Nick Baron

Population displacement, state-building and social identity in the lands of the former Russian empire, 1917-1923

The East European successor states to the Russian empire were shaped by their early experience of war and peace, imperial collapse and new state-building, population displacement and resettlement, and the dissolution and reformation of traditional social identities and affiliations. In the course of World War I, several million people, both Russians and non-Russians, had been dispersed from the tsarist empire’s western borderlands throughout its European and Siberian territories. 1 The war ended in a crescendo of revolutionary upheaval and the assertion of a new national politics on the periphery of the unravelling imperial polity. The peace treaties and territorial arrangements of 1918-20 marked the birth of a new era of nationalist and revolutionary conflict, extensive social dislocation and intense ethnic discord, grand visions of reconstruction and regeneration, and renewed population movements on a massive scale. This article explores the nature of the wartime and postwar displacement, diaspora, and resettlement of populations and their impact on processes of state construction, nation-building, and identity formation in the space of the former Russian

New Spatial Histories of 20th-Century Russia and the Soviet Union: Exploring the Terrain

thought. The second part of the book, “reading Maps,” includes a brief examination of the cultural nature and political significance of maps and an engaging, though rudimentary, outline of the evolution of cartography in relation to systems of power and knowledge. For these sections, the author relies heavily on a limited range of mainly English-language secondary sources, all well-known to anglo-american scholars but perhaps less familiar to his German readership. The work is at its most interesting when the author ventures beyond the well-trodden territory of historiographical synthesis to offer NEW SPaTIaL HISTORIES OF 20TH-CENTURY RUSSIa aND THE SOVIET UNION 435 his own studies of modern space and the spaces of modernity, constructing an anthology or “sampler” of methods, approaches, and styles in the new spatial history. In part 2, Schlogel dedicates chapters to the 1938 Philo-Atlas (a handbook published in Berlin in 1938 to facilitate Jewish emigration), a tourist map showing Sarajevo under siege during the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s, the life of Sandor Rado (the Soviet “agent Dora” based in Switzerland during World War II), and the historical role and meaning of the map-table. Each proceeds from description of the particular artifact, text, or biography to general meditations on 20th-century cartographic strategies, sensibilities, and technologies. In part 3, “Working with the Eyes,” and part 4, “Diaphanous Europe,” the author uses the same approach to reflect on the material and mental spaces of modernity and postmodernity, and on the means of knowing and understanding these spaces. among other subjects, he analyzes a photograph of John F. Kennedy’s assassination; the markings on city pavements; town plans; the life-stories of houses, hotels, and apartment blocks; room interiors; Berlin directories from 1932 to 1962; railway timetables; the fingerprint; Baedeker’s travel guides; the poetics of the american highway; Diaghilev’s cultural and erotic peregrinations; European cemeteries; and the gates to auschwitz-Birkenau. These essays are idiosyncratic, provocative, incisive, and insightful. They bring space into the foreground, as an historical actor in its own right rather than a mere backdrop to action, and enliven our appreciation of how history inscribes itself in spatial forms and ideas. at the same time, they constitute a significant challenge to historians—as well as to scholars of other disciplines, policymakers and planners, and the general reader—to engage with space in new ways. In particular, Schlogel proposes that we should “go out into the world” and experience space directly, through “working with the eyes” as much as with the intellect, studying nature at first hand like the explorerscholar von Humboldt, treading city streets like Walter Benjamin, flaneur of 20th-century urban modernity. Following this method, Schlogel suggests, our narrative will be structured by the routes we take and observations we make, by our perception of analogies, contiguities, or disjunctions between or among phenomena, rather than by chronology or causality. This new history will no longer privilege diachronic development at the cost of acknowledging rupture and discontinuity, since it is grounded in our acute sensation, as well as our critical reading, of the juxtaposition of physical traces of the past in space. It is a history that asserts simultaneity and confrontation above progress and flow. 2 Schlogel’s analysis bears a striking resemblance to Michel Foucault’s 1967 assertion, “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed,” in Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, 1 (1986): 22.

Remaking Soviet Society: the Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49

The end of the Second World War in Europe brought liberation from Nazi captivity to several million Soviet citizens. Most had been taken westward by the Germans as prisoners of war or as forced labourers seized in occupied territories. A small minority of Soviet men had, voluntarily or not, joined the enemy’s armed forces. Over the subsequent months and years, the majority of these Soviet displaced persons returned to their places of origin. Their journeys home, however, were not simple trajectories. The time they had spent abroad, outside the purview of Soviet military commissars or intelligence operatives, marked them in the eyes of the Stalinist state as suspect. Both before and on their return to Soviet territory, repatriated citizens were confined in holding stations and camps, where they were subjected to ‘filtration’ (fil’tratsiia) pending their return home or alternatively their further resettlement or deportation. Referring to recently declassified political police records from Kiev region in Ukraine, this chapter considers the role and significance of the encampment, investigation and registration of returnees. It seeks to relate these practices of power to the postwar reconstruction of society and to the establishment of new normative identities and autobiographical narratives.

Violence, Childhood and the State: New Perspectives on Political Practice and Social Experience in the Twentieth Century

Nurturing the Nation examines the history of child displacement – understood as both state practice and social experience - in Eastern Europe and Russia in the first half of the twentieth century.

Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915-1953

Nurturing the Nation examines the history of child displacement – understood as both state practice and social experience - in Eastern Europe and Russia in the first half of the twentieth century.

Placing the Child in Twentieth-Century History: Contexts and Framework

In the Ukraine ragged homeless boys came and beat on the train doors and begged, many of them hanging onto the train in hopes of getting to somewhere where there might be food. [. . .] Miss Daunt says bitterly that there are no girls in Leningrad. She exaggerates, but she has cause to speak bitterly, as she lives down a street where there is a sailors’ club and she sees girls, who she thinks cannot be more than twelve, accosting sailors there. Diary of British diplomat Reader Bullard, 13 June 19332

Property of Communists. The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev

MARK B. SMITH’S MONOGRAPH EXAMINES A PARADOX THAT LIES at the heart of Soviet history, namely that the ‘party–government that terrorized its population also protected and fostered its progress’ (p. 3). Stalinism, in particular, was ‘ruthlessly progressive’ (p. 4), enacting bloody repression while laying the basis of a welfare system of a particular kind, an institution of social welfare without institutionalised citizens’ rights. The post-Stalinist regime developed and expanded this system, modifying its form, scope and practical implementation while doing little to alter its essential character or to overcome its inherent contradictions. Smith elucidates this paradox of Soviet political rule and social regulation by considering the evolution of the Soviet mass housing programme, which he describes as ‘one of the greatest social reforms of modern European history’, nevertheless largely overlooked by historians (p. 4). At the heart of his analysis of urban housing design, construction and allocation is the development of ‘complex property relations’ as an ‘essential driver of the program’ and as ‘a central dynamic of the Soviet system’ (p. 5). Specifically, he enquires into the property rights of individuals, both de jure and de facto, and how formal and informal entitlements inter-related and interacted. What did ‘ownership’ really mean in a context that denied private property? By extension, what rights and autonomy did citizens possess in a system which, in ideological principle—but not always in everyday practice—refused to acknowledge citizens’ rights or a discrete private sphere? In this way, ingeniously, Smith uses a detailed and precise, sometimes technical, examination of Soviet state housing policy, its motivations and development, to provide valuable insights into key issues of general significance concerning Soviet governance, state–society relations and individual experience. To accomplish this analysis, Smith establishes a conceptual framework that directs our attention to three motifs ‘encoded into the ideology of Soviet urban housing’ (p. 5), which at different times each acted to a greater or lesser degree as core determinants of policy making and implementation. These were the ‘dogmas’ of sacrifice, of beneficence and of paradise (pp. 5–6), the first dictating the subservience of society to state-defined strategic or developmental imperatives; the second defining the socialist system’s underlying purpose and rationale as improving the population’s living conditions; and the third embodying the ultimate goal of post-revolutionary social policy, to reform human consciousness, thereby to create a new form of social collective—the communist society. Using this framework, and drawing on extremely thorough archival research, as well as on published primary material and cultural sources, Smith offers a lucid and cogent analytical narrative and interpretation of the development of Soviet housing policy in the interplay of institutional interests, its evolving ideological character and legal forms, its changing rhetoric, and its practical and social outcomes. The main chapters of the book address the period from 1944, when planning for large-scale post-war housing reconstruction was initiated, to the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, which marked the end of the foundational stage of the mass housing policy. Part One offers a chronological survey of the housing programme, with the first chapter focussing on wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction (1944–1950), the second on the subsequent elaboration and expansion of the mass housing programme during a period spanning the late Stalinist and post-Stalinist systems (1951–1957), and the third on the ‘self-defeating dynamic’ (p. 21) of urban residential construction during the remaining years of the Khrushchev era (1958–1964), when rapid building tempos dictated by the regime undermined its own EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 65, No. 6, August 2013, 1217–1237

Violent Peacetime: Reconceptualising Displacement and Resettlement in the Soviet-East European Borderlands after the Second World War

The contributions to this volume argue for conceiving the history of the Soviet-East European borderlands in the mid-twentieth century as a continuum of violence, social crisis and radical state intervention that pre-dated, spanned and continued beyond the Second World War.2 We have sought to demonstrate how the Soviet regime and new East European governments, as well as exiled national leaders and emigre communities, drew on and developed wartime and pre-war discourses, strategies and techniques in order to rebuild and restructure the postwar region. Political rulers and government officials, professional experts and volunteer relief workers, and millions of displaced persons (DPs), repatriates and resettlers, acted and interacted in the shadow of wartime destruction and continuing conflict, bitter and persisting ideological rivalries, troubled state reconstruction, disputed territorial reconfigurations and vast demographic upheavals. Their actions not only took place within this context, but contributed to shaping the post-1945 history of the East European warlands.

The Karelian ASSR

This chapter seeks to suggest a novel approach to the study of Stalinist decision-making. It does so with a view to overcoming the dichotomy between agent-centred and structure-dominated historiographies that for so long has weakened conceptual innovation in this field. Emphasis on agency, characteristic of the so-called ‘totalitarian’ historians, has pushed most popular historiography — and much serious work — towards an untenable methodology of unbounded voluntarism. On the other hand, emphasis on the causal primacy of structure tends towards a faceless functionalism. Neither approach is able to capture the reciprocal and dynamic interaction between human deeds and the contexts in which they are embedded that characterises historical change. A more fruitful framework of analysis is suggested by ‘structuration’ theory, which concentrates the researcher’s attention on the sources, character and consequences of this creative interaction, while situating the decision-making agent’s mediation of cultural, psychological, material and other prior ‘structures’ within a field of competing power interests. Such an approach seeks to ‘find in each successive state of the phenomenon under examination both the result of previous struggles to maintain or modify it, and the principles … of subsequent transformations.’1