Не по своей воле… История и география принудительных миграций в СССР по Павел Полян by Alex Marshall (review)

426 Рецензии/Reviews Alex MARSHALL Павел Полян. Не по своей воле... История и география при- нудительных миграций в СССР. Москва: “ОГИ”, “Мемориал”, 2001. 326 с. ISBN: 5-94282-007-4. The historiography of forced migration within the former USSR continues to grow apace. Pavel Polian ’s latest work marks a significant advance in a field first ploughed by the likes of former Soviet dissident Aleksandr Nekrich1 and the infamous Cold Warrior Robert Conquest.2 In part this has been a product of new archival access, and in part a consequence of a more broad-based and holistic approach to the study of the subject, itself inspired to some degree by the end of the Soviet Union and the consequent need to place the USSR in its overall twentieth century context. Perhaps the most admirable aspect of this fine work is its refusal to see forced migration as a symbol of Soviet “exceptionalism,” as so many others have, but to place it instead within its global context. Forced migration has both a long historical tradition behind it (one need think only of the fate of the Scottish Highlanders in the eighteenth century or of the Muslims of Andalusia after 1492) and a particular place in the history of twentieth-century authoritarian modernization. Polian makes effective use of the work of Peter Holquist to point out both the strong imperial as well as pan-European roots of forced migration before 1917 (both Tsarist Russia and Imperial Germany before 1914 first tinkered with forced migration in their various colonies, and then employed it on a massive scale in eastern Europe during the First World War).3 The American scholar Eric Lohr in particular has recently significantly advanced general studies on this point, pointing to the considerable parallels and areas of continuity between the later Soviet government and the actions and thinking of both the imperial and provisional governments of Russia in 1914–1918.4 Polian himself also makes effective comparisons between the forced migrations carried out within the Soviet Union after 1917 and those conducted by contemporaneous authoritarian regimes in the 1920s, 1 A. Nekrich. The Punished Peoples. The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War. New York, 1979. 2 R. Conquest. Soviet Deportations of Nationalities. London, 1960. 3 P. Holquist. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 19141921 . Cambridge, MÀ, 2002. 4 E. Lohr. Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaigns Against Enemy Aliens During World War I. Cambridge, MA, 2003. 427 Ab Imperio, 2/2006 event nonetheless remains a major blank spot in most existing Western historiography of the Second World War, which appears uncomfortable and even vaguely embarrassed by European and American complicity in forced migration, such an uncivilized and barbaric practice in Western eyes. Polian is to be congratulated for not shrinking from analysis of it here. The great majority of this work, however, focuses solidly on the particular characteristics of forced migration within the Soviet Union between 1919 and the rehabilitation processes that began in the 1950s and which continue even today. Polian follows Terry Martin in identifying clearly distinct periods within this general policy, in which diverse motivations were at play at various times in different regions.5 The deportation of the Terek Cossack Host in 1920, for example, was an intrinsic part of the Soviet state-building process, designed to facilitate the creation of viable mountaineer administrative districts in the North Caucasus in general and to defuse the land question that had created ethnic conflict in the Terek oblast’ in particular ever since the 1860s. Tsarist ethnic policies in the region, which had entailed the 30s, and 40s – with Imperial Japan for example, which both pressed some four million Koreans, including children, into slave labour during the SecondWorldWar on the Korean peninsula itself, and engaged in the widespread forced migration of Koreans to Japan and other parts of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Some 444,000 were ultimately compulsorily moved from Korea to other regions in 1939-1944 (P. 39). Perhaps one of the largest forced migrations to occur in this period happened, of course, under international mandate and with the full consent of the international community after the Second World War, in the grand geopolitical reordering of post-war eastern Europe. This began as...