Resettling The Borderlands

Until the arrival of the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century, the South Caucasus was traditionally contested by two Muslim empires, the Ottomans and the Persians. Over the following two centuries, Orthodox Christian Russia – and later the officially atheist Soviet Union – expanded into the densely populated Muslim towns and villages and began a long process of resettlement, deportation, and interventionist population management in an attempt to incorporate the region into its own lands and culture. Exploring the policies and implementations of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Resettling the Borderlands investigates the nexus between imperial practices, foreign policy, religion, and ethnic conflicts. Taking a comparative approach, Farid Shafiyev looks at the most active phases of resettlement, when the state imported and relocated waves of German, Russian sectarian, and Armenian settlers into the South Caucasus and deported thousands of others. He also offers insights on the complexities of empire-building and managing space and people in the Muslim borderlands to reveal the impact of demographic changes on the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict. Combining in-depth and original analysis of archival material with a clear and accessible narrative, Resettling the Borderlands provides a new interpretation of the colonial policies, ideologies, and strategic visions in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Until the arrival of the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century, the South Caucasus was traditionally contested by two Muslim empires, the Ottomans and the Persians. Over the following two centuries, Orthodox Christian Russia – and later the officially atheist Soviet Union – expanded into the densely populated Muslim towns and villages and began a long process of resettlement, deportation, and interventionist population management in an attempt to incorporate the region into its own lands and culture. Exploring the policies and implementations of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Resettling the Borderlands investigates the nexus between imperial practices, foreign policy, religion, and ethnic conflicts. Taking a comparative approach, Farid Shafiyev looks at the most active phases of resettlement, when the state imported and relocated waves of German, Russian sectarian, and Armenian settlers into the South Caucasus and deported thousands of others. He also offers insights on the complexities of empire-building and managing space and people in the Muslim borderlands to reveal the impact of demographic changes on the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict. Combining in-depth and original analysis of archival material with a clear and accessible narrative, Resettling the Borderlands provides a new interpretation of the colonial policies, ideologies, and strategic visions in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

The displacement of population during and after the Second World War took place on a global scale and formed part of a longer historical process of violence, territorial reconfiguration and state 'development'. This book focuses on the profound political, social and economic upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at this time.

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands engages with the evolving historiography around the concept of belonging in the Russian and Ottoman empires. The contributors to this book argue that the popular notion that empires do not care about belonging is simplistic and wrong. Chapters address numerous and varied dimensions of belonging in multiethnic territories of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. They illustrate both the mutability and the durability of imperial belonging in Eurasian borderlands. Contributors to this volume pay attention to state authorities but also to the voices and experiences of teachers, linguists, humanitarian officials, refugees, deportees, soldiers, nomads, and those left behind. Through those voices the authors interrogate the mutual shaping of empire and nation, noting the persistence and frequency of coercive measures that imposed belonging or denied it to specific populations deemed inconvenient or incapable of fitting in. The collective conclusion that editors Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum provide is that nations must take ownership of their behaviors, irrespective of whether they emerged from disintegrating empires or enjoyed autonomy and power within them.

Across the Chinese borderlands, investments in large-scale transnational infrastructure such as roads and special economic zones have increased exponentially over the past two decades. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Borderland infrastructures. Trade, Development, and Control in Western China addresses a major contradiction at the heart of this fast-paced development: small-scale traders have lost their historic strategic advantages under the growth of massive Chinese state investment and are now struggling to keep their businesses afloat. Concurrently, local ethnic minorities have become the target of radical resettlement projects, securitization, and tourism initiatives, and have in many cases grown increasingly dependent on state subsidies. At the juncture of anthropological explorations of the state, border studies, and research on transnational trade and infrastructure development, Borderland infrastructures provides new analytical tools to understand how state power is experienced, mediated, and enacted in Xinjiang and Yunnan. In the process, Rippa offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of life across China's peripheries.

In this innovative study of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, Eagle Glassheim examines the transformation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland from the end of the Second World War, through the Cold War, and into the twenty-first century. Prior to their expulsion in 1945, ethnic Germans had inhabited the Sudeten borderlands for hundreds of years, with deeply rooted local cultures and close, if sometimes tense, ties with Bohemia’s Czech majority. Cynically, if largely willingly, harnessed by Hitler in 1938 to his pursuit of a Greater Germany, the Sudetenland’s three million Germans became the focus of Czech authorities in their retributive efforts to remove an alien ethnic element from the body politic—and claim the spoils of this coal-rich, industrialized area. Yet, as Glassheim reveals, socialist efforts to create a modern utopia in the newly resettled “frontier” territories proved exceedingly difficult. Many borderland regions remained sparsely populated, peppered with dilapidated and abandoned houses, and hobbled by decaying infrastructure. In the more densely populated northern districts, coalmines, chemical works, and power plants scarred the land and spewed toxic gases into the air. What once was a diverse religious, cultural, economic, and linguistic “contact zone,” became, according to many observers, a scarred wasteland, both physically and psychologically. Glassheim offers new perspectives on the struggles of reclaiming ethnically cleansed lands in light of utopian dreams and dystopian realities—brought on by the uprooting of cultures, the loss of communities, and the industrial degradation of a once-thriving region. To Glassheim, the lessons drawn from the Sudetenland speak to the deep social traumas and environmental pathologies wrought by both ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored modernization processes that accelerated across Europe as a result of the great wars of the twentieth century.

This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed. Brown's study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named, and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups. Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth-century "progress." Table of Contents: Glossary Introduction 1. Inventory 2. Ghosts in the Bathhouse 3. Moving Pictures 4. The Power to Name 5. A Diary of Deportation 6. The Great Purges and the Rights of Man 7. Deportee into Colonizer 8. Racial Hierarchies Epilogue: Shifting Borders, Shifting Identities Notes Archival Sources Acknowledgments Index This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed. Brown's study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named, and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups. Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. Brown argues that repressive national policies grew not out of chauvinist or racist ideas, but the very instruments of modern governance - the census, map, and progressive social programs - first employed by Bolshevik reformers in the western borderlands. We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth century "progress." Kate Brown is Assistant Professor of History at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A Biography of No Place is one of the most original and imaginative works of history to emerge in the western literature on the former Soviet Union in the last ten years. Historiographically fearless, Kate Brown writes with elegance and force, turning this history of a lost, but culturally rich borderland into a compelling narrative that serves as a microcosm for understanding nation and state in the Twentieth Century. With compassion and respect for the diverse people who inhabited this margin of territory between Russia and Poland, Kate Brown restores the voices, memories, and humanity of a people lost. --Lynne Viola, Professor of History, University of Toronto Samuel Butler and Kate Brown have something in common. Both have written about Erewhon with imagination and flair. I was captivated by the courage and enterprise behind this book. Is there a way to write a history of events that do not make rational sense? Kate Brown asks. She proceeds to give us a stunning answer. --Modris Eksteins, author of Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age Kate Brown tells the story of how succeeding regimes transformed a onetime multiethnic borderland into a far more ethnically homogeneous region through their often murderous imperialist and nationalist projects. She writes evocatively of the inhabitants' frequently challenged identities and livelihoods and gives voice to their aspirations and laments, including Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Jews, and Russians. A Biography of No Place is a provocative meditation on the meanings of periphery and center in the writing of history. --Mark von Hagen, Professor of History, Columbia University

Examines the economic motivations and complications that drove ethnic cleansing in the post-World War II Sudetenland.