-
Afterword
- Central European University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Afterword AT THE CROSSROADS OF GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY The book by Pavel Polian, Against TheirWill, is the first systematic research of mass forced migrations in the USSR. The multi-million-strong movement of human mass over the entire territory of the USSR constituted an inseparable part of the 70year -long economic, social and political history of the country. Undoubtedly, not all migrations were literally “forced,” but the question is whether they were absolutely voluntary. Any self-initiated movement of people within the country—putting aside going abroad—was complicated in the Soviet times, to say it mildly. Mass movement of peasants to cities took place as early as the 1930s (the USSR urban population grew from 26 up to 56 million persons in the period of 1926 through 1939). However, who can tell to what extent this movement was voluntary, and to what extent it represented a flight dictated by the desertion of the countryside through famine, forced collectivization, the infringement of rights practiced in collective farms, and threat of political repression? At the end of the 1930s, Stalin made a public statement: “…there have been no unemployed and homeless peasants that strayed from their villages and live in fear of hunger […] for a long time now […] Today we can only talk about asking the kolkhozy to meet our request and let at least a million and a half young collective farmers annually leave in order to develop our growing industry.” [Report on the Communist Party Central Committee activities at the 8th Party Congress, 10 March 1939. Voprosy leninizma no.11 (Moscow, 1952): 625–626.] By no means can one discern even an allusion to one’s “free will” in these words, uttered by Stalin in his favorite hypocritical manner. One could leave if they “let” one leave. To either drag or prohibit is the Prishibeyev1 wisdom of the “migration policy” practiced during many Soviet decades with its planned voluntary resettlements, with passports issued to some citizens and not to others, with the “passport regime,” with propiska regulations, with restricted towns, with exit visas and so on. Even against this medieval—and not quite yet extinct today— background, two historical tragedies, which affected millions of USSR citizens in the first half of the 20th century, still stand out as the most large-scale repressive operations carried out on social and ethnic grounds. These are dekulakization and the deportation of entire peoples. It is these events that P. Polian examines in his book, without omitting “combined” instances, i.e., repression administered based on both social and ethnic grounds (for example, directed against the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian “bourgeois”) or less known to the Russian-speaking audience the internment of German civilians and citizens of other countries at the end of the Second World War, along with other precedents of forced migrations on a smaller or larger scale. Although these tragic events are known to virtually everybody today, there are still only a few thorough research works written about them. One may get an impression that the topic had been exhausted and closed once and for all by A. Solzhenitsyn. In reality, this is far from the actual state of things. And whereas the heights of Gulag Archipelago can hardly be expected to be achieved again, the archives that have become accessible nowadays open new opportunities for serious research and deeper knowledge and understanding of the events that were taking place in the Soviet Union in the 1920–1950s. Pavel Polian is among the few authors that—through their creative work—keep asserting that it is not time yet for the pages of so recent a history to be turned. It must be noted, however, that P. Polian is not a professional historian, but an expert on economy and geography in the classical sense, dealing with a wide range of geographic issues reflected in a score of books and nearly three hundred articles. However, in recent years the researcher has manifested clear adherence to historical—or, rather, historico–geographic—analysis of AGAINST THEIR WILL 322 [54.80.11.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:22 GMT) large-scale and, as a rule, barely researched events and phenomena of the 20th century. The reading audience is already familiar with his monograph published in 1996 under the title “Victims of Two Dictatorships ,” a historico–geographic depiction of the experience of the POWs and the Ostarbeiter. The book represents a detailed account of the tragedy of forced stay and labor of Soviet POWs and...