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rfmcdonaldIt's well and surely time, I think, for me to resume the Tuesday night Alternate History book reviews that I liked doing so much. Comments, as always
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The Grozny Oblast of the Russian Federation seems by all reports to be as quiet a Russian province as any. Homogeneously Russian by population, notable for its farmland and its rich abundant oil, possessing not as depressed ane conomy as one might expect of a provincial economy deep in the Caucasus, Grozny seems to show as little sign of its non-Russian past as the collection of provinces and territories on th northeastern shore of the Black Sea that once constituted Circassia. The only difference between Circassia and Chechno-Ingushetia--the territory's former name, after the two major constituents of the Vainakh group--is that the Circassians were ethnically cleansed to Anatolia by centralizing Russian power in the 19th century while the Vainakh were ethnically cleansed to Central Asia by centralizing Soviet power in the 20th century. And yet, despite being permanently removed from their homeland, the Vainakh still survive. How?
A. Kosigan's 2008 study tells us all about the Vainakh. Home so far from home is a sensitive, opinionated exploration of an interesting chapter in the Stalinist forced population movements of the mid-20th century, particularly of those directed against potentially disloyal ethnic minorities (co-ethnics of Axis powers, or one of the Muslim and Turkic-Turcophile people of the northeastern shore of the Black Sea and Caucasus) during the Second World War. I am personally reasonably familiar with the contours of the expulsions and resettlements of the Russian Germans, mainly because after Communism's end the large majority of the Soviet Union's ethnic Germans ended up returning to their titular homeland. I did not know much about the deportees from the Caucasus and Black Sea area. Kosigan's study makes the very compelling point that, rather than being anomalous actions of little relevance, the deportations of the Vainakh and their neighbours is actually of signal importance. Overseen by the Caucasian, the Georgian, Stalin, the brutal Vainakh expulsion that killed almost half of the half-million Vainakh alive in 1944-1945 finds its ultimate origin in the terrifically costly expulsion of the Circassians to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s, undertaken with the goal of pacifying a restless frontier that could be opened to productive settlement. The Vainakh, like the former Circassian neighbours, happened to occupy lands with valuable resources, and also happened to have a very decentralized tribal social organization that helped them resist state pressure. It was only in the 1940s, when the rebellious Vainakh were confronted Soviet state mobilized in a desperate struggle for national survival, that they succumbed, vacating their homelands, leaving them open to more "productive" and "rational" settlement by Russians and Slavs just like other resettled peripheral areas such as Karelia and Kaliningrad, and providing, in their diaspora, a useful and disposable labour force for an underdeveloped labour-hungry Central Asia. Although destalinization led to the removal of official stigma against the Vainakh and the other deported peoples of the Caucasus in 1967-1957, by that time the Soviet Centre had grown too accustomed to its newly stable Caucasian territories to want to reverse Stalin's ethnic cleansing. And so, just like the Crimea Tatars originally of Ukraine and the Meshkhetian Turks originally of Georgia, the Vainakh originally of Russia stayed in their Central Asian exile.
Kosigan presented a history that I knew nothing of lucidly and compactly. The analysis he provides of the development of the Vainakh community in its exile in Kaxakhstan--concentrated mainly in the cities and farms of southeastern Kazakhstan, particualrly around Almaty--is revelatory. The Vainakh are the third-largest national community in Kazakhstan, well ahead of the Ukrainians, Uzbeks and Germans and ranking behind only the Russians and the titular nationality in size. To a remarkable degree, the Vainakh have preserved their language and their family structures, adapting their culture from the compact fortified villages of the Caucasus to the ethnically very mixed plains and cities of Central Asia so as to retain just enough continuity to survive as a distinct minority. In independent Kazakhstan, it turns out, the Vainakh play a relatively minor role: Nazarbayev lacks any interest in support Vainakh desires to return to their homeland (ironically, of the two hundred thousand Vainakh who emigrated to Russia after 1991, the vast majority went not to their homeland by to cities like Moscow as migrant labourers) and the Vainakh show little interest in compromising their existence. They have managed to survive.
Great book, highly recommended to students of ethnic minorities.
The Grozny Oblast of the Russian Federation seems by all reports to be as quiet a Russian province as any. Homogeneously Russian by population, notable for its farmland and its rich abundant oil, possessing not as depressed ane conomy as one might expect of a provincial economy deep in the Caucasus, Grozny seems to show as little sign of its non-Russian past as the collection of provinces and territories on th northeastern shore of the Black Sea that once constituted Circassia. The only difference between Circassia and Chechno-Ingushetia--the territory's former name, after the two major constituents of the Vainakh group--is that the Circassians were ethnically cleansed to Anatolia by centralizing Russian power in the 19th century while the Vainakh were ethnically cleansed to Central Asia by centralizing Soviet power in the 20th century. And yet, despite being permanently removed from their homeland, the Vainakh still survive. How?
A. Kosigan's 2008 study tells us all about the Vainakh. Home so far from home is a sensitive, opinionated exploration of an interesting chapter in the Stalinist forced population movements of the mid-20th century, particularly of those directed against potentially disloyal ethnic minorities (co-ethnics of Axis powers, or one of the Muslim and Turkic-Turcophile people of the northeastern shore of the Black Sea and Caucasus) during the Second World War. I am personally reasonably familiar with the contours of the expulsions and resettlements of the Russian Germans, mainly because after Communism's end the large majority of the Soviet Union's ethnic Germans ended up returning to their titular homeland. I did not know much about the deportees from the Caucasus and Black Sea area. Kosigan's study makes the very compelling point that, rather than being anomalous actions of little relevance, the deportations of the Vainakh and their neighbours is actually of signal importance. Overseen by the Caucasian, the Georgian, Stalin, the brutal Vainakh expulsion that killed almost half of the half-million Vainakh alive in 1944-1945 finds its ultimate origin in the terrifically costly expulsion of the Circassians to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s, undertaken with the goal of pacifying a restless frontier that could be opened to productive settlement. The Vainakh, like the former Circassian neighbours, happened to occupy lands with valuable resources, and also happened to have a very decentralized tribal social organization that helped them resist state pressure. It was only in the 1940s, when the rebellious Vainakh were confronted Soviet state mobilized in a desperate struggle for national survival, that they succumbed, vacating their homelands, leaving them open to more "productive" and "rational" settlement by Russians and Slavs just like other resettled peripheral areas such as Karelia and Kaliningrad, and providing, in their diaspora, a useful and disposable labour force for an underdeveloped labour-hungry Central Asia. Although destalinization led to the removal of official stigma against the Vainakh and the other deported peoples of the Caucasus in 1967-1957, by that time the Soviet Centre had grown too accustomed to its newly stable Caucasian territories to want to reverse Stalin's ethnic cleansing. And so, just like the Crimea Tatars originally of Ukraine and the Meshkhetian Turks originally of Georgia, the Vainakh originally of Russia stayed in their Central Asian exile.
Kosigan presented a history that I knew nothing of lucidly and compactly. The analysis he provides of the development of the Vainakh community in its exile in Kaxakhstan--concentrated mainly in the cities and farms of southeastern Kazakhstan, particualrly around Almaty--is revelatory. The Vainakh are the third-largest national community in Kazakhstan, well ahead of the Ukrainians, Uzbeks and Germans and ranking behind only the Russians and the titular nationality in size. To a remarkable degree, the Vainakh have preserved their language and their family structures, adapting their culture from the compact fortified villages of the Caucasus to the ethnically very mixed plains and cities of Central Asia so as to retain just enough continuity to survive as a distinct minority. In independent Kazakhstan, it turns out, the Vainakh play a relatively minor role: Nazarbayev lacks any interest in support Vainakh desires to return to their homeland (ironically, of the two hundred thousand Vainakh who emigrated to Russia after 1991, the vast majority went not to their homeland by to cities like Moscow as migrant labourers) and the Vainakh show little interest in compromising their existence. They have managed to survive.
Great book, highly recommended to students of ethnic minorities.
