Today's schedule

Yesterday, I got a rough draft of my abstract for Boston written out by hand. Today I am going to type it up, edit it and send it off. Then I am going to work some more on revising my cover letter. On the basis of peoples comments I have decided I should really target jobs that do not require much teaching experience. There are a few post-docs and research orientated positions every year. Objectively, I should have a better chance at them then at jobs wanting people to teach world history to freshmen. Unfortunately, there are only about a half dozen post-doc openings a year in my field.

Next week after I have gotten some of the stuff with deadlines out of the way I intend to return to writing Catherine's Grandchildren. It has now sat for a while and I can go over it and see where it needs to be expanded or rewritten. I also need to start sending out proposals for publishing my dissertation as a book again. I do not think I am ever going to hear from the UK publisher currently looking at it. It would be nice to get a third book on my cv.

Reorientation

Since my 100th post here this morning I have vowed to reorientate this blog somewhat. I am instituting a no whinging policy on myself for instance in order to differentiate myself from the pack of people with both blogs and Ph.Ds. I am also seeking to communicate more with a broader range of people. I have been informed that my post in memory of the 64th anniversary of the Volga German deportation order is being distributed via e-mail among some people of German from Russia descent in the US. I suspect that some of these people are those that generally do not look at blogs. This is a good thing.

In the near future I am of course along with 20 other bloggers going to write about cotton in Uzbekistan and the sordid political-economy this white gold supports. That will be on the 1st of September. I am also going to try and answer Chris O'Byrne's question on how I got interested in writing about deported peoples in the USSR which is one I get asked alot. I am also going to still try and do a Carnival of Diasporas on the 15th of September. I have yet to receive any nominations. I think I could do it with about half a dozen entries or so. Yes, I know this probably exceeds the number of regular readers of this blog, but you can submit multiple entries from different sources. So if you see any good posts on diasporas send them to me at pohlcat [the at symbol] rocketmail [the dot] com. Otherwise I am going to have to track them down myself.

Another day in utopia

The sun is bearing down quite fiercely now. The solar radiation has, however, forced the bugs into retreat. They only come out in force at night. There is also a small breeze to counteract the heat somewhat. No, we do not have airconditioning.

I am going to work on my abstract for Boston today. I hope to get a rough draft of it written out by this evening. I am going to delay covering the pipes for the day. It requires hauling a heavy wheelbarrow full of dirt up a rocky hill. Work I am deeming too difficult for me in this heat.

I will spend today in the most beautiful spot on Earth without any administrators, students or other people to cause me stress. It is amazing how much more work I can get done in such a relaxed atmosphere. I am now working on finishing deadlines for October, November and December. Elsewhere people are struggling with meeting deadlines for today. Of course they do not live in the Utopia of Arivaca.

100th Post

According to Blogger this is my 100th post. This blog is over a year old so it actually does not average to much. I am not sure how many people have read this blog. I do not have a site counter. But, on the basis of the comments my regular readership appears to be pretty low. On the other hand I have not had to go purge my comments of Scottish trolls and their libelous confederates recently either and that is a very good thing.

In the past 100 posts this blog has dealt extensively with academia, writing, Russian-Germans, Stalinist deportations and life in Arivaca. In the future it will probably have more posts on Central Asia, diasporas (especially German ones) and the American South West. There will also be a conscious effort also to reduce the number of complaining posts. Plenty of other blogs specialize in whining and I am beginning to find it very unattractive. That probably means fewer posts on academia since there is not much positive to say about it from my perspective. Indeed there is not much about it I really understand. It will also probably mean not too many comments about other blogs as well for the same reasons. On the other hand if you want to know about my quiet little life and strange historical interests there will be lots of posts.

Arizona Wildlife

There are a large number of insect eating creatures in Arivaca. The ranch right now has hundreds of little baby toads hopping around. There are lots of big fat geckos, skinks and othe lizards, some measuring up two feet in length. Recently, I have even started to see a number of large spiders. Yet, despite all these predators we are still overrun with bugs. All kinds of horrible insects abound. There are enough moths here to eat every wool product produced in America. We have flys, crickets, wasps, beatles (some several inches long) and lots of things I cannot identify. Eating dinner has become a challenge. You need one hand to bat away the miniture kamikazes. It seems that no matter how many insects the lizards, toads and spiders eat it barely reduces the swarms of pests. Tonight at dinner there was a spider so full that it could not even move and the insects danced over it without fear.

Afternoon's work and bad job prospects

I got a short outline done for the abstract, encyclopedia article and my new improved cover letter done this afternoon. I am finding the advice given by fellow bloggers to be very helpful in revising the cover letter. I think part of my problem is that as an outsider I don't know how American academics think. Honestly, I find their culture and way of thinking to be much more alien than any of the peoples of the Orient I study. They seem akin to certain insular ethno-confessional groups that try and keep contact with outsiders to an absolute minimum and hence remain an enigma to the larger world.

The amount of jobs available in anything that might remotely touch any of the fields I study is quite small. The new H-net listings only had two that looked possible and one of those is an extreme stretch. Ethnic Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies looks on the basis of the name alone to fit most of my research. However, I think I do ethnicity and race different than most scholars in the US who think in very constrained terms. I suppose I will apply to the job in Ethnic Studies, but the description makes it pretty clear they mean ethnic groups in the US and not Eurasia. I figure I will apply anyways. It is probably a better match than the womens history course I once applied for because the university campus was on the beach in Virginia. People are always astounded I applied for a womans history position until I tell them about the beach part.

Morning so far

Well, I finished clearing all the kindling from the mesquite trees my uncle trimmed. It took me about an hour and it is now really hot. I am going to lay off the physical work until tommorrow morning. Then I will start covering up the exposed pipes that run along side the house with dirt from the creek bed. Now I am going work on my abstract for Boston.

Under a hot Arizona sun

Yesterday, we got the second post to the gate up. Today, I am going to clear some of the brush from the property before it dries out and becomes a fuel for a potential wild fire. I am going to try and get as much done on this before it gets too hot. Yesterday, was quite hot and today looks to be even hotter.

Later in the day I hope to get some work done revising my cover letter. I am also going to start another encyclopedia article and work on an abstract for a conference in Boston in October 2006. I should be able to get fairly coherent versions of all three done by Friday. At least that is this week's modest goal.

On Dr. Camicao's advice I am going to delete the entry with the sample cover letter. Thanks, to Miriam for providing one last detailed critique. The emphasis on teaching over publication by US universities still troubles me. There does not really seem to be any way around this obstacle. It is the classic Catch-22 clause detailed in Joseph Heller's novel.

Yesterday, I only posted the one blog entry out of respect for the Russian-German memorial day. In the near future I will not be posting so much on the various deported peoples. In the last week I had one post on the Russian-Koreans, three on the Kalmyks, one on the Chechens and one on the Russian-Germans. On the 1st I will blog on the cotton industry in Uzbekistan. The rest of the entries will be about life in Arivaca and the nuts and bolts of writing.

"In our hearts we felt the sentence of death" Stalin's Ethnic Cleansing of the Russian-Germans

"We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed in our hearts we felt the sentence of death." (Second Corinthians 1:8-10, NIV)

Sixty four years ago today the Soviet government publicly announced its intentions to deport the entire Russian-German population living in the Volga region, over half a million men, women and children. In a couple of months this target population had expanded to include the entire Russian-German population of the USSR. By 1942, over 850,000 Russian-Germans had been forcibly uprooted from their homes west of the Urals to exile under special settlement restrictions in Kazakhstan and Siberia. In total the Stalin regime confined more than 1.2 million Russian-Germans to these remote areas during the course of World War II. Here they formed a captive labor source to develop the agriculture, mining and forestry of these regions. Lack of proper shelter, food, winter clothing and medical care led to high rates of morbidity and mortality from malnutrition, typhus, dysentery, gangrene and tuberculosis. Around a quarter of a million Russian-Germans, a fifth of the population perished from such causes during the 1940s. Only in the mid-1950s did their conditions improve beyond the level of mere survival.

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet finalized the Soviet decision to deport the Volga Germans on 28 August 1941. It issued Ukaz no. 21-160 "On Resettling the Germans Living in the Region of the Volga." On the basis of this decree. The NKVD systematically rounded up all ethnic Germans living in the Volga German ASSR, Stalingrad Oblast and Saratov Oblast starting on the 3rd of September. They completed the operation on the 20th. The NKVD packed an average of more than 40 Russian-Germans into each cattle car used in the deportations. The insides of these wagons had only a pail or hole to serve as a toilet. Their human cargo soon became engulfed in an overpowering stench of sweat,urine, feces and vomit. On average the trip into exile took two weeks during which many people especially children became ill with gastro-intestinal diseases, mange and measles. Those that died enroute had to be buried without marker or fanfare near the sides of the rail tracks. This modern day Middle Passage marked the start of a nightmare that lasted a decade and a half.

Upon arriving at their destinations in Kazakhstan and Siberia, local authorities assigned the deportees to various collective farms. Their new accomodations frequently lacked doors, windows and any furnishings. Many found themselves living in mud huts and sleeping on the floor. A very large number of exiles received accomodation in already occupied Kazakh or Russian houses and lived under extremely compact conditions. Epidemics spread rapidly in this environment.

Famine like conditions existed for many of the Russian-German deportees. Until integrated into the collective farms in their new locations they could only receive a small amount of grain in return for vouchers issued in exchange for stocks confiscated during the deportation. However, until 11 November 1941, many local authorities refused to honor these vouchers. Thus for the first few months of exile the Russian-Germans only had the food they brought with them or could acquire by bartering their few belongings with the local population. Desperately hungry, the deportees often swapped valuable clothes, rugs and utensils for mere scraps of food. Ethnic Russians in particular engaged in the regular cheating of Russian-German exiles in trade deals. During the first few months of exile, many Russian-Germans had access to almost no food and many perished from hunger.

In January 1942, conditions got even worse for a large number of Russian-Germans. The Stalin regime relocated large number of those deported to Siberia from grain farms in the south to fishing trusts along the shores of the arctic rivers in the north. In total more than 80,000 Russian-Germans came to work in fisheries in the arctic. They had to construct their own housing out of mud on the banks of the rivers. These dark, damp, cold and dirty structures proved incapable of keeping out the elements and greatly facilitated the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis. The Russian-Germans working for the fishing trusts received 600 grams of bread a day and worked long hours in icy cold water without protective clothing. Malnutrition, frostbite, hypothermia and drowning became all too common among these workers.

Also in January 1942, the Stalin regime began the forced mass mobilization of Russian-Germans into labor camps without charge or trial. In January and February 1942, the regime inducted nearly 68,000 Russian-German male deportees aged 17-50 to work in GULag camps devoted to felling timber and industrial construction. Soviet authorities drafted another 25,000 to work on railway construction. Almost 93,000 men found themselves condemned to forced labor in the labor army (trudarmiia) under conditions little different from common criminal convicts. Their only crime was their German heritage. The Soviet govenment conducted another labor draft of Russian-Germans starting in February 1942. This time they subjected all Russian-German men in the USSR aged 17-50 to conscription. This draft mainly inducted labor army men from the large number of Russian-Germans already living in Kazakhstan and Siberia before the deportations. It netted close to 41,000 conscripts for work in labor camps. Finally in October, the Stalin regime extended the labor army draft to men 15-16 and 51-55 and all women 16-45 except those pregnant or with children under 3. This final mass mobilization drafted almost 71,000 men and 53,000 women. In total more than 316,600 Russian-Germans served in the labor army during World War II. Over 182,000 of them served this sentence of forced labor in the same GULag camps and under the same conditions as prisoners. Despite its official liquidation in 1946, many labor army conscripts only left the camps in 1956 and 1957. Horrific living and work conditions in the labor army led to over 100,000 deaths among the Russian-Germans.

Even after the death of Stalin and the abolition of the special settlement restrictions, the Russian-Germans remained second class Soviet citizens on the basis of their biological descent. They could not live in the European areas of the Soviet Union, they had little access to German language publications and they continued to be the target of official and popular ethnic defamation. They also remained largely excluded from higher education and white collar jobs on the basis of their nationality. Attempts in the 1960s by Russian-German activists to solve these problems within a Soviet frame work failed. Hence, since the legalization of emigration from the USSR in 1987, the vast majority of Russian-Germans have left Kazakhstan and Siberia to live in Germany.

In memory of those who died

For further reading see Krasnoyarsk Memorial

A very brief history of the Chechens

This post will be much shorter than my three entries on the Kalmyks. The history of the Chechens, particularly during the last decade is much more familiar to most Anglophone readers than that of the Kalmyks. The Chechen diaspora in the US is also much more recent and smaller than the 1,000 Kalmyks that have lived in PA and NJ since the early 50s. I am also not going to deal too much with the post-Soviet period of Chechen history. This is a basic historical background post.

The Chechens are native to the North Caucasus. Their native language is closely related to that of the neighboring Ingush. Both of these languages are part of the Ibero-Caucasian family and considerably different from the nearby Turkic languages of Karachai and Balkar. The Chechens have traditionally been Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, but have been strongly influnced by Sufi brotherhoods (Tariqas). These brotherhoods have frequently been used to organize Chechen resistance to Russian and Soviet rule.

Russian settlement of Chechen lands began in earnest in the second half of the 18th century. In 1779, Catherine II sent Prince Potemkin with an expeditionary force to subjugate the North Caucasus. Military resistance by native Muslims began in an organized fashion in 1785 under Shaykh Mansur. In 1827, Khazi Mulla declared a holy war against the Russian encroachment into the North Caucasus. This Jihad had especially strong support among the Chechens. In 1832, the Russians killed Khazi Mulla. A man named Hamzat Bek took his place in leading the Muslim resistance to the Russians in the North Caucasus. In 1834, fellow Muslims killed Hamzat Bek. The leadership of the Islamic insurgency in the North Caucasus fell to one of the greatest military minds of all time, Imam Shamil. An ethnic Avar, Shamil organized Avars, Chechens and other North Caucasian Muslims into an effect guerrilla army. Under his leadership these guerrillas kept the Russian army from subduing the region for over a quarter of a century. In 1859, the Russians captured Shamil and the resistance disintegrated. By the summer of 1864, the Russians had defeated the insurgents. Chechen resistance to Russian rule flared up again in the 1930s and 1940s when it took an anti-Soviet form.

Anti-Soviet uprisings among the Chechens flared up in 1929-1930 against the collectivization agriculture. Armed resistance against Soviet officials continued until 1933. In 1938 they again turned to attacks on Communist Party officials and state property in retaliation for Chechens killed in the Great Terror. Finally, in 1939 a large scale insurgeny against Soviet rule in Chechnya flared up under the leadership of Hasan Israilov. This rebellion continued to rage until Spring 1941 before being supressed by the NKVD.Small bands of anti-Soviet Chechen guerrillas continued to operate throughout the the war. These consistent armed revolts, particularly the last one motivated the Stalin regime to implement a final solution to the Chechen problem.

Between 23-29 February 1944, the NKVD deported nearly 390,000 Chechens and over 90,000 Ingush from their homeland to special settlements in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In the process of this round up, the NKVD committed numerous massacres of the civilian population. Most notably at Khaibakh where NKVD soldiers burned to death over 700 Chechens in locked buildings. In exile they suffered incredible harships. They could not adjust to the unfamiliar climate and agriculture of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. By 1950 malnutrition, typhus and other poverty related causes had killed in excess of 125,000 Chechens and 20,000 Ingush in the special settlements. Strong agitation by the exiled Chechens to return home paid off in the years after Stalin's 1953 death. In 1957 the Soviet government allowed the Chechens and Ingush to return to the Caucasus.

The Soviet government deported the entire Chechen population to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to both prevent further uprisings and collectively punish the Chechens for their past resistance. The official justification of Nazi collaboration has no basis. The Nazis only reached the western most Ingush populated areas of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR during World War II. The only Chechens that the Germans could recruit came from POW camps. Yet, few Chechens served in German organized units compared to many nationalities not subject to deportation. The numbers are so small that German records don't have them listed. In contrast 20,000 Georgians, 18,000 Armenians, 180,000 Kazakhs and Central Asians, 250,000 Ukrainians and 310,000 Russians fought with the Germans against the USSR. The Stalin regime for some reason neglected to deport the entire Georgian and Russian populations as punishment for this collaboration.

From the 1960s to the collapse of the USSR, the Chechens increasingly became more Sovietized. Russian for instance replaced Chechen as their primary language. But, they did not forget the events of the 1940s. When the USSR fell apart the Chechens attempted to gain their independence. The memory of the deportations served as a tool for mobilizing the Chechens to fight against the Russians. Since 1991 there have officially been two wars in Chechnya. The second one is still ongoing with an estimated 100,000 Chechen fatalities out of a population of about a million. The Chechens still desire to be free of Russian rule and the Russians are still taking exterminationist measures to punish that desire.

Arivaca blogger population to grow

Today I found the blog of a man moving to Arivaca. So if any of my tales of the Garden of Eden that is Arivaca have intrigued you and you want to know more go see his blog. His name is name is Chris O'Byrne and his blog Where is Chris? is currently detailing the move and overland trip from points east to Arivaca. Having made the overland trip myself I will note that TN is wonderful, NM nice and AR and TX awful. These last two states are ugly. Crossing from Memphis TN with its nice upkept roads and well maintained rest stops to AR with its pot holed highways and filthy toilets is quite disturbing actually.

Carnival of diasporas

Since I seem to be on some sort of carnival black list, I thought maybe I could host my own. Given the small traffic of this blog it would have to be a mini-carnival. But, I think I could make it work. In my last post I mastered embedding links in the text. I now have the basic technology down. I have given some thought on the theme of such a carnival. I want it to fill an unoccupied niche that has broad appeal. I think I came up with a suitable idea. One of my interests is diaspora studies. I subscribe to a broad definition of the term. Simply put a diaspora is a group of people with a common heritage living outside their ancestral homeland who maintain a transgenerational political, cultural or symbolic connection to that homeland. The classic diasporas are the Jews, Greeks and Armenians. Other diasporas include the Irish, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Indians and Chinese. I have blogged a bit about some diasporas here already. Most notably the Germans and Koreans in the Soviet Union and the Kalmyks in the United States. So if you have a post on diasporas or saw one by somebody else you liked, send it to me at pohlcat [the at symbol] rocketmail [dot] com. I am going to set a deadline of 12 September 2005 so I can get them up by 15 September 2005. Also if anybody would like to host a future Carnival of diasporas, let me know. Feel free to spread this message around.

Some of my writing on Crimean Tatars

I have a number of academic pieces on the net. Most recently, 'And this Must be Remembered!'Stalin's Ethnic Cleansing of the Crimean Tatars and their Struggle for Rehabilitation, 1944-1985 appeared in the Spring-Summer 2004 issue of Ukrainian Quarterly, pp. 33-56. Also a timeline of recent Crimean Tatar history. Finally, The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars which was a conference paper delivered at Columbia University in 2000. If you are interested, stop by and take a look. Feel free to leave comments here.

The morning so far

Today I finished editing and sent off my encyclopedia article on the GULag. I now have three articles left to write for that project. I also helped my uncle set the first post for the gate. Now I am going to clean up the mess that asserted itself while I was writing my encyclopedia article.

Thanks for the cover letter advice

Thank you to bushpigeon, New Kid on the Hallway, Dean Dad and Artichoke Heart for their detailed and lengthy constructive criticism and advice regarding cover letters. A special thanks to Dr. Camicao for setting the whole thing up. I will definitely attempt to incorporate your suggestions.

The rest of the week

I finished typing of a draft of the encyclopedia article. I am going to edit it today and tommorrow and then send it off to the editor. My word count tallied it at exactly 1000 words. It is amazing how much information you can condense into a small space when you do not have any extra room.

I will be posting an entry on the 28th of August in rememberance of the deportation of the Russian-Germans in 1941. The 28th marks the 64th anniversary of the decree ordering the deportation of the Volga Germans from the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Saratov Oblast and Stalingrad Oblast. I have gotten a really good response from the last two deportation posts on the Russian-Koreans and the Kalmyks.

On 1st September I will be blogging about cotton in Uzbekistan. In honor of Uzbekistan's independence day a number of bloggers will be writing in favor of sanctions against the nation's cotton crop. I have written elsewhere here on the horrible conditions of cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan. The state owns the farms and pays those who work on them only a small fraction of the vast sums it earns selling cotton. They are also tied to the land as they were in Soviet times. It also regularly employs child labor on a mass scale during the fall to harvest the cotton crop. If that were not enough the regime is a repressive dictatorship with thousands of political prisoners, many the victims of torture. The poltical-economy of this regime depends upon cotton. I will have more to write on this come the first.

Tasks for the day

It is already extremely hot and it is only 8:00 am. So I think work on the gate post might be limited today. I am sweating enough as it is just sitting here typing. I am pretty sure I won't be able to wield a pick long enough to complete the mushrooming of the pit in this heat.

On the other hand I am pretty sure I can finish off the encyclopedia article I am working on. I just have two little sections left to complete. Both of them should be fairly easy to write. I do not anticipate trying to track down information that is in books packed away in storage.

Eurasian blogs

This blog has recently gotten some attention as a result of its posts on Russian-Koreans (Koryo Saram) and Kalmyks. I have noticed that Nathan Hamm at Registan has added me to his blogroll. Thank you Nathan. Also Andy Young, another British citizen (they seem to be overly represented on my links), of Siberian Light linked to each of my posts on the Kalmyks. The links on Siberian Light got picked up and mentioned on a couple of other blogs. So another big thank you goes out to Andy Young. I have added links to both Registan and Siberian Light over on the left hand side.

Slow progress

Today I finished digging the hole for the gate post down to 18". But, my uncle wants it made wider at the bottom like an inverted mushroom. The fireants and heat got too thick today to do that. There is no deadline so I will continue to work on it a little each day until it is done.

I got a little more written on the encyclopedia article. I will probably finish a rough draft of it tommorrow. Fortunately, it is not due until mid-October. So I have plenty of time to complete it. It is also only 1000 words. But, I have another two 1000 word articles and one 500 one also due at the same time I have yet to start.

I heard back from the cotton conference today by e-mail. They received my paper. I also got a rejection by e-mail for a position in Central Asian history I applied for before moving to Arizona. I haven't heard in a while from the publisher in the UK that has been considering publishing my dissertation as a book for about a year now. I sent them another e-mail the other day.

Forecast for the day

This morning unlike yesterday is sunny and warm. It will probably get pretty hot today. I am going to finish digging the gate post hole today. I also hope to finish a draft of the encyclopedia article on the GULag. Finally, I intend to apply for at least one job today. I might as well get rejected for the same job more than once.