A Biography of No Place

From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland

Kate Brown

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780674252974
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed.Kate Brown's study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named, and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups.Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth-century "progress."

CHAPTER

1

• • •

Inventory

In April 1935, a Mr. Ortenberg, the secretary of the Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region, met with a Mr. Litovchik, the administrator of the provincial Communist Party committee. Ortenberg performed the last rites on Polish autonomy within the Soviet Union by signing over the possessions of the extinguished region to Litovchik. The material world that made up the Polish autonomous region consisted of two couches, one desk with two drawers, a typewriter, a food cooler, a metal file cabinet, a wooden box, a long table, seventeen simple chairs; a fine, black, open-air carriage with two horses—one named Mashka, and a stallion, Vaska—and a bust of Stalin (this item added in pencil later). As well, Litovchik signed over one used car—a Soviet make, a GAZ—which had seen better days. The radiator leaked, the frame was rusted, and the battery had only one cell. The speedometer didn’t work, nor did the hand or foot brakes.¹

Besides these humble possessions, the government of the Marchlevsk Region left behind a box of paperwork—protocols, reports, correspondence—carefully stowed in a squat cement building at the end of a treelined alley surrounded by vegetable gardens and broken picket fences in the center of Zhytomyr, a provincial capital in central Ukraine. The papers in no way express the essence of the stunted ten-year life span of the Soviet experiment in Polish cultural autonomy. They give no sense of what made life within the borders of the Polish region different from life without. Most of the preserved documents are written in Russian or Ukrainian, fewer in Polish. They describe the usual melancholy struggle for perfection in the quest for socialism that beset many other regional administrations during the second decade of the Soviet regime.²

Archival documents fail us at times. Trying to uncover the essence of the Marchlevsk Region from the documents left behind is like trying to read an autopsy report to determine the nature of the personality, the value of the life. If there was a special quality to the Polish Marchlevsk Region, moments, at least, of pride, or a swelling sense among those who believed in the project that they were building something worthwhile—making a statement to the world about the grand magnanimity of international socialism, or showing the blighted Polish workers across the border the path to a better life—these documents hardly narrate that story.

Among the files there is a photograph, circa 1926. A group of men and women are lying on hay bales, wearing winter sheepskins or furs. The hay seems a prop, a way to show the homey, rustic quality of the event, while the faces look urban. The men’s hair is carefully parted down the middle and slicked. Some wear suits of black wool and pinched wire-rimmed glasses. Others wear high leather boots and long shirts belted at the waist in imitation of the toiling peasant. The date is March 30; the caption reads: “The first meeting of the Dovbysh Council of the Polish Region.”³ The delegates to the meeting include elected representatives from local village councils and factories as well as distinguished guests from Kiev, Kharkov, and Moscow. Several eminent Polish communists are present: Felix Kon’, the director of the Central Communist Party of Poland, and Boleslav Skarbek, a member of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Central Committee. The woman in the center of the photograph, elegantly dressed, is Sofia Dzerzhinskaia, a member of the Moscow-based Polish Bureau and wife of Felix Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the first Soviet secret service, the Cheka. Polish Bureau leaders called the meeting to formally inaugurate the Polish Region, created a year before in April of 1925. This small, rural corner of Ukraine made it on the map that day. It became something concrete, apart from the greater spread of level fields and scrubby forests of the then western, now central, Ukraine. With the region’s founding, Marchlevsk became part of that indefinable mesh of circumstances and actions that made up the Revolution in the Soviet context. At the same time, Marchlevsk stepped into Polish national history, because in creating the region the Polish communists also created an object, a set of borders, however imagined, that would later be unmarked, destroyed (if imagined objects can be destroyed) in the act of Mr. Ortenberg’s signing over an old car and other odd items to Mr. Litovchik.⁴

In 1997 I had come to Zhytomyr, a comfortable, lush old city sixty miles west of Kiev, looking for an obscure historical gasp—ten years, no time really—when Soviet theorists came up with the contradictory notion of organizing the internal borders of the first socialist state not in terms of efficiency or production, as one would expect of a modernizing internationalist regime, but around national borders and ethnic identity. It was a peculiar experiment. Instead of ruling as most modern governments have done since Napoleon—by dividing territory into viable economic units for efficient tax collection and administration—socialist reformers took villages with mixed populations, people of different religions, dialects, and national heritage, and by gerrymandering borders they created tiny islands of national self-rule based on a constantly mutating perception of ethnicity.⁵ I sought out the Marchlevsk Region because the Polish population, of all the borderland’s ethnic groups, possessed the most ambiguous and fluctuating sense of identity. The Poles, like all officially recognized ethnic groups in Ukraine, were granted cultural and geographic autonomy as part of the Soviet nationality policy whereby Soviet officials formed out of the smallest villages national territories, to be run in separate languages with distinct cultures and languages.

Ukraine led all Soviet republics in implementing the policy. By 1926 there were eleven officially chartered national minority regions in Ukraine, and nearly 300 nationally autonomous villages. To support these minority regions, socialist reformers created an entire infrastructure of publishing houses, newspapers, courts, schools, libraries, cultural centers, radio programs, clubs, and theaters for each ethnic group in each minority language. No minority, no matter how humble and inconsequential, could be overlooked. In Dnepropetrovs’k, for example, city leaders set up a newspaper in Hungarian for the thirty-six Hungarians who lived there.⁶ In order to staff these new minority organizations, the Ukrainian Commission for National Minority Affairs also founded institutions of higher education to train cadres in Polish, German, Yiddish, Bulgarian, and other languages.⁷

The Marchlevsk Autonomous Polish Region was a product of this ethnophilia. The idea for it was first conceived by a corps of prominent Polish Bolsheviks who attended the Fourth Congress of International Communists, held in Moscow in 1922. The Polish-Soviet War had ended unexpectedly for Polish communists. They had assumed that during the war Polish workers in Poland would rise up and join the Red Army, and that Poles, who had just been freed from a century and a half of rule by Moscow, would turn back again, persuaded by yet another invading Russian army to follow communists down the red path. This historic eventuality did not happen, and at the conference the words of Felix Kon’—“Our fatherland is here and not there”⁸—rang out with the great hope of rationalizing compensation, emphasizing that loyalty to the socialist cause stood above loyalty to Poland. Even so, millennial convictions are hard to shake, and the two leading communists at the meeting, Kon’ and Julian Marchlevskii, decided that if they couldn’t export communism to Poland, they could at least import Poland to communism.⁹ They proposed to establish, along the newly created Polish-Soviet border, a Polonized autonomous region which would serve as an example for Polish workers and farmers to the west of the border, as it developed independently a proletarian society based on Polish culture.

By 1925 the idea was brought to life. The Marchlevsk Autonomous Polish Region was founded in the borderlands, a place considered the most backward, poor, and un-revolutionary part of Ukraine. The subjects of the national minority experiment were villagers and townspeople who lived in the isolated, hard-to-reach periphery. These people possessed no historical importance as we would determine it now, as contemporaries knew it then. They were categorized as mostly peasants, mostly illiterate, mostly poor. Marchlevsk, the regional center of Polish autonomy, was no place, yet it would become a world unto itself, a microcosm of the Revolution in Polish form.

But what was Marchlevsk? What constituted Soviet Polishdom on the margins of the first socialist state? Although this question would puzzle me for months as I searched through the old documents, Soviet communists simplified the complexities of the borderland terrain by quantifying them. They succinctly summed up Marchlevsk by counting. Marchlevsk had a population of 40,577 “souls”: 70 percent (29,898) Poles, 8,089 Ukrainians, 2,805 Germans, and 1,391 Jews. Before 1917, no Polish schools functioned officially and the elementary schools, all four of them, taught in Russian. In just three years, official sources boasted that villagers built forty-one schools—thirty-one Polish, three German, two Ukrainian, and one Yiddish—and were paying the salaries for eighty-nine teachers.¹⁰ By 1930, they had also founded four bookstores, fifteen Polish-language reading huts, literacy centers in most villages (where 4,574 adults were learning to read), and night courses where 14,901 people studied agronomy, politics, and economics.¹¹ In 1925, the men appointed to run the Marchlevsk Region set in motion twenty-five Polish village councils (sovety); by 1930 the number had grown to thirty, twenty-one of which actually functioned in Polish. Before the Revolution, there had been no elections in the region for local government; by the mid-1920s, 63 percent of villagers turned out for elections, and 24 percent of the village council members they elected were women. During tsarist rule there had been no hospital in the region, not even a doctor or nurse; in a few years the residents of the Marchlevsk Region had built one hospital and six medical clinics.¹²

To read the official correspondence is to experience the tempo of the decade. Overnight the quiet settlement of Dovbysh was turned into the capitol of Polish Marchlevsk, becoming a city without ever having been a town. One morning the settlement was awakened from centuries of provincial slumber by frantic construction pounding at a host of new buildings meant to mark Marchlevsk as a place of importance, a regional and national capital. Carpenters set to work on a courthouse, a library, a police station, several two-story apartment buildings, a pharmacy, a movie theater, and a veterinary clinic; they built two new glassworks and modernized the prerevolutionary factories, so that the number of workers in the region grew from two hundred to nearly two thousand by 1930.¹³ Marchlevsk received electricity and phone service before any other settlements in the district, and regular bus service sprang into action to and from the provincial center, Zhytomyr, with twelve kilometers of the road already paved—all of this constructed within a few years of the rustic photograph on the haystack. There is no space here to list all the social and political organizations that took root in the postrevolutionary soil. For the small rural region of Marchlevsk, they number over one hundred: literary, drama, and political circles, women’s leagues, consumer and producer cooperatives, children’s organizations, labor unions—the Union of Chemists, the Union of Loggers and Farmers, the Union of Medical Workers—not to mention dozens of Communist Party cells, communist youth and children’s clubs. And for each organization, Marchlevsk leaders made up charts about its social and ethnic composition—how many rich, middle, and poor peasants; how many Poles, Germans, Jews, and Ukrainians—in an intoxicating incantation of figures swiftly flowing in a broad current of mathematical abstraction to one noble and common destination.¹⁴

When Soviet officials wanted to please their superiors, they drew up charts. In the chart they expressed progress in terms of numbers, which rose steadily from year to year. In fact, their superiors chided them if the numbers remained static from one year to the next.¹⁵ Progress amounted to a quantifiable formula: Time (stretched out slowly over the long winter months of inactivity, cursed soundly during the mud season, sped up a hundredfold at planting and harvesting) plus Energy (derived from the backs of laborers stacking bricks and digging ditches; the organizational acumen of officials gathering villagers in meeting after meeting, answering questions, typing up reports) and Emotions (fear, anger, hope, ambition, disappointment, envy, confusion, embarrassment), all condensed into shorthand so that as you read these charts you have the sensation of flight, as if you lived not in increments of time ticked off in earthbound seconds but in an epoch, one that had finally broken free from the immobile bedrock of backwardness, conservatism, and tradition, which many felt had cursed the borderlands for centuries. Marchlevsk was such a numerical creation, born and reborn hundreds of times in the reports and charts of diligent civil servants.

And that is the problem: this Marchlevsk of charts and numbers is a fictional representation sketched out in tabulated columns. The men and women who made the charts helped draft Polish Marchlevsk into existence. Yet few people who lived in the region and read the numbers in newspaper accounts and government reports could have believed that these numbers represented reality; it was, rather, a unidimensional projection of it cast onto the backdrop of the postwar, postrevolutionary semichaos—which no one needed to mention in their reports because most people understood it implicitly, witnessed it daily. In other words, to live in the Soviet Union at the time meant frequent and arbitrary encounters with the unexpected and unplanned, with departures, great and small, from the charts. As such, investigators sent to the countryside often played the numbers against what they saw. Many investigators arriving in nominally Polish villages were surprised to discover that the villagers spoke only Ukrainian. One investigator recounted that “in principle” there were eleven Polish-language news-sheets in Polish villages, but that was a fact on paper only: “In reality, only one news-sheet appears regularly; for the rest there is no one in the villages who knows how to write and edit in Polish.”¹⁶ The numbers represented as much aspiration, as much living in future tense, as present-tense existence. The figures in the charts, striding across the pages of the national newspapers, became important and later rote because of their ability to soothe and reassure. Amidst all the daily shortages, mistakes, rudeness, and ignorance, amidst the misshapen limbs, the miswritten lives, and general suffering, which most people in the Soviet Union encountered frequently, the numbers brought readers the message that they were on the right track, that they were building, brick upon brick—or, at least, digit upon digit—a new reality, a great new society.

Looking for Marchlevsk

The charts describe aspiration, a particular way of ordering a chaotic world, but not life as most people knew it at the time, waking in the morning to the lowing of the neighbor’s cow and the clanking of the bronze church bell. A more grounded memory of Marchlevsk, one full of the banalities of the everyday, must be recorded somewhere, and I went to Zhytomyr in central Ukraine to look for imprints of it. My path to Zhytomyr was not direct. I left Moscow in early spring of 1997, bought a train ticket, and rambled west across the flat, frozen fields of European Russia and eastern Ukraine, riding and listening to an old woman, my companion in the couchette, narrate her long life in extended monologues punctuated by heavy sighs. In Kiev, archivists handed me file after file, cheerfully unveiling secrets the Soviet government once guarded so closely. But the files mentioned Marchlevsk and the other national regions in the borderlands only in passing; the eyewitne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 Inventory
• 2 Ghosts in the Bathhouse
• 3 Moving Pictures
• 4 The Power to Name
• 5 A Diary of Deportation
• 6 The Great Purges and the Rights of Man
• 7 Deportee into Colonizer
• 8 Racial Hierarchies
• Epilogue: Shifting Borders, Shifting Identities
• Notes
• Archival Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index