It is a Beautiful Morning in Africa

Last night I arrived back in Ghana. This morning I went for a long walk and checked the ATM machine. While I was in Kyrgyzstan the university paid me my salary for July. I took out 100 cedis since the cab ride back to Legon from the airport had reduced the holdings in my wallet to 20 GH. I then checked my university e-mail and found they are ready to process my residence permit. So I will go up the hill later this morning. The weather here is nice and cool, but it has not rained yet since I got back. So far things are moving along much better than I expected. Although I miss my family I am happy to be back in Africa.

I Keep Moving Forward

I accomplished my main goal this summer with a week to spare. I hope I can keep up this record of success when I get back to Africa. I have a lot of work waiting for me in Ghana.

Nearing the end of my vacation

My vacation is almost over. Soon I will have to return to Africa and start working again. I did, however, recently receive a small grant to attend a conference in Ghana on German colonialism in West Africa. I will be presenting a paper on cotton in German Togoland. The conference will be in late September. I will post more on my proposed paper later.

The Embassy Called me on Monday

The US embassy called me on Monday and told me that my daughter's documents were ready. I went that afternoon and picked up her US birth certificate (CRBA) and passport.  I have now finished what I came to Bishkek to do this summer. My daughter now has ironclad evidence of her US citizenship and can enter the US without a visa.

Almost Done

I came to Kyrgyzstan this summer with one primary objective. This objective is to get my daughter a US birth certificate and passport. After four trips to the US embassy I have finished all the paper work. Now I just have to wait for the documents to be processed.

Third World Problems

I am getting closer to accomplishing what I came back to Bishkek to finish. I think there is some universal law that nothing in the third world ever works on the first try. Nothing ever works on the second try either. If you get really lucky you can get things to work on the third try. But, normally everthing takes four or more attempts before you can accomplish anything.

Bishkek

Kyrgyzstan is hotter than Ghana was when I left. Bishkek is a lot smaller and quieter than Accra. I have met with some old friends and not much seems to have changed in Central Asia since I left in December.

Back in the Former USSR

On Monday night I left Accra to go to Bishkek via London and Istanbul. I arrived in Bishkek on Wednesday morning. I do not recommend travelling from Africa to Europe to the middle of Asia in a single non-stop trip unless you are in a hurry. I will be here for about a month before I return to Ghana.

I have some things that need my attention

I know looking at this blog it looks like my personal life is rather limited. But, I actually do have a life outside of academia. Those of you who know me personally know what  I am talking about. I have not posted on it very much in order to protect the privacy of other people. At any rate I have to go take care of some matters pertaining to that personal life this month. So until the fall semester starts at University of Ghana blogging will be slow.

Five Non-Controversial Things I Believe

1. It is almost impossible to get a really good beef hamburger outside the US. You can find decent ones if you look hard, but not excellent ones.

2. There is nothing scientific about social science, political science, or any other like discipline.

3. The best library in the world is the Library of Congress.

4.  SOAS is the single best English language institution in the world for studying Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

5. Nobody will leave any comments on this blog post.

Half steps

Sometimes you can not accomplish everything in one attempt. You have to do it in two half steps. This is frustrating, but a half step is much better than no step. I am going by what I think is a Chinese proverb: "Fear not moving slowly, fear only standing still." Even if it is not a real Chinese proverb it still makes a lot of sense to me.

Pineapple and Watermelon

Today I came across a fresh fruit juice combination I had not seen before. It was pineapple and watermelon. It tasted pretty good. But, I still prefer pineapple and ginger.

Strategy for Progress

I have decided that the best strategy for getting through life is to accomplish a little bit each day. Days where I accomplish nothing are frustrating. Monday was such a day. But, since then I have been doing well. A little bit of progress each day means moving forward. It is days when nothing gets done that kill progress and hope.

Modernity and Genocide: The Circassians

Modernity is of course a relative term. But, for a while now many scholars have identified the German extermination of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia during 1904-1907 as the first modern genocide. However, it appears that all of the modern state technology and ideology necessary to commit genocide had been in place and used considerably earlier by another state. The Russian genocide against the Circassians during 1860-1864 appears to have all the elements at least in an embryonic form of more modern genocides such as the Holocaust and the Soviet mass deportations in the 1940s.

A good argument can be made that the US committed genocide against certain Native American nations earlier than 1860. I am thinking in particular of the forced relocation of the Cherokee and other peoples by Andrew Jackson. However, I think these earlier cases had not yet acquired all of the elements of modernity that are shared by genocides in the 20th century. They certainly had many of the same features as more recent cases of genocide, but the first fully formed case of an ideologically driven attempt to destroy a group of people as a distinct entity appears to be the Russian extermination of the Circassians. The emphasis on ideology rather than land I think is a key factor in modern genocides. The articulation of totalized exclusionary concepts of the state that did not allow for the survival of certain separate cultural groups within its territory had not yet fully evolved until the 1860s.

So while the forced relocation of the Cherokee certainly constituted a genocide in being a deliberate act that the US government knew would lead to large numbers of deaths, it lacked the modern ideological drive of dissolving them as a distinct group. The survivors were allowed to reorganize their national life in what became Oklahoma. The initial removal did not aim to liquidate the Cherokee as a coherent national group, but rather to violently displace them to a marginal territory of the US. Modern genocides driven by ideology in contrast have sought to eliminate the victim groups as national entities through various means. The Tsarist expulsion of the Circassians sought to completely annihilate the idea of a Circassian nation. There was no place within the Russian Empire for the Circassians, no matter how marginalized. The Tsarist government succeeded in permanently detaching the Circassians from their ancestral lands and deporting them to the Ottoman Empire. While Circassian communities continue to exist in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine the dispersal prevented them from forming any large contiguous, coherent, and compact settlement from which to reclaim any political autonomy. It is only among the descendants of the small number of Circassians that avoided expulsion from the Caucasus that any territorial autonomy could be reestablished after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime.

Pocket Umbrella

Since it is the rainy season here in Ghana I have finally broken down and purchased a cheap umbrella. It is small enough that it fits in my pocket so I can carry it with me in case it starts to rain. I am not sure how much protection it will afford, but something is better than nothing.

Health Care: Ghana 1 US 0

Ghana routinely beats the US in football. But, it also seems to beat the US in providing health care to ordinary people. Timothy Burke, no stranger to Africa, reports that the waiting time to see a doctor at an ER in Fresno routinely averages nine hours. I have never spent more than two hours at the hospital in Legon. I went yesterday to see a doctor about renewing a script. I got there at 11:00 am. I saw a nurse and had my temperature and blood pressure taken by noon. I saw an actual doctor and got my script at 1:00 pm. This is the same pattern I have experienced here each of the last three times I have gone to the University of Ghana Hospital. Over all it seems amazingly efficient compared with Professor Burke's story out of Fresno. Now according to all the official statistics Ghana is a lot poorer than the US. So how come it can manage a working health care system and the US can not?

Moving on to my Second Semester in Africa

Now that I have entered my grades I am completely done with the academic work of my first semester at the University of Ghana. Now I have to prepare for next semester. I still have to complete a syllabus for Aspects of Early Modern European history. I already finished my syllabus for Aspects of World History, 1914-1945. I also have to teach each of these two classes twice, once at the main campus in Legon and once at the campus in Accra. In the research and publishing department I have one conference paper to co-write on cotton in German Togoland and a revise and resubmit for a journal article dealing with Soviet history. So it is more than the one class I taught last semester, but still a pretty reasonable work load.

My First University of Ghana Shirt

Yesterday I purchased a University of Ghana knit shirt. I had not seen them on sale before. However, yesterday I noticed that two men had set up a table with all kinds of University of Ghana paraphernalia at the main gate near the security office. I purchased a green one for 16.5 GH.

Grades Entered

Well I got some problems solved in the last two days. I got my grades entered today. The average for my class was a B, higher than a normal bell curve. I am not sure when I will next teach the class, but I think over all it went quite well. When I do teach it again I will change the readings somewhat. It makes sense to focus the class, Aspects of World History since 1945, on the Cold War. So I will probably remove the articles on collectivization in North Korea and the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians. These events are only marginally connected to the conflict between the US and the USSR.

Busy

I am really busy this week. But, I should be able to moderate any comments you want to make on this blog. Consider this post an open thread post if you want.

Happy Independence Day

Tomorrow is American Independence Day. So to all my American readers happy Independence Day. I do not have anything special planned. I have a lot things I need to take of this week so I can not afford to take the day off. But, my thoughts will be with my fellow Americans.

A Walk in Legon

The weather today in Legon is beautiful. I took a walk this morning and ran into my Liberian friend. He is one of those people who can see the invisible sun. As much as I may feel sometimes that my life is not progressing right, I have never had members of my family murdered in front of me or been forced to live in a refugee camp. Yet, there are people who suffer from the fate above like my friend who manage to persevere and literally reconstruct their lives. He told me he is going back to Liberia at the end of this year where he still has some surviving family. Ghana is a very nice place to live in large part because it has been politically stable and peaceful for a relatively long time now. But, some of Ghana's neighbors such as Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have not been so fortunate in recent decades.

Comments made easier

I have made the comments function easier to use. I have enabled Open ID so you do not have to have a Blogger account to comment. I suspect, however, that my blog just does not have a large enough audience to garner any comments on a regular basis.

More on Cotton in German Togoland

Well if criticism of the founding of Israel is not going to garner me any comments then I doubt anybody in the blogosphere is going to care much about my thoughts on German Togoland. But, one never knows. The brief German colonial empire in Africa may become the next hot topic of historical debate. Of course even in this context, scholars have shown less interest overall in Togoland than in other parts of the empire such as Namibia.

At any rate last night I finished a draft of the proposal for my first conference paper on an African subject. As should be obvious from the information above it is on cotton in German Togoland. The conference is on German colonial rule on West Africa and will take place here in Ghana. Eastern Ghana used to be part of German Togoland.  I am going to write on the failure of the German colonial administration in Togoland to make the territory into a major supplier of raw cotton for the German textile industry. I am going to contrast this with the success of the Russian Empire during the same time in developing cotton cultivation in Central Asia to such an extent that it supplied most of  its textile industry. I am going to coauthor the paper with a post graduate student here in the history department. Right now he is looking over the proposal I wrote. I think transnational topics like the history of various commodities are a good way for me to broaden my portfolio to include some publications on topics directly related to Africa.

Tomorrow is Republic Day

Tomorrow is another big national holiday here in Ghana. This time it celebrates the adoption of a republican form of government by Ghana. Most everything will be closed until Monday which is Independence Day in the US.

Okay that didn't work

Well posting five controversial beliefs did nothing to garner me any comments other than one from Walt, my good friend of many years now. I think I first met him in New York over eleven years ago. So much for the suggestion that provocative postings would elicit comments. I do not think it even got me any new readers. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

Five Controversial Things I Believe

In an effort to be provocative enough to solicit comments I have listed five things I believe below that I think are definite minority opinions in American academia and the blogosphere.

1. The Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, practiced racial discrimination against a number of nationalities and Jews were not the worst treated group by a long shot.

2. The mass deportation of nationalities by Stalin to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia constituted genocide by any reasonable definition of the word.

3. The mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from their homes in Central Europe at the end of World War II was a crime against humanity with no moral justification.

4. The mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 was also a crime against humanity with no moral justification.

5. American academia is rigged so people like me who believe things like I listed above can not get jobs at US universities.

PhD training verus job requirements

The training to be a university history lecturer and the actual job are considerably different and I do not know exactly why this is the case. But, the specialization emphasized to get the doctorate contrasts sharply with the emphasis with the general knowledge needed to teach undergraduates. It seems here a greater emphasis on Western and Central Europe is more helpful than anything fancy. My post graduate training focused on areas almost completely outside Europe. My three MA courses were on Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and a methods course aimed at scholars of Asia and Africa. My PhD dissertation was on the deportation of Russian-Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Europe as it is traditionally understood played a very marginal role in my post graduate studies.Yet, looking at my scheduled classes for the next year I have one class on European history each semester and one on world history each semester. So right now I am brushing up on European history from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth century. In retrospect I should have read a lot more 17th and 18th century French and English history while I was living in Arivaca. Instead I read a lot of Arizonan, Middle Eastern, Siberian, and Afghan history.

Evolution of the Blogosphere and the Death of Commenting

It seems to me the Internet and especially the blogosphere is a lot more civil now than it was five or six years ago. But, it is also a lot more boring and less dynamic. Somewhere along the line the medium ceased to be a forum for debate, some of it very hostile, and became a series of echo chambers. This may explain why I never get any comments anymore. People who agree with me feel no need to comment since they would not be adding anything new. This segment of the world's population is of course very small. In contrast those people who disagree with me, undoubtedly the vast majority of the planet, do not ever read my blog. They are off reading other blogs or more likely playing with Facebook or Twitter.

Still no comments

I wonder why other blogs get comments, but I never do?

Adjusting to different climatic cycles

Ghana is in the northern hemisphere. Therefore it should be summer now. But, it is a lot cooler now than it was in January when I first got here.

Today in Accra

Today I went shopping in Makola Market. Fortunately, before I went on my expedition I fueled up on a huge amount of fufu. Walking along the streets of the market is like being in a different world even from the surrounding areas of Accra. The place is a maze of stalls, tables, and porters with goods to sell. I did, however, manage to negotiate the labyrinth and find the item of my search. I purchased two of them, each from a different vendor.

The international role of the Tuskegee Institute

Yesterday I came across a bunch of articles on the development of cotton cultivation in German Togoland. A lot of them dealt with the role of African-Americans from the Tuskegee Institute. They established a model farm and school to train Togoland farmers on the best ways of cultivating cotton.  Evidently the Germans started to push for an increase in cotton farming in Togoland at the turn of the century in order to reduce the dependence of their textile industry upon American cotton. This has some interesting parallels to the development of cotton cultivation in Central Asia. Including the fact that there was also an experimental farm run by African-Americans from the Tuskegee Institute in the Uzbek SSR during the 1930s. Langston Hughes wrote about visiting it in his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander. Apparently in the early 20th Century Tuskegee had the world's foremost experts on the cultivation of cotton and they were sought out by regimes as diverse as the German colonial administration of Togoland and the USSR under Stalin.

Book Progress

My book manuscript is coming slower than I would like. I am only up to 59,000 words. I hope to get some work done on it this weekend. For some reason I am finding it difficult to motivate myself to write more than a few hundred words a day on it.

Giant Mangoes

Last night I purchased a mango at the market so big that cut up it fills three bowls. I have eaten two bowls worth so far. I honestly did not think mangoes could grow that big.

There must be an invisible sun

I do not know how people manage to endure horrible tragedy and suffering and still have the strength to rebuild normal lives. I find my own burdens difficult to bear some days and they are far lighter than those of many other people. 

American Popular Culture

My access to American popular culture is obviously limited. I get some clues about what is going on via the Internet or from conversations with family, but I do not have a television so I can not follow events and trends in the US on CNN. Most of my exposure to American popular culture recently is in the form of mystery novels. The bookstore on campus seems to have a never ending supply of American mystery novels. Recently I have been reading a lot of Patricia Cornwell and Sue Grafton. As I have noted earlier a lot of the better mystery novels written in the last two decades seem to be written by women and take place in the American South. Grafton's novel's take place in California, but Cornwell has centered most of her writing around Richmond, VA. I am not sure if this is significant or not. I think in decades past most American mystery writers were men and there was a much more northern tilt to the genre.

Sources for Early Modern Europe?

I have to teach a course on Early Modern Europe next semester. Does anybody have any suggestions on sources? In particular I am looking for stuff  on 17th and 18th century England and France. I am trying both to brush up on my own knowledge and pick appropriate readings for the syllabus. It is a 300 level class.

Diaspora Nationalities in the USSR

Despite what everybody else says there was racism in the USSR and national equality did not exist in any real sense from the late 1930s onward. In particular Soviet citizens belonging to diaspora nationalities came under severe repression. On 31 January 1938 the Soviet Politburo passed a resolution regarding the extension of various national operations by the NKVD. Below I have provided a translation of an excerpt from the resolution. The capitalization is in the original.

Allow the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs to continue until 15 April 1938 operations to destroy spying-sabotage contingents of POLES, LATVIANS, GERMANS, ESTONIANS, FINNS, GREEKS, IRANIANS, KHARBINTSY, CHINESE and ROMANIANS, both foreign subjects and Soviet citizens, in accordance with existing decrees of the NKVD USSR.

The lack of differentiation between Soviet citizens descended of immigrants to the Russian Empire and foreigners is striking. The operating assumption of the Soviet government was that even after several generations national minorities would continue to owe their political loyalty to their ancestral homeland due to inheriting some sort of national essence from their parents. In all other historical contexts this assumption is called racism. I do not know why people give Stalin and his henchmen a free pass on this.

Source: S.U. Alievea, Tak eto bylo:  Natsional'nye repressii v SSSR 1919-1952 gody (Moscow: "Insan", 1993), vol. I., p. 253

Another lovely day

The weather in southern Ghana is a lot nicer than I expected it to be before I got here. Looking at a map it is quite close to the equator and I assumed it would be much hotter and more humid than it has been. Even though we are in the northern hemisphere, the temperature has been cooler now that it is summer than it was in January.

Sunday in Legon

Today the campus seemed particularly deserted even for a Sunday. Walking around I saw very few people. Despite being summer it is quite cool now. So the walk was quite pleasant.

Today's activities

Today I planned to get more done than I actually did. This afternoon I ate fufu and goat in light soup for lunch, drank a coconut, and then took a tro-tro to Nkrumah Circle and walked down to Makola Market. I got a late start and getting a seat on a tro-tro took over half an hour. So I did not get to the market until considerably after three in the afternoon. I took a cab home around four thirty so I could get home before it got dark. I wish there was subway system in Accra. It would solve a lot of transportation problems.

German Togoland

Last night I compiled a three page bibliography of sources to look at regarding German Togoland. This morning I found one of the shorter ones in the library and read all twenty pages. The scholarship on the colony is limited. I suspect in large part to its relatively small size, brief existence, and lack of large scale military conflict in comparison to other German colonies in Africa.

Updating the Blog Roll

Okay I have been lazy about just about everything recently. But, I have finally cleaned up my blog roll. Those blogs that have been inactive for a long time have been removed. I have also once again added Randy McDonald's A Bit More Detail. For a long time it was impossible for me to access Live Journal sites so I took them off the roll. If anybody would else would like me to add them to the list let me know. I only ask that you link to me in return.

Another accomplishment and it is still five minutes to noon

I finally got JSTOR to work on my laptop. Now I can actually do some research. If anybody knows any good articles on German colonialism in West Africa, I am interesting in German Togoland, please let me know now that I can download them. Most of the literature on German colonialism in Africa I have seen deals with Namibia.

Today's accomplishments

Today I finally finished grading final exams. I had been putting off the last seven for what seems like weeks. I still have to enter them into the computer, but I do not have to read any more student essays on the Cuban Missile Crises or the end of the Cold War for a while now. Overall the students did well. But, I think they did better in general on the mid-term. Nobody failed the exam and over half the grades were a B+ or better.

Even more thrilling, after weeks of failure I finally got the latest virus definitions for my anti-virus software to download onto my laptop. I had to wait until most people had left campus for summer break for the available bandwith to be sufficient for this task. But, I finally got updated today and a quick scan showed no problems.

Moving slowly, but surely

I have gotten up to 57,000 words done on the book ms or 200 pages double spaced. I also recently got invited to submit a paper to a conference on a subject that is rather new to me. But, I am excited about doing a paper on an African related topic and going to another part of Ghana to deliver it.

Good News

So far this week has gone well. I got a set of peer review reports back on a journal article and it was revise and resubmit, not a flat out rejection for a change. Getting a manuscript past both editors who are increasingly using desk rejections to limit the number of articles they send out for peer review and peer review itself seems to be taking longer and longer. In the days before the Internet it took months to get an article published now it only takes years.

Seventy Years since the Baltic Deportations of 14 June 1941

Today is the 70th anniversary of the first mass deportations of people from the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to Siberia and other distant areas of the USSR by the occupying Soviet authorities. This forced resettlement of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children led to predictable human suffering and mass mortality. I do not have time to write an extensive post about this crime today. But, I have written about this deportation in the past and the following links will take you to some of those pieces. Five years ago for the 65th anniversary I wrote a short summary of the deportations which you can find here. The following day I posted a short piece on the personal experience of a single Estonian woman who had survived the deportations and exile which you can find here.  Finally, for those that are interested here is an attempt to quantify the number of people to die as a result of the deportations. The deportations represented an attempt to violently remove the leading strata of the Baltic states in order to eliminate  resistance to Soviet colonial rule. As I noted earlier, Soviet rule over the Baltic states represented a classical colonial occupation complete with economic exploitation, foreign settlement, and armed resistance.

US Embassy

Yesterday and today I went to the US embassy to get more pages put in my passport. The embassy is a lot friendlier on the inside than it looks on the outside. The procedures are pretty streamlined and I was in the embassy less than an hour both days. Getting to the embassy, however, takes at least an hour even though it is less than twenty miles away. Accra has the worst traffic I have ever seen. It makes Los Angeles look good by comparison.

The sun is shining again

Yesterday it was gloomy and rainy all day long. Today the sun is shining and there is not a hint of approaching thunder clouds. Also even though it is summer it is not too hot.

Rainy Season

It is now officially the rainy season as if I had any doubts earlier. Today it rained for hours on end. I have been told that this will continue for some months.

Drinking from a coconut

Today I did not do much productive. I walked around campus, cruised the Internet, and ate cheap Ghanaian food. One of the things I ate was a green coconut. Actually you do not so much eat it as drink it since most of the edible part at this stage is still in the form of the liquid coconut milk.

More on publications and academic jobs

There seems to be a pervasive need by American academics to maintain the illusion of meritocracy by falsely claiming that publications count in hiring decisions. For the vast majority of hires at the assistant professor level this is simply not true. If it were I would have gotten at least one US interview from 2005 to 2007. Publications undoubtedly count for many other things, but for landing a first teaching job in the US they do not help at all and may very well hurt your chances. They can often signal to committees that your expertise is too narrow and outside the perimeter of what they are looking for in a candidate. Again for the most part they are looking for people to teach European history from 1400-1945 to freshmen, not anything specialized. I enjoy teaching in Africa so other than wasted time and effort being blacklisted in the US is not that big of deal for me. But, it really is misleading for American academics to be telling recent PhDs that if they just publish enough they will get a job. This is simply not true and in many cases publications might hurt their chances.

Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan 1950

After the Second World War had already ended on 9 May 1945, the Stalin regime subjected the Russian-Germans already living in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan before 1941 to special settlement restrictions. Between 18 September 1945 and 6 November 1946 the Soviet government extended the special settlement regime to 105,817 Russian-Germans living east of the Urals during the war and therefore not subject to deportation (Berdinskikh, doc. 9, pp. 341-343). The largest concentration of these local Germans was in Kazakhstan. The new decrees placed 59,365 Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan under special settlement restrictions and exempted only 107 of the ethnic Germans living in the republic (Krieger, note 24, p. 155). The legal basis for these restrictions was quite weak even by the standards of the time. A 12 August 1950 top secret report from the Minister of State Security (MGB) of Kazakhstan to Abakumov, the head of the MGB for all of the USSR noted the unsound legal basis for placing these local Russian-Germans under special settlement restrictions. I have reproduced the relevant passages below. The translation from Russian is my own. The underlining appears in the original text.

In Kazakhstan the record of special settlers includes 56,972 local Germans, not subject to resettlement in the Period of the Great Fatherland War. These Germans were taken into the registration of special settlers in 1945 by a telegraphed decree by the deputy minister of internal affairs of the USSR c.(omrade) Chernyshev. There has been no kind of government decision about the extension of these restrictions establishing them as evictees.

The General Procurator of the Union of SSRs has clarified to the Procurator of the Kazakh SSR that it is illegal to take these Germans into the registration of special settlers and they are subject to liberation. Guided by these instructions, the Procurator of the republic, and also oblast and raion procurators of the Kazakh SSR refuse to sanction the arrest and arraignment on criminal charges cases of flight by these Germans from places of settlement and do not sanction their arrest by administrative order for the violation of the regime in places of special settlements (Tsarevskaia-Diakina, doc. 200, p. 657).

The position of the General Procurator did nothing to change the legal status of the local Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan. They remained special settlers until 1954, well after Stalin's death on 5 March 1953. But, the complete lack of any legal basis for their restricted status did not go unnoticed even among the officials of the MGB.

Sources:

Berdinskikh, V.A., Spetsposelentsy: Politcheskaia ssylka narodov Sovetskoi Rossii. Moscow: Novoe literatunoe obozrenie, 2005.

Krieger, Viktor, Rein, Volga, Irtysh: Iz istorii nemtsev Tsentral'noi Azii. Almaty: Daik-Press, 2006.

Tsarevskaia-Diakina, T.V., ed., Spetspereselentsy v SSSR: vol. v of Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920-kh - pervaia polvina 1950-kh godov. Moscow: Rosspen, 2004.

More Book Progress

I have gotten up to 55,000 words on the book manuscript. It is coming along nicely. I have almost completely finished the section on the legal infrastructure of the special settlement regime. This weekend I am going to try and get a working draft of the section on the labor army finished.

Making Future Research Plans

I have been reading and thinking about comparative history recently. I have a couple of projects dealing with Russian-Germans I want to finish up. But, after I finish them I am going to change my research focus. It appears that I might be working in Ghana for quite some time. The source base here is best geared towards the colonial history of the Gold Coast, followed by the more recent history of the Republic of Ghana, and finally the history of Pan-Africanism as an ideology. I am told that the archives here especially for the colonial era are easy to access, well ordered, and contain a great deal of information. I am, however, not sure exactly what I would research. First, I obviously need to do a lot of background reading on African history. I would like to do something comparative that incorporates some aspect of African history. I have been thinking about maybe writing an extended comparison of Soviet policies towards deported nationalities, the special settlers, and South African apartheid. If anybody has any suggestions for me regarding sources on African history and possible comparative research projects I might be able to pursue please let me know. I will have some more thoughts on comparative history later.

Book Progress

I am almost up to 54,000 words on my book manuscript. That is 190 pages double spaced. I hope to get a completed first draft done sometime in August.

Easing into summer

Now that classes are over things are pretty slow on campus. I am almost finished grading final exams. I will definitely finish up this week. I also have some things I need to do in Accra, but they should not be too difficult. I have been working on my current book manuscript regarding Russian-Germans and have written a little over 53,000 words total. I would like to get a completed manuscript done before the middle of August. I hope to be able to read up on African history as well as prepare for next semester's classes in the next couple of weeks. It is very nice not having to teach four or five classes a semester.

If I knew then what I know now

Today I read over my old blog posts from when I lived in Arivaca Arizona. At that time I did not think I would ever get an academic job. If I had to do it again I would have done things differently. First, I probably would not have bothered to apply to any jobs in the US. I now know I never had a shot of even getting an interview with any US institution. Having a PhD from the UK and no teaching experience basically eliminated me from the first round of any search. No amount of publications could overcome this second disability. Anybody who tells you that publications are what get you hired as an assistant professor in the US is lying to you. I see this lie repeated a lot on academic blogs and I wish it would stop. Second, I would have sent an application to every history department in English speaking Africa regardless of whether they were advertising openings or not. While having a British degree hurt me a lot in the US job market since my degree is from SOAS not Oxford or Cambridge I believe it would have helped me in the African market. Not surprisingly the School of Oriental and African Studies is known and respected in Africa. This was the second university in Africa I even looked at and I got the job on the basis of my CV and publications without the need for an interview. Finally, I would have done a lot more to project myself as a generalist rather than a specialist. Universities are not looking for people to teach on the subject of their PhD dissertation. They are looking for people who can teach the broad outlines of several centuries of the history of whole continents. I honestly did not fully realize how far removed the daily work of a university lecturer is from the process of getting a PhD when I lived in Arivaca.

A Brief History of Communism in Africa

Despite Soviet rhetoric under Lenin and Stalin denouncing imperialism and colonialism there was little Soviet support of movements seeking independence in Africa before the 1960s. Most anti-imperialist activity undertaken by Moscow during this time focused on Asia. Even here, however, rhetoric trumped actual material assistance. As a result the vast majority of independence movements in Asia succeeded under non-Communist leadership. Nehru and Gandhi in India, Jinnah in Pakistan, and Sukarno in Indonesia to name only the leaders of the three most populous Asian states to gain independence after World War II, threw off European colonial rule without establishing a Soviet style system. The only successful anti-colonial movement to establish a communist government was the Viet-Minh under Ho Chi Minh fighting against French colonial rule. In 1954 they established a communist regime in North Vietnam after the signing of the Paris Accords with France. Successful communist revolutions after Stalin’s death were few until the 1970s. After North Vietnam there was only Cuba in 1959 and South Yemen in 1969. Successful communist revolutions against colonial regimes were even rarer. Cuba was already an independent state leaving only the British colony of South Yemen as an example of communism replacing colonialism between 1954 and 1975. The British and French empires collapsed in Africa without any communist governments replacing them. It was only in the mid-1970s that communism established a foothold on the African continent with the collapse of the imperial regimes of Ethiopia and Portugal.

Although Soviet support for national liberation movements in Africa gets rhetorical and limited material support starting in the early 1960s under Khrushchev it is only later under Brezhnev that this support becomes significant. Soviet support for national liberation movements in southern Africa such as the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, ZAPU in Rhodesia, SWAPO in Namibia, and the ANC in South Africa sought to buy the allegiance of these movements should they ever come to power. In the case of Angola and Mozambique this strategy was successful. In Rhodesia, the USSR bet on the wrong horse. Robert Mugabe’s ZANU movement came to power rather than ZAPU. In Namibia and South Africa the Soviet Union’s favored movements came to power, but they did not establish communist regimes. Moreover, the ANC came to power after the USSR disintegrated and ceased to exist as a state.

The first communist government in Africa was not established until 1974. The overthrow of Emperor Selassie in Ethiopia that year made it the first state in Africa to pursue the Soviet model of development. The collapse of the Portuguese Empire led to the establishment of two other Soviet style states in Africa that promptly allied themselves with the USSR, Angola and Mozambique. The MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique had received Soviet military assistance during their existence as guerilla organizations fighting against Portuguese rule. Upon the removal of Portuguese soldiers from Africa in 1975 they continued to receive Soviet military hardware as well as Cuban soldiers in their struggle against armed anti-communist movements backed variously by Rhodesia, South Africa, and the USA. Today Angola and Mozambique are at peace and the ruling parties have largely dismantled the Soviet style economic structures created in the 1970s.

Overall communist movements had limited success in Africa. Outside of South Africa, there were no organized communist parties prior to World War II. Communism came to power in Ethiopia through a military coup and in Angola and Mozambique through guerilla organizations more influenced by Castro’s Cuban Revolution than Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution. Africa provided a weak social, organizational, and ideological environment from which communist movements could develop. Asia proved to be much more fertile ground for such movements. Communist governments came to power in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and at one time strong communist parties or movements existed in Burma, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

What I did today

Today I had to get a prescription renewed. The medical system here is pretty efficient. I would say it is comparable to the British NHS system with which I am familiar.  But, I wish the doctors would give me a prescription for longer than a month. It seems silly to spend a couple of hours every month just to get a prescription renewed. I hope the next time I go I can get more than a month.

Another trip to the mall

Yesterday I went to Accra Mall. It was crowded as usual. It amazes me that while in the US almost everything is made in China at the Game store almost everything is made in South Africa. Some of it like my Logik kettle is not made very well. I still have to return it since it is still under warranty, but in the meantime I have purchased a more expensive and hopefully more durable kettle.

Thanks for Commenting

Thanks for commenting people. Since 4:00 pm yesterday I have gotten five comments on my blog. That is more comments than I have gotten in the last two months.

More on working in Africa

This semester I spent a lot of time adjusting to life on a new continent. This is the fourth continent I have lived on in the last ten years. Which I think is part of the coming globalization of academic labor. Had I stayed in the US, I am pretty sure I would have had to stop looking for an academic job eventually. To date I have only had one phone interview for a US position in seven years during which I sent out hundreds of applications. I am not exactly sure why there is so much competition for lousy academic jobs in the US compared to much better academic jobs in places like Ghana. But, I suspect I got lucky in getting here before the competition realized that there are universities outside of the US, Canada and Europe.

I Love International Students

I did not realize it until recently, but we get paid a nice bonus for grading the final exams of our international students. I had two international students in my class. Both of them did quite well. When I turned in the marking sheet with their grades into the International Programs Office today I just had to sign two forms and they gave me 50 cedis in cash. That is not bad at all.

Classes

We had a department meeting today. Among the items on the agenda were class assignments for next year. Nobody has more than two classes to teach each semester. Since we get paid a straight salary rather than on a per class basis,  I am very pleased with this teaching load.

Comments

I am pretty sure this blog has the fewest number of comments per a reader of any blog in the history of the Internet. I am not exactly sure why. Is it because nothing I write is interesting enough to comment on?

Grading Final Exams

I have 27 more final exams left to grade. I got through a big pile last night. I am definitely going to try and finish them all this week.

Today

Today I learned that Pizza Inn makes lousy pizza. I had been craving pizza for days and decided to try the South African based chain since the burger at the related Chicken Inn is not bad. I am sorry that I did. The pizza crust was flavorless and as far as I could tell there was no sauce on it.

Today I also learned that Ghana has delicious avocados. I should have just skipped the pizza and gone for the avocados. For the price of a medium pizza and coke I could have bought 10 large avocados.

Thoughts on the end of the semester

My first semester at the University of Ghana went pretty fast. I still have exams to grade, but I should be finished before the end of next week. The British style set up of one lecture a week and one or two tests a semester for each class is a lot less work intensive for instructors than the American system. It appears that it also may be more effective in getting students to learn. They have to do the assigned reading if they want to pass the class.

It is now raining on an almost daily basis. Thankfully, I have not seen many mosquitoes come out yet. Since most students are done with their exams, a lot of them are leaving campus. Every day there seems to be a constant exodus of students for the summer break.

Since I taught a 400 level class full of final year students I will probably not see most of my former students again. They will be going on to do other things. But, I am pretty confident that they left my class with more knowledge than they had in January.

Is there a Neo-Colonialism?

If colonialism is primarily a system of economic exploitation rather than political domination then the creation of independent states does not necessarily end colonial relationships. The situation of continuing colonial economic relationships between former colonies and European powers like the UK and France is generally referred to as neocolonialism. This relationship is characterized by the export of raw materials to the former colonizing powers in Europe and the importation of finished goods from those same countries. Yet, without any political control to enforce this relationship I fail to see how it is truly colonial. A lot of former colonies in Asia have managed to move away from such trade patterns first by engaging in import substitution and then the export of manufactured goods. A move away from the export of raw materials to the use of those materials to produce finished goods is certainly also possible in Africa. There already is a lot more manufacturing in Africa than I think most people outside the continent realize.

Grading Exams

I have now graded 15 out of 85 final exams. Most of them are pretty good. I have not come across any that were absolutely horrible yet.

Rain

Today it rained really hard. But, I managed to avoid getting soaked. Fortunately, the few times I needed to go out, the rain had relented.

Africa Unity Day and the Decline of Pan-Africanism

Tomorrow is Africa Unity Day. But, the university has scheduled my exam on that morning. I know that the university would not schedule an exam on certain other holidays such as Christmas. Indeed my lecture on Good Friday was cancelled due to the holiday. So I am wondering if the fact that my exam is on Africa Unity Day is indicative of the general decline in recent decades of Pan-Africanism as an ideology with an actual goal rather than just something people give lip service to?

Given the success of the European Union, a lot of aspects of Pan-Africanism would appear to be quite beneficial not only to Africans, but other people as well. An African version of a Schengen visa for instance would make travel easier for people from outside Africa as well as increasing tourist revenue for African countries. The costs of goods would also decrease within Africa as it became cheaper to move them within Africa due to the elimination of trade barriers. Yet, despite the benefits of greater economic cooperation, the ideology of Pan-Africanism seems to have declined in direct proportion to the rise of Pan-Europeanism in the form of the EU during the last fifty years.

I do not think political unification of Africa was ever a realistic goal. The continent is too large and diverse. But, there certainly could be a lot more unity than there is currently. A lot of artificial barriers to the movement of people and goods still exist in Africa. A greater commitment to actually realizing Pan-African goals could substantially reduce these barriers.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow my students take their final exam. I hope I can get all 85 of them graded before Monday. Then I am officially done with the semester. I do not teach again until August.

Gender, Geography, and Genre

I have noticed that a lot of the mystery writers I have been reading lately are both women and write about the US South. The success of women mystery writers using the South as a setting seems to have taken off some time in the 1990s. But, it does seem odd that so many mysteries written in the last two decades take place in the former Confederate states. The Midwest in contrast is greatly underrepresented.

Progress

I finally feel I have made real head way in taking care of what should be rather routine matters, but caused me great difficulty. Now that those problems are solved, I can look forward to grading final exams on Wednesday. After I finish grading the exams I will be done for the semester.

Daily Life in Ghana

To be honest I never thought until recently that I would live and work in Africa. But, as I have noted the experience has been very positive in a number of ways. I will say that life here in Ghana is a lot more similar to that in the US than I would have thought several years ago. Globalization has made the technological basis of life similar across formerly very dissimilar countries. When combined with the fact the official language here is English, Ghana has not been a really great culture shock for me. I have not encountered anything that strikes me as really strange here. Mostly the people here are polite, friendly and helpful. That is not always the case in the US.  But,daily life here is not radically different from that in the US.

My Day

Today was hectic despite being a Saturday. On the plus side I found my bank account had more money in it than I thought. I also did get to walk through Accra today. On the negative side I dropped my phone and the thing finally died. Then I locked myself out of my house. After getting back into my house I decided to buy another phone rather than try and get the old one repaired again. Had I known how little a new mobile phone actually costs I would have gotten a new one a while ago. The phone was 42 cedi to replace. Getting the old one repaired had taken me days and cost 27 cedi. The new phone works fine.

Giving Thanks

It looks like some major problems I have recently encountered are almost solved. I would like to thank all those people who have helped me recently. I am truly grateful and hope that some day I will be able to pay it forward.

Weekend Plans

Tomorrow I am hoping that it does not rain all morning like it did last Saturday. I would like to see a little bit more of Accra before I have to grade 85 final exams on Wednesday. I am hoping a long walk in the city will help me relax.

On Human Rights

It seems to me that if human rights are to mean anything they have to be universal. Winning the war does not make all of ones actions moral. Hence I am very disturbed by the recent rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia on the basis that all his crimes are justified by the victory over the Nazis. This is one of the reasons why I have always been puzzled about why do people who otherwise oppose discrimination and human rights violations in places like South Africa during apartheid support similar Israeli practices against the Palestinians? This seems to be based upon judging people on the basis of their identity rather than on the basis of their actions. Just because a government calls itself democratic does not give it the right to engage in ethnic cleansing, torture and other human rights violations.

Looking on the Bright Side

The more academic blogs out of the US I read the better my own situation looks. I have a job teaching university students, my students are overall quite good,  I have time to do research, and I have medical coverage. Ghana is politically stable and violent crime seems to be quite rare. I certainly could do a lot worse.

More on Colonialism

Like most of my opinions, my belief that colonialism refers primarily to a system of political domination rather than economic exploitation of less prosperous nations by more prosperous ones appears to be a minority in the scholarly world. To me it seems that there are four distinguishing features of colonialism and not all of them have to be present for a colonial relationship to exist. For instance point four was largely absent in the Gold Coast during colonial rule. The features of colonialism are listed below.

1. Political control of an ethnically distinct territory by a state dominated by a different ethnicity.

2. Widespread articulated and often violent resistance to that political control by the dominated people.

3. Economic exploitation of the the dominated territory by the dominating power resulting in a net economic loss for the controlled territory and a net economic gain for the controlling power.

4. The settlement of the ethnically dominant group from the controlling power into the controlled territory.

For some reason it appears most people emphasize point number three as being most important. This was the Soviet regime's argument for why Central Asia was not under colonial rule even though points one and four did apply. It is an argument that a lot of non-communists seem to support as well. But, it should be noted that this does not get the USSR off the hook for being an empire. All four of these points applied to the Baltic States and Ukraine, especially western Ukraine. The situation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in the years after World War II until the restoration of independence fit the classical colonial model in all aspects.

Today there are not too many cases that fit all four points. Tibet and East Turkestan seem to fit points one, two, and four, but not point three. Since for some reason most scholars think point three is the most important feature of colonialism this makes the status of China as a colonial power ambiguous. Israel's control over the West Bank meets all four criteria, but it may be the only such case left. However, there are a number of cases such as Tibet where points one and four and even two are all met. If these cases are not colonialism, then what term should be used to describe them?

More on the Crimean Tatars

Last year the International Committee for Crimea published my paper, "The False Charges of Treason Against the Crimean Tatars." You can read the article in PDF form here.

Update: The link should work now. If not the address is listed below.

www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/pohl20100518.pdf

If that does not work you can find it under the title "The False Charges of Treason Against the Crimean Tatars" on a Google search.

67th Anniversary of the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

This is a follow up to my last post. One nationality in the USSR that lost all semblance of the right to national self-determination were the Crimean Tatars. The Soviet government attempted to forcibly liquidate the Crimean Tatars as a national entity on 18 May 1944. The Stalin regime ruthlessly deported them from their homeland in Crimea to special settlement restrictions in Uzbekistan and the Urals. They lost the right to live in their ancestral homeland, their national-state formation in the form of the Crimean ASSR, almost all of their collective and private property, all institutions in their native language, and tens of thousands of lives as a result of this act of ethnic cleansing. I have a lot more detailed posts from years pasts remembering this horrible tragedy. If you look up posts made on 17 May 2009,  18 May2007, and 18 May 2006  you can get a more detailed summary of the deportations and their horrific aftermath.

Questions on Colonialism

There is a an old debate as to whether the USSR was an empire and ruled Central Asia and other areas outside the ethnic Russian core as colonies. One of the main arguments made against the USSR being a colonial empire was that the less developed areas of the USSR such as Central Asia received far more in economic terms than they lost. This argument seems strange to me. It seems to argue that colonialism is primarily an economic rather than a political relationship. I am not sure if this is the case. If a larger power bribes the population of a smaller territory with an increased standard of living in exchange for giving up its political independence what is it called? The USSR was not unique in this policy, so I am not so sure it is not a type of colonial rule based upon carrots rather sticks.

First, while Central Asia and the Caucasus had a far higher material standard of living as a result of being part of the USSR than they would have otherwise this was not true of all areas under Soviet rule. The Baltic States, particularly Estonia and Latvia had a far lower material standard of living as a result of being occupied by the USSR than they would have had otherwise. Were Latvia and Estonia colonies as a result of this economic relationship in addition to being illegally occupied? While the Central Asian republics were not colonies as well as being legally part of the USSR? Must the colonized territory be a net loser and the colonial power a net beneficiary economically for a colonial relationship to exist?

Second, the Soviet definition of national self determination seems odd here. For the most part Central Asians were satisfied with the political and economic situation under Soviet rule. There was very little dissent among these nationalities. National dissent in the USSR was largely limited to Germans, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Armenians. But, surely lack of opposition and satisfaction due to receiving a high standard of living as a result of the transfer of wealth from other regions of the USSR is not the same as popular participation. Central Asians, particularly the Communist Party elite who benefited most from being part of the USSR viewed their political participation and economic benefits from the system as satisfactory, but they did not have any real control over most important issues of policy making. Did this satisfaction with the status-quo in fact translate into national self-determination? It seems that the Soviet policy towards Central Asia had a lot in common with US policy towards Puerto Rico and other territories. The economic benefits of remaining under the control of a larger power far outweigh the benefits of political independence.  Is Puerto Rico not a colony because most of the population consents to being a Commonwealth of the US?

I think part of the problem is the negative connotations of the word colonialism. But, not all colonial relationships were alike. Traditionally colonialism has involved an economic transfer from the dominated to the dominant power and popular opposition by the colonized people. However, are these the defining definitions of colonial rule? It seems to me that political rule not just the direction of economic transfer should be a consideration in whether a colonial relationship exists. This would mean, however,admitting to the existence of relatively benign forms of colonial rule such as the US currently exercises over places like Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Somoa.

Why I work in Africa and not the US

Russell Arben Fox has a recent post up on the path he has travelled since getting his PhD. My own path has also required a lot of physical moving. On the perennial question of whether one should get a PhD especially in a field like history, my own personal view is that you should not expect to work in the US as an academic. But, if you are willing to work in a place like Ghana then it is possible to get a good academic job.

Teaching university students is great. However, the job market has been bad in the US for a long time and it does not look like it is getting better any time soon. So if you want to work as a history lecturer then go ahead and get the PhD. But, be prepared to work in Africa or someplace outside of North America or Europe. It will definitely be a number of years before you get back to the US permanently. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that you need to consider. I did not initially intend to work first in Kyrgyzstan and then Ghana. However, during the first three years after I received my PhD I found it impossible to find an academic job even as an adjunct in the US. Below I speculate on the reasons for this failure.

My experience is probably different than other peoples, but a lot of the common wisdom is bunk. Publications do not seem to help at all  in applying for jobs in the US. What American universities are looking for is teaching experience not published monographs or peer reviewed journal articles. I had two scholarly books and several journal articles published at the time I started looking for a university of job and applied to hundreds of jobs without receiving any interviews. I was told on a number of occasions that they would not even consider me because I had no teaching experience. On a number of occasions these institutions ended up hiring people who not only had no publications, but were ABD. One would think that having a PhD, not being a TA was the minimal requirement for being an assistant professor, but one would be wrong. It was only after teaching in Central Asia that any US universities even suggested that they were interested in interviewing me. So the claim that publications are the most important element in hiring at US universities is largely a lie. Publications are of little importance when applying to the vast majority of university positions in the US compared to teaching experience and where you did your degree. I did my PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. Having a British degree from any place other than Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is a serious disadvantage in the US job market. So I had two strikes against me in the US. On the other hand having a degree from SOAS helped me get my present job. The institution is as respected here as it is unknown in the US.

That said, working abroad has advantages. The students here at the University of Ghana appear to be much better than what I read about on American academic blogs. They work hard and are respectful. I am also in a much better position in every respect than I would be working as an adjunct in the US. I work less for more than appears to be the case with American adjuncts. My compensation and benefits are actually quite good here.

My feeling is that my own path will become more common in the future. Academia will increasingly become more migratory. In many ways this is good. I think Americans including academics are far too isolated from the rest of the world. But, the dream of being able to work as an academic in your home country is going to be increasingly difficult for newly minted American PhDs to obtain. The options may very well be working abroad in places like Ghana or working outside of academia.

University Benefits

My job has some nice benefits. One of which I just discovered is free computer repair. Well it is not totally free, I have to pay for the parts. But, the university provides the labor to fix my personal lap top. Since I use the lap top for work this makes good sense, but a lot of other universities seem to be totally lacking in any sense when it comes to accomadating faculty. At any rate the fan in my lap top needs to be replaced and it is nice not to have to run all over Accra looking for a reliable and affordable repair shop.

Another nice benefit is health care. I understand a lot of people lecturing at US universities do not have health coverage provided by their employer. Certainly there was no such thing where I worked in Bishkek. The University Hospital serves Legon  and gives me free access to doctors and most lab work. The exceptions are X-rays and EKGs which cost 15 cedis ($10) each. The quality of the medical care is comparable to what I have experienced in the UK and US. That is the doctors are quite good. Today I had to go get a prescription changed. I left my house a little after ten and got back a little before one. So the total time at the hospital including all the wait time was less than two hours. I think that is pretty good for a busy Monday morning. Unfortunately, medicine is not covered and is not that cheap. There are no $4 generics like you can get at Wallmart. I paid 10 cedis ($6.50) for three weeks of pills. But, still overall the system here is a lot better than what a lot of people have in the US.

My job is easy. It is the rest of life that is hard

Right now I have no academic work to do. Instead I am overwhelmed with taking care of things that are causing me far more stress than they should. I hope I can get most of the important items on my agenda done this week. If I am persistent and do not freak out too much I think I will be okay. Trust me people, first world problems are a lot easier to handle than third world problems.

Blog Direction

It appears I do have some readers other than my mother. This blog is in a transition period like everything else in my life. My academic writing is still focused on the former Soviet Union, but now it appears I may be living and working in Africa for some time. So for the last six months or so the blog has become a mixture of observations of life in Ghana based upon very little background knowledge and a few posts on Russian-Germans during the Stalin era. It will probably continue in this direction for a while. But, ultimately I would like to be able to write more in depth about some issues of African history, particularly as they intersect with other issues I have researched. I am going to start trying to move a little bit in this direction soon.

Again any advice on teaching very large classes?

This semester I only taught one class and I was told it was a small one by local standards. It had 85 students. Next semester I will teach two sections each of three classes. Two of the classes or four sections will probably be much, much larger than anything I have taught before. They are going to introduce a cap of 300 students per a class soon, but for me anything over 100 is simply huge. Does anybody have any advice for managing class sections this large? In particular how do you grade tests? We have to grade the final exams ourselves without TA assistance.

Invitation to Delurk

If you are reading this blog and not directly related to me by blood please let me know. I am thinking I must have some readers other than my family. But, I have no idea who other than my family actually reads this thing.

A few more days to the clock

Well it looks like I am not as close to being finished as I thought. My final exam has been moved from May 12 at 7:30 am to May 25 at 11:30 am. At least I do not have to wake up as early.

Final countdown

The semester is almost completely over. My final exam is on Thursday morning. Then I just have to grade the exams. I am going to try and finish grading before Monday.

The Kids are Allright

For the last couple of days I have had students coming to my office to ask questions before they take the final exam next week. Even though it is technically work I really enjoy talking to students. I am pretty sure that I am accomplishing some small measure of information transfer. My general impression of the students that took my class is that they are very good. I do not feel that my teaching is being wasted on people too lazy to take advantage of it. Reading blogs by lecturers based in the US I often get the sense that many American students fall into this category. On the contrary I feel that many of my students are very motivated, hard working, young men and women with very good study habits. I am not sure if this is something that can be generalized to university students in Ghana or is more specific to the University of Ghana or even more narrowly to the history department or even just my class. There is a certain degree of self selection here and I did make it clear to the students that the class would have a lot of reading and not be easy. It appears that most of them have risen to the challenge. I will know for certain after they take the final exam next Thursday.

Writing Progress

This week is revision week. That is students have one week between the end of classes and final exams to study. This also means apart from office hours from ten in the morning until noon that I do not have any class related work this week. So I have instead started again seriously working on my book manuscript regarding the Russian-Germans in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Last night I cranked out five pages double spaced and the current draft is currently up to around 46,000 words. That is 170 pages double spaced. I am aiming for a completed manuscript of around 80,000 words which seems to be the length many academic publishers now want for monographs. I still wish there was some median between the very short 8,000 word journal article and the fairly lengthy 80,000 word book. It seems to me that something between 20,000 to 50,000 words would fill a much needed gap between these two extremes.

Review of the Semester

Friday I taught my last class of the semester. I think I accomplished my primary teaching goal of transferring some knowledge to some students. How much knowledge and how many students I do not know for certain yet. But, judging on the basis of the mid-term exam I believe that most students should be able to demonstrate evidence of learning on the final exam. I am also very happy that I did not have any problems with students using cell phones or laptops in class.

Some Stories are Lost Forever

I have been thinking about this for a while, but it only recently really clicked. Despite all the excitement about the partial declassification of Soviet archives in the 1990s, the type of information they provide is quite limited in regards to the deported peoples. Yes, we now know the mechanisms and legal structures of the instruments of repression from the inside. We also have much, much better, although far from complete or perfect statistical data on the numbers of people subjected to various forms of repression, their geographical distribution, and their use as an involuntary labor force. What we do not have is much contemporary material from the deported peoples themselves. The archives contain some letters written to officials complaining about their material conditions. They also contain police reports on the "subversive" political opinions of the special settlers. However, overall material from the point of view of the deportees themselves is lacking. There are almost no surviving diaries and other written documents outside of official state, party and police archives that would provide an insight into their lives at the time. There are some exceptions such as letters written by Russian-Germans deported as kulaks in the 1930s to relatives in the US and Canada. But, after 1937, such sources are very rare. Lots of information was simply not recorded by the authorities or was destroyed. The official archives that exist today have very little on the human lives and relationships of the special settlers.

Memoirs written after the events exist, but most of these were written long after the events when many survivors had already died and memories had faded. Oral history has the same problems as memoir literature. It would have been much better to collect this information in the 1950s and 1960s rather than have to wait until the 1990s before conditions allowed such activity without criminal penalties. Now a lot of information has gone to the grave without ever being recorded.

Ironically, it appears that despite the paucity of archival access at the time it was written that Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago remains one of the best works on Stalinist repression. Yes, he did not have accurate information on the population statistics of the labor camps and special settlements. But, he did have access to a lot of sources that no historian can tap into today. He had access to a lot of memoirs that have since been destroyed in order to protect the writers from persecution by the KGB. He could also talk to a lot of camp survivors who have since perished. This combined with his own experience in the camps and in internal exile allowed him to provide a history from the point of view of the victims rather than the repressive apparatus. This is something that nobody can do as well today.