Gridded lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are nearly the same place

American Historical Review

Volumn 106, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 17-47

  Brown, Kate ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040099636     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2652223     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. KarLag stands for Karagandinskaia lager, the Karaganda Labor Camp.
2. Y. A. Poliakov, ed., Vsesoiuznaia perepis' naseleniia 1937 g (Moscow, 1991), 180.
3. It is curious to note that the same commentators who frequently comment on the repetition and monotony of Soviet urban spaces and who attribute these qualities to socialist authoritarian state control and uninspired top-down planning overlook, or momentarily forget, the monotony and repetition of the American subdivision located in thriving centers of capitalism.
4. The grid, however, on high, flat ground is not inevitable. Old Central Asian cities along the silk route, such as Tashkent, Samarkand, and Kashgar, center on the mosque and market, from which streets wind around without any specific pattern. In the American Southwest, Mesa Verde is an intricate labyrinth built into the cliffs of a mesa, and Pueblo Bonito circles around like a contemporary soccer stadium.
5. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, William Weaver, trans. (San Diego, 1974), 11. Henri Lefebvre argues that the passage from one mode of production to another must entail the production of a new space. He calls for a study of history that looks at the "interconnections, distortions, displacements, mutual interactions and their links with the spacial practice of the particular society or mode of production."
6. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (Oxford, 1994), 42-46.
7. As well, Marshall Berman notes the necessity for revolutions to produce new spatial patterns. See Berman's discussion of Chernyshevsky's Crystal Palace, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982; New York, 1988), 241-44.
8. The title and jurisdictions of Soviet federal and republic security branches changed frequently. In 1934, the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) was subsumed into the National Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), which was responsible for the gulag network and special settlements. In 1946, the bureau in charge of state security was renamed the NKVD-MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. To reduce confusion, in this article I will refer to the Soviet security organs generally as the NKVD.
9. Soviet security forces maintained broad and variegated categories of incarceration, arrest, and exile. Those arrested were assigned to prisons or labor camps. Those deported were restricted to living within a limited area called a "special settlement" or "labor settlement." For literature on the Soviet penal system, see Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin's Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (New York, 1994);
10. V. P. Danilov and S. A. Krusil'nikov, eds., Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri, 1933-1938 (Novosibirsk, 1994);
11. G. M. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1997);
12. Michael Jakobson, The Origins of the GULAG: The Soviet Prison-Camp System, 1917-1934 (Lexington, Ky., 1993).
13. For statistics, see J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930-1953 (Jefferson, N.C., 1997);
14. V. H. Zemskov, "Spetsposelentsi," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 11 (1990): 3-17.
15. For an interesting review of the comparison of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union as similar "totalitarian" states, see Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997).
16. For a discussion on the changing concept of totalitarian states, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995).
17. Before the Cold War, in the 1930s and during World War II, historians, political scientists, and journalists looked for and found similarities between the Soviet Union and United States. Not just left-leaning activists but right-minded businessmen and politicians saw affinities with the Soviet Union and made trips there to exchange information. For example, Rufus Woods, an influential Washington State newspaperman and one of the chief promoters of the Grand Coulee Dam, made several trips to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Though a conservative, Woods admired the Soviet industrialization drive and thought the same pattern of building big could revitalize the West. See Robert E. Ficken, Rufus Woods, the Columbia River and the Building of Modern Washington (Pullman, Wash., 1995).
18. For studies comparing, favorably, the United States and Soviet Union, see William T. R. Fox, The Super-Powers: The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union: Their Responsibility for Peace (New York, 1944);
19. I. A. Startsev, Amerika i russkoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1942);
20. Merle Elliott Tracy, Our Country, Our People, and Theirs (New York, 1938);
21. Edmund Wilson, Travels in Two Democracies (New York, 1936).
22. For an illuminating comparative history of slavery and serfdom in czarist Russia and the United States, see Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
23. Jonathan A. Becker, Soviet and Russian Press Coverage of the United States: Press, Politics, and Identity in Transition (New York, 1999).
24. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 55, 62.
25. As Iain Chambers writes, "The falling away of earlier dualities - the real and artificial, the original and false - leads to casting previous epistemological certainties into an instructive confusion." Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London, 1994), 58.
26. See Michel Foucault on the art of coercive assignment, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (1977; New York, 1995). In the Soviet Union, the enemy and citizen-traitor was most often identified as someone sympathetic to capitalism or "bourgeois-nationalist" states. Meanwhile, in the United States, from the World War I - era Palmer Raids to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, socialists, communists, and "fellow travelers" constituted a threatening category of disloyal citizens.
27. See Alan M. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley, Calif., 1987);
28. Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, 1980).
29. As Foucault does in Discipline and Punish, 167-200.
30. As David Rollison phrases it: "the organization (and imagination) of space is deeply implicated in the maintenance of existing power structures." Rollison, "Exploding England: The Dialectics of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern England," Social History 24 (January 1999): 1-16.
31. Lefebvre points out how the Spanish-American town was laid down on the basis of the grid, which reflected the political and administrative authority of the new urban power. The grid enabled the Spanish colonizers to arrange space in terms of a hierarchy and segregate space into discrete units designated for different functions. Production of Space, 151.
32. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 2.
33. For a study of how territory west of Chicago was charted and commodified in this way, see William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991).
34. Sim van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe, Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs, and Towns (San Francisco, 1986), 3. Scott contrasts gridded industrial cities with the medina of an old Middle Eastern city, where each neighborhood and quarter are unique, "the sum of millions of designs and activities," without an overall plan or map.
35. Seeing Like a State, 184.
36. For a discussion of the changing stories about the American West, see William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative," Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1347-76.
37. As quoted in John W. Reps, The Forgotten Frontier: Urban Planning in the American West before 1890 (Columbia, Mo., 1981), 454.
38. Carroll Van West, Capitalism on the Frontier: Billings and the Yellowstone Valley in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, Neb., 1993), 120.
39. West, Capitalism on the Frontier, 119.
40. Waldo Orlando Kliewer, "The Foundations of Billings, Montana" (MA thesis, University of Washington, 1938), 11, 20.
41. West, Capitalism on the Frontier, 124.
42. See Reps, Forgotten Frontier;
43. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis;
44. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995).
45. In 1930, the Karaganda mines produced all of 3,000 tons of coal, a drop from the 1913 prerevolutionary figure of 7,200 tons. See O. Malybaev, Bor'ba KPSS za sozdanie i razvitie tret'ei ugol'noi bazy SSSR (Alma-Ata, 1961), 64.
46. "Politburo resolutions," Secret Sector of the All-Union Resettlement Committee of the SNK SSSR, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki [Russian State Economics Archive] (hereafter, RGAE), 1/5675/48a.
47. The administrative center of KarLag formed its own town, located outside the city of Karaganda. KarLag had divisions that stretched throughout Karaganda Province. By the beginning of 1936, there were 37,958 prisoners and 806 staff persons in KarLag. S. Dil'manov and E. Kuznetsova, Karlag (Alma-Aty, 1997).
48. Gridded cities built during the industrial drive include Magnitogorsk, Nizhnii Tagil, Orsk, Novokuznetsk, Makeevka, Komsomol'sk, Bratsk, Magadan, and Noril'sk. For a discussion of Soviet urban planning and the creation of Magnitogorsk ex nihilo, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 72-85, 108-23.
49. See Berman's discussion of the Russian revolutionary modern city, "the dream of modernization without urbanization," in All That Is Solid, 241-44.
50. For an echo of this vision of deurbanized urban space enacted in Karaganda, see Sabit Mukanov, Karaganda (Moscow, 1954).
51. The land was reallocated from the Letovichnii and Bliukherovskii miasosovkhozi, meat collective farms, which implies that the land had previously been allocated to Kazakh pastoralists. See "Doklanaia zapiska o pereselenii i khoziaistvennom ustraistvi Ukrainskikh pereselentsev v Kazakhskoi ASSR," October 11, 1936, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [State Archive of the Russian Federation] (hereafter, GARF), 9479/1/36, ll. 23-26. In another document, the amount of land for the thirty-seven settlements is given at 955,740 acres. Pliner to Ezhov, Agranov, and Berman, GARF 9479/1/36, ll. 36-39.
52. See, as well, Pohl, Stalinist Penal System, 40.
53. On the growing economic impetus behind the spread of the gulag labor camp system, see Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva, 84-88.
54. For correspondence on the subdivision, transfer, and valuation of formerly "uninhabited land" belonging to Kazakh-based livestock breeding farms, reallocated as farmland for NKVD use, see Director of the Land Fund of the Labor Colony, NKVD Shkele to GULAG NKVD Pliner, November 5, 1936, RGAE 5675/1/140, l. 12; All-Union Department of Resettlement, Berman to Miroshnikov on the incorporation of the department into the NKVD, July 4, 1936, RGAE 5675/1/165, l. 25.
55. The Billings Herald, June 1, 1882,
56. as quoted in West, Capitalism on the Frontier, 133.
57. Mukhanov, Karaganda.
58. As Berman writes, "This equation of money, speed, sex and power is far from exclusive to capitalism. It is equally central to the collective mystique of 20th century socialism." In both societies, he points out that popular self-image was dedicated to whole peoples on the move. The crucial point, he notes in his discussion of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's modernist vision in Faust, is "to spare nothing, to overleap all boundaries, . . . all natural and human barriers fall before the rush of production and construction." All That Is Solid, 49, 64.
59. A crew of seven men built a public bath, a hospital, and a school in one month. A. S. Elagin, ed., Karaganda, Istoriia gorodov Kazakhstana (Alma-Ata, 1989).
60. As quoted in Reps, Forgotten Frontier, 693.
61. Kliewer, "Foundations of Billings, Montana," 22.
62. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 106.
63. Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991), 216.
64. See accounts of deportees to Kazakhstan in Stanislaw Ciesielski and Anton Kuczynski, eds., Polacy w Kazachstanie: Historia i Wspolczesnosc (Wrocław, 1996);
65. Krzysztof Samborski, "Zyczliwosci zadnoi," Dziennik Polski, July 6, 1995;
66. Jerzy Sierociuk, "Archipclag Kokczetaw," Przeglad Akademicki 13-14 (1994). Vieda Skultans writes that people exiled to Siberia or imprisoned in labor camps emphasized the vastness and absence of human habitation as a way of representing their own lack of personal memories embedded in the landscape.
67. Skultans, The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (London, 1998), 28.
68. As Lefebvre writes, "The notion of a space which is at first empty, but is later filled by a social life and modified by it, also depends on this hypothetical initial 'purity,' identified as 'nature' and as a sort of ground zero of human reality." This kind of "empty" space, he argues, is merely another form of a representation of space. Production of Space, 190.
69. In fact, ranchers now in the Great Plains, facing soil erosion caused by over-grazing, are reinventing grazing methods that follow the old patterns of the bison herds.
70. Mukanov, Karaganda;
71. Elagin, Karaganda;
72. T. Y. Barag, Karaganda (Moscow, 1950);
73. Malybaev, Bor'ba KPSS.
74. Malybaev, Bor'ba KPSS, 15.
75. Malybaev, Bor'ba KPSS, 102.
76. For accounts of pre-Soviet and Soviet-era Kazakh history, see Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs, 2d edn. (Stanford, Calif., 1995);
77. Elizabeth E. Bacon, Central Asians under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change, 2d edn. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980);
78. A. K. Akhmetov, ed., History of Kazakhstan: Essays (Almaty, 1988);
79. M. K. Kozibaev and K. S. Algazhumanov, Totalitarnii sotsializm: Real'nost' i posledstviia (Almaty, 1997).
80. White, "It's Your Misfortune," 87.
81. Rollison argues there are two ways to transform land into property. The first is to turn people off the land. The second is to eradicate all signs of the old culture. In this way, he writes, the "massive manipulations and transformations of landscape that have resulted from the spread of capitalist values destroyed human memory." David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500-1800 (London, 1992), 73.
82. West, Capitalism on the Frontier, 175.
83. From the Billings Post, April 17, 1884,
84. as cited in Kliewer, "Foundations of Billings, Montana."
85. See Olcott, Kazakhs;
86. A. K. Akshiyev, et al., eds., Istoriia Kazakhstana (Almaty, 1993), 310.
87. Author interview with M. K. Kozybaev, Almaty, September 1997.
88. Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, Encyclopedia of the American West, 4 vols. (New York, 1996), 4: 1092.
89. This abbreviated account of Crow history relates only the meta-narrative of Indian victimization. For a far more complex view of the Crows' adaptability and pragmatism in founding the Crow Reservation, which accelerated the tribe's transition to a modern self-consciousness, see Frederick E. Hoxie, Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805-1935 (Cambridge, 1995).
90. See Olcott, Kazakhs, chap. 8.
91. See Tsentral'nii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kinofotodokumentov Respubliki Kazakhstan (hereafter, TsGAK RK), photo numbers: 5-4377, 5-3655, 5-4380 (1930).
92. "Twenty Years of the Billings Gazette," The Billings Gazette, 1905.
93. West, Capitalism on the Frontier, 145.
94. The NKVD Resettlement Bureau directed its agents in Kazakhstan to draw up new boundaries from land funds appropriated from Kazakh nomads. Report from Alma-Ata on Karaganda Oblast', RGAE 5675/1/140 (Autumn 1936), ll. 13-19. In 1931, the Resettlement Bureau of the NKVD started to deport kulaks (rich peasants) to Kazakhstan and later in 1936 groups of Poles and Germans to the region. The pioneering nature of the deportation program was similar to that of the founding of KarLag. As one official reviewed the program in 1936: "Most new industrial bases are located in the Karaganda Oblast'. There the sparse population in the newly constructed regions creates a severe problem. In a series of events, resettlement has enlivened vacant regions and makes possible the development of agriculture." Just how marginal the land was is captured in the following excerpt from the report: "Almost all parcels suggested have little to no water source." From Land Fund (OMZ) to Pliner, November 2, 1936, RGAE 5675/1/40, l. 4. See also Director of the Land Fund of the Labor Colony, NKVD Shkele to GULAG NKVD Pliner, November 5, 1936, RGAE 5675/1/140, l. 12. On the 1936 deportations, see GARF 5446/18a/209 (23/I/36); on Ukrainian Republic proposals to deport, see the Central State Archives of Government Organizations of Ukraine (hereafter, TsDAHOU) 1/16/12 (February 25, 1936); TsDAHOU 1/16/12, l. 346 (November 25, 1935); on NKVD preparations in Kazakhstan, see Berman to Yagoda, April 16, 1936, GARF 9479/1/36, ll. 7-11, and July 13, 1936, GARF 9479/1/36, ll. 12-16.
95. The settlements were largely sited on "uninhabited steppe, in droughty, un-irrigated zones," with eight to seventeen inches of annual precipitation, which evaporated at a high rate in the intense Kazakh sun and wind. For descriptions of the topography, see Berman to Yagoda, July 13, 1936, GARF 9479/1/36, ll. 1.2-16, the State Archive of the Kochetau Oblast' (hereafter, GAKO), 906/1/29; and George J. Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan, 1896-1916 (Bloomington, Ind., 1969), 15.
96. The NKVD also sketched out new towns to accompany the communities, laying out streets for new schools, hospitals, stores, and homes. Land and responsibilities changed hands frequently between state enterprises and bureaus, but land was always under the control of one large bureaucratic organization or another, whether a branch of internal security, regional government, or an economic bureau. For example, the Labor Settlement Division of the NKVD-GULAG was in charge of the distribution network, cultural and educational facilities, medical services, and agricultural-veterinarian expertise for deportees to Kazakhstan until transference to the land bank and regional government in the late 1930s. See "Obiasnitel'naia zapiska NKVD SSSR za 1937 god," GARF 9479/1/41, l. 11.
97. The NKVD of Karaganda Oblast' in Kazakhstan reported that the settlers from Ukraine arrived "disoriented" with misinformation about Kazakhstan. They had been told it was to the south and had a warm climate and to sell all their warm clothes and bring salt, because there was little salt to be found in Kazakhstan. Some families brought with them no warm clothes and up to ninety pounds of salt. See Berman to Yagoda, April 16, 1936, GARF 9479/1/36, ll. 7-11.
98. A local official in charge of deportation reported in a secret document that 90 percent of the deportees shared the opinion of Friedrich Ralov: "I'm very happy to be resettled, it will get me better work than I have now in the collective farm." Many other resettlement officers reported a similar "I am happy to go" sentiment from other villages. They also reported tearful goodbyes and reluctant departures. State Archives of the Zhitomir Oblast' (hereafter, DAZO), 42/1/372; P-87/1/3, ll. 27-30, and P-42/1/327, l. 76. The assertion that deportees would be happy to be deported sounds hard to believe until one considers that the deportations occurred amid a century of voluntary migration from the overcrowded agricultural terrain of European Russia to the virgin lands of Kazakhstan. Between 1880 and 1980, over 5 million people migrated to Kazakhstan in search of virgin soil and opportunity. For statistics, see V. Moiseenko, "Migratsiia naseleniia v perepiskakh Rossii i SSSR," Voprosy statistiki 3 (1997): 30-36.
99. Of the 70,000 deportees, 64,319 arrived in the Karaganda Region by October 1936. See GARF 9479/1/36, l. 19.
100. Author interview with Maria Andzejevskaya, Tulgari, Kazakhstan, audiotape, September 29, 1997.
101. See DAZO, P-42/1/372 (1936), ll. 29, 78, 87, 163-41, for lists of persons requesting permission to be deported from the Right Bank border zone of Ukraine to Kazakhstan.
102. Deportees could not travel more than 25 kilometers beyond their assigned settlements. See "Postanovlenie SNK SSSR o trudovikh poseleniiakh OGPU v zapadnoi Sibiri i Kazakhstane," June 9, 1933, GARF 5446/57/25, ll. 21-22. Not that that law stopped deportees from leaving the special settlements. NKVD officials reported "massive flight of the deportees to various places in the USSR" and ordered that the guard be increased on the railroads and in the special settlements. Berman to Zalin, GARF, June 1937, 9479/1/38, ll. 1-2. In the Kokchetav Province (oblast') of northern Kazakhstan, 9 percent of the deportees fled in the first year. GAKO 11/1/39, l. 144.
103. J. C. Murphy, The Comical History of Montana: A Serious Story for Free People (San Diego, 1912), 40.
104. Author interview at the Karaganda German Cultural Center, Kazakhstan, audiotape, October 13, 1997.
105. It may sound strange to talk of 1937, one of the chief years of the Great Terror, as a good year. However, the agricultural success in 1937 of the deportees was such that NKVD officials worried about the growth of "kulaks" in the settlements. See Pohl, Stalinist Penal System, 63. Meanwhile, Zemskov argues that 1937 represented "a peak of liberalization of the labor exile regime." V. H. Zemskov, "Ob uchete spetskontingenta NKVD vo vsesoiuznykh perepisykh naseleniia 1937," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 2 (1991): 75.
106. Author interview with Bernice McGee, Livingston, Montana, audiotape, April 20, 1998.
107. Author interview with Maria Andzejevskaya, Tulgari, Kazakhstan, audiotape, April 29, 1997. The "Special Settlements" of the kind in which Maria lived functioned usually at a loss to the state, which supported the settlements in the face of continual requests for subsidies to get through the next year. Like homesteaders on the plains, the "special settlers" in Kazakhstan were caught in a cycle. In the fall, they paid their taxes and loans back to state banks; in the spring, they needed more loans and subsidies for planting. See Danilov, Spetspereselentsi, 8.
108. West, Capitalism on the Frontier, 136.
109. Dil'manov and Kuznetsova, Karlag.
110. White, "It's Your Misfortune," 236. See, as well, Scott on schemes for agricultural modernization that emphasized technical expertise, planning, and central control, which produced commercial and political monopolies and diminished the autonomy of the farmer.
111. Seeing Like a State, 271.
112. West, Capitalism on the Frontier, 169.
113. Margarete Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, Edward Fitzgerald, trans. (London, 1950), 111.
114. The order read: "Among the Germans of the Volga there are thousands and hundreds of thousands diversants and spies, preparing terrorist acts and diversion." Postanovlenie SNK SSSR i TsK VKP(b), August 26, 1941, and ukaz Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, August 28, 1941, "O pereselenii nemtsev iz Saratovskoi, Stalingradskoi oblastei i Respubliki Nemtsev Povol'zhya," as reproduced in G. A. Karpikova, ed., Iz istorii Nemtsev Kazakhstana (1921-1975 gg.): Sbornik dokumentov (Almaty, 1997), 95. The total number of persons deported under this category amounted to 1,093,490, of whom 393,537 were living in Kazakhstan in 1949.
115. Zemskov, "Spetsposelentsi," 10, 12.
116. Fred C. Koch, The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present (University Park, Pa., 1977), 214.
117. Nels Anderson, Men on the Move (Chicago, 1940), 227.
118. Anderson, Men on the Move, 227.
119. See Steve Hochstadt on the forces of economic propulsion and agricultural poverty that led to a growing and increasingly powerless migrant labor force, in Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820-1989 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999), 211-12.
120. Mikolaj Iwanow, Pierwszy naród ukarany: Stalinizm wobec polskiej ludnosci kresowej (1921-1938) (Warsaw, 1991);
121. Cieseilski and Kuczynski, Polacy w Kazachstanie;
122. Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (London, 1970);
123. Alexander Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War, George Sanders, trans. (New York, 1978);
124. Genrich Strons'kii, Zlet i podinnya: Pol's'kii natsional'nii raion v Ukraini y 20-30 roki (Ternopil, 1992).
125. On the universalization of the image of displaced persons into an ideal "type," see Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995), 8-14.
126. As lain Chambers writes, "We seek to return to the beginnings, no longer our own, but that of an 'Other' who is now requested to carry the burden of representing our desire." Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, 72.
127. Berman writes poetically about the wrecking-ball quality of modernity: "The innate dynamism of the modern economy and of the culture that grows from this economy annihilates everything it creates - physical environments, social institutions, metaphysical ideas, artistic visions, moral values - in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating the world anew.All That Is Solid, 288.
128. Author interview with Maria Weimar, Karaganda, audiotape, October 1987.
129. For examples of the chaotic quality of Soviet labor, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times; Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999);
130. Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994);
131. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain.
132. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 167-87.
133. As Lefebvre writes, "It is within space that time consumes or devours living beings." Production of Space, 57.
134. Mary Murphy, Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41 (Urbana, Ill., 1997), 4.
135. This figure derives from the 4 million workers in manufacturing; of these, as well, 500,000 annually were injured in accidents. Edward L. Ayers, et al., American Passages: A History of the United States (Fort Worth, Tex., 1999).
136. Pohl, Stalinist Penal System, table 25, p. 48. Not that American labor fatalities and Soviet labor camp casualties are entirely compatible. NKVD-directed industries made up between 15 and 75 percent of total Soviet production in various industrial branches. Thousands more free Soviet workers died on the job throughout the 1930s.
137. The NKVD orders were explicit: "Labor Army conscripts do not have the right to create mixed settlements. They should be housed in special enclaves, separate from the workers." GARF 9479/1/57, ll. 7-8.
138. By 1949, there were in Kazakhstan 820,165 deportees living in guarded settlements called "special settlements." The categories of special settlers consisted of the following state-designated ethnic-political groups: Germans, Chechens, Ingushi, Karachaevs, Balkirs, Kalmyks, Russian collaborators with Germany under General Vlasov (Vlatsovsti), Ukrainian nationalists (Ounovtsi), and deportees from Georgia and Crimea. Zemskov, "Spetsposelentsi," 3-17.
139. See Terry Martin, "An Affirmative Action Empire" (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996), 234-36.
140. Yda Schreuder, "Labor Segmentation, Ethnic Divison of Labor, and Residential Segregation in American Cities in the Early Twentieth Century," Professional Geography 41 (1989): 131-43.
141. In both the Soviet and American cities, ethnic enclaves never reached a pure form; people moved in and out of them but often with difficulty.
142. Marshall Berman, commenting on Baudelaire's depiction of nineteenth-century Paris, writes that it is no coincidence that Baudelaire's "primal encounters" could never occur in contemporary urban spatial complexes. He writes: "for most of our century, urban spaces have been systematically designed and organized to ensure that collisions and confrontations will not take place . . . The distinctive sign of 19th century urbanism was the boulevard, a medium for bringing explosive material and human forces together; the hallmark of the 20th century urbanism has been the highway, a means of putting them asunder." All That Is Solid, 165.
143. Maria Weimar, as part of the "Labor Army," was freed in 1947. See Pohl, Stalinist Penal System, 76. However, the zones containing other categories of prisoners from KarLag marked the cityscape until 1955, when the last categories of unfree persons in Karaganda Province were released. KarLag was closed in 1956, and in the countryside around Karaganda deportees termed "special settlers" were gradually granted mobility in a series of laws from 1954 to 1974.
144. Karpikova, Iz istorii Nemtsev Kazakhstana;
145. Dil'manov and Kuznetsova, Karlag, 12;
146. V. N. Zemskov, "Massovoe osvobozhdenie spetsposelentsev i ssyl'nykh, 1954-1966 gg.," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 4 (1991): 5-25.
147. Author interview with Maria Weimar, Karaganda, audiotape, October 1997.