16. When I get back to Bishkek I will be on the look out for a complete stranger to help.

Through the Red Gate

This is the first review and recommendation of a completed film ever on this blog. Under Jakob's Ladder is still in the production stage. As a general rule I have not been very impressed with the medium of film recently. Through the Red Gate, however, is a very welcome exception to this trend. My only complaint about the film is that is too short. It is only about 45 minutes. Its subject matter, the fate of Mennonites in the USSR during collectivization and dekulakization, could easily sustain several hours of informative documentation. The documentary is centered around interviews with surviving members of the Bargen and Regehr families who lived through the Stalin regime's campaign to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." The Bargen family left the USSR as part of the last batch of 5,461 Mennonites legally allowed to leave the USSR by the Soviet government near the end of 1929 (1). The Regehr family in contrast was not so lucky. The OGPU deported them to a special settlement village in the Urals in the summer of 1931. The two families are related and during the 1930s the Regehrs managed to smuggle out of the USSR a large number of letters to the Bargens in Canada. Many of these letters have been published in English translation in Ruth Derksen Siemens, Remember US: Letters from Stalin's Gulag (1930-37) Volume One: The Regehr Family (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2007). This surviving contemporary record along with personal memories of the events gives the documentary a strong primary source base. I intend to show this documentary to both my Political History of the USSR and my Migration and Borders classes next semester. For more information on the documentary and the related book see the excellent website of Dr. Ruth Derksen Siemens.

Cited Sources

1. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 320.

I have Sympathy for the Devil, but not for Israel

One very nice thing about living overseas is that unlike in the US you are not subject to constant media bombardment praising every action of Israel and condemning all criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

Burgers in California

One of the things that Americans take for granted that does not exist in Kyrgyzstan is ready and cheap access to a wide variety of good burgers. Since returning to the US to visit family I have eaten four burgers. In order they were from Carl's Junior, Ruby's, McDonald's and In and Out. Obviously the one from Ruby's was the best. But, for a little over two dollars including tax, the one from In and Out was surprisingly very good.

Back from Arivaca

Yesterday I arrived back in California after a week in Arivaca, Arizona. My talk at the Arivaca library on daily life in Bishkek went well. About twenty people showed up for the presentation.