To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War by Rebecca Manley (review)

351 Ab Imperio, 3/2010 on which he relies may have a role to play as a supplementary source, relying on them exclusively in order to write about railway construction in Turkestan makes about as much sense as writing a history of railways in Algeria using nothing but the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry. As it is, the essay has nothing to add to what we already know about the shift toward a new East–West axis of movement along the Transcaspian Railway, which gradually supplanted North–South caravan routes for the transport of bulk goods, most notably cotton. Thanks to recent work (some of it showcased in this volume), we now have a good understanding of Turkestan’s place in the Russian imagination, its cultural and political subjugation, and to some extent its administration. However, without some consideration of the nature of economic and social change under colonial rule, the question posed in the title to le Turkestan Russe. Une colonie comme les autres? remains at best only partly answered. Timothy NUNAN Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009). 282 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-08014 -4739-6. The Great Patriotic War was the defining moment in the Soviet experience for the generation that came of age in the early twentieth century. Victory in war came with the loss of a generation of men and vast territorial gains in Europe, and “making sense of war” afterward dramatically altered the domestic local politics.1 Still, as Rebecca Manley shows in this impressive volume, the front experience was mirrored by the evacuation of masses – some 16.5 million people – from the western Soviet Union to the Volga Region, Siberia, and CentralAsia. Indeed, for many, the experience of evacuation to and life on the “Tashkent Front” in the rear of the Soviet Union, rather than battle, would define their war experience. Having herself wandered across much of this vast geographical territory at stake, with archival research based in Moscow, St. Petersburg , Odessa, Volgograd, and Tashkent, Manley takes her reader on a richly satisfying tour of the 1 Amir Weiner. Making Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton, 2001. 352 Рецензии/Reviews on the other. As the Soviet state began to think in terms of classes, institutions , and “human contingents,” the concept of the individual evacuee and the voluntary refugee – someone running away from danger on his/ her own – was subsumed by planned evacuation. As Manley suggests by pointing to a 1938 NKVD draft memo, the 1930s saw the elimination of the “voluntary refugee” as a concept: Soviet citizens were either to participate at the front, be evacuated in the event of war, or be considered “labor deserters.”According to 1940 labor laws, those attempting to self-evacuate outside of prescribed guidelines were to be liquidated. At the same time, when the war actually began, few concrete guidelines actually existed, and a hastily composed Evacuation Council began to devise specific policies. Rejecting other scholars’ views that the priorities of the evacuation were, alternatively, women and children, Jews, or anyone but civilians, Manley provides a textured picture of the various priorities of the Soviet 2 Perhaps the closest work to Manley’s volume is Peter Gatrell.AWhole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I. Bloomington, 2005. For relevant unpublished work, see: Eugene Kogan. The Evacuation of Soviet Military Industries from the War Zone / PhD Dissertation; University of Warwick, 1990. Douglas Northrop. Unplanned War, Planned Economy: Economic Change and Development in Soviet Central Asia, 1928–1945 / Unpublished Paper, 1992. For Russian-language works, see: Evakuatsiia: Voskreshaia proshloe. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Almaty, 30 oktiabria 2008 g. Almaty, 2009; P. V. Dobrov, S. Iu. Babenko. Evakuatsiia z Ukrainy v roky Velukoi Vitchyznianoi viiny. Donetsk, 2008; N. A. Gromova. Evakuatsiia idet: 1941–1944: Pisatel’skaia koloniia: Chistopol’, Elabuga, Tashkent, Alma-Ata. Moscow, 2008; Prikazano pristupit’: Evakuatsiia zakliuchennykh iz Belarusi v 1941 g. Sbornik dokumentov / Ed. А. Kokurin. Minsk, 2005. process and politics of evacuation, from the planning of evacuations to the voyage itself to life in Tashkent, and finally, to the return home, for...