To The Tashkent Station

In summer and fall 1941, as German armies advanced with shocking speed across the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership embarked on a desperate attempt to safeguard the country's industrial and human resources. Their success helped determine the outcome of the war in Europe. To the Tashkent Station brilliantly reconstructs the evacuation of over sixteen million Soviet civilians in one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II. Rebecca Manley paints a vivid picture of this epic wartime saga: the chaos that erupted in towns large and small as German troops approached, the overcrowded trains that trundled eastward, and the desperate search for sustenance and shelter in Tashkent, one of the most sought-after sites of refuge in the rear. Her story ends in the shadow of victory, as evacuees journeyed back to their ruined cities and broken homes. Based on previously unexploited archival collections in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, To the Tashkent Station offers a novel look at a war that transformed the lives of several generations of Soviet citizens. The evacuation touched men, women, and children from all walks of life: writers as well as workers, scientists along with government officials, party bosses, and peasants. Manley weaves their harrowing stories into a probing analysis of how the Soviet Union responded to and was transformed by World War II. Over the course of the war, the Soviet state was challenged as never before. Popular loyalties were tested, social hierarchies were recast, and the multiethnic fabric of the country was subjected to new strains. Even as the evacuation saved countless Soviet Jews from almost certain death, it spawned a new and virulent wave of anti-Semitism. This magisterial work is the first in-depth study of this crucial but neglected episode in the history of twentieth-century population displacement, World War II, and the Soviet Union.

Central Asia has long been situated at the geographical crossroads of East and West, once strategically located on the ancient Silk Road. The envy of the expanding Russian empire, it was colonized in the 19th century by Cossacks and traders from the north. This book examines how Central Asia, by then part of the Soviet Union, experienced population displacements on an even greater scale during the Second World War. Vicky Davis analyses how troops were sent westwards into action, only for waves of civilians to travel eastwards into the region: evacuees, refugees and even internal deportees sent into exile from their homelands in other parts of the vast Soviet Union. Central Asia in World War Two is the first book to tackle the subject of minorities fighting for the Soviet Union under Stalin in the Second World War. Based on meticulous archival research, it considers the interactions of the individual citizen and the Soviet state, weaving together the experiences of over three hundred ordinary men and women in Central Asia as they coped with their new roles on the front line or in the rear. Suffering incredible economic and physical hardship, racism and religious oppression, these mainly Muslim citizens were subjected to a forced process of Sovietization under the influence of Stalin's ubiquitous propaganda machine. Davis reveals how, while conscripts were all too often slaughtered or scapegoated in their regiments, the women and children left at home slaved in factories and communal farms to fuel the machinery of a war taking place thousands of kilometres away. She convincingly argues that the impact of forced assimilation, cultural indoctrination, anti-Semitism and re-education on the region were as great as the daily fight for survival in wartime. The legacy of the period is almost as complex, with struggles over the ownership and revision of history continuing even today.

Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s. Volume 3 explores how the Soviet Union’s changing relations with Nazi Germany between the signing of a nonaggression pact in August 1939 and the Soviet victory over German forces in World War II affected the lives of some five million Jews who lived under Soviet rule at the beginning of that period. Nearly three million of those Jews perished; those who remained constituted a drastically diminished group, which represented a truncated but still numerically significant postwar Soviet Jewish community. Most of the Jews who lived in the USSR in 1939 experienced the war in one or more of three different environments: under German occupation, in the Red Army, or as evacuees to the Soviet interior. The authors describe the evolving conditions for Jews in each area and the ways in which they endeavored to cope with and to make sense of their situation. They also explore the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, the role of the Soviet state in shaping how Jews understood and responded to their changing life conditions, and the ways in which different social groups within the Soviet Jewish population—residents of the newly-annexed territories, the urban elite, small-town Jews, older generations with pre-Soviet memories, and younger people brought up entirely under Soviet rule—behaved. This book is a vital resource for understanding an oft-overlooked history of a major Jewish community.

The first book-length study of the survival of Polish Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

During the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War, from 1941 to 1945, as many as 24 million of its citizens died. 14 million were children ages fourteen or younger. And for those who survived, the suffering was far from over. The prewar Stalinist vision of a “happy childhood” nurtured by a paternal, loving state had given way, out of necessity. What replaced it—the dictate that children be prepared to sacrifice everything, including childhood itself—created a generation all too familiar with deprivation, violence, and death. The experience of these children, and the role of the state in shaping their narrative, are the subject of this book, which fills in a critical but neglected chapter in the Soviet story and in the history of World War II. In Sacrificing Childhood, Julie deGraffenried chronicles the lives of the Soviet wartime children and the uses to which they were put—not just as combatants or workers in factories and collective farms, but also as fodder for propaganda, their plight a proof of the enemy’s depredations. Not all Soviet children lived through the war in the same way; but in the circumstances of a child in occupied Belarus or in the Leningrad blockade, a young deportee in Siberia or evacuee in Uzbekistan, deGraffenried finds common threads that distinguish the child’s experience of war from the adult’s. The state’s expectations, however, were the same for all children, as we see here in children’s mass media and literature and the communications of party organizations and institutions, most notably the Young Pioneers, whose relentless wartime activities made them ideal for the purposes of propaganda. The first in-depth study of where Soviet children fit into the history of the war, Sacrificing Childhood also offers an unprecedented view of the state’s changing expectations for its children, and how this figured in the nature and direction of post-war Soviet society.

This volume showcases selected recent work presented at the 13th Regional Conference on Mathematical Physics held in Antalya, Turkey in 2010. The conference was dedicated to the memory of Faheem Hussain, one of the initiators of the Regional Conference series, and one of the organizers of the 12th Regional Conference. The “region”, originally comprised of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, extends now to Bangladesh and Central Asia. However, the contributing researchers are not only limited to this region. Prominent contributors include B Ahmedov (Tashkent), F Ardalan (Tehran), N Dadhich (Pune), D A Demir (İzmir), R L Hall (Montreal), M Hortaçsu (İstanbul), M Koca (Oman), C S Lim (Kobe), F Mahomed (Johannesburg), A Qadir (Rawalpindi), M A Rashid (Rawalpindi), M Sakamoto (Kobe), M Sharif (Lahore), F Toppan (Rio), N Ünal (Antalya), amongst others. They sample a number of topics in the formal aspects of mathematical physics, general relativity and cosmology, quantum gravity, quantum field theory, and even applied physics. Contents:Formal Aspects:Geometric Spectral Inversion (Richard L Hall)Heun Functions and Their Uses in Physics (M Hortaçsu)Coxeter Groups, Quaternions, Symmetries of Polyhedra and 4D Polytopes (Mehmet Koca and N Özdeş Koca)Hermite-Bernoulli 2D Polynomials (Burak Kurt and Veli Kurt)Symmetry Classification of Coupled Heat-Diffusion Systems via Low Dimensional Lie Algebras (F M Mahomed and M Molati)Green's Functions and Transition Amplitudes for Time-Dependent Linear Harmonic Oscillator with Linear Time-Dependent Terms Added to the Hamiltonian (M A Rashid and M U Farooq)Time Dependent Harmonic Oscillator and Quasi-Coherent States (Nuri Ünal)General Relativity and Cosmology:Integrability Conditions for Conformal Ricci Collineation Equations (M Afzal, U Camci and K Saifullah)Noether Symmetries of Geodesic Equations in Spacetimes (Ibrar Hussain)Universal Features of Gravity and Higher Dimensions (Naresh Dadhich)Some Interesting Consequences of ƒ(R) Theory of Gravity (Muhammad Sharif and Hafiza Rizwana Kausar)Quantum Gravity:Stress-Energy Connection: Degravitating the Vacuum Energy (Durmuş Ali Demir)The Information Loss Paradox and the Holographic Principle (Asghar Qadir)Quantum Field Theory:Generalized Noncommutative Gauge Theory (F Ardalan)CP Violation and Flavor Physics in Gauge-Higgs Unification Scenario (C S Lim)Hidden Quantum-Mechanical Supersymmetry in Extra Dimensions (Makoto Sakamoto)On Chiral and Nonchiral 1D Supermultiplets (Francesco Toppan)Applied Physics:Application of Perturbation Theory to Elastic Models of DNA (B Eslami-Mossallam and M R Ejtehadi)Electromagnetic Studies of Ionospheric and Magnetospheric Perturbations Associated with the Earth, Atmospheric and astrophysical Phenomena (S R Tojiev, V S Morozova, B J Ahmedov and H E Eshkuvatov) Keywords: