Death and Life in the Labor Army

At the same time that the Nazi regime was engaged in the mass gassing of Jews in death camps the Stalin regime was busy rounding up every single able bodied adult of German ancestry in the USSR for slave labor. The Soviet government condemned hundreds of thousands of men and women to work under conditions that resulted in tens of thousands of them dying from hunger, exhaustion, and exposure solely because their ancestors had immigrated to the Russian Empire from Central Europe.  During 1942 and 1943 the Soviet government forcibly mobilized over 316,000 ethnic Germans into the labor army to perform forced labor. As a result of the inhumane conditions in the labor army over 60,000 or nearly a fifth of those conscripted perished during and soon after the war (German and Silantjewa, p. 308). Below I have reproduced an excerpt from Orlando Figes The Whisperers describing the conditions experienced by Rudolf Gotman in the labor army.

Rudolf Gotman was born in 1922 to a Lutheran German family from the Crimea. The Gotmans were categorized as 'kulaks' and exiled to the wilderness near Arkhangelsk in 1931.  When the war broke out Rudolf was picked up by the NKVD as a 'German national' (in fact his ancestors had lived in Russia since 1831) and sent to work in the coal mines of the Donbass. There he was conscripted by a labour brigade made up of a hundred young men from 'German' families and sent to work in a food-processing factory in Solikamsk, in the northern Urals. In the autumn of of 1942, the men were sent to a nearby logging camp to fell timber. They lived in barracks, slept on wooden benches, and were given starvation-level rations. Made to work in freezing temperatures, more than half the brigade members died in the first winter. The NKVD guards, who supervised the brigade, showed no mercy for the 'German' boys and called them 'Fascist scum'. Rudolf survived by virtue of the fact that he was injured and taken to hospital: otherwise he would have died from exhaustion. He remained in the labour army for the next fourteen years. He worked in factories, Soviet farms and construction sites and was even sent to the Caucasus to build dachas for Stalin, Molotov and Beria. He did not receive any pay until 1948, and was not allowed to to leave the labour army until 1956, as part of the general amnesty for Gulag prisoners. (Figes, p. 424).

May those who died rest in peace.

Sources:

Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, (London: Penguin Books, 2008).

A. German and O. Silantjewa, (eds.), "Vyselit' s treskom". Ochevidtsy i issledovateli o tragedii rossiiskikh nemtsev / "Fortjagen muss man sie". Zeitzeugen und Forscher berichten uber die Tragodie der Russlanddeutschen, (Moscow: MSNK-Press, 2011).

Ghana off of FATF blacklist

Ghana has now been removed from the list of countries blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for having weak laws and institutions aimed at preventing money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The FATF is a international body and it placed Ghana on its blacklist in February of this year. It is expected that the removal of Ghana from the blacklist will make international financial transactions involving Ghana both cheaper and faster.

Source: Daily Graphic

It is again hot in Africa

This morning I was already sweating profusely by 8:30 and it is only going to get hotter from now until about March. Fortunately, so far this week there have been no electrical problems so I can keep cool in my office which has air conditioning and a ceiling fan.

Anytime you need a particular piece of technology it will be broken at the first two places you look.

Sometimes I feel like I am living the entire corpus of sayings in  Murphy's Law. There is in fact a Pohl's principle in the first book. You can go look it up. But, today was one of the few times I needed a scanner. Our office has no scanner. At the first place I went to the scanner was broken. The scanner was also broken at the second place I tried. The third place had no scanner and I finally struck gold at place number four. Not only did they have a scanner, but it actually worked. Of course I was lucky I only had to go to three places with a scanner to find one that worked. Nothing ever works the first time or the second time. If you are really lucky it will work the third time. In fact that is why it is still called the Third World long after the death of the Second World and the whole idea of nonalignment.

Another African Weekend

Yesterday, I took a tro tro down to the start of Oxford Street in Osu and then walked to Osu Beach to see the Ocean. It was a great view, but it was really hot. I couldn't stay out and enjoy it too long in the heat. The start of Osu Street at the Koala Market is really upscale and caters mostly to foreigners and rich Ghanaians. But, on the beach the fancy buildings give way to shacks and containers with much more reasonably priced goods being sold with little overhead. This is a very different type of coastal geography than from what exists in the US. There all the expensive property would be on the beach and the poorer buildings far away.

Soviet Citizens in German military units during WWII

During the Second World War over 1.3 million Soviet citizens fought in the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units. Over 1 million of these men were Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians (Berdinskikh, p. 65). These units included in 1943 a total of 90 Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack battalions, 90 Caucasian and Central Asian battalions, and the 29th and 30th Russian Waffen SS Divisions. There was also the 14th Waffen SS "Galician" Division formed from Ukrainians in what was eastern Poland before 1939. The Latvians contributed the 15th and 19th Waffen SS divisions and the Estonians the 20th Waffen SS Division (Chebotareva, p. 447). In 1945 just after the mass deportations of North Caucasians, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks the German military had the following breakdown of Baltic and Soviet nationals fighting in its various units.

Baltic States
Lithuanians - 36,300
Latvians - 104,000
Estonians - 10,000

Soviet Citizens
Russians - 53,000
Azerbaijanis - 36,500
Georgians - 19,000
North Caucasians - 15,000
Volga Tatars - 12,500
Crimean Tatars - 10,000
Armenians - 7,000
Kalmyks -5,000

(Chebotareva, pp. 447-448).

For citizens of the USSR the number of Russian collaborators is much greater than among the North Caucasians, Crimean Tatars, and Kalmyks combined. Yet the Stalin regime did not exact any collective punishment at all upon the Russians, Azerbaijanis, Volga Tatars, or Georgians. It did deport in the summer of 1944 the entire Armenian population of Crimea eastward as it had the Crimean Tatars. But, the Crimean Armenians numbered less than 10,000 and made up only a small percentage of the total Armenian population of the USSR. Later in 1948 and 1949 there are significant partial deportations from the three formerly independent Baltic States as well as much of the Armenian population living along the Black Sea. But, the Armenians in the Armenian SSR as well as the bulk of the indigenous population of the Baltic states are allowed to remain in their homelands without suffering the collective punishment for "treason" imposed upon the Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, and Crimean Tatars.

Sources:

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

 V. Chebatoreva, "Ukaz Presidium Verkhnogo Soveta SSSR ot 28 avgusta 1941 g. - preventivnaia mera obespecheniia gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti ili politcheskaia povokatsiia?" in A.A. German (ed.), Nachal'nyi period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i deportatsiia rossiiskikh nemtsev : vzgliady i otsenki cherez 70 let (Moscow: MSNK-press, 2011),  pp. 442-455.

George Fredrickson on Race and why Francine Hirsch is wrong

George Fredrickson was before his death probably the foremost historian in the world on the comparative history of systems of racial exclusion. His comparative historical work on racism in the US, South Africa, and Brazil still stands out as some of the best comparative history ever written. I am currently rereading Fredrickson's writings on race and I am even more struck now by how much his views are diametrically opposed to Hirsch's. Yet Fredrickson is the orthodox and mainstream view when it comes to race in the US and South Africa and Hirsch is the orthodox and mainstream view on race in the USSR. How is it that only the study of Soviet nationalities remains chained to definitions of race and racism that had already been discarded with regards to the study of the rest of the world by the end of the 1960s? (Fredrickson, pp. 79-80). I have some ideas at the end of this essay. But Hirsch is the dominant figure in the US today on the study of the history of Soviet nationality policies under Stalin. She unlike Fredrickson explicitly denies that race can be constructed along cultural rather than biological lines.  Hirsch is unable to conceive of racism as anything except the narrow biologically based racism practiced by Nazi Germany.

But to call Soviet population politics "racial"  - to insist that a state sees its population through a "racial" lens if it ascribes cultural or behavioral traits to its population groups (that is, if it stereotypes)  - is to obscure important differences between the Soviet and Nazi regimes and their projects. If we call all politics of categorical exclusion and discrimination "racial politics," then what do we call politics actually based on the category "race"? (Hirsch, p. 37).

Fredrickson makes it clear as does John Rex that there is no real distinction between ethnicity and race such as posited by Hirsch.  Fredrickson in point of fact defined racism in terms of ethnicity.

Racism, then, can be defined as an ethnic group's assertion or maintenance of a privileged and protected status vis a vis members of another group or groups who are thought, because of defective ancestry, to possess a set of relevant characteristics that disqualify them from full membership in a community or citizenship in a nation state. (Fredrickson, p. 85).

This would certainly apply to the Russian dominated Soviet state's treatment of ethnic Germans in the USSR who were deemed by virtue of their ancestry to be potential traitors and therefore subjected to special settlement restrictions which made them second class citizens in the USSR.

Instead Hirsch claims that nationalities as defined by social and historical criteria are radically different from racial groups defined by biology.

The mass deportation of targeted nationalities, along with other Soviet nationality policies, was premised on the conviction that nationalities (like classes) were sociohistorical groups with a shared consciousness and not racial-biological groups. This is not a trivial distinction: it is imperative to understand Soviet conceptions of "race" and "nationality" before we can undertake a truly comparative analysis. (Hirsch, p. 30).

The distinctions made between culture and biology and ethnicity and race by Hirsch to deny the existence of racial discrimination in the USSR by the Stalin regime against the deported peoples are in point of fact trivial in practice. Something she might have figured out if she had done any real comparative work instead of confining herself to Nazi Germany as the only example of racism in world history. She instead conflates biology with race and denies that culture can also be the basis for racial discrimination.

But Soviet nationality politics (with its focus on group consciousness transmitted through culture), unlike Nazi racial politics (with its focus on racial type transmitted through biology), did not require murder. (Hirsch, p. 40).

Not only does culture perform the exact same function as biology in the Soviet case, but it is as Fredrickson points out the basis for one of the most blatantly racist systems in modern history, South African apartheid.

Stereotyping and stigmatizing a racialized group on the basis of cultural rather than biological inferiority provides a new rationale for discrimination rather than a basis for combating it. This "new racism" is not really unprecedented. Cultural rather than biological determinism was the official justification for apartheid in South Africa. (Fredrickson, p. 81).

The distinction between primordial ethnicity determined by ancestral culture and genetically determined racial categories is in reality extremely trivial. Fredrickson in fact calls the entire debate "unprofitable." (p. 84).  As already noted he defines racism in terms of ethnic status not the articulation of an explicit doctrine of biological superiority like Hirsch does.

Since race is a constructed category it can be formed on the basis of things other than biology such as culture. In practice culturally based racial discrimination such as existed in the USSR against the deported peoples and in South Africa during apartheid is no different from the denial of rights justified by claims of biological inferiority or difference.

[T]he designation of people by skin color and the mistreatment of them on that basis has no special features that would distinguish it from group domination based on religion, culture, or the simple belief that some people have defective ancestry. It is only because modern Western liberalism often assumes that it is relatively easy for people to change their religion or culture and be assimilated into a group other than the one in which they were born that the distinction has become important. (Fredrickson, p. 84).

In the case of the USSR it was not easy at all for stigmatized groups like the ethnic Germans to change their legal nationality as recorded on line five of their identification documents. Instead the NKVD decreed that this status was automatically inherited from your parents and could not be legally changed on 2 April 1938 (Petrov and Roginskii, p. 167).  Henceforth nationality in the USSR could not be functionally distinguished from race. Racism is not about biology despite the claims of people like Francine Hirsch.

Passport nationality did become inheritable - insofar as the regime maintained that an individual's nationality derived from the nationality of one or both of his parents, and insofar as passport registers circumscribed the registration process accordingly. But, more fundamentally, nationality was not biological or racial. For the NKVD and the party the issue was not an individual's biological (genetic or blood) membership in one or another group, but his or her cultural heritage and possible ties to other states. NKVD and party officials saw these latter factors as predictors of an individual's loyalty to the regime - predictors of "Soviet" consciousness. (Hirsch, p. 39).

Racism, however, is about differential and inferior treatment of people based upon ancestry which includes "cultural heritage", not biology as Hirsch falsely claims. Nationality in the USSR was certainly based upon descent from specific cultural groups. The Stalin regime then targeted specific nationalities such as the ethnic Koreans, Germans, Kalmyks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and others for persecution and the deprivation of civil rights guaranteed to all other Soviet citizens. Under the definition of racism given above by Fredrickson the Soviet treatment of the deported peoples would certainly qualify as racial discrimination.

Hirsch strongly opposes this line of thinking and instead adheres to a notion that racism only exists if it is a replica of Nazi Germany's genetically based categorization of people into biological classes. That is she believes what defines racism is the justification for the creation of different categories of people and their unequal treatment rather than the unequal treatment itself (Hirsch, pp. 40-41). As Fredrickson notes the belief in different groups defined by descent and the unequal treatment of individuals because of their membership in those groups is what distinguishes racism from other forms of discrimination. Not whether that discrimination is based upon biology or culture. In fact how racism is justified is immaterial to determining whether it actually exists.

One might conclude, therefore, that racism, or something virtually indistinguishable from it, has no essential relation to skin color or other obvious physical characteristics and need not even be based on significant cultural differences. The essential element is the belief, however, justified or rationalized, in the critical importance of differing lines of descent and the use of that belief to establish or validate social inequality. (Fredrickson, pp. 84-85).

The fact that nationality in the Soviet Union was defined culturally rather than genetically is therefore immaterial in determining whether it functioned at times as a racial category. In the case of the deported peoples all the empirical evidence in fact points to nationality functioning as a racial category or something so close as to be almost identical.

The constant refrain by Hirsch that race has to be based upon a concept of biological inferiority is clearly rejected by Fredrickson. She claims that groups have to be explicitly defined as biologically inferior for racism to exist. Her denial of racial discrimination against the deported peoples is based entirely upon a biological definition of race. One she notes did not motivate Soviet treatment of the deported peoples.

The Soviet regime did not persecute nationalities because of suspected "biological weakness" or "deficient inner constitutions." It did not brand particular nationalities as biological inferiors or degenerate races. It did not praise Russians as representatives of a superior race, but an advanced "Soviet" nation (which was advanced in part, because "Russian kulaks" and other "Russian class enemies" had been reformed or removed). The Soviet regime had a scientific and political concept of race, but race did not guide its nationality polices. (Hirsch, p. 37).

Fredrickson notes that the beliefs and reasons for the unequal treatment of ethnic groups by a state is not what determines whether that treatment is racist. He also specifically repudiates the notion that there must be a belief in the inferiority of the stigmatized group for racism to exist.

Racism as a general phenomenon is not therefore defined by any specific beliefs about what makes a given minority undeserving of equal treatment. We know from the history of anti-Semitism and anti-Japanese discrimination in the United States that racism of a virulent sort can be directed at groups believed to be superior, at least in their competitive efficiency to an in-group seeking to protect its position. (Fredrickson, p. 86).

The position taken by Fredrickson is basically the mainstream orthodox view of historians of race relations in the US, Europe, and other regions of the world outside the Soviet Union. It is, however, only held by a tiny handful of people dealing with the history of the USSR. I suspect that this is because the study of Soviet history is extremely backwards in almost all aspects compared to other regions of the world. Most historians of the USSR still for instance completely reject the use of oral sources and cling dogmatically to a completely archive based model. This is despite the fact that until 1989 access to Soviet archives was extremely limited. In the 1990s there was a partial opening of the archives, but as my experience this summer in Kyrgyzstan shows many of these files have been reclassified as secret or top secret. In the TsGAKR everything dealing with Stalinist repression has been reclassified and is no longer accessible. The impoverished theoretical framework of Soviet history as represented by the dogmatic and outdated views of Hirsch on race, however, is an even greater impediment to understanding than the lack of archival documentation.

Sources:

George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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

N. Petrov and A. Roginskii, "The 'Polish Operation' of the NKVD, 1937-8" in B. McLoughlin and K. McDermott, Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2003).

Suggestion Box

I have now finished editing my piece, "Is there a Black Eurasia? Ghanaian and other Diasporic Populations in the USSR in Comparative Perspective." I now need some suggestions about what to write next. I have been working a little bit on a piece with no publisher yet again comparing the special settlement regime in the USSR with apartheid in South Africa. In addition to the actual practices it also looks at the similarities in Soviet and South African ethnos theory. Although given the difficulty I had finding a peer reviewed journal willing to publish my last such comparative piece I think I should also line up an article on another topic. The official orthodox line of scholars of Soviet nationality policies established by Francine Hirsch is that the mass deportations of entire ethnic groups in the USSR and placing them under special settlement restrictions were not acts of racial discrimination. Their sole argument being that ethnicity is not race and biology is not culture. This puts most historians of the USSR at complete odds with the definition of racial discrimination enshrined in international law and people researching ethnicity and race in the rest of the world.  The 1965 ICERD and scholars of race and ethnicity like Malik, Rex, Balibar, Fredrickson, Dubnow, Tilley, Weitz, and others have repeatedly pointed out that ethnicity can be racialized and racial categories can be constructed along cultural rather than biological lines. But, if you try and apply the definition of racial discrimination in the ICERD and espoused by people like Rex and Fredrickson to the USSR you get lots and lots of  vicious peer review rejections.  The majority view among people dealing with Soviet nationality policies is apparently that Hirsch is correct and race can only be constructed along genetic and biological lines. They therefore conclude that there was no official racial discrimination by the Stalin regime against groups such as Koreans, Germans, Kalmyks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and others. Getting through such ideological gate keepers takes a couple of years now. So in addition to another article comparing the Soviet special settlement regime and South African apartheid I need something I can get published a little bit faster.

Electricity update

Sure enough everybody got electricity back, but me. Only my office remained without light and more importantly air conditioning and ceiling fan. But, fortunately I now have electric power back in my office. It was only absent for the better part of four days.

Electricity

Sunday the whole campus had no electricity. On Monday it was just the top floor of the department building where the faculty offices are located. Since last evening it is only the side of the top floor with my office that has no electricity. So I have been without any electricity in my office for the better part of four days now. I am hoping they permanently fix this problem today. What is interesting is that the area effected keeps getting narrower. I would not be surprised if soon it is just my office that has no electrical power.

AAUP Hypocrisy on BDS

It turns out that the AAUP was a very strong supporter of sanctions against the Republic of South Africa. During the 1980s they made no arguments against boycotting South African universities on the basis that such a boycott was a violation of academic freedom. It is only when dealing with Israeli apartheid and colonialism that they have produced such arguments. The reasons why this should be have to do with the history of the American liberal left and its connections to Zionism, but the claims by the AAUP and people like Claire Potter that the PACBI is asking for something different than what the AAUP itself supported regarding South Africa are completely false. In both cases the boycott has been targeted at academic institutions not individual scholars despite the lies spread by the likes of Potter.

AAUP and BDS

I see from a post on Mondoweiss that the official position of the AAUP is to reject BDS against Israel on the basis that an academic boycott of the last remaining apartheid state is a violation of the principles of free speech. Did the AAUP also publicly come out against an academic boycott of South Africa in the 1980s? If not why not? Would not the principle of freedom of speech apply equally in both cases? This is of course not surprising most "radical" professors in the US are strong opponents of any type of action against Israel. The only partial exceptions appear to be Judith Butler and some math professor at UCLA. The position of the AAUP and "Tenured Radicals" such as Claire Potter in strongly opposing any action against Israel is far more typical of the self identified left wing radical professors in the US. They should just be honest and admit that they are not radical at all on this issue or any other. Instead they are upholding established and orthodox left wing values that have dominated US universities for decades without any significant challenge. For some reason one of these values is support for Israel which does not make them much different from Gingrich or Romney when it comes to the Middle East.

New Book Purchases

Today I decided to bulk up my collection on Ghanaian and particular northern Ghanaian history. I bought three books on the subject.

D.E.K. Amenumey, Ghana: A Concise History from Pre-Colonial Times to the 20th Century (Accra: Woeli Publishing Services, 2011).

I actually know Dr. Amenumey personally, he comes by the department on occasion and he introduced the paper I gave with Felix Longi at the conference on German colonialism in Winneba. When I first met him I had no idea just how big a name he was in the field.

Ibrahim Mahama, A Colonial History of Northern Ghana (Tamale, Ghana: GILLBT Printing Press, 2009).

Cliff S. Maasole, The Konkomba and their Neighbours: From the Pre-European Period to 1914 (Accra: Woeli Publishing Services, 2006).

I am hoping I can get a basic understanding of the numerous ethnic conflicts in the north east of Ghana which exploded with such violence in the 1980s and 1990s. As I have mentioned before the region is extremely ethnically complex with a lot of population groups involved in chieftancy and land disputes. Just sorting out the different groups is confusing.

Black Outs

One thing that people in the US don't have to contend with regularly is power outages. On Sunday the power went out at nine in the morning and did not come back on until past ten at night. Today the power in our offices went out in the morning and still has not come back on. Without air conditioning and fans it is far too hot to work in my office. In the time it took to grade five exams I was drenched in sweat. I am hoping that what ever infrastructure problem is causing us to have regular outages is fixed soon.

Another valiant but probably doomed attempt

My last reader survey was a complete failure. It only got one comment and I have no idea who that person was. Of course it may be that he is the only person other than my parents, one guy in Manhattan, one other person in Ghana, and occasionally a guy in Hungary who ever reads my blog. However, I am hoping that there may be some lurkers out there who have not made their presence known to me.

Mali once again

Apparently the current position of the US left is that any and all military intervention is good if it has the support of international organizations such as the UN. This is a radical change from the left's position in earlier decades and is especially strange given that the UN Security Council is currently dominated by the US, UK, and France without even the presence of a Soviet veto any more. So the American left seem to believe that military intervention in Mali by the US is a good thing because it has the support of the UN, AU and ECOWAS and will be supporting ECOWAS troops on the ground. They also seem to think that the intervention in Libya was the greatest thing ever. I remember a time when they opposed US military intervention abroad even when it had the support of organizations like the UN and SEATO. Fortunately, I am not a leftist and I do not think that the stamp of approval from international organizations automatically makes military intervention in Mali a good thing or that the earlier US intervention in Libya was necessarily the correct decision. In fifty years we can do a proper historical examination of these things. In the mean time I think it is prudent to limit military solutions to where they are absolutely necessary and not to try and bring democracy to the world, maintain the borders of post-colonial states, or eliminate Islamic political movements through the barrel of a gun.

More Thoughts on Intervention in Mali

Today the AU, EU, and ECOWAS are meeting with the government of Mali in Bamako to discuss concrete plans for military intervention against the Islamists in northern Mali. The current plan is to send 3,300 ECOWAS soldiers to assist the Malian army in this task. France in particular has been pushing for a military solution to the problems in Mali, but the US may end up providing air support to the operation just as it did to rebels in Libya who overthrew Qaddafi. At the same time it looks like the Islamists have greatly reduced food and utility prices for the people living in northern Mali and have thus gained themselves some popular support. Some refugees from southern Mali have even returned to northern Mali. The Islamists are also busy destroying the tombs of Sufi saints in northern Mali. So like many radical social movements the Islamists in Mali are a mixed bag. In terms of personal freedom they are extremely restrictive. They are now, however, successfully alleviating some of the poverty afflicting the people of northern Mali. It would be foolish to assume that the Islamists do not in fact have a significant social basis of support. They very well may be capable of preventing the proposed military intervention from reestablishing effective rule by Bamako over the region.

My Official Initiation into the Vandals

Last night I attended a party to welcome new fellows at Commonwealth Hall (Vandal City). The order as they call it which is led by a master is actually a very good networking resource. It also had a good spread of food. I am going to have to start visiting the Senior Common Room and keeping my ears open. I suspect there is an awful lot of important stuff I can learn from my elders.

Lots of new freshmen at Legon

According to the official figures given by the Vice Chancellor the University of Ghana at Legon admitted 17,819 new students this academic year out of 31,813 applicants. Out of this number 15, 272 were undergraduates and 2,547 graduate students. Although our department only admitted two graduate students. The number of foreign students admitted was 456. The huge size of the student body presents some problems most notably in the very large size of lower division classes and the difficulty in marking so many exams. I just finished grading over 120 midterms for my 200 level class. Although I have never seen more than 60 students actually attend any one class.

Source: Ghanaian Chronicle

Two Documents on the Deportation of the Crimean Germans

Secret

Information

     From the Crimean ASSR, as reported in a conversation on 2.IX-41 with the Peoples Commissar of Internal Affairs for the Crimean ASSR com. Karanadze, were evacuated to Ordzhonikidze krai in accordance with the Resolution of the council on evacuation No. SE-75s of 15.VIII-41 close to 60 thousand people of German nationality.
    According to a report from the UNKVD of Ordzhonikidze krai (com. Shapiro) in Ordzhonikidze krai [I have redacted a long list of raions in Ordzhonikidze krai here] from the Crimean ASSR have arrived 50 thousand citizens of German nationality. 
    In addition to these people another 3 thousand people of German nationality from the Crimean ASSR arrived in Rostov oblast, that have in connection to conducting the operation to resettle them from Rostov oblast, been resettled in the Kazakh SSR.

Dep. Chief of the Section for Special Settlements NKVD USSR
Captain of State Security Konradov

Source: N.F. Bugai (ed)., Deportatsiia narodov Kryma: Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii, (Moscow: INSAN, 2002, document no. 48, p. 79. Translated from the Russian into English by J. Otto Pohl

Top Secret

Information

On the resettlement of Germans from Krasnodar and Ordzhonikidze krai

October 1941

     In executing the Resolution of the State Committee of Defense of the USSR No. 698-ss of 21 September 1941 - the NKVD of the USSR undertook the resettlement of Germans from Krasnodar and Ordzhonikidze krais to the Kazakh SSR. 
     The total subject to resettlement from Krasnodar krai - 34,287 people and from Ordzhonikidze - 95,489 people of this number 50,000 Germans arrived in Ordzhonikidze krai from the Crimean ASSR.
     From this composition on 14 October 1941 from Krasnodar krai were sent out 38,136 people, remaining to be sent out are 2500 people and from Ordzhonikidze were sent 74,570 people.
     The loading and shipping in echelons is continuing.

Deputy Peoples Commissar of Internal Affairs
Union of SSRs Commissar of State Security III-rank  Kobulov

Dep. Chief  of the Section for Special Settlements NKVD USSR
Captain of State Security                                            Konradov

Source: N.F. Bugai (ed.), Deportatsiia narodov Kryma: Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii, (Moscow: INSAN, 2002), doc. no. 49, p. 80. Translated from Russian to English by J. Otto Pohl.