Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945-50

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Warlands

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Warlands Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet–East European Borderlands, 1945–50 Edited By Peter Gatrell Professor of Economic History, University of Manchester

and Nick Baron Associate Professor in History, University of Nottingham

Editorial matter and selection © Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron 2009 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–57601–8

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Maps 1

From ‘Homelands’ to ‘Warlands’: Themes, Approaches, Voices Peter Gatrell

Part I

2

3

4

6

7

Transit: National Experiences and International Interventions in Postwar Displaced Persons Camps

Living in the Displaced Persons Camp: Lithuanian War Refugees in the West, 1944–54 Tomas Balkelis ‘How those Brothers in Foreign Lands are Dividing the Fatherland’: Latvian National Politics in Displaced Persons Camps after the Second World War Aldis Purs The Quaker Internationalist Tradition in Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–48 Jenny Carson

Part II 5

vii viii ix xii

Return: Soviet Postwar Resettlement Practices and Population Management

Remaking Soviet Society: the Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49 Nick Baron Dirt, Disease and Disorder: Population Re-placement in Postwar Leningrad and the ‘Danger’ of Social Contamination Siobhan Peeling The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia, 1945–49 Joanne Laycock

v

1

23 25

48

67

87 89

117

140

vi

Contents

Part III 8

9

10

Border Crossings: State Practices of Displacement and National Reconstruction

Ukrainian–Polish Population Transfers, 1944–46: Moving in Opposite Directions Kateryna Stadnik To Pacify, Populate and Polonise: Territorial Transformations and the Displacement of Ethnic Minorities in Communist Poland, 1944–49 Konrad Zielinski Population Displacement and Regional Reconstruction in Postwar Poland: the Case of Upper Silesia Ewa Ochman

Part IV

The Politics of Memory: Long-Term Perspectives on Displacement

11

Locating Estonia: Perspectives from Exile and the Homeland Meike Wulf

12

Violent Peacetime: Reconceptualising Displacement and Resettlement in the Soviet–East European Borderlands after the Second World War Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron

Index

163 165

188

210

229 231

255

269

List of Figures and Tables Figures 2.1

‘A DP room in an unknown place’. Source: Dypukas, Kempten DP camp, 10 August 1946, Nr. 1, p. 15. 5.1 Anti-repatriation postcard distributed to Soviet displaced persons, 1945. 6.1 A ‘Sunday clean-up’ (voskresnik) on Kaliaev street, Leningrad, during the blockade.

33 95 124

Tables 8.1

Ukrainian population from Poland registered and evacuated to the USSR, 1944–47 8.2 Polish citizens evacuated from the USSR to Poland, 1944–47

vii

177 178

Acknowledgements First and foremost the editors and contributors wish to express their gratitude to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting the collaborative research project of which this book is one outcome (RG/AN993/APN18314, ‘Population displacement, state practice and social experience in the USSR and Eastern Europe, 1930–1956’). The editors are grateful to the contributors for their enthusiastic participation in the project. Several other people have made valuable contributions to the project, offering practical advice and research assistance as well as giving their time to investigate and clarify key points. They include Rosaria Franco, Lena Khabarova, Chris Lash, Pavel Polian and Liudmyla Sharipova. The editors are also grateful to the following colleagues whose comments on our workin-progress, as well as their own scholarship, have helped us to shape and refine our ideas: Pamela Ballinger, Daniel Cohen, Geoff Eley, David Feldman, Elizabeth Harvey, Anna Holian, Peter Holquist, Andy Janco, Rebecca Manley, Mark Mazower, Eduard Mühle, Norman Naimark, David Norris, Jessica Reinisch, Silvia Salvatici, Ben Shephard and Johannes-Dieter Steinert. They are not responsible for any errors or shortcomings. On behalf of all the authors we would also like to express our particular appreciation to the many librarians and archivists in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Poland, France, Switzerland, the USA and the UK, who responded to our requests for information and supplied the necessary research material. Two anonymous readers commissioned by our publisher made helpful comments and suggestions which we have done our best to take into account. At Palgrave, Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland offered valuable support in the later stages of the project. We also appreciated Ruth Willats’ careful work with the copy editing. Nick Scarle of the Cartographic Unit, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, drew the maps with exemplary care and professionalism. Finally, the editors are also grateful to their colleagues, including members of the administrative staff, at the University of Manchester and the University of Nottingham for support and assistance.

viii

Notes on Contributors Tomas Balkelis is currently an AHRC Research Associate in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester. His most recent publications include a monograph The Making of Modern Lithuania (Routledge, 2009), ’Social banditry and nation-making: the myth of a Lithuanian robber’, Past and Present, 198 (2008) and ’War, ethnic conflict and the refugee crisis in Lithuania, 1939–1940’, Contemporary European History, vol.16, no. 4 (2007). Nick Baron is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he has taught since 2004. Prior to this he was a doctoral student at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Soviet Karelia: Politics, Planning and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920–1939 (2007), and The King of Karelia. Col P.J. Woods and the British Intervention in North Russia 1918–1919. A History and Memoir (2007); editor of Nurturing the Nation. Displaced Children, State Ideology and Social Identity in Eastern Europe and the USSR, 1918–1953 (2009); and co-editor (with Peter Gatrell) of Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (2004), and (with V.G. Makurov) of Sovetskaia lesnaia ekonomika. Moskva-Sever. 1917–1941 (2005). He has also published numerous articles on twentieth century Russian and East European history and historical geography. He is currently writing a cultural study of early Soviet cartography. Jenny Carson has recently completed a PhD dissertation entitled ‘The Friends Relief Service and Displaced Persons (DPs) in Post-war Germany’ (School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester). Her research considers how the Quakers as an organisation saw their duties towards Displaced Persons and to what extent and how these organisational ideals came into question in the field. Peter Gatrell, Professor of Economic History, School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, is the author of numerous books and articles, including A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (1999), which won the Wayne Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Alec Nove Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. He contributed the chapter on Russian economic history to the Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Russia. Together with Nick Baron he co-edited Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (2004). He is ix

x

Notes on Contributors

currently completing a full-length study of World Refugee Year, 1959–1960 and a monograph entitled The Making of the Modern Refugee. He is on the editorial board of several journals including Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Jo Laycock was Manoogian Simone Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Michigan in 2008 and prior to that was a doctoral student in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester. She is the author of Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, Ambiguity and Intervention 1878-1925 (2009). Her current research deals with population displacement and its repercussions in Soviet Armenia after the Second World War. Ewa Ochman, RCUK Fellow in Polish Studies, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester, is the author of several articles on remembering the Second World War in Eastern and Central Europe and its impact on the formation of post-communist identities. She is currently completing a book analysing the collective remembrance of the Red Army in Poland after the war. Siobhan Peeling is a Teaching Fellow in the School of History, University of Nottingham, where she has recently completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “‘Out of Place” in the Post-war City: Practices, Experiences and Representations of Displacement during the Resettlement of Leningrad at the End of the Blockade’. She has given presentations on histories and theories of space, place and displacement, with particular reference to the post-Second World War reconstruction of Leningrad and the longer-term development of Soviet state and society. Aldis Purs is currently a research scholar at the University of Washington. His publications include Latvia: The Challenge of Change (co-authored with Artis Pabriks, 2001) and a chapter on tourism in interwar Latvia in Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker (eds) (2006), Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism. Kateryna Stadnik is Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Political Processes of the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences, Kiev, Ukraine. She has a Candidate of Sciences degree in History from Donetsk State University and a PhD in Social Studies from the Central European University, Warsaw. Her recent publications include ‘Youth Transitions in East and West Ukraine’ (co-written with Irina Predborska and Ken Roberts), in European Sociological Review, 2004. She has published widely in several languages on the history and sociology of migration, inter-ethnic relations, education, youth and ageing. Meike Wulf took up a post as Assistant Professor of the Political Culture of Europe at the University of Maastricht in 2009. She completed a PhD

Notes on Contributors

xi

in the Government Department, London School of Economics, in 2006 on ‘Historical Culture, Conflicting Memories and Identities in Post-Soviet Estonia’, and is currently completing a book on this subject for Berghahn Books. In 2007–08 she was CEELBAS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, working on cities and urban experiences in Eastern Europe. Konrad Zielinski is Associate Professor in the Centre for Ethnic Studies, Faculty of Political Sciences, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. He is the author of three monographs on the history of Polish Jewry: W cieniu synagogi. Obraz zycia ˙ kulturalnego spoleczno´sci zydowskiej ˙ Lublina w latach ˛ okupacji austro-wegierskiej [In the Shadow of the Synagogue: The Image of Jewish ˙ Cultural Life in Lublin during the Austro-Hungarian Occupation] (1998); Zydzi Lubelszczyzny 1914–1918 [The Jews of Lublin Province, 1914–1918] (1999); and Stosunki polsko-zydowskie ˙ na ziemiach Królestwa Polskiego w czasie pierwszej wojny s´wiatowej [Polish-Jewish Relations in the Kingdom of Poland during World War I], which will shortly appear in an English translation. He has also coauthored a history of the Lublin rabbinical school Jeszywas Chachmej Lublin – ˛ Uczelnia Medrców Lublina (2003).

Maps Oslo

SWEDEN

N O R W AY

Stockholm

North Sea DENMARK LATVIAN SSR

Copenhagen

Baltic Sea Lübeck

Blomberg

be

Brunswick

Grodno

a

Berlin

i

El

Bergen-Belsen

Goslar Potsdam

Einbeck

Kaliningrad (Königsberg)

Map 2

Warsaw

e

Seedorf

Scheinfeld

la

POLAND

Hanau

Brest

tu

GERMANY

g

Vis

Rhin

Bu

Oder

Pod la ch

Hamburg

Amsterdam

LITHUANIAN SSR

VladimirVolynskii

Prague

L’viv

FRANCE

Esslingen

Tübingen Dachau Kempten

SWITZ.

Drogobych

Erding Munich

Kufstein

Bern

G a l i (Lwów) c i a

C Z E C H O S LO V A K I A

Vienna

AUSTRIA

Bratislava Budapest

HUNGARY

I TA LY Zone s o f Allied occupation

Territory transferred from Germany to Poland

British zone French zone

Territory transferred from Poland to USSR

Soviet zone

Allied Displaced Persons (DP) camps

American zone

Soviet filtration and transit camps

Dan

Carpathia n Mountains

ube

Belgrade

YUGOSLAVIA

Map 1 Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Republics of the USSR xii

Maps

FINLAND

Lake Ladoga

Helsinki

0

500 km

Leningrad

Tallinn ESTONIAN SSR

Vo

Valga

l ga

Riga Moscow

Dau

gav

a

RUSSIAN SFSR

Vilnius Minsk BELARUSIAN SSR

Kursk

V o l h y n i a Luts’k

PereiaslavKhmelnitskii

Kiev

Rovno (Rivne) Ternopil (Tarnopol)

Don

Pripyat

Rokitianskii

P o d o l i a

Stanislaviv (Stanisawów)

Dne

pr

Done

UKRAINIAN SSR

Avdeevka

Kirovograd

Donetsk Volnovakha

Dn est r

Kishinev

Sea of Azov

ROMANIA Bucharest

Crimea

Yalta

Black Sea Map 1 Continued

ts

n

Do

xiii

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Maps

Kaliningrad (Königsberg)

BALTIC SEA

LITHUANIAN SSR

Gdansk (Danzig) EAST PRUSSIA

POMERANIA

Vi

st

ul

a

Szczecin (Stettin)

Bia l ystok

EAST BRANDENBERG

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BORDER MARK

de

O

L

A

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D

Bu

r

g

Warsaw Vis tu la

LOWER SILESIA O

Wroc l aw aw (Breslau)

dr a

K l odzko

Opole (Oppeln)

7

Vis

Katowice

a

Rzeszów

5 1

tul

n

6

3 8

Sa

L

Kraków

Jaworze

Pawlokoma Zawadka Morochowska

Z I

Przemysl (Sanshchina)

E

Poland

Cieszyn

O

Map 2

A

Auschwitz Bytom Chorzów Gliwice Jaworzno Miko l ów Mys l owice Swietoch l owice

Z

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Zamosc

UPPER SILESIA 4 2

Zabrze Soviet filtration and transit camps

Che l m (Kholm)

Lublin

Polish ‘Regained Territories’

0

200 km

Maps

Territory ceded to Turkey under Treaty of Kars (1921)

RUSSIAN SFSR

Caspian Sea

Georgian SSR

Black Sea

Tbilisi

Batumi Ardahan Leninakan

Azerbaijan

A

Kars

SSR

r m

Kura

ia n e R S S

Yerevan

Imyshly

n

TURKEY

0

A

100 km

Map 3 Soviet Armenia and the Caucasus

ze

xv

Ara rb

ai

ja

n

IRAN

x

Baku


1 From ‘Homelands’ to ‘Warlands’: Themes, Approaches, Voices Peter Gatrell

The displacement of population during and immediately following the Second World War took place on a global scale and formed part of a longer historical process of violence, territorial reconfiguration and state ‘development’ stretching back to the First World War and earlier still. This book explores one important part of this bigger picture by focusing on the profound political, social and economic upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This territory had been bitterly contested in 1914–21 (the world war having given way to civil war and the Polish–Soviet War); it witnessed massive population shifts as a result of collectivisation in the Soviet Union (1929–32) and Stalinist deportations of national minorities, notably between 1936 and 1944; and it became the major site of the Nazi deportation, incarceration and extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. During the war, substantial numbers of ethnic Germans were also ‘called home’ to the Reich from their homes in the Baltic States and eastern Poland. The long shadow cast by Hitler also manifested itself in the wartime transfer of forced labourers from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States to work in Germany, where they were in effect stranded at the moment of the Nazi capitulation. The situation in 1945 was further complicated by the decision of the victorious Allies to agree a series of territorial adjustments, which extended Poland’s frontiers westwards at Germany’s expense as compensation for apportioning Poland’s eastern borderlands to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Nor did the Allies limit themselves to redrawing borders. They also sanctioned the expulsion of ethnic Germans from their farms in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, approved an exchange of population between Soviet Ukraine and Poland, and debated what to do with the surviving Jewish population and with several million displaced people.1 Pronounced territorial changes and population transfers were not confined to Russia and Eastern Europe. Appropriately for a war that spanned several continents, the Second World War culminated in vast shifts of population between and within belligerent countries. By the end of the war some 1

2 Peter Gatrell

20 million Chinese had been displaced. Two million Korean refugees were living in Japan along with other displaced people. The eventual victory of the Chinese Communist Party after years of civil war led to the immediate exodus of at least 750,000 refugees to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. In the Middle East, the formation of the state of Israel was associated with the widespread displacement of the Palestinian Arab population. Many of Europe’s surviving Jews, including 100,000 Polish Jews who had found sanctuary in the USSR, attempted to make a fresh start in Israel; Jews who had lived for generations in Arab states also joined the exodus to Israel. In the Indian subcontinent, the British Raj gave way to two new states, India and Pakistan, and the imminent end of colonial rule unleashed terrible violence between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, leading to the enforced transfer and resettlement of some 13 million refugees on either side of the new borders.2 Historians have recently examined these upheavals afresh in the light of the fiftieth anniversaries of the events and because of the importance that refugees assumed in international politics during the 1990s. This global picture should be kept in mind, partly because it draws attention to the widespread recourse to measures that reshaped and repopulated territory in accordance with nationalist or revolutionary doctrine, and partly because historians of population displacement can learn from one another’s methods and insights.3 In this book we too have adopted a broad historical perspective. Our focus is on Russia and Eastern Europe where the great continental and multinational empires – Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary – held sway until 1918. PostFirst World War territorial reconfiguration created sovereign successor states, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. In addition, Ukraine and Belarus, as well as Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, enjoyed brief periods of independence before being incorporated into the Soviet Union as constituent republics. In an earlier collaborative work, we demonstrated that the process of state construction was inextricably connected to the displacement and re-placement of population in new ‘homelands’, as well as to the variable values ascribed to individuals as prospective citizens on the basis of class and ethnicity and to programmes for socio-economic reconstruction and modernisation.4 From a geopolitical perspective, the basic division after the Russian Revolution of 1917 was between ‘bourgeois’ Europe and the new Soviet state whose mutual antagonism affected relations between displaced and ‘settled’ populations, raising questions, for example, about the political trustworthiness or otherwise of refugees from Bolshevik Russia in Europe and of European immigrants or diasporic communities in the Soviet Union. To complicate matters further, all successor states in Eastern Europe were characterised to varying degrees by continuing poverty and social inequality, often expressed in ethnic terms. They suffered economic turbulence during the Great Depression, to which some of them responded by seeking closer economic ties with Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, the Soviet state responded to its self-diagnosis of under-development by embarking on

From ‘Homelands’ to ‘Warlands’

3

a programme of rapid economic transformation, which was accompanied by ruthless measures against perceived opponents. As is well known, Soviet industrialisation, collectivisation and terror all had immense demographic consequences during the 1930s.5 During the Second World War the entire region became a site for Nazi exploitation and colonisation which was limited only by the extent of the German army’s advance. These territorial, political and socio-economic ambitions entailed above all ‘clearing’ the land of Jews, first by random, large-scale shootings and by concentrating them in urban ghettoes, and ultimately by transporting them to the death camps. Prolonged warfare, conscription, deportation, expropriation, imprisonment and mass murder also wreaked havoc on the non-Jewish inhabitants, and on a much greater scale than during the First World War and its aftermath.6 The evacuation of Soviet civilians to Central Asia after the Nazi invasion in June 1941 had a profoundly disruptive impact.7 So, too, did the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, Belarus and the Baltic lands in 1939–41 and the Red Army’s reconquest of Eastern Europe in the later stages of the war, whose intervention helped create a lethal cocktail of violence as different ethno-political armed groups struggled for supremacy.8 After 1945, as in 1918, the map of Europe was redrawn with equally profound consequences. In Mark Mazower’s words, ‘the main reason for [population transfer], in retrospect, is clear enough: after the interwar era’s unsatisfactory experience with minorities in the new nation-states, people were being moved in order to consolidate political boundaries’. The cartographic carnival launched at Yalta and confirmed at Potsdam altered the shape and ethnic composition of Poland and Ukraine, legitimised the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States and entrenched communist power throughout the region.9 Other sites of territorial adjustment and population movement included the Soviet – Finnish border, where 420,000 Karelians left their homes, which now formed part of the USSR, and settled in Finland in September 1944. Bulgaria insisted on the transfer of 160,000 ethnic Turks to Turkey. The communist victory in Yugoslavia and the division of Venezia Giulia into a British/US zone and a Yugoslav zone prompted tens of thousands of refugees to flee westwards.10 Massive migration also took place as the war drew to a close. The Allies agreed to the expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. In a speech to the House of Commons in December 1944, Winston Churchill spoke of the need for a ‘clean sweep’ of ethnic Germans from Poland. Although punitive considerations lay behind this proposal, Churchill also described it as a means of ‘disentangling’ groups in order to create ‘friendship’ between nations, referring to the results of the Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1923. When Czechoslovakia expelled its Sudeten German population, the Czech leader Eduard Beneš spoke of providing a ‘humane and orderly’ transfer consistent with ‘civilised’ norms of conduct. His government also drove 200,000 Hungarians across the Danube into Hungary.11 Events on

4 Peter Gatrell

the ground suggested that these decisions had in some respects already been anticipated by the people at whom they were directed. Stalin casually claimed that ‘all the Germans had run away’ from Poland, and Churchill agreed. This concealed the fact that throughout the summer of 1945 ordinary Czechs and Poles took matters into their own hands, forcing Germans from their homes, with the result that one British eye-witness likened the human impact of this treatment to the results of German behaviour in Belsen.12 The decision by the Allies to redraw Poland’s eastern frontier was accompanied by the reciprocal transfer of Poles and Ukrainians (see chapter 8 by Kateryna Stadnik). Further upheavals followed. The newly installed ‘national communists’ in Lithuania, led by Antanas Snieckus, despatched ethnic Poles from the Vilnius region to Poland in order to create a more ethnically homogeneous Lithuania.13 In the contested lands of Upper Silesia, the victorious Red Army deported close on 100,000 able-bodied men to work in Soviet labour camps, as Ewa Ochman discusses in chapter 10. These decisions had a number of immediate repercussions. Germany had to find room for several million ethnic German expellees, while simultaneously accommodating displaced Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Latvians, Lithuanians and others, including ex-combatants who had fought against Soviet Russia. Responsibility for their maintenance was shared between German officials, the Allied occupation forces (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, SHAEF) and relief organisations subordinated to SHAEF. Notwithstanding the political upheaval in 1945, Allied officers expected that former combatants and forced labourers who had (as one official put it) become ‘mislaid’ would return to their homes. For their part, some ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) expected that the Western powers would force the Soviets to retreat. Both expectations were dashed.14 Vital questions of administration also arose in respect of the management of population transfer: new agencies were established alongside the Allies’ military apparatus to arrange for the repatriation of DPs from Eastern Europe, as well as the exchange of population between Soviet Ukraine and Poland under the Lublin Accord of September 1944. These arrangements were complex and the process was contentious. To be sure, most prisoners of war (POWs) and many DPs did return to their homes in 1945–46, often under concerted pressure from the Allied military, although tens of thousands of German POWs remained in Soviet camps until the 1950s. But many Eastern Europeans had no wish to be repatriated, given the confirmation of Soviet rule in the Baltic States and the former eastern territory of Poland.15 Meanwhile, the organisation of population exchange in Ukraine and Poland, far from being carefully administered, became a chaotic, hasty and brutal business, characterised by mutual hostility between Polish plenipotentiaries and the Soviet NKVD, as Kateryna Stadnik discusses in chapter 8.16 Central to this process were the claims made by the victorious Soviet state. The geopolitical scope of the Soviet Union reached beyond the European


5

continent. Soviet officials attempted to woo Russians who left Russia during the Civil War and settled in China. A German missionary reported from Hong Kong: Soviet-sponsored newspapers and radio stations did their best for creating an embarrassing confusion among Russian emigrants, giving them a specific explanation of the war purposes, embellished by national aspirations, and advertising such changes in Russia as religious freedom, restoration of military ranks and many other modifications in the forms of life to be possessed by Russian people upon the end of war.17 Thus the propaganda efforts of Soviet repatriation officers were not confined to Europe’s DP camps but had their counterpart in Shanghai and Tsientsin and (as Joanne Laycock demonstrates in chapter 7) among Armenians in the Middle East. The rewards to be made from addressing displacement in this region are substantial. One of these – developing a comparative perspective on the global process of postwar displacement – has already been mentioned.18 Another is that we can gain a clearer understanding of the Stalinist transformation of Eastern Europe and how it relates to the geopolitics of territorial change, population transfer and violence at the end of the Second World War.19 Finally, we can also think of this region as a case study in broader themes: the exercise of power; experiences of displacement; trans-national connections; and the memory and commemoration of displacement. In what follows, these themes are discussed in turn.

Exercising power Power has multiple meanings and expressions. Increasingly, scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to gain a better understanding of the variety of forms of power. As one scholar puts it: power is not exercised solely by the state over its population, but is mobilized as new forms of expertise address different objects of reform, intervening in ways that produce subjects with the appropriate mentality to govern themselves from a discrete distance.20 The idea of ‘governing at a distance’ invites us to venture beyond the formal realm of state intervention and to examine politics in terms of interrelated discourses and practices, rather than to assume that the dualism between state and ‘civil society’ sufficiently describes the myriad manifestations of power. This approach encourages a focus on regimes of power that promote, encourage and induce modes of behaviour rather than impose them in a clearcut manner. Non-governmental organisations and various kinds of expert

6 Peter Gatrell

knowledge occupy as important a role in this analysis as do formal state institutions, such as the bureaucracy and the armed forces.21 This is not to ignore the fact that the postwar territorial and demographic ‘settlement’ entailed oppressive state action, sometimes depicted in unapologetically retaliatory terms and at other times construed as ‘progressive’ or ‘rational’ politics. States decided whom to incarcerate, to admit and to deport. Officials devised and utilised categories that drew distinctions between displaced people according to their ‘eligibility’ for repatriation or resettlement. In other words, they had the power to ‘name’, a process that, as Ian Hacking puts it, ‘has real effects on people’.22 One overt instance was the creation of the category of ‘displaced person’. In 1944 SHAEF officers labelled DPs those ‘civilians outside the national boundaries of their country by reason of the war’ and ‘desirous but unable to return to their home without assistance’.23 Formal responsibility for DPs was divided between the military and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which cooperated over arrangements for their repatriation and employed more than 600 Repatriation Officers. Subsequently, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), created by the United Nations in December 1946, defined a DP as someone who had been ‘deported from or has been obliged to leave his country of nationality or of former habitual residence, such as persons who were compelled to undertake forced labour or who were deported for racial, religious or political reasons’. DPs could now make a ‘valid objection’ to repatriation if they feared ‘persecution because of race, religion, nationality or political opinions’. This caused a lasting rift between the IRO and the Soviet Union.24 In a more discursive vein, Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago that the Allies invented the term ‘displaced persons’ during the war ‘for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence’, because the designation ‘stateless person’ at least implied a loss of protection by a sovereign power. As a consequence, she said, DPs knew only one ‘country’, namely the internment camp.25 The camp operated as a carceral institution with its own apparatus for admission, verification, surveillance and discharge. An early account of these arrangements justified confinement on the grounds of keeping the peace between marauding DPs and Germans at the immediate end of the war. But the DP camp became a durable institutional feature of postwar Europe. In chapter 2 Tomas Balkelis draws on the work of Erving Goffman who discussed the procedures that created and governed modern institutions of which the camp was a prime example.26 Power was expressed in an intrusive and all-encompassing manner. Soviet ex-combatants were repatriated to the USSR under the provisions of the Yalta Agreement signed in February 1945, which defined Soviet citizens as those who lived on its territory prior to September 1939. They faced a tough regime of ‘filtration’ under the watchful eyes of military counter-espionage and the secret police, which administered a series of reception centres and


7

‘assembly-transfer points’ (sborno-peresyl’nye punkty), already established by the NKVD in 1941 and providing for interrogation and political instruction as well as medical inspections. As Nick Baron points out in chapter 5, the same regime applied to civilian returnees, who typically spent several weeks in these centres. Analogous verification or otherwise personally intrusive procedures were implemented elsewhere.27 Kateryna Stadnik shows that stringent arrangements applied to Ukrainians who were transferred from Poland to Soviet Ukraine and whose political credentials had to be established, enabling the Soviet authorities to weed out former members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). In Poland the ‘resettlers’ from Ukraine were immediately examined for signs of infection and deloused by the ‘Special Commission for Epidemics’, but checks were also made to ascertain whether any of the newcomers were affiliated to the Polish underground armed resistance (the Armia Krajowa), although many of them had already been identified as such by the Soviet authorities and deported to Siberia.28 The Soviet authorities in Leningrad sought to reassure the resident population that rigorous controls were in place to deal with the epidemiological risks from returnees in order to render them ‘harmless’; these measures are discussed in chapter 6 by Siobhan Peeling. Nor were such controls and procedures an exclusively communist practice. There were concerns that German war criminals were disguising themselves as DPs to evade capture; the vexed issue of wartime collaboration kept UNRRA investigators extremely busy.29 Latvian DPs in Germany regarded as humiliating the intimate physical inspections and X-rays to which they were subjected by the Western Allies, the more so as these health checks exposed infectious disease, other bodily ailments and decaying teeth that directly affected their status as potential immigrants to Britain.30 This process continued into the late 1940s and early 1950s. The IRO devoted huge resources to resettlement. It observed ‘one long connected chain of clearly established procedures, a highly coordinated affair depending on very exact timing’. This process comprised interviews, medical examinations, ‘selection’ and ‘orientation’, in other words, a series of intrusive measures. Revealingly, the official historian of the IRO characterised those who objected as ‘ignorant and prejudiced’.31 The extensive ‘grip’ of the state went hand in hand with the growth of non-governmental organisations. NGOs (part-funded by government) constituted themselves as legitimate forms of intervention, assisting refugees prior to resettlement or arranging sponsorships. They included a plethora of secular and religious organisations. Some, such as the Red Cross, Save the Children Fund, the Society of Friends (Quakers), the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were well established. Others arrived on the scene in the aftermath of the Second World War; these included CARE (Cooperative American Remittances to Europe, later the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere),

8 Peter Gatrell

the World Council of Churches (an ecumenical fellowship formally constituted in 1948), Christian Aid, Oxfam and World Vision, a product of the Korean War.32 In the present volume we offer a case study by Jenny Carson in chapter 4 of British Quaker activism in Germany. Quakers were sometimes asked to justify themselves (‘Why have you left your own country?’) and answered by affirming the ‘spirit’ that prompted concern for fellow human beings. From their perspective there was a close connection between ‘faith’ and ‘action’, although what kind of ‘action’ was appropriate, and how they could negotiate the constraints to which they were subject, caused them immense personal anguish. In the event, Quakers compromised between their wish to promote international reconciliation and the fact that many DPs drew a sharp distinction between themselves and people of a different nationality. But more was at stake in ‘humanitarian’ intervention than the expression of empathy or the demonstration of care informed by religious faith. The extensive field of action enabled them simultaneously to raise their public profile and establish a broader claim to legitimacy and efficacy. Postwar displacement also constituted itself as a field for the demonstration of professional expertise. Nikolas Rose speaks of ‘experts of subjectivity . . . who transfigure existentialist questions …and the meaning of suffering into technical problems about the most effective ways of managing malfunction and improving “quality of life” . . .’.33 Population displacement enabled the affirmation and demonstration of professional expertise. Postwar Europe became a vast field for men and women (some of them, indeed, refugees) to gain and apply a specialised knowledge of medicine, nursing, mental health, psychology, education, social work and welfare, law and engineering.

Experiencing displacement Pieter Lagrou describes the experiences of POWs, deported workers, Jews, political prisoners, ‘collaborationist refugees’ and others as a ‘cacophony of experience’.34 Trying to distinguish the multiple voices is difficult. In terms of the research questions addressed in this book, what opportunities were afforded those who sought to convey their experience of displacement? In what terms did they speak? Did refugees and displaced persons, for example, attempt to harmonise their experience or did they become accustomed to ‘cacophony’? Who spoke loudest and whose voices went unheard? Whatever the answers to these challenging questions, the attempt to relate ‘actual’ experience mattered a great deal to refugees and DPs who wished to communicate and thus to validate it, often in the face of official suspicion or scepticism.35 What context conditioned the terms in which they spoke? Chief among the institutions that governed ‘experience’ was the camp. Much remains obscure about the social, political, cultural and economic life in the ‘strange half-world’ of the DP camps, which were more prevalent in the


9

British zone of occupation than in the French and US zones.36 One historian describes the DP camp as a ‘mini-state’, where ‘effective self-organisation was a precondition for resolute opposition to the threat of forced repatriation’.37 In their contributions, Tomas Balkelis (chapter 2) and Aldis Purs (chapter 3) extend what is already known of its turbulent and lively politics. As the previous section suggests, the camp did not exist in isolation from other projects, which included ‘humanitarian intervention’ and intervention by the diaspora (see below). What of daily life in the camp? According to one historian, DPs were ‘bored, demoralised, disgruntled, feeding a voracious black market, and preyed on by black marketeers’.38 This seems a rather impoverished generalisation to make. DPs sometimes alluded to the sense of shame they felt in having recourse to the black market, and there is more that can be said about this kind of sentiment, to whom it was expressed and under what circumstances.39 We should certainly be alert to other kinds of emotional response. True, inmates complained of a complete lack of privacy. But, as one Latvian informant told Linda McDowell: ‘We lived there for three years. I was a teenager and there was a lot going on . . . I grew up there.’40 Speaking of her life in cramped accommodation in a refugee camp in Trieste after the war, an exiled woman (esule) from Fiume described ‘the tragedy of the war [as] a curious adventure: bombs, fires, alarms and flights to the shelter seemed undecipherable episodes that didn’t endanger me but rather made my life more interesting’. This potential for self-realisation also needs to be woven into the story.41 Certainly, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that DPs created an active political and cultural life in the ‘waiting room’.42 Several universities flourished. Theatrical activity was one element in the rich cultural life among Lithuanian and Ukrainian DPs in Germany. The playwright Antanas Škema ˙ (1910–61) depicted ‘scenes of exile life, filling them with sarcastic irony’, as well as suggesting a mixture of ‘spiritual break, creative search and sometimes loss, sometimes discovery’. Ukrainian productions ranged from satire to classical tragedy. One popular revue, Khozhdenie Mamaia po druhomu sviti (‘Mamai’s pilgrimage through the other world’), introduced Mamai, a character who undertakes a series of picaresque adventures. In one episode he meets Dante at the bottom of the sea, only to be told that he must enter purgatory, a wax museum that is the DP camp with its ‘gossip, newspaper battles, multiplicity of parties and endless speeches about unity’. Hell is the Solovki prison camp in Russia where the ‘sultan’ Stalin invites Mamai and his Cossack companions to ‘return to the motherland’, whereupon Mamai strangles the figure of Death and frees the Cossacks. The play ends with a tribute to Mamai from the wax museum, which he nevertheless chooses to reject.43 It is difficult to reconcile this extraordinary work of imagination with the standard assessments made by many external observers. DPs lived under the spotlight of experts who diagnosed various pathologies of displacement, in

10 Peter Gatrell

particular ‘DP apathy’, to be distinguished from ‘boredom’. UNRRA officials, relief workers and military personnel frequently labelled DPs, particularly Jewish DPs, as ‘inert’, or worse, stigmatised them as ‘uncivilised’. It was but a short step to diagnose a regression to an infantile state.44 Louise Holborn, in her fundamental work on the IRO, maintained that DPs were isolated, insecure, apathetic and embittered, although these negative attributes were, she says, offset by the establishment of new communities along ‘corporate’ lines. Making a distinction between these corporate communities, Holborn added that ‘the Jewish population directed their energies towards the future; it was a hope within the realm of possibility. The non-Jewish group looked back to what had been.’45 Jacques Vernant asserted that ‘neurosis is a common condition among refugees and, quite apart from symptoms of a definitely pathological character, there is every justification in speaking of a “refugee complex”’.46 The sociologist Edward Shils wrote of ‘a widespread psychological regression, i.e. a collapse of adult norms and standards in speech, behaviour and attitude, and a reversion to less mature patterns’, resulting from a loss of ‘original community and family connections’ as well as material deprivation. DPs remained apathetic, ‘cantankerous’ and incapable of ‘rational political thought’. Shils hoped that the DP camps might become ‘experiments in group therapy’, designed to prepare DPs for resettlement in a third country or, failing that, to allow them to settle in Germany.47 In November 1946, the embryonic World Council of Churches noted ‘a growing depression amongst refugees and DPs [at] having to spend a second winter in the camps or under other abnormal conditions’. The Evangelical Refugee Commission spoke of needing to ‘find as many delegates of the Church as possible to live and to find work amongst the refugees, in order to fight against demoralisation’.48 The diagnosis of ‘DP apathy’ retained its respectability for years afterwards. The more helpless, apathetic and dependent the refugees were thought to be, the greater the justification for external assistance of various kinds. A contemporary study of displacement by Kazys Cirtautas conveyed a universe of suffering and moral collapse. In almost apocalyptic terms the author described the consequences of homelessness: Out of the great uncertainties and insecurities of life arises the greed for money, alcohol, women. Their indifference towards common decency amounts to an abandon of morality as a principle of life. They no longer feel themselves bound by ethical precepts. They become a menace, dangerous characters who will stop at nothing.49 He went on to suggest that some refugees had the capacity to transcend immorality, indifference and despondency by finding God: Our portrayal would not be complete were we to ignore the cases in which both parties try to assist each other in mutual helpfulness and sincere


11

understanding. People no longer look upon each other as Catholics or Protestants, Ukrainians or Bavarians, Communists or Socialists, attractive or homely [sic], but as human beings who need to be understood, respected and loved. Such an attitude rests ultimately upon a religious and ethical motivation. It exists, unfortunately, as the exception rather than the rule.50 More also needs to be done to engage with gendering social experience, for example, taking into account the sheer magnitude of violence inflicted on displaced women of all ages by men in positions of authority. This is a subject with many dimensions. A gendered reading of displacement suggests that women had a particular responsibility for the survival of the ‘nation’. Polish women portrayed themselves as ‘helpless’ victims – a rhetorical device that drew attention to the damage inflicted on their bodies and on the Polish nation, without discounting the possibility of discovering a resilience that might yet guarantee its survival. There is also the issue of attending to masculine representations of enfeeblement or impotence and the perceived need to develop mechanisms and resources for ensuring future vitality; the Armenian experience is an interesting case in point. One thinks, too, of the disruption to family structures, the challenge to patriarchal authority, and how this presented difficulties for those who lost their authority yet created opportunities for others.51 This underlines the fact that displacement is never one-dimensional.

Transnational programmes and connections The victorious Allies confronted the question of what to do with the victims of Nazi forced labour who had been deported to the Reich. It was more straightforward – if still contentious – to repatriate men in uniform. So far as civilians were concerned, it became politically explosive to attempt to set a reverse process in motion. Other considerations took precedence. One was to cherry-pick the ‘best’ DPs as workers who would contribute to the task of economic reconstruction in the West; others remained where they were. By 1952 around 80,000 DPs were employed in Germany and Austria.52 But resettlement also posed difficulties. One awkward issue concerned Jewish DPs, whose wish to settle in Palestine came up against British reluctance to approve mass immigration and whose continued incarceration in DP camps became bound up with placating German public opinion at the onset of the Cold War.53 By contrast Poles, Balts, Ukrainians and Russians, having expressed an aversion to going home, could be admitted and resettled under carefully controlled conditions. They were ‘captured’ (so to speak) by the Allies as part of the emerging Cold War, the most promising being invited by the US Air Force to contribute their knowledge of the Soviet system.54

12 Peter Gatrell

Transnational connections also extended to the emergence before the Second World War of ‘epistemic communities’ in relation to questions of health, conservation and pollution.55 This movement of knowledge operated in respect of the relief of DPs in ways that are now beginning to become clear. Monitoring the health of refugees would prepare the ground for the immigration of more productive workers; hence the significance of initiatives taken by members of the international medical community in the US, Europe and Palestine/Israel. The American Joint Distribution Committee, for example, linked up with Zionists in Israel and Europe to promote the cause of ‘mental hygiene’.56 Transnational diasporas that build on dense networks of social relations established over time have played an important role in assisting people newly displaced from the homeland.57 These connections were already well established by 1945 among the Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Jewish and Armenian communities of North America and Western Europe. During the First World War they publicised the effects of enemy occupation on the ‘homeland’ and affirmed a collective ethnic responsibility and duty towards the relief of suffering ‘brethren’ who had become refugees for whatever reason.58 In the aftermath of the Second World War the link between these diasporas and DPs manifested itself in the politics of relief as well as in expressions of loss. The United Ukrainian American Relief Committee, founded in January 1944, joined forces with its Canadian counterpart in 1945 to establish a Central Ukrainian Relief Bureau. Equivalent ‘helping hand’ organisations emerged in Italy, Belgium and France.59 The material interests of Polish DPs were looked after by ‘Polonia’, in the shape of American Relief for Poland (ARP) and the Polish American Immigration and Relief Committee. Louise Holborn praised them for having ‘the confidence of their refugee clientele and [appealing] to old beliefs and traditions they shared with [refugees], thus facilitating their adjustment to a new life’. They campaigned against repatriation and decried the actions of the authorities in the US zone of occupation. Americans of Polish descent were also persuaded to sponsor DPs as immigrants.60 But these connections were sometimes difficult to forge. The same applies to relations between DPs and ‘vintage’ ethnic communities: Angelika Eder has shown, for example, how the small Polish community in Hamburg had little contact with Polish ex-combatants and DPs alike.61 Thus one must exercise caution about the viability and resilience of connections between DPs and the diaspora. This does not mean that diasporas were of no account in political terms or in establishing rhetorical claims to ‘recognition’. Diasporic groups expressed a sense of loss, but also potential ‘recovery’. A Ukrainian spokesman bemoaned the creation of ‘small Ukrainian islands [that] will be washed by foreign seas’, but believed that they would not be ‘swallowed up’, because of intense patriotism and cultural activism.62 The idea of disappearance also figured in Armenian discussions of resettlement, although the situation among


13

Armenians in the diaspora bore little resemblance to the stance adopted by Eastern Europeans. Where Ukrainian, Polish and Baltic DPs saw only the destruction of their independent homelands, many diaspora Armenians in the Middle East and in North America acknowledged that the USSR guaranteed the survival of the homeland, albeit in a Soviet guise. These diasporic organisations – albeit differentiated rather than homogeneous – not only played an important part in sustaining memories of migration, exile and ‘homecoming’ but, as Joanne Laycock shows, also backed a concerted repatriation campaign launched in 1945 by the authorities in Soviet Armenia.63

Migration and memory The profound consequences of forced migration and incarceration now reverberate throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, as Meike Wulf demonstrates in chapter 11. But it was not always thus. To be sure, German expellees played a prominent part in West German politics throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and a dedicated government department helped to keep them in the public eye.64 Yet the corollary was a process of erasing the memory of German cultural life in Poland, where the communist state validated its claims to the newly acquired western territory by claiming that it was inherently Polish (see chapter 9 by Konrad Zielinski). Children were accordingly taught a patriotic version of the history of the ‘recovered lands’ (ziemie odzyskane) in which Germans only had a walk-on part. ‘We are not newcomers to this land, instead we are returning to it’, declared the Polish linguist Mikolaj Rudnicki.65 Most displaced persons could not avail themselves of these formal channels of communication and resources. Soviet civilians who returned from Central Asia at the end of the war found that their experience was at odds with the dominant heroic myth of the ‘Great Patriotic War’.66 The postwar generation of DPs from Eastern Europe found it difficult to gain widespread public recognition of their experience of deportation and incarceration, initially because other political issues had a greater claim on Western attention and later because host societies were unwilling to listen to tales of anti-communist struggle or revanchist claims during the era of détente. In addition, the children of DPs usually looked forward rather than back. But the dramatic political changes in 1989–91 soon unleashed public interest in the events surrounding displacement.67 When close connections were re-established between the diaspora and newly independent states in Central and Eastern Europe, it became important to associate ‘national’ history with the personal experiences of DPs and deportees. Accordingly, a growing market has developed for publications such as memory books and other cultural products. The internet also provides a fresh outlet for the dissemination of memoirs and photograph albums.68

14 Peter Gatrell

Efforts were made at the time to establish a record of displacement, albeit in the face of unsympathetic military authorities in the DP camps. Cirtautas (see above) lamented a lost world: A refugee is always delighted when he finds an opportunity to converse abroad in his mother tongue, perchance in his provincial dialect. For a brief moment he can feel again that he is at home. The sounds, the cadences bring back precious memories. It is as though father and mother were speaking again; the voices of his playmates, the companions of his childhood, resound again on the village green. Once again he seems to breathe the air of home. The folk songs of his hosts remind him of the native airs he used to sing at home . . . These were realities that had become part of his very being. Now they belong to a yesterday, a world that seems to be a fairy land, a way of life in which he knew nothing of the existence of a foreign world. Yet this yesterday is so real, so vivid, that he would gladly give his life if he could restore its beauty. Pondering these folk songs, he discovers in them anew his country’s past with all its triumphs and woes. Here the pastoral idyll draws on ideas of time and space. Time is a previous commodity that should not be wasted, however difficult this might be. One’s own (family) time is understood as a means of reflecting on the nation’s (past) time and on ideas of homeland and exile.69 Expressions of personal loss could sometimes be connected through narrative to broader understandings of national dispossession and displacement, enabling the individual to ‘retrieve meaning and purpose under the most inauspicious circumstances’.70 Narrative convention sustains the idea of an epic journey that links one’s own destiny to that of the collective and ‘inscribe[s] the new genealogy in the host country’.71 These narratives incorporate ideas of individual hurt, couched within a narrative of national ‘trauma’ and suffering, what Liisa Malkki describes as a mythico-history. They focus on the genesis of displacement, the journey, the camp and the constitution of ‘home’. Narratives such as that of Cirtautas attach particular significance to the place one has left behind, which can be ‘recognised’ by sensory association and remembered by means of tangible objects.72 Above all, these narratives enable the author to establish a degree of agency, even if his or her audience is not very sympathetic (see above). Memory is, however, contested, particularly when it comes to establishing ‘guardianship’ over national memory. In Meike Wulf’s chapter we learn how the ‘exile memory’ of displaced Estonians in Sweden contended with ‘homeland Estonians’ living in Soviet Estonia. The exiles viewed those who stayed behind as having betrayed Estonian culture and having been ‘polluted’ by association with the Soviet regime; the homeland Estonians countered that they demonstrated resilience in the face of sovietisation, describing themselves as ‘white geese’.


15

Something similar also operates at the level of formal commemoration practices. In the Julian Marches, contested at the war’s end by Yugoslavia and Italy, Pamela Ballinger has shown how younger refugees from Istria depicted the DP camp as a place of romance and sanctuary from Yugoslav communist violence. As long-term exiles (esuli), however, they more often adopted the role of victims and martyrs, creating shrines in their new homes to departed souls or displaying photographs of abandoned villages. Much of the language and visual imagery supports the idea of a ‘Calvary’ or exodus. Accompanying this is a sense that (like their Estonian counterparts) these exiles maintained a ‘pure’ Italian identity in sharp contrast to what they perceived as the ‘contamination’ with the Yugoslav population that befell the Italians who remained in Istria and who threw in their lot with Communist Yugoslavia in order to contribute to socialism.73 *** Our book is a contribution to the burgeoning literature on the practices and experiences of population displacement. It argues for an historical approach that establishes the larger geopolitical, political, legal and economic framework to which displaced persons were subject – something that earlier authors such as Schechtman, Holborn and Vernant understood very well. We shed additional light on the creation and management of the DP camp, which isolated and held the refugee in a kind of limbo. At the same time, we show that DP camps manifested a degree of porosity, most evident in the transnational connections that DPs maintained with diasporic groups in the absence of politically acceptable links with the ‘homeland’. Our book also addresses the ways in which population transfer, incarceration and resettlement were experienced and understood in terms of space-time. This manifested itself in a variety of ways. Poland’s appropriation of the ‘recovered lands’ entailed not only the exodus of the German population but also a refashioning of space, such that German monuments and cemeteries in Wrocław were dismantled and the material used to build a sports stadium and zoo. By these means the German presence was effaced in time and space.74 Displaced persons frequently related their predicament to having ‘wasted time’ while working as forced labourers or living in DP camps, and state officials and volunteer relief workers made a habit of describing DP life in terms of ‘apathy’ or ‘boredom’. But confinement did not necessarily equate to passivity; the camp was also a site of cultural and educational activities, often connected to ideas that circulated in this milieu about ‘national survival’ and productive of national identities.75 Time was also closely connected to space – the localised space of the DP camp, of course, but also space outside the camp. Time and space were also linked to the geopolitical context. For many DPs, the space beyond offered possibilities of ‘freedom’ (an idea increasingly disseminated by anti-communist interest groups in the West, such as the Assembly of Captive European Nations), but it also disclosed

16 Peter Gatrell

a world of uncertainty and even danger, should they be repatriated. But not all displaced persons thought in these terms: Armenians in the US and in the Middle East actively sought to resolve the space-time issue by ‘returning’ to a national ‘homeland’ in Soviet Armenia. We also suggest that these multiple histories and readings of displacement – personal, collective, institutional – need to be brought into clearer focus and related to one another. Population displacement enabled government officials, professional experts, volunteer caseworkers, camp leaders and refugees to constitute themselves as ‘interests’, including by interacting with one another. Non-refugees justified their actions by engaging with ideas about purposeful intervention, adventure and self-realisation, as opposed to aimlessness and ‘apathy’. But refugees and DPs too had a story to tell, often located within a narrative convention that emphasised ideas of national damage or catastrophe. They devoted time and scarce resources to surviving hardship. Their stories harked back to earlier episodes of displacement as well as to national epics that enabled them to make sense of their predicament. Doubtless there are journeys and tales that remain untold because they do not conform to an established template; the narratives of DPs who remained in Germany and Austria belong in this category. Certainly, there are stories that can now be told because the tectonic plates shifted in Europe after 1989. But none of these stories floats freely. They have cultural underpinnings. They connect with grand projects to build the social and economic foundations of new states in a new geopolitical context and to lay the foundations for further ‘humanitarian’ endeavour.

Notes 1. Two excellent general histories that address the impact of war in Europe are M. Mazower (1998) Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane) and T. Judt (2005) Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Heinemann). See also the indispensable books by E. M. Kulischer (1948) Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press); M. R. Marrus (1985) The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and N. Naimark (2001) Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). The impact of war on people in uniform, via conscription, imprisonment and repatriation, lies outside the scope of this chapter. 2. U. Butalia (2000) The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst & Co.); Y. Khan (2007) The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London: Yale University Press); I. Pappe (2007) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld). Older studies that retain their value include J. B. Schechtman (1946) European Population Transfers 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press); J. B. Schechtman (1949) Population Transfers in Asia (New York: Hallsby Press); J. Vernant (1953) The Refugee in the Postwar World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press); E. Rees (1959) We Strangers and Afraid: the Refugee Story Today (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace); and E. H. S. Chandler


3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

17

(1959) The High Tower of Refuge: The Inspiring Story of Refugee Relief throughout the World (London: Odhams). A key work of political science, with a substantial historical component, published on the eve of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, is A. R. Zolberg, A. Suhrke and S. Aguayo (1989) Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York: Oxford University Press). N. Baron and P. Gatrell (eds) (2004) Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in the Former Russian Empire, 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Books). See also P. Holquist (2003) ‘New Terrains and New Chronologies: the Interwar Period through the Lens of Population Politics’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, IV(1), pp. 163–75; I. Deák (2003) ‘Trying to Construct a Productive, Disciplined, Mono-Ethnic Society: the Dilemma of East Central European Governments, 1914–1956’, in A. Weiner (ed.) Landscaping the Human Garden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 205–17. T. Martin (2001) The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 313–22; K. Brown (2004) A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 134–52, 155–8; N. Baron (2007) Soviet Karelia: Politics, Planning and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920–1939 (London: Routledge), pp. 74–83, 114–19, 179–88. A helpful summary of developments in Eastern Europe is J. Rothschild (1974) East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press). On Russia, see R.W. Davies, M. Harrison and S. G. Wheatcroft (eds) (1994) The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). For the earlier period, see V. G. Liulevicius (2001) War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); E. Lohr (2003) Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). R. Manley (2009) To the Tashkent Station: The Evacuation and Survival of Soviet Civilians during the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). J. T. Gross (2002) Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, new edn.); T. Snyder (2003) The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press); P. M. Polian (2002) Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: zhizn’, trud, unizhenie i smert’ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbaiterov na chuzhbine i na rodine (Moscow: ROSSPEN); G. Swain (2004) Between Stalin and Hitler: Class War and Race War on the Dvina, 1940–46 (London: RoutledgeCurzon); A. Weiner (2001) Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). For boundary changes at the end of both world wars, see P. R. Magocsi (1993) Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, second edition); Mazower, Dark Continent, pp. 217, 221. Schechtman, European Population Transfers, pp. 388–99; P. Ballinger (2003) History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). M. Frank (2007) Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 95; K. Janics (1982) Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority, 1945–1948 (New York: Columbia University Press).

18 Peter Gatrell 12. Frank, Expelling the Germans, pp. 74, 90, 134, 215. 13. V. Stravinskiene (2005) ‘Lietuvos lenku˛ teritorinis pasiskirstymas ir skaiˇciaus kaita (1944 m. antrasis pusmetis – 1947 metai)’, [Territorial Distribution and Demographic Change among Poles in Lithuania, late 1944–1947], Lituanistica LXIV (4), pp. 13–27. Thanks to Tomas Balkelis for this reference. 14. M. Proudfoot (1956) European Refugees: a Study of Forced Population Movements (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press); W. Jacobmeyer (1985) Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimatlosen Ausländer: Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945–1951 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), p. 15. 15. L. J. Hilton (2005) ‘Pawns on a Chessboard? Polish DPs and Repatriation from the US Zone of Occupation of Germany, 1945–1949’, in J-D. Steinert and I. WeberNewth, Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution (Osnabrück: Secolo Verlag), pp. 90–102. 16. D. Sula (2002) Działalno´sc´ przesiedlenczo-repatriacyjna ´ Panstwowego ´ Urz˛edu Repatriacyjnego w latach 1944–1951 (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego); Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations, pp. 179–201; O. Subtelny (2001) ‘Expulsion, Resettlement, Civil Strife: the Fate of Poland’s Ukrainians, 1944– 1947’, in P. Ther and A. Siljak (eds) (2001) Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 155–72. 17. Pastor L. Stumpf to Thomas Jamieson, 25 September 1952, File 425.5.103 Reports, Hong Kong, Pastor Stumpf 1952–1955, WCC Archives, Geneva. 18. On the need for a comparative treatment of population displacement in the Baltic states, see E. Mühle (2005) ‘Resettled, Expelled and Displaced: the Baltic Experience 1945–1951’, in N. Angermann (ed.) Ostseeprovinzen, Baltische Staaten und das Nationale: Festschrift für Gert von Pistohlkors zum 70. Geburtstag (Münster: Schriften der Baltischen Historischen Kommission), pp. 565–89. 19. Important collective studies include Ther and Siljak, Redrawing Nations, and N. Naimark and L. Gibianskii (1997) (eds) The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). See also I. Deák, J. T. Gross and T. Judt (eds) (2000) The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War 2 and its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); S. B. Várdy and T. Hunt Tooley (eds) (2003) Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (New York: Columbia University Press); R. Melville, J. Pešek and C. Scharf (eds) (2007) Zwangsmigrationen im mittleren und östlichen Europa: Völkerrecht, Konzeptionen, Praxis 1938–1950 (Mainz: Von Zabern); and J. Reinisch (2009) (ed.) Displacement and Replacement in the Aftermath of the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). 20. J. Vernon (2005) ‘The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: the Technopolitics of the School Meal in Modern Britain’, American Historical Review, CX(3), pp. 693–725. See also G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf); W. Larner and W. Walters (eds) (2004) Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge); I. Feldman (2008) Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 (Durham NC: Duke University Press). 21. N. Rose and P. Miller (1992) ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, XLIII(2), pp. 173–205; T. Mitchell (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). 22. I. Hacking (2004) ‘Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: Between Discourse in the Abstract and Face-to-Face Interaction’, Economy and Society, XXXIII(3), pp. 277–302. See also R. Zetter (1991) ‘Labelling Refugees: Forming


23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

19

and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity’, Journal of Refugee Studies, IV(1), pp. 39–62. Proudfoot, European Refugees, pp. 115, 149–51. In less formal parlance the term became a ‘blanket label’, being ‘applied indiscriminately by the Allies to former concentration camp inmates, French civilian workers, soldiers of General Vlasov, Soviet POWs, Italian military internees and female Polish agrarian labourers’, according to U. Herbert (1997) Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 376–77. See also M. Wyman (1998) DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, second edition). Proudfoot, European Refugees, pp. 402–18. H. Arendt (1958) The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace), pp. 279, 284. E. Goffman (1968) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Harmondsworth: Penguin, first published 1961). For a statement about the ubiquity of ‘camp life’ in the modern world, see B. Diken and C. Laustsen (2005) Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (London: Routledge), pp. 79–100. See also Proudfoot, European Refugees, p. 177. Iu. N. Arzamaskin (2001) Zalozhniki vtoroi mirovoi voiny: repatriatsiia sovetskikh grazhdan v 1944–1953 gg. (Moscow: Fokus), pp. 10–12, 54, 64–5. In letters sent to Soviet repatriation authorities, desperate civilians complained about conditions in holding centres and camps. According to one survivor, ‘if truth be told, we received better food from the Germans’. Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations, p. 188; J. Misztal (1990) Weryfikacja narodowosciowa na ziemiach odzyskanych (Warszawa: PWN). Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, pp. 179–85. There is a strand of opinion that regards British procedures as remarkably lax, enabling Nazi officials and sympathisers to enter the UK. See D. Cesarani (1992) Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (London: Heinemann). L. McDowell (2005) Hard Labour: The Hidden Voices of Latvian Migrant ‘Volunteer’ Workers (London: UCL Press), p. 81. L. W. Holborn (1956) The International Refugee Organization: A Specialized Agency of the United Nations, its History and Work, 1946–1952 (London and New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 250, 369, 373–4. See also J. Reinisch (2008) ‘Introduction: Relief in the Aftermath of War’, Journal of Contemporary History XLIII (3), pp. 371–404. Holborn, International Refugee Organization, pp. 145–9, 162–5, listing around 200 voluntary societies assisting the IRO’s field operations. There is a useful discussion of CARE in M. Curti (1963) American Philanthropy Abroad: a History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), pp. 491–503. Quoted in A. Ong (2003) Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), p. 16. P. Lagrou (2003) ‘The Nationalisation of Victimhood: Selective Violence and National Grief in Western Europe, 1940–1960’, in R. Bessel and D. Schumann (eds) Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 243–57 (p. 253). Partisans are missing from his list. See the discussion in A. Ager (ed.) (1999) Refugees: Perspectives on the Experience of Forced Migration (London: Continuum); M. Eastmond (2007) ‘Stories as Lived

20 Peter Gatrell

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research’, Journal of Refugee Studies, XX(2), pp. 248–64. See A. Holian (forthcoming) Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press). In addition to works by Wyman and Holborn cited above, studies by Ben Shephard and Daniel Cohen are eagerly awaited. V. Kulyk (2003) ‘The Role of Discourse in the Construction of an Émigré Community: Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria after the Second World War’, in R. Ohliger, K. Schönwälder and T. Triadafilopoulos (eds) European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies since 1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 213–37 (p. 215). Marrus, The Unwanted, p. 323. E. Bakis (1955) ‘DP Apathy’, in H. B. M. Murphy (ed.) Flight and Resettlement (Paris: UNESCO), pp. 84–5. McDowell, Hard Labour, p. 79 (my emphasis). A valuable recent work is J-D. Steinert (2007) Nach Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit: Britische humanitäre Hilfe in Deutschland, Die Helfer, die Befreiten und die Deutschen (Secolo Verlag: Osnabrück). Ballinger, History in Exile, p. 201. This apposite term is used by A. Grossman (2002) ‘Victims, Villains and Survivors: Gendered Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Postwar Germany’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, XI(1–2), pp. 291–318 (p. 302); Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, pp. 160–7. Dalia Kuiziniene (ed.) (2005) Beginnings and Ends of Emigration: Life without Borders in the Contemporary World (Kaunas: Versus Aureus), pp. 193–203, 263–7. See also V. Revutsky (1992) ‘Theatre in the Camps’, in W. W. Isajiw, Y. Boshyk and R. Senkus (eds) The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced Persons after World War 2 (Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press), pp. 292–310 (quotations on pp. 302–3). See the discussion in Grossman, ‘Victims, Villains and Survivors’, pp. 297–8. Grossman suggests that the camp had the potential to become a kind of therapeutic community. Holborn, International Refugee Organization, pp. 191–2. Vernant, The Refugee in the Postwar World, p. 17. E. A. Shils (1946) ‘Social and Psychological Aspects of Displacement and Repatriation’ Journal of Social Issues, II(3), pp. 3–18. For a contemporary critique, see J. Hyndman (2000) Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press). WCC Archives, Geneva, Box 425.1.031, ERC Fieldworkers 1947–1948. C. K. Cirtautas (1963) The Refugee: A Psychological Study (Boston, MA: Meador), pp, 70, 73, first published 1957. I have emphasised the poignant allusion to ceaseless momentum. Cirtautas was born in Lithuania in 1915 and graduated from a Catholic seminary in 1940. He received a doctorate from Wrocław in 1943 (sic) for a thesis on ‘problems of moral education’. He moved to the US in 1950 and in the same year published Porträt des Heimatlosen: Heimatlosigkeit als Weltschicksal. Cirtautas, The Refugee, pp. 59–60. K. Jolluck (2002) Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press); N. M. Wingfield and M. Bucur (eds) (2006) Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Atina Grossman suggests that DPs sought


52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

21

to restore a sense of self through high rates of reproduction and a ‘stubborn’ willingness to survive. Derived from Wyman, DPs, p. 202. A. Grossman (1998) ‘Trauma, Memory and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945–1949’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, XXXVIII, pp. 215–39. A. Inkeles and R. A Bauer (1959) The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). The Harvard Interview Project is now online at http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/index.html. P. Haas (1992) ‘Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination’, International Organization, XLVI(1), pp. 1–35. P. Weindling (ed.) (1995) International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); R. Zalashik and N. Davidovitch (2006) ‘Measuring Adaptability: Psychological Examinations of Jewish Detainees in Cyprus Internment Camps’, Science in Context, XIX(3), pp. 419–41. Ö. Wahlbeck (2002) ‘The Concept of Diaspora as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Refugee Communities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, XXVIII(2), pp. 221–38; A. Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge); G. Sheffer (2003) Diaspora Politics at Home and Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). P. Gatrell (1999) A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. 148, 161, 169, 271. M. Dyczok (2000) The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 70–1, 86–8; M.B. Kuropas (1992) ‘Ukrainian-American Resettlement Efforts, 1944–1954’, and L. Y. Luciuk (1992) ‘A Troubled Venture: UkrainianCanadian Refugee Relief Efforts, 1945–51’, both in Isajiw, Boshyk and Senkus (eds) The Refugee Experience, pp. 385–401 and 435–57. Holborn, International Refugee Organisation, p. 147; J. Cisek (2006) Polish Refugees and the Polish-American Immigration and Relief Committee (Jefferson, NC: McFarland). A. Eder (2003) ‘Polish Life in West Germany after 1945’, Sarmatian Review XXIII (2) available online at www.ruf.rice.edu/%7Esarmatia/403/232eder.html. The full statement is in R. Ilnytzkyj (1992) ‘A Survey of Ukrainian Camp Periodicals, 1945–1950’, in Isajiw et al., The Refugee Experience, pp. 287–8. P. Gatrell (2007) ‘Displacing and Replacing Population in the Two World Wars: Armenia and Poland Compared’, Contemporary European History, XVI(4), pp. 511–27. I. Connor (2007) Refugees and Expellees in Postwar Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Key texts include G. Thum (2003) Die fremde Stadt: Breslau 1945 (Munich: Siedler Verlag), esp. pp. 304–86 (quotation on p. 341), and B. Linek (1999) ‘ “De-Germanisation” and “Re-Polonisation” in Upper Silesia, 1945–50’, in Ther and Siljak (eds) Redrawing Nations, pp. 121–34. On the expellees, see R. Moeller (2001) War Stories: the Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). Manley, To the Tashkent Station. This point is made in the preface to the second edition of Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons. See the Kresy-Siberia website, www.kresy-siberia.org/links.html, accessed 6 April 2009.

22 Peter Gatrell 69. Cirtautas, The Refugee, pp. 51–2, 128. 70. V. Skultans (1998) The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (London: Routledge), p. 126. See also A. H. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod (eds) (2006) Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press). 71. G. Noiriel (1996) The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship and National Identity (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press), p. 116. 72. L. Malkki (1993) ‘National Geographic: Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialisation of National Identity among Scholars and Peoples’, Cultural Anthropology, VII(1), pp. 24–44; G. Ben-Ezer (2002) The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977–1985 (London: Routledge). 73. Ballinger, History in Exile, pp. 195–201. See also P. Ballinger (1998) ‘The Culture of Survivors: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Memory’, History and Memory, X(1), pp. 99–132; G. L. Uehling (2004) Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Return (New York: Palgrave). 74. Thum, Die fremde Stadt, pp. 387–92. Thum also speaks of a ‘ruralisation’ of Wrocław in the immediate aftermath of war. 75. In addition to the references above, see A. Holian (2008) ‘Displacement and the Postwar Reconstruction of Education: Displaced Persons at the UNRRA University of Munich, 1945–1948’, Contemporary European History, XVII(2), 167–95.

Part I Transit: National Experiences and International Interventions in Postwar Displaced Persons Camps


2 Living in the Displaced Persons Camp: Lithuanian War Refugees in the West, 1944–54 Tomas Balkelis

Introduction At the end of Second World War refugees were everywhere: on the roads and streets, in cellars, bomb shelters, train stations and army barracks. They had, in Modris Eksteins’ words, become ‘the symbolic centrepiece’ of war.1 According to United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) estimates, at the end of 1946, more than 60,000 Lithuanians could be found in three Western zones of occupation in Germany, Austria and Italy. This was only a fraction of the estimated 250,000 who left Lithuania during the war, as forced labourers deported to Germany, as men drafted into the German armed forces or as refugees fleeing the Soviet advance in 1944.2 The majority were settled in more than 113 displaced persons (DP) camps, where all but a relatively small number remained until they were allowed to emigrate in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This chapter explores aspects of what has been described as the ‘DP camp mentality’, with a particular focus on the Lithuanian experience.3 It investigates how the camp shaped the lives of war refugees from Lithuania. Lithuanians were, of course, but one of several displaced groups who shared similar war experiences and who also left a considerable archive of their activities as refugees.4 Their war and postwar experiences are most readily comparable to those of Latvians and Estonians. During the war, all three Baltic states experienced three occupations, lost their statehood and faced a mass civilian displacement to both the West and East.

The DP camp as a ‘total institution’ In his seminal study Asylums, first published in 1961, Erving Goffman developed the concept of ‘a total institution’. A total institution, as he understood it, is a place of residence and work where a large number of individuals, cut off from the wider society for a significant length of time, together lead an enclosed and rigidly administered life. Goffman argued that such institutions 25

26 Tomas Balkelis

have an ‘encompassing character’, which creates a ‘barrier to social intercourse with the outside’. Among their key features are the ‘breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating [different] spheres of life’ and internal power hierarchies that develop within them.5 Goffman analysed mental asylums, prisons, convents and hospitals – he never applied his concept to refugee camps – but key conceptual features of a total institution were also apparent in the DP camp.6 According to Goffman, in a total institution ‘all aspects of life were conducted in the same place and under the same single authority’.7 By moving into a DP camp, refugees forfeited most of their liberties and rights as citizens of their former states. They became stateless persons in need of help and protection. In this instance, centralised authority was constituted by UNRRA and subsequently the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). As in other total institutions, each inmate in the DP camp had to reside in the immediate company of a large group of others. The refugee camp, like other such institutions, provided total care. Daily activities were usually scheduled according to regulations imposed from above; in Goffman’s words, ‘the various enforced activities were brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfil the official aims of the institution’.8 Although the DP camps were primarily intended to provide temporary relief, they also functioned to isolate refugees from the outside world. Not only did the Allies and many refugees themselves hold Germany responsible for their traumatic wartime experience, Germany’s shattered economy was barely able to cope with the large number of ethnic German expellees (Vertriebene). Thus, humanitarian and economic factors lay behind the Allies’ decision in June 1944 to separate non-German refugees in assembly centres and later in special camps.9 The camps greatly facilitated the registration of refugees and the distribution of relief and medical aid. Western officials also wished to verify refugees’ personal histories and political backgrounds. From this perspective, the DP camps enabled the refugee population to be ‘sifted’. Thus political considerations made the camp as ‘a total institution’ even more necessary. DP camps disclosed a basic distinction between a large number of inmates and a small supervisory staff who might be drawn from UNRRA or IRO, or from committees newly recruited from among the residents. This distinction soon translated into a distinct power hierarchy: staff tended to feel superior and in full control, whereas the inmates, in some ways at least, were expected to feel inferior, in need of protection or even responsible for their predicament. This naturally created a social distance between the two groups. Characteristically, the inmates often found themselves excluded from decisions regarding their fate, during ‘screenings’, relief measures and the repatriation process. Despite the fact that many camps were run simultaneously by UNRRA and the camp committees, this social distance remained one of the key factors shaping the outlook of camp inmates, as we shall see.

Living in the Displaced Persons Camp

27

The DP camp was a social hybrid, being part-residential community and part-formal organisation. Furthermore, it became, in Goffman’s words, ‘a natural experiment on what can be done to the self’.10 The social and psychological impact of the camp manifested itself on multiple levels. In this respect I shall look specifically at the various adaptation strategies developed by Lithuanian inmates in the DP camps.11

The DP camp as a site of multiple interventions One of the possible ways of examining the DP camp as a total institution is as a site of multiple interventions both from outside and within. Intervention here means a set of intrusive and cross-cutting policies that sought to control the refugees or competed for their loyalties. These interventions affected individuals by imposing limitations on their private space or moral behaviour, and the collective by enforcing certain rules of group behaviour, forms of work and leisure activities. Here I pose questions as to how such interventions worked politically, administratively and socially. The camp was a site for political intervention: a series of ‘screenings’, political siftings, propaganda campaigns and attempts at forced repatriation conducted by the Western military, UNRRA and IRO, and also by the Soviets, who initially enjoyed almost unlimited access to the camps. This political pressure had serious consequences for the lives, mindset and political outlook of most DPs. In the best scenario they might lose the privilege of care in the camp; in the worst, they could be forcibly repatriated and face the serious risk of further repression. To counteract this pressure, inmates used various strategies to avoid that possibility. Second, the camp may be viewed as a site for administrative intervention by UNRRA, IRO and camp officials who regulated the everyday lives of the inmates by controlling resources and operating a system of rewards and penalties. Most of the rules were imposed from outside; relatively few were designed locally. For example, refugees’ mobility was restricted by a night-time curfew and inmates required a pass if they wished to leave the camps. Despite these administrative pressures, DP camps were not prisons: DPs could travel, work and study outside the camps and change their place of residence. Indeed, over the course of time, the camp regime became in some respects more benign. Nevertheless, officially at least, any movement outside the camps was subject to control and regulation.12 Third, the camp can be regarded as a site of intervention from within. Owing to its isolation and the characteristic regimented life, the camp was almost an ideal setting for political indoctrination. The Allies advocated gradually shifting responsibility for all aspects of camp administration from a central authority to selected groups of inmates.13 Various elite groups vied for the political and ideological backing of the refugees. These self-appointed camp authorities spoke on behalf of the rank and file. Some groups were

28 Tomas Balkelis

closely related to the camp establishment, but others developed their own political or cultural agendas based on their pre-war political or religious affiliations. This point is barely mentioned in the official records or in accounts of the DP experience produced by nationalist historians. If the official records fully supported these camp groups or were ignorant of them due to the linguistic barrier, the historians were more preoccupied with seeing the DP episode as a page in the heroic ‘national history’. Intervention of this kind was largely a result of officially sanctioned camp collectivism and the uncertain international status of the DPs. It was closely tied to the issue of emigration and the DPs’ international credibility. In essence, as we shall see, this community pressure worked on two levels: as an effort to present DPs to the outside world as ‘suitable’ candidates for emigration and as a struggle to preserve their ‘moral face’ in the light of deteriorating conditions in the camps. The following sections discuss each of these interventions in greater detail.

Living in fear: repatriation, propaganda and camp politics The DP camp was a site of intensive political intervention which originated largely from attempts by the Allies and UNRRA to repatriate as many DPs as possible. The fact that during first two months of peace more than five million people returned to their former homelands further strengthened their determination to solve the DP crisis by means of repatriation. However, growing inter-Allied tensions and pressure from public opinion and émigrés, coupled with a wave of discontent among the DPs, forced a gradual revision of this policy. As a result, from December 1945 in the US occupation zone and from mid-1946 in the French and British zones, repatriation became voluntary.14 In her study of Ukrainian DPs, Marta Dyczok shows how the intransigence of Ukrainian refugees and exiles helped to change Western policy. Other refugees, including those from the Baltic, also openly opposed repatriation. Although by October 1946 the Baltic DPs, who had not been citizens of the Soviet Union before 1 September 1939, were excluded from the repatriation of Soviet DPs, they still had to go through a series of ‘screenings’, the primary purpose of which was to reduce the number of refugees in UNRRA’s care and to encourage their repatriation.15 These screenings only stopped in late 1946 after the joint appeal of the Baltic prelates to all Christian nations.16 Refugees had little control over the screening process: the reason for their ejection from camps was not disclosed and they had no right of appeal. They felt helpless against ‘nameless and faceless officials’ who could interrogate them for hours using a 57-point questionnaire.17 One account noted that ‘everyone is concerned with his future. Everyone thinks that one can be ejected either today or tomorrow’.18 The presence of Soviet officials on the screening boards, as well as questions about family members (if any) living in Lithuania, added to their anxiety. Screenings also provided an opportunity


29

to settle personal or political scores with camp neighbours: an anonymous letter to an UNRRA commission could lead to the loss of refugee status.19 Often conducted by UNRRA or military representatives who did not know their language (interviews were conducted in English, Russian or German), these screenings resulted in several groups of refugees being ejected from the camp. They included those who had left Lithuania in 1941, Lithuanians originating from the Memel (Klaipeda) region, ex-Wehrmacht servicemen and those who arrived in the Western zone of occupation after the deadline. In the American zone, this was 1 August 1945 and, as a result, more than 3,000 Lithuanians there lost their DP status.20 One DP publication reported: The position of those expelled from the DP camps . . . is very bad. Family members are often separated. Persons expelled . . . are compelled to accept German identification papers and are transferred to transit camps across Germany. This procedure closely resembles the labour slavery of Hitler’s time because separated from their relatives and compatriots the Balts are entirely at the mercy of the hostile German authorities.21 Some of those expelled were able to transfer to other zones and have their DP status restored, but others saw no option other than to return to the Soviet Union.22 After the screenings, the visits of Soviet officials were the second most feared intervention in camp life. From June 1945 to mid-1946, Soviet repatriation commissions, staffed by political officers and intelligence agents, with the full consent of the Western allies, operated unrestricted in hundreds of DP camps.23 Soviet officers enjoyed direct access to the camps (and often to the camp records), where they lectured DPs on their ‘patriotic duty’ to return to Lithuania and on the advantages of life in the Soviet Union. DPs had no right to refuse to attend these so-called ‘information meetings’. One Lithuanian described an ‘information meeting’ which took place in Tübingen camp in the French zone. A Soviet officer urged the Lithuanians to return and his French counterpart, Colonel Roché, urged the Lithuanians to accept the offer by reassuring them that ‘some will be taken to Lithuania, some to the Ukraine, others will go to Siberia [sic]’. Seeing the lack of a positive response, he asked the DPs why they were so reluctant. Someone explained that Lithuanians did not speak Russian.24 When only a minority took up the offer of repatriation, UNRRA, with the consent of the Soviets, introduced a 60-day food ration in early 1947 for those who decided to repatriate. It had little effect.25 The Soviets conducted an active propaganda campaign among the DPs to entice them to return to Soviet Lithuania. In 1948 the émigré press reported that refugee camps in Germany are flooded with Communist literature . . . It is distributed by IRO’s British and American officers. According to IRO’s

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own data, 21,000 copies of the Baltic Soviet Republics’s papers, magazines and books were distributed in the British zone in October 1947 alone.26 Lithuanian DPs were also exposed to Soviet propaganda by radio. During these twice-weekly broadcasts civilian life in capitalist societies such as England, Belgium and Holland was depicted as ‘continuous misery’ compared to life in the Soviet Union.27 In 1947 the Soviet Lithuanian authorities published the newspaper Tevynes balsas (‘Voice of the Homeland’) addressed specifically to the Lithuanian DPs. The newspaper, whose editor also edited the leading Soviet Lithuanian daily Tiesa (‘Truth’), described the mass of ordinary DPs as helpless victims of war, easily manipulated by Allied propaganda, by former Nazis disguised as DPs and by local nationalist committees. Soviet propaganda articles featured the names of those DPs who repatriated, stories of camp life and repatriation, and even group photographs. In one such instance, ‘the pianist Liudas Kuprevicius writes: do not hesitate to come back to Lithuania!’28 The propaganda appealed not only to the minds of refugees, but also to their patriotism: ‘You, DP Lithuanians, are like a branch broken from a healthy and thriving tree of the nation’.29 The use of arboreal metaphors, common to a nationalist discourse, was directed at all Lithuanian DPs, irrespective of their social status. The majority of the Lithuanian DPs had no illusions about the Soviet regime in Lithuania. The brutal Soviet occupation of 1940–41, mass deportations of the summer of 1941 and the armed resistance after 1944 were key experiences that shaped their strongly anti-Soviet stance. In contrast to Western public opinion and to the dismay of UNRRA officials, they never saw the Soviets as ‘liberators’. The few who chose to return were escorted from Soviet assembly centres in the West into Soviet filtration camps. One Lithuanian DP, a former German labour deportee, recalled his journey: In May 1945 our DP camp was visited by Soviet officers who urged us to return to the homeland. They praised changes in the Soviet Union and promised that our journey home would be comfortable. We left after a week. . . . [In the Soviet zone] we were met with reproaches: ‘You have worked for the Nazis! Get out of our sight before we shoot you!’ We reached Warsaw on foot, without the slightest trace of soup or bread. In Grodno we were locked . . . in former stables. They continued to insult and snub us for a month. Their insults were worse than those of the Nazis. In the camp there were several hundred Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians and people of other nationalities. We received no food, not even the slush that we used to get in the [DP] camp . . . This was our ‘filtration’ by the postwar ‘father’. Not everyone was able to get out. I think the rest were deported, while some just disappeared.30 In 1945, before UNRRA operations got into their stride, about 60,000 Lithuanians returned to Soviet Lithuania from Germany. Of those only half


31

were allowed to settle in Lithuania, the rest were deported to different parts of the Soviet state.31 Lithuanian refugees resisted the screenings and Soviet pressure by means of forged DP identity cards, faked war biographies, petitions, hunger strikes and sometimes physical violence. In March 1947, all Baltic DPs in the Augsburg camp (in the US zone) went on a one-day strike: they refused to take any food, switched off the camp lights and marched round the camp singing their national anthem.32 Soviet officials were frequently met with threats of violence by camp inmates and had to have a military escort while visiting Baltic and Ukrainians DPs.33 In Kufstein camp in Austria, the Lithuanian DPs punctured the tyres of a jeep used by a NKVD officer.34 The DP press in Germany countered Soviet propaganda by verifying the names and personal stories of those mentioned in Tevynes balsas. It turned out that many of those former DPs who returned to Soviet Lithuania had fake identities or had been excluded from the DP camps for various criminal offences.35

Oming to terms with DP status In the chaos of the final weeks of war, Lithuanian refugees made no rush to the first refugee assembly centres hurriedly established by the Allies. The gradual transition of power enabled many to travel between different regions of Germany, and peace allowed them to compare living conditions in different areas.36 A Lithuanian refugee candidly described his early whereabouts in postwar Germany: ‘Where are we going to stay? The future seemed uncertain, but we did not lose our hope’.37 What was certain, however, was that the majority ruled out any return to Soviet-occupied Lithuania for they vividly remembered the Soviet atrocities that had occurred in the twelve months following the first Soviet occupation in June 1940.38 When the military authorities began to register them in July 1945 (UNRRA only became operational in September 1945), war refugees officially became DPs. According to the official definition, this status applied to civilians displaced from their countries of residence due to the war and who wanted to be repatriated or resettled in a new country but were unable to do so without help.39 How did the displaced Lithuanians respond to their new status? On the one hand, it offered them legal protection: only registered DPs were entitled to official relief. Henceforth local German authorities had no legal control over them. On the other hand, it meant that they formally lost their rights as citizens of their former states. The new DP identity paper included fingerprints instead of a photograph, while the old passport became a piece of memorabilia. One refugee wrote in his memoirs: This is how we became persons of unenviable fate, depersonalised and marked by the two letters, DP. We have lost our human and citizen rights and became nothing more than a Displaced Person.40

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The Lithuanians reacted to this change by bitterly transcribing the acronym ‘DP’ as Dievo paukšteliai (literally, ‘birds of God’), although this metaphor was also capable of embracing the idea of an escape to a freer life. Coming to terms with their new DP identity was a long and painful process. In many respects it resembled a process of mortification, which, according to Goffman, occurs when a person enters a total institution and undergoes a series of ‘radical shifts in his moral career . . . in the beliefs that he has concerning himself and significant others’.41 In other words, the DP had to abandon his or her past and surrender to a new status as a DP. One of the key features of this transformation was the loss of self-reliance and confidence. Many DPs felt depressed by the fact that they were heavily dependent on the mercy of strangers. A Lithuanian DP newspaper editorial summed up the overall mood: We, the DPs, are the great concern of the world. But the world has become a great concern for us too . . . In general the essence of UNRRA is giving and taking. We, the DPs, are the ones who take . . . Who, then, are we: beggars, victims or brothers in arms? These questions must be answered, otherwise we shall not be worthy of our name . . . Besides, our relations with those who give can lead to misunderstandings.42 To sum up, being a DP was accepted as an inevitable ordeal, but it might yet be temporary. The first public poll conducted among the Lithuanian DPs by the newspaper Žiburiai [‘The Lights’] showed that the overwhelming majority ‘expressed their hope of returning to their free homeland’.43 At the same time, refugee status also seemed to reinforce a shared historical memory, enabling DPs to interpret their bitter experience as yet another element in the historical narrative of Lithuania’s collective suffering and foreign occupation.

Living conditions Transfer to a DP camp entailed not only the loss of personal freedom but also exposure to life in a very different environment. One contemporary described how ‘Germans came to be de-Nazified, and the DPs came to be collectivised, turned into material objects and placed in a camp’. While German civilians were allowed to keep their private space, ‘DPs have to squeeze in under their decrepit beds together with their potatoes, cabbage, carrots, shoes and other personal belongings’. The fact that most camps were established in former German army barracks, labour camps, warehouses, factory buildings and even former Nazi concentration camps lowered refugees’ morale still further. Having spent their second Christmas in former German army stables, one group of Lithuanians expressed their indignation by asking, ‘Was this indeed our liberation?’ In the DP camp, thick, cold walls, small windows and narrow corridors barely lit by dim electric lights created a sense of isolation and abandonment. As this same DP noted, ‘we are living a life that no one is interested in’.44


33

Many were shocked and disturbed by the lack of private space. Several families often had to share a single room, in which only flimsy curtains separated one family from another. Single men were often obliged to find a space in lofts. A cartoon from the time (Figure 2.1) conveys something of the

Figure 2.1

‘A DP room in an unknown place’.

Source: Dypukas, Kempten DP camp, 10 August 1946, No. 1, p. 15. Reproduced by kind permission of the Archive of the Institute for Diaspora Studies, Kaunas University.

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overcrowded conditions, in which the butcher worked in close proximity to amorous couples, and where the enforced loss of privacy afforded opportunities to the Peeping Tom.45 No wonder some observers drew a comparison with life on a Soviet collective farm: If earlier, while living in our homeland, we knew about each other only from our personal encounters, today one can hear every single conversation, even our breathing at night behind thin walls, and everything becomes public knowledge. Collective life exposes everything. Not only have we become tired of one another’s company, we have also lost mutual respect. . . . This kolkhoz [collective] life has turned us into dull and banal people.46 The transfer of DPs from one camp to another was commonplace so that those who found a degree of security and stability in one camp had no guarantee that they would remain there. As one memoir put it, ‘today we are here, tomorrow we are already somewhere else - endless transfers went on for four years when we lived in those miserable camps’.47 DPs felt trapped, no matter whether they stayed in one camp or were transferred to another.

Camp administration Most DP camps were run directly by military officials and UNRRA/IRO, but they were all short-staffed. In August 1945, UNRRA deployed 2,500 staff to oversee more than one million DPs.48 Although it engaged extra staff, UNRRA also devised ‘camp committees’ staffed by prominent DPs, including former political figures, civil servants and priests, who worked alongside UNRRA administrators. Most committees were formed along ethnic lines. A typical camp committee would be elected by inmates or appointed by UNRRA for a limited period of time. It took responsibility for a wide range of functions, including DP registration and placement, food and shelter, employment, camp maintenance and hygiene, and educational, cultural and religious activities. The committees also provided ‘legal advisers’ who liaised between the camp administration and inmates. Elections to the committee involved most camp residents, but the democratic process unleashed a power struggle among different elite groups. The resulting infighting was seen as an unpleasant aspect of camp life.49 Camp committees had a much deeper impact on the lives of ordinary DPs than did UNRRA, whose staff had a limited grasp of the languages spoken by the DPs and knew little of Baltic history and culture. The committees levied community taxes to fund their activities. They had the right to punish inmates who broke camp rules. The Lithuanian Exile Community


35

(Lietuviu˛ tremtiniu bendruomene, ˙ LTB) (see below) even considered imprisonment of DPs who broke the rules.50 At the end of the year UNRRA felt obliged to curb excessive disciplinary practices, reaffirming the exclusive right of the military to fine or arrest DPs.51 However, the committees had the power to limit inmates’ freedom of movement and cut their rations. Such power terrified the DPs: losing the food ration was tantamount to slow starvation. No wonder most refugees regarded the committees as part of the ‘establishment’ which encouraged corruption and venality. Local camp bureaucrats ran a system of rewards and punishments: those who adhered to the rules were rewarded with extra privileges, but those who broke them might forfeit their limited rights. Ordinary DPs sought out and befriended members of the local DP camp committee as one way of improving their family’s living conditions, but they were often placed in an invidious position. One DP commented bitterly that ‘a camp court can punish a person for profiteering in such a way that in order to pay his fine he has to keep profiteering’.52

Employment The social composition of the Lithuanian DP population was more diverse than some historians have suggested.53 A 1947 survey of 74,000 Baltic DPs in the British zone showed that 5,600 came from professional intelligentsia, 8,500 were formerly administrators or had worked in commerce, while 10,000 and 12,500 were farmers and workers respectively.54 More than 40 per cent were aged between 17 and 35. Adult men made up 42 per cent of the total number, while 34 per cent were adult women.55 DPs who managed to get jobs either in the camp or outside were considered fortunate. In 1945–46 the unemployment rate among DPs reached 90 per cent.56 In Scheinfeld, a typical DP camp in the American zone, only 112 inmates out of a total population of 1,200 were employed, of whom 43 worked in the camp administration and 17 were members of the camp police. The rest, for the most part, had menial jobs.57 According to UNRRA, 58 per cent of Balts in the British zone had found work by 1947, but camps such as Seedorf, where most of the male DPs were employed in forestry, were the exception rather than the rule.58 Baltic DPs were widely used in construction, as in rebuilding in Hamburg, where 5,000 Balts worked. Nevertheless, these jobs tended to be short-term. Certain professions were in high demand; doctors, for example, were widely employed as camp personnel. In general, however, even those who were gainfully employed tended to work for extra and more varied food rations or to avoid irksome camp committee requirements. Pay was miserable and often came in the form of cigarettes.59 As a rule, social divisions in the DP community seemed to be reinforced by the few limited opportunities of employment available. Only those who had the support of the camp committee could expect to get decent work.

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Social distinctions: camp elite and inmates According to Goffman, a staff/inmate split is a typical feature of any total institution that manages large numbers of people.60 The institutional character of the camp was responsible for creating a distinction between the camp establishment and ordinary refugees. Control of better food rations, relief distribution and access to jobs increased the power of local camp bureaucrats over the inmates. One refugee recalled that, in his camp, committee members received 66 packs of cigarettes each, while other inmates got only ten.61 Another noted: Subjects complain about their superiors, who . . . issue orders according to their own wishes. Ordinary refugees are being pushed around. No wonder that one can become afraid of your own people, not foreigners.62 But there was more to it than this. The DP camp frequently revived the social structure of pre-war Lithuania, with the result that, as one refugee noted, ‘having just arrived in the camp, people soon became divided according to their former jobs and rank’. Lithuanian men continued to address each other by their pre-war social status in the camp.63 Although the war appeared to render obsolete the old class distinctions, in so far as everyone was a DP, in practice the camp reproduced traditional hierarchies. The young Lithuanian poet A. Nyka-Niliünas captured this in his diary: When I went to a warehouse of the [Lithuanian] Red Cross to get a new coat, they offered me a tattered rag from a pile of clothing for ‘ordinary folk’. They would not let me go into a room where they kept quality clothes for special people. . . . A woman explained to me that only ‘venerable nationals’ are allowed there.64 ‘Ordinary folk’ expressed their frustration about misrule by the camp committees in satirical newspapers. The liberal paper Mintis (‘Thought’), published in the US zone, provided an outlet for these emotions. One writer likened the committee members to ‘a cabinet of ministers, only without top hats’;65 another described them as behaving like ‘gentry among their serfs’.66 DPs poked fun in other terms: ‘Avoid a committee treasurer from a distance. Otherwise he will pull out a charity list and will ask for a donation to the camp community’.67 A DP editorial regretfully concluded that ‘there is no close relationship between the camp establishment and refugees’.68 Living in the collective setting of the camp came at a price. The loss of private initiative brought about by the fact that the DPs became passive recipients of relief was one of them. Cramped living conditions, a poor diet, monotonous routine and high unemployment all induced boredom and social isolation. Shrinking private space corresponded to an increasing


37

role of the collective in supervising camp activities. The weakened social ties between DPs and evidence of depression in turn encouraged community control and bureaucratic intervention. The term ‘DP apathy’ soon entered the official language of authorities and became a subject for study from outside.69 Within the camp, officials monitored morale by trying to identify the vices that afflicted the ordinary DPs. Žiburiai, one of the largest newspapers controlled by the conservative intelligentsia, identified drunkenness, profiteering, apathy and self-centredness. By appealing to the Catholic Church and DP press, the editors called for action: ‘We must save our nationals, who are already unable help themselves!’70

The struggle for DP morality Moving into a refugee camp meant entering an arena in which one lived under the scrutiny of international agencies. The military authorities, UNRRA and IRO made it clear that DPs who broke camp rules, particularly by getting involved in illegal political or social activities, did not deserve official relief and could be denied protection. This meant transfer to the German authorities or repatriation. Later, external scrutiny was linked to the issue of eligibility for admission to a third country. As a result of this official pressure, DPs’ reputations and representation to the world beyond the camp assumed key importance. This concern permeated camp politics, relations between various ethnic groups, camp institutions, the DP press and even the private lives of individuals. Ethnic DP communities competed among themselves to prove to the Allies and each other that they were trustworthy representatives of the nation. One spokesman summed it up thus: For the Lithuanian community the conditions of exile provide a unique opportunity to reveal their national spirit through a constant contact with other nations. Now strangers pass judgment on our nation and its culture from the actions of its individual members and small communities. . . . Therefore, before showing up to strangers, we must ask ourselves . . . whether our performance [sic] will unveil the Lithuanian spirit and tell others who we are and what we want.71 According to the Lithuanian DP philosopher Juozas Girnius, concern with ‘the Lithuanian character’ was not so much a reflection on the psychological condition of the DPs, as a survival instinct of the whole nation facing new adverse conditions.72 The DP camp became a site where the ‘national spirit’ was to be forged and defended. This was to be achieved through cultural activity, the only relatively unrestricted field left to the refugees.73 For many DPs this became a means of maintaining their self-respect and dignity in the monotonous and depersonalising life of the camp. Meanwhile, the idea of a ‘national image’

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and collective reputation became a significant element in the efforts of DPs to preserve their identities. In an editorial entitled ‘We and the Strangers’, a Lithuanian DP said, ‘we have to get along with and present ourselves well to the Americans, British, French, Belgians, Dutch, Danish, Norwegians and Swedes among the officials of the occupation authorities and UNRRA’. The author concluded that this must be done because ‘the members of these nations are representatives of the cultured Western world’ and their help could be indispensable for DPs’ care and Lithuania’s future.74 Nevertheless, under camp conditions the appropriate representation of the national community could be achieved only with a great difficulty. As a result of their prolonged isolation, camp residents were regarded as having fallen prey to a variety of social and mental maladies. The camp elite singled out ‘DP idleness, illegal profiteering, drunkenness, gambling, loose sexual behaviour, hooliganism, crimes against private property, evasion of work, violence, lack of solidarity and denunciations of other nationals’.75 The patriotic intelligentsia were quick to attack these ‘social vices’. One contemporary lamented, ‘there are some DP camps where the production of homemade vodka is a form of national sports. . . . A typical sight at night in a camp is the presence of our drunk fellow men singing’.76 Another wrote: Card gambling became an epidemic in camps . . . Everything is being put aside, all work and business, people even forget to eat, they arrive late at work because they need to sit at a card table and gamble. . . . Community leaders gamble as well as ordinary people.77 Apathy, nervousness, poor hygiene and weakening communal ties were also noted as everyday features of camp life. One writer concluded that ‘overall, one has to admit that the life in a camp is a dull and all-impoverishing experience’.78 Others suggested that one of the ways to overcome camp boredom was to get involved in different cultural activities. No wonder that the camp intelligentsia saw the struggle for the DPs’ morality as their main objective. Their disciplinary campaign led to the virtual ‘nationalisation’ of camp life, on the grounds that ‘every Lithuanian exile morally represents not only himself, but also the whole community and the entire nation’.79 The patriotic leaders spoke and acted on behalf of the collective, claiming responsibility as guardians of ‘the DPs’ moral behaviour’. Some certainly were saved from the misery of the camp life by being drawn into the collective. But this campaign in effect turned a DP camp into a site of intense supervision. Although personal control became the responsibility of the inmate, external control by the elite was more prominent. The call for discipline and morality was accompanied by reproaches to ‘those who denigrate their good name [and] also degrade the name of all refugees and the whole nation’.80 Some of these moral guardians even cautioned against ‘showing that life [in a camp] is full of joy and plenty’ lest this create an impression to foreigners that ‘we are too arrogant’.81


39

Other observers complained that ‘another cancer of our camp life is the loose sexual conduct among our youth. Under the conditions of exile their behaviour became immoral’. One consequence was the spread of venereal diseases.82 Although inmates as a rule were reluctant to marry, those who married foreign spouses became a target of opprobrium. Thus, in the multinational camp of Kufstein in Austria (in the French zone), which housed about 150 Lithuanians, half of all marriages were with members of other ethnic groups.83 For the nationalist zealots, this too amounted to ‘loose sexual conduct’. ‘From a national perspective people like that are dead for Lithuania’s future’, wrote one commentator, referring to ‘those young Lithuanian males who forsake the chastity of Lithuania’s daughters and seek the protection of a foreign woman’.84 Their justification that such marriages offered a chance to escape from the miserable camp conditions was to no avail: the camp committees were urged not to issue marriage licences to Lithuanian men. In this struggle for DP morality Lithuanian women became a popular target of the efforts by the intelligentsia ‘to preserve the Lithuanian spirit’.85 A contemporary noted: In the DP life, there are two groups of women. The first are free from many duties; they sing and smoke; they look modern and beautiful; they are involved in profiteering and new romances . . . they are concerned with themselves, they show off in public and they ‘represent Lithuanian women’. The second group are family women who are drowning in the everyday routine; they are behind the times, behind the fashion and culture, invisible and disliked even by their husbands. . . . Their health is getting worse . . . while the number of divorces is growing. The author’s sympathy was clearly reserved for the second type, ‘the exemplary family woman’. If, during their lives in independent Lithuania, women ‘could afford to spend their young days carefree’, the experience of exile forced them to mature and ‘to become concerned with the fate of Lithuania’. Women were discouraged from marrying foreign men and risk ‘losing their fighting spirit’.86 According to one patriotic female writer, ‘the condition of exile did not reduce the number of our [women’s] duties, but only increased them’.87 Some even compared women’s efforts to preserve the Lithuanian family and the national spirit in camps with the Tsarist era when they had to educate their children illegally in order to preserve their national identity.88 Thus, the nation’s past became a political tool in the hands of the national elite in their attempts to mobilise the camp population. All the same, the effort to keep DP women in the domestic realm did not deter some women from participating in public life. Many became prominent cultural and social activists and members of numerous DP organisations. On 8–9 March 1947, a group of DP women founded the Union of Baltic Women in the US zone in Esslingen.

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The organisation had 37 Lithuanian, 21 Latvian and 17 Estonian women deputies. Among its key aims were ‘to care about and educate our youth’ and ‘to preserve our national spirit and character . . . in the light of possible emigration’.89 Having spent months and even years abroad, Lithuanians were exposed to a variety of foreign languages and cultures. For some the status of their native language became a matter of serious concern: We have to admit that, during the last three and a half years in exile, the respect for the native language which we have instilled in our homeland has sharply deteriorated. . . . People are starting to lose their linguistic immunity to foreign loan words . . . All our language experts should fight this!90 This was the aim of the Lithuanian Language Society (Lietuviu˛ kalbos draugija), established in February 1947. The society actively published Lithuanian textbooks, course materials, dictionaries and fiction and monitored the language of the local DP press.91 As a result, the camp became a venue where community politics infiltrated almost every sphere of private life. The Lithuanian language, women, men, youth, children, family, ethnic traditions and their condition in exile – all became contested issues on which the intelligentsia writers expended enormous efforts to ‘save’ the DPs from the degradation and perils of camp life. What of the formal political consequences of camp life? In March 1946 in Hanau (in the American zone), a general meeting of Lithuanian DP delegates established the Lithuanian Exile Community (Lietuviu˛ tremtiniu˛ bendruomene, ˙ LTB), which became the central institution of the Lithuanian DPs in Western Europe. The organisation had a clear political orientation since, among its primary goals, was ‘to consolidate the national community . . . and in this way to prepare for a new life in an independent homeland’.92 The LTB was heavily dominated by the Catholic clergy and former members of the Christian Democratic Party of Lithuania. Another key objective was ‘to preserve the good reputation of our exiles’.93 This was reflected in a special supplement of LTB which set ‘the rules of fighting vices among the DPs’. The LTB, along with two main relief agencies, the Lithuanian Red Cross and the General Fund of American Lithuanians (Bendrasis Amerikos lietuviu˛ fondas, BALF), were key institutions.94 On the local level, camp committees acted as formal representatives of the LTB.95

Breaking away from the camp The DP camp was more than a place where refugees were screened, controlled, exploited and indoctrinated. For younger Lithuanians in particular, and those who did not have strong social bonds with the DP collective, exile opened


41

up new possibilities. Some DPs enrolled in Western universities: by 1947 there were more than 2,180 Lithuanian DP students in Germany.96 Baltic students even managed to establish their own university in Hamburg, which had 440 Lithuanian students as early as 1946. In addition, many DPs acquired new skills in the camps, including foreign languages, driving, carpentry and tailoring, thereby preparing for a new career once they emigrated.97 In due course some DPs used the opportunity to travel, taking organised excursions to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A contemporary recalled that ‘our occasional sightseeing tours made our life in a camp less monotonous’.98 For a small group of Lithuanian artists and intellectuals, who rejected the collective propaganda and camp politics, exile became a springboard to their yet unexplored creativity. Alfonsas Nyka-Niliünas, who started his career as a poet in a camp, wrote in his diary in 1946: ‘the only way to protect yourself from this world and to find a way towards oneself is to create a personal “mythology”’.99 Some young refugees sought escape in the world of music, art and literature. Among those whose intellectual work spilled over beyond the confines of national culture were Algirdas Julius Greimas, who later became an internationally renowned linguist in France, Jonas Mekas, a pioneer of the American avant-garde cinema, and Marija Gimbutiené, a wellknown anthropologist in the US. ‘At least in the creative realm [our exile experience] is worth the price we had to pay,’ wrote an exiled Lithuanian critic later.100 However, for the majority, the camp years came as a shock that disrupted their normal lives. Refusing to abandon their hopes of return, many drifted from the real world into the realm of fantasy and imagination where their personal and collective allegiances to the past were only strengthened. An American Lithuanian sociologist, a child of Lithuanian DPs, wrote that Lithuanian refugees successfully assimilated in the US, but also experienced chronic grief, mourning and intense collective nostalgia. This grief was most commonly expressed as a form of ‘conservatism . . . marked by an intense, radicalised desire to preserve the totality of their culture in their new milieu’.101 This conservative impulse was already evident in the camp setting where numerous cultural societies took to preserving the national heritage. This nostalgia encompassed various elements, from the impulse to protect Lithuanian folk traditions and language to a desire to re-establish ‘old Lithuania’ and their privileged social and political position within it.

Conclusions Few official documents convey the horror and anxiety that the DPs suffered during the time they spent in camps. However, their diaries and memoirs are more eloquent. Depression, mistrust, isolation and abandonment were the consequences of this political intervention. As one Lithuanian DP newspaper wrote, ‘the mood is negative [among the DPs]. Screenings and transfers

42 Tomas Balkelis

from one camp to another are affecting the people’.102 Overall, political pressures made the Lithuanian refugee community turn inwards. They relied on self-defence as well as some help from émigré circles. The initial pressure to repatriate strengthened their political resilience and forced them to organise their own institutions, such as LTB and BALF.103 Official relief agencies, notably UNRRA and later IRO, were increasingly seen as part of a Western political establishment that could not be relied on. Only the adoption of a policy of mass emigration modified that distrust in the late 1940s. As a rule, the Lithuanian war refugees avoided referring to themselves as former DPs throughout their later years in emigration. Instead, they preferred to call themselves exiles or expatriates (tremtiniai). On the one hand, this was clearly a political choice since many felt that the war and subsequent Soviet ‘liberation’ of their homeland had inflicted a great injustice. Despite the Allied victory, independent Lithuania ceased to exist for more than 50 years. In the view of many DPs the fate of their country rather than their own personal displacement constituted the real ‘Baltic tragedy’.104 Two key factors – accommodation and food provision in the DP camp – ensured their physical survival and security, but offered little in the way of psychological support. The camp was remembered largely as an institution that turned refugees into helpless displaced persons whose vulnerability was entrenched by bureaucratic institutional practices. In essence, the DP camp served as a political institution of supervision and control, and hence a ‘total institution’ par excellence. This control was most clearly expressed by the multiple interventions described above. Living for several years under these bureaucratic arrangements contributed to a sense of lost autonomy. This manifested itself in so-called ‘DP apathy’, which different authorities used as a pretext for external and internal intervention. The apparatus of control was constantly justified as a means of delivering more efficient humanitarian help. Among the social and psychological consequences of prolonged life in the camps was their sense of depersonalisation and homelessness. The very fact of moving into the camp meant having to accept a new social and political role. In most cases the DPs regarded this in negative terms. At the same time, their ethnic identity was transformed into a defensive mechanism which ensured that the boundary between outsiders and insiders assumed critical importance. This prompted a process of politicisation, and, more specifically, nationalisation of the camp population. In essence, it meant that those who did not see their national identity as the most dominant form of self-definition now had to accept it by virtue of living in a camp. The elite made a strenuous effort to forge ‘a single national community’ from a mass of disorganised and socially stratified refugees. Refugees became the target of propaganda whose key features were an attempt to create a positive image of the Lithuanian DPs in the West and to preserve (or construct) a sense of collective worth. As a result, DPs developed a high degree of social


43

interdependency, which was transferred to their communal life in emigration. Yet the elite-led programme was only one of a series of competing views as to how national identity could be constituted in exile. A small group of liberal DP artists and intellectuals saw displacement as an opportunity to conceptualise their identity in more liberal and less collective terms. This was most evident in their efforts to keep their distance from the nationalist propaganda and divisive camp politics and to develop their individual careers within a liberal setting of postwar Western Europe. Another consequence of living in the camp was the redefinition of social roles among the refugees, most of whom had to adapt to new social roles and professions more suited for their future careers as new immigrants. Many middle-class professionals moved down the social ladder into manual work. This did not stop them contributing to various cultural and professional organisations which helped compensate for the loss of social status. The frustration and bitterness of ordinary refugees described above did not spill over beyond the pages of the DP press, perhaps because younger people managed to break free while others indulged in private amusements, sport or cultural activities. But incarceration had other consequences in the longer term. A sense of loss and injustice reverberated in the lives of DPs when they eventually settled overseas. Years after he left a DP camp in Blomberg (in the British zone), the Lithuanian émigré Jonas Matulionis drew on the diary entries he made at the time to summarise the experience of an entire generation: Emigration ended our nomadic period of life, which was temporary, uncertain and exhausting. We lived at the mercy of others, obliged to look every day at the hand of help they held out to us. Thank God, the Western world did not turn its back on us, but how difficult it is to live at the mercy of others! . . . Will we be happy in our new countries? I doubt it. Without our country, without our homeland, whose juices slaked our thirst, we will always feel like uprooted trees dumped by a storm on alien earth.105

Notes 1. M. Eksteins (1999) Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of our Century (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin), p. 209. 2. V. Bartuseviˇcius (1993) Lietuviai tremtiniai Vokietijoje (Lampertheim: Lietuviu˛ ¯ kulturos institutas), p. 71. There were other groups such as ethnic Lithuanians who were repatriated to Germany as ‘people of German descent’ in 1941 (up to 35,000) and refugees from the Memel (Klaipeda) region who fled in 1944 but were considered German citizens (an unknown figure, but most likely in the thousands). Initially both groups were denied DP status. 3. H. B. M. Murphy (1955) Flight and Resettlement (Geneva: UNESCO), p. 59. 4. This contribution is largely based on a number of Lithuanian DP publications from the archives of the Immigration Research Centre, University of Minnesota,

44 Tomas Balkelis

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

and the Institute for Diaspora Studies, Kaunas University, as well as a small body of memoirs written by Lithuanian DPs and the relevant official documents. E. Goffman (1962) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (London: Penguin Books), pp. 15–17. That Goffman’s work is widely used testifies to its universal theoretical implications. See T. J. Scheff (2006) Goffman Unbound! A New Paradigm for Social Science (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers). Goffman, Asylums, p. 17. Goffman, Asylums, p. 17. Proudfoot, European Refugees, p. 445. Goffman, Asylums, p. 18. Goffman was also concerned with the issue of adaptation or ‘making out’ among inmates. Asylums, pp. 18, 157–281. See the SHAEF Guide to the Care of Displaced Persons in Germany, extracts in M. J. Proudfoot (1957) European Refugees: 1939–1952 (London: Faber and Faber), pp. 162–3. Proudfoot, European Refugees, p. 163. Proudfoot, European Refugees, p. 228. M. Dyczok (2000) The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees (London: Macmillan), p. 102. SHAEF memorandum, no. 39, 30 October 1945, explicitly forbade forceful repatriation of the citizens of the former Baltic states. Anon. (1947) Baltic Refugees and Displaced Persons (London: Boreas Publishing), p. 22. Bartuseviˇcius, Lietuviai tremtiniai Vokietijoje, pp. 82–3; T. Lane (2004) Victims of Stalin and Hitler: the Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain (New York: Palgrave), p. 163. ¯ ‘Pagristas susirupinimas,’ Mintis, 227, 2 December 1946, p. 2. J. Kapaˇcinskas (1965) Siaubingos dienos: 1944–1950 metu˛ atsiminimai (Chicago: ¯ M. Mockuno spaustuve), ˙ p. 101. ‘Savavališki UNRRA’os tikrinimai’, Varpas, 1947, 1, p. 30. In the American zone, 12 per cent of the 330,000 DPs were ejected from camps. Bartuseviˇcius, Lietuviai tremtiniai Vokietijoje, p. 21. Baltic Refugees and Displaced Persons, p. 21. V. Alseika (1955) ‘DP’, Lietuviu˛ enciklopedija, vol. 5 (Boston, MA: Lietuviu˛ enciklopedijos leidykla), p. 151. N. Bohatiuk (1985) ‘The Ukrainian Emigrants of World War Two, 1945–1954 – their Life in the Camp Economy’, Ukrainian Review, XLI(1–2), p. 8. Bartuseviˇcius, Lietuviai tremtiniai Vokietijoje, p. 81. Alseika, ‘DP’, p. 151. Current News in the Lithuanian Situation, 1948, VI(15–16). Lietuvis, 3, 30 July 1949, p. 2. Tevyn ˙ es ˙ balsas, 4, 9 October 1947, p. 3. ‘Iškreiptas Tevyn ˙ es ˙ balsas’, Mintis, 196, 23 September 1947. K. Mikusauskas, ‘Sugr˛ižimas nuo Elbes’, ˙ Tiesa, 14 June 1989. The figure of 60,000 for 1945 is based on Soviet sources and is much larger than the UNRRA figures, but UNRRA became operational only in September 1945 when many refugees had already been repatriated. The Soviet figure may also include refugees who did not register with UNRRA. N. Kairiukštyte˙ (1990) ‘Lietuvos gyventoju˛ repatriacija iš Vokietijos 1945 metais’, Lituanica, II, p. 56. Kapaˇcinskas, Siaubingos dienos, pp. 106–7.

Living in the Displaced Persons Camp 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

45

Bohatiuk, ‘Ukrainian Emigrants’, p. 10. ¯ P. Matekunas (1956) Kufšteino lietuviu˛ stovykla (New York: Vaga), p. 62. ‘Kas yra tie sovietiniai liudininkai?’ Teviškes ˙ garsas, 107, 14 January 1948, p. 3. This is evident from the postwar memoir of journalist Kapaˇcinskas, Siaubingos dienos, p. 66. Kapaˇcinskas, Siaubingos dienos, p. 81. V. N. Zemskov (1993) ‘Prinuditel’nye migratsii iz Pribaltiki v 1940-1950 godakh’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1, pp. 4–19; E. Grunskis (1996) Lietuvos gyventoju˛ tremimai, ˙ 1940–1941 ir 1945–1953 metais (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos institutas). W. Jacobmeyer (1985) Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum heimatlosen Ausländer: Die Displaced Persons in Deutschland, 1945–1951 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht), p. 16; Bartuseviˇcius, Lietuviai tremtiniai Vokietijoje, p. 73. Kapaˇcinskas, Siaubingos dienos, p. 82. The reference to the ‘birds of God’ most likely implied that the refugees no longer belonged to any political or geographic entities. Goffman, Asylums, p. 24. ‘Mes DP ir apie mus’, Žiburiai, 42, 16 November 1946, p. 2. Almost 18 per cent of the readers of Žiburiai, one of the largest DP newspapers with a circulation of tens of thousands, took part in the poll. All but seven approved the return to free Lithuania and emigration. ‘Pirmojo viešosios nuomones ˙ apklausimo rezultatai’, Žiburiai, 89, 12 February 1947, p. 4. ‘Mes naujoj stovykloj’, Mintis, 39, 14 April 1947, p. 2. In the American zone a DP was entitled to 4 square metres of living space, while inmates in Germany’s prisons were entitled to 6 m2 . See V. Alseika (1955) ‘DP’, Lietuviu˛ enciklopedija, vol. 5 (Boston: Lietuviu˛ enciklopedijos leidykla), p. 150. ¯ veidai,’ Mintis, 27, 10 March 1947, p. 3. ‘Nuobodus K. Kemežys (1992) Po pasaul˛i besiblaškant: atsiminimai (Sydney: Rotor Publications), p. 289. Proudfoot, European Refugees, p. 235. The mistrust of these committees is evident from numerous DP press publications. See ‘Velykine enciklopedija,’ DP aitvaras, 1, 1 April 1948, p. 2; ‘Pagarba valdžiai’, Mintis, 24, 3 March 1947, p. 3. ‘LTB statuso pirmasis priedas’, Žiburiai, 3, 25 February 1946. ‘UNRRA Administrative Order Nr. 190’, Pasaulio lietuviu˛ archyvas [Lithuanian World Archive], Chicago, V-LTB C. K-AS-1-2. Balandžio Pirmosios ožys, 1 April 1946, p. 6. L. Saldukas (2006) ‘Culture in Adversity: the Lithuanian DP Experience’, Lituanus, LII(3), p. 24. ‘Baltu˛ DP pabeg ˙ eliu ˙ skaiˇcius ir susigrupavimas’, Mintis, 38, 11 April 1947, p. 4. Alseika, ‘DP’, p. 148. T. Lane (2004) Victims of Stalin and Hitler: the Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain (New York: Palgrave), p. 167. ‘LTB Scheinfeldo apylinkes komiteto veikimo ataskaita, 1948’, Pasaulio lietuviu˛ archyvas, V-Schein-2–9. See details of other camps in ‘Stipreja ˙ lietuviu˛ padetis’, ˙ Mintis, 31 March 1947, p. 4. Baltic Refugees and Displaced Persons, p. 28. Lane, Victims of Stalin and Hitler, p. 168. Goffman, Asylums, p. 20. Kapaˇcinskas, Siaubingos dienos, p. 97.

46 Tomas Balkelis ˛ Antrojo pasaulinio karo 62. A. Gustaitis (1990) Algirdas, Karas braukia kruvina˛ ašara: ¯ dienoraštis (Chicago: Deveniu kulturinio fondo leidykla), p. 92. 63. Kapaˇcinskas, Siaubingos dienos, p. 78. ¯ 64. A. Nyka-Niliunas (2002) Dienorašcio fragmentai, 1938–1975 (Vilnius: Baltos Lankos), p. 169. 65. ‘Pagarba valdžiai’, Mintis, 24, 3 March 1947, 24, p. 3. Mintis had a circulation of around 30,000. 66. DP Aitvaras, 1, 1 April 1948, p. 3. 67. ‘Pagarba valdžiai’, p. 3. 68. ‘Daugiau kudirkiškos širdies,’ Mintis, 235, 20 December 1946, p. 4. 69. Murphy, Flight and Resettlement; E. Bakis (1948) ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Refugees’, Scholar, II–III; E. A. Shils (1946) ‘Social and Psychological Aspects of Displacement and Repatriation’, Journal of Social Issues, II (3). 70. ‘Kur einame’, Žiburiai, 10, 8 September 1945, p. 2. This paper was published in the DP camp in Augsburg, in the US zone. 71. ‘Lietuviškaja˛ dvasia˛ svetimiems atskleidžiant’, Žiburiai, 41, 12 October 1946, p. 1. 72. J. Girnius (1947) Lietuviškojo charakterio problema (Augsburg: Haas und Cie), p. 3. 73. On the cultural activities of the Lithuanian DPs see L. Saldukas (2002) Lithuanian Diaspora (Vilnius: Vaga); D. Kuiziniene (ed.) (2005) Beginnings and Ends of Emigration: Life without Borders in the Contemporary World (Kaunas: Versus Aureus). 74. ‘Mes ir kitatauˇciai’, Žiburiai, 29, 20 July 1946, p. 1. 75. Anon. (1946) ‘Tremtiniu˛ bendruomenes ˙ gairemis’, ˙ Tevišk ˙ es ˙ garsas, VI, p. 1. 76. ‘Tremties gyvenimo dem ˙ es’, ˙ Žiburiai, 36, 7 September 1946, p. 5. 77. ‘Rykšˇciu˛ vertas amatas’, Mintis, 34, 26 March 1947, p. 3. 78. ‘Tremties gyvenimo dem ˙ es’, ˙ p. 5. 79. ‘Tremtiniu˛ bendruomenes ˙ gairemis’, ˙ p. 1. 80. ‘Tremtiniu˛ bendruomenes ˙ gairemis’, ˙ p. 1. 81. ‘Tremtiniu˛ ateit˛i svarstant’, Žiburiai, 15 June 1946, p. 3. 82. ‘Tremties gyvenimo dem ˙ es’, ˙ p. 5. ¯ 83. P. Matekunas (1956) Kufšteino lietuviu stovykla (New York: Vaga), pp. 67–8. 84. ‘Vyro narsa ir moters sijonas’, Mintis, 20, 21 February 1947, p. 3. 85. ‘As ištekesiu ˙ už svetimtauˇcio’, Mintis, 15, 8 February 1947, p. 3. 86. ‘Moterys prašo demesio’, ˙ 48, Mintis, 1947, p. 3. 87. ‘Aš ištekesiu ˙ už svetimtauˇcio’, p. 3. 88. ‘Šeima ir emigracija’, 31, Mintis, 21 March 1947, p. 3. 89. ‘Pabaltijo tautu˛ USA zonoje besirandanˇciu˛ moteru˛ konferencija Esslingene’, Mintis, 31, 21 March 1947, p. 3. ¯ 90. ‘Susirupinkime gimtosios kalbos likimu’, Mintis, 30, 15 March 1947, p. 3. 91. Some 775 books (216 were fiction) were published by the Lithuanian DPs during 1945–50. See Saldukas, ‘Culture in Adversity’, p. 33. ¯ 92. ‘Tremtiniu˛ Bendruomenei ˛isikurus’, Žiburiai, 11, 16 March 1946, p. 1. ¯ 93. ‘Tremtiniu˛ Bendruomenei ˛isikurus’, p. 1. 94. In the British zone of occupation the Lithuanian Central Education and Welfare Board (referred to as the Lithuanian Central Board or LCB) took care of the Lithuanian DPs. See E. P. Baltutis (2004) ‘Lithuanian Displaced Persons and the Lithuanian National Committee in the British Zone of Germany, 1945–1948’, unpublished. 95. ‘Daugiau demesio ˙ tautiniams komitetams’, Žiburiai, 8, 24 November 1945, p. 6.


47

96. Alseika, ‘DP’, p. 154. 97. Most of this retraining was directed towards blue-collar work. Many highly educated DPs lost their social status as a result. 98. Kapaˇcinskas, Siaubingos dienos, p. 100. ¯ 99. A. Nyka-Niliunas (2002) Dienorašˇcio fragmentai, 1938-1975 (Vilnius: Baltos Lankos), p. 145. 100. K. Ostrauskas (1996) Ketvirtoji siena (Chicago: A. Mackaus fondas), p. 35. 101. L. Baškauskas (1981) ‘The Lithuanian Refugee Experience and Grief’, International Migration Review, XV(1), p. 280. ¯ 102. ‘Pagr˛istas susirupinimas’, p. 2. 103. BALF stands for Bendrasis Amerikos lietuviu˛ fondas (General Fund of American Lithuanians) established in 1944. 104. ‘Baltic Tragedy’ was the title chosen for a documentary about the destruction of the Baltic states (International Historic Films, 1985). It includes the documentary ‘Home of the Homeless’ (UNRRA, 1947), which deals with the DP episode. 105. J. Matulionis (1975) Neramios dienos (Toronto: Tevyn ˙ es ˙ žiburiai), p. 25.

3 ‘How those Brothers in Foreign Lands are Dividing the Fatherland’: Latvian National Politics in Displaced Persons Camps after the Second World War1 Aldis Purs

Introduction War and population displacement served as midwives to the Republic of Latvia during and after the First World War. Conflict and flight would be the republic’s pallbearers during and after the Second World War. In each case, the land was occupied by foreign powers and witnessed an active battlefront for extended periods. In each case, military activity and the fear of the behaviour of a victorious army compelled hundreds of thousands of Latvians to leave their homes – to become displaced persons. In each case, Latvian responses to the refugee crisis evolved from humanitarian relief into proposed far-ranging political solutions. In each case, the Latvian ‘refugee problem’ transcended local concerns and became part and parcel of a wider European phenomenon of mass population displacement, state formation and the quest for international peace. However, despite the many similarities, war and population displacement produced diametrically opposite results for an independent Latvian state. The most basic explanation is purely geopolitical: after the First World War, Germany and Russia were weak, defeated states. Latvians, like many in East and Central Europe, exploited the relative great power vacuum to achieve an independent nation-state. The victorious Allied powers aided and abetted the formation of new states. The Second World War, however, ended with the defeat of only one great power in East and Central Europe, Germany, while to the Soviet Union went unprecedented spoils. The international mood had also shifted. The Western Powers’ complete lack of appetite for or ability to continue waging war meant a tense acceptance of the final field of battle. Latvian refugees’ desperate hopes for a war of liberation were muted into a chorus of national grievances within the developing ‘Cold War’. After 1918, Latvian refugees could ‘return’ to a newly independent state (although 48

Latvian National Politics in DP Camps 49

many never did), but after 1945 Latvian refugees considered themselves without a legitimate state to which they could return. Latvian refugees became internationally defined as ‘displaced persons’ and favoured resettlement over return to what they assumed would be instant punishment at the hands of communist oppressors and occupiers. Although several scholars have examined population displacements and displaced persons, Western academic work has barely begun to explore the history of Latvian displaced persons (DPs). One reason is language. Interactions with Latvian DPs relied either on the Latvians’ own mastery (or lack) of English or on bilingual intermediaries. These intermediaries were either from the DP community or employed by the Soviet government. Neither could be considered impartial. Western camp administrators and staffs (and the scholars who followed their written records) relied on informants and/or on what could be gleaned from documents and limited communication in third languages. These sources could readily identify wartime occupations, but struggled to penetrate the thick mist of privacy and secrecy about the daily politics and power struggles within the DP community. DPs were very reticent about lifting this shroud, and as émigrés they became even more protective and selective gatekeepers of the Latvian DP experience. With the passage of time, the relentless march of nostalgia, the inevitable deaths of eyewitnesses and the fervent wish to prevent washing ‘dirty laundry’ before a non-Latvian audience, Latvian émigrés have expurgated any meaningful, larger context from the DP experience. Even in Latvian language sources, few authors challenge the standard view of Latvian hardship, tragedy and ultimate survival and success through the DP exodus.2 As a result, émigré Latvian memory of the DP experience is exclusive, private, privileged and monochrome; that is to say, accounts of conflict are remembered benignly. There is little left in the common memory of the cutthroat factional politics that spilled over from interwar and wartime Latvia into the refugee camps. Little remains of the resulting crises of contested identity and authority. Nor is there much connection to or comparisons with the pan-European crisis of population displacement. Two accomplished scholars from émigré Latvian backgrounds have broken away from these general tendencies in writing of the DP experience. Modris Eksteins’ ambitious Walking since Daybreak expressly attempts to place his family’s DP experience (and by extension the Latvian DP experience) into a larger European framework at the centre of twentieth-century history.3 If Eksteins repositions the Latvian DP experience on a grand stage, Agate Nesaule’s A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile puts population displacement under an individual microscope. In Nesaule’s account, trauma goes beyond great power politics to include the difficult ways in which family relationships formed and solidified through these displacements.4 Both accounts attempt to break the rigid exclusiveness of

50 Aldis Purs

academic literature and reach more general readers. Still, these works primarily analyse the consequences of the DP experience. There is still little research on the conflicts and cleavages of identity and authority within the Latvian refugee community before and during camp life. However, clear lines of continuity can be identified from pre-war political divisions, through the differing patterns of behaviour during the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Latvia, and into the Latvian DP camps. This forgotten or suppressed aspect of Latvian DP history and experience is addressed in this chapter.

Contested political authority in Latvia before and during the war Before the First World War, the idea of an independent Latvian nation-state was fanciful. No major political force, legal or illegal, advocated its creation. The world war and the ensuing population displacement radically changed the pre-war equation. While lobbying for refugee issues, activists coalesced around a dwindling number of options for a postwar era. The most conservative came to embrace Latvian lands ruled by the German empire, particularly as a conservative Russian option became less and less likely. The most radical became ardent supporters of a soviet state. The amorphous political middle muddled away from each of these extremes and hesitantly supported an independent Latvian state in the autumn of 1918. Political enemies and strangers brokered previously unthinkable alliances to realise this vision. The promise of radical agrarian reform and a democratically elected constituent assembly was the glue that bound politicians to the majority of inhabitants of the Latvian lands. This was the zenith of unified political authority and legitimacy in interwar Latvia. Parliamentary politics undermined this fragile consensus and Latvia, like so many other interwar European states, slid into authoritarianism. In 1934, K¯arlis Ulmanis seized power and ruled until the Soviet occupation in the summer of 1940. Thereafter, a rump parliament sought admission to the Soviet Union. Prior to occupation, Ulmanis’ Cabinet secretly directed Latvia’s ambassadors in London and Washington to assume de jure legal authority over the Latvian state if such power was abrogated in Latvia itself. Matters of political authority and legitimacy became more confused with the Nazi occupation in the summer of 1941. The German authorities looked for Latvian politicians to staff a native ‘Self-Administration’ (pašp¯arvalde). Meanwhile, Latvian politicians opposed to Soviet and German rule began to form a general resistance movement, Latvijas Centrala padome (Central Council, LCC). The LCC’s aim was to re-establish the Republic of Latvia, but the Gestapo disrupted most of its work by arresting many of its leaders. The German army eventually disarmed and disbanded the LCC’s ersatz military wing, the Kurelis group.5 As the total defeat of the German army drew closer, Latvians under


German command tried to assert some national authority in the war’s final days by founding the Latvian National Council (Latvijas Nacion¯al¯a padome) in Potsdam, Germany on 20 February 1945.6 After capitulation, Latvian communists and the Red Army reimposed a socialist state on the Latvian lands. Partisans continued fighting this occupation into the 1950s, but were unable to defeat Soviet power. The Soviet Union, however, waged a long battle for legitimacy in the eyes of most Latvians – a battle whose outcome was not finally decided until 1991. The Latvian national elite scattered across Europe as refugees claimed the mantle of the Republic of Latvia. However, within refugee camps these national politicians waged an internecine campaign against each other for the allegiance of Latvian DPs. Each of these competing pretenders staked their claim to legitimacy on the basis of different views of the legacy of the Republic. Each group saw fundamental differences in the past and future of the Latvian state. The foremost heirs of the Republic were the ambassadors to London and Washington, K¯arlis Zarinš ¸ and Alfreds Bilmanis, respectively. Following the Soviet invasion, they continued to represent themselves as the legal and legitimate representatives of the Republic of Latvia. Neither the British nor the US government recognised the Soviet annexation and continued to treat the two men and their staff as diplomatic entities. Other ambassadors lost their credentials, but some, like Voldem¯ars Salnais in Sweden, remained close to Western diplomatic circles.7 Salnais, living in a neutral country in close proximity to Latvia, had relayed intelligence reports to Zarinš, ¸ Bilmanis and the US State Department on Soviet and Nazi occupation policies. Zarinš ¸ and Bilmanis (and to an extent Salnais) were left to struggle alone for the restoration of the Republic of Latvia. They fought Soviet claims against them and lobbied on behalf of the tens of thousands of Latvian DPs in the refugee camps.

Different paths to DP status Latvians gained DP status by three basic routes. Some were forcibly displaced from their homes, some ‘voluntarily’ fled from their homes and the third group were soldiers who ended the war in the custody of American or British military forces. Throughout the Nazi occupation, the Reich Labour Service scoured the Latvian countryside looking for labourers. Initially, hundreds of Latvians volunteered for work in Germany, but their status quickly lost its voluntary character. Their contracts were unilaterally extended and their conditions and pay fell far below what had been promised. Not surprisingly, German and Latvian Self-Administration attempts to procure more labourers failed. As military conscription vied with labour conscription, some Latvian men were given the choice of becoming a labourer or soldier. The choice was difficult; the military option seemed more likely to involve stationing near home, whereas work in the Reich seemed safer. Increasingly, Latvians were

52 Aldis Purs

forcibly rounded up and deported to the Reich. In eastern Latvia, where Nazis deemed the locals most racially inferior, deportations were abrupt and brutal. In at least one town, writes one historian, ‘German security forces simply grabbed all able-bodied people, packed them onto trucks and shipped them off to the railway station and then to their final destination in the Reich’.8 Up to 23,000 Latvians were sent to work in Germany during the war and consequently found themselves ‘displaced’ after the war. Roughly ten times as many Latvians fled to Germany as Soviet troops reoccupied Latvia. They became the great majority of Latvian displaced persons after the war. Almost all assumed that their ‘displacement’ would be temporary and that they would soon return home. The least studied period of their displacement is their initial arrival in Germany while the war still being waged. Most of them navigated bureaucracies, military imperatives and local hostility to the best of their abilities for nearly a year. Some registered as refugees while others looked for temporary work and sought residency permits and food ration cards. The two constant dilemmas were where to live and what to eat. The intangible dilemma was about place: should they have left, should they return, when might they return and where were their loved ones? Slowly, these displaced Latvians began to congregate together. They also fled continuously westward as the Soviet offensive pushed through Poland and into Germany. At the war’s end there may have been nearly 300,000 Latvians in the Reich. Perhaps as many as 100,000 ended the war in Soviet-occupied Germany before being repatriated to Soviet Latvia.9 Those that remained in Western custody were eventually placed in DP camps from which they began to negotiate their futures with the Allied powers. A far smaller number of Latvian refugees fled to Sweden, successfully evading German patrols and Soviet aerial power and overcoming hazardous conditions to cross the Baltic Sea in small fishing vessels. Sweden was initially the preferred destination as a route out of war and into neutrality. Likewise, the LCC backed by its Swedish contingent operated a fleet of boats that brought many Latvian activists to Sweden’s shores. Latvians displaced in Germany initially believed that Sweden offered far better material conditions and individual rights. They looked to those Latvians in Sweden for political and material guidance. The concentration in Sweden of parliamentarians and those close to the LCC seemed to favour their cause in the developing struggle for the hearts and minds of Latvian refugees. The roughly 140,000 Latvian soldiers who served in the German army were the most contentious category of DPs for Latvians and Western allies alike. Most were conscripted in or after 1943 and served in one of two divisions popularly known as the Latvian Legions. One division remained on Latvian territory when Germany capitulated and became Soviet prisoners of war. The other division was drawn progressively westward to defend Berlin. Some units were able to navigate the German rear in the last days of war and surrender to US or British forces. Others were taken captive by the Soviets. To make


matters more complex, still other Latvians served in different units. At the end of the war, the overriding question was what should be done with these Latvian prisoners of war in Western zones of occupation. The initial reaction of the US forces unfamiliar with the vicissitudes of East European history was to hand Latvian troops over to Soviet military officials. As Allied decisionmakers realised that many East European refugees (prisoners of war included) did not want to return to Soviet-occupied territories, repatriation came to a halt and there began a legal, moral and political battle over the fate of refugees.10 Regarding the Legion, the debate had several key components. The first and most basic was whether all refugees from Soviet territory should be repatriated. The British and Americans struck out the citizens of the Baltic Republics from the Soviet citizen category as they did not recognise the Soviet annexation. The next issue was the fate of Latvian soldiers who fought for the German army. Those in favour of repatriation argued that they were volunteers and potentially war criminals, while those against claimed that the troops were hapless conscripts. As this debate about the character and actions of the troops raged in Allied quarters, dividing opinion among the various claimants to political legitimacy of the Latvian nation, non-military Latvian refugees also began to enter Allied controlled refugee camps and became part of the evolving DP system.11 Although DPs were legally barred from political action by the occupation authorities, and although their representatives could not formally constitute national committees, they did so covertly.

National politics in Latvian displaced persons camps Latvian forced labourers in wartime Germany had few collective legal rights. Even the various feeble attempts by the Self-Administration or Latvian officers to press for Latvian rights made no connection with the people displaced by the Reich Labour Service. As with all occupation institutions, the intention had been to mobilise people in the service of the war effort, not to create a place of interaction, negotiation and compromise. The closest these Latvian labourers came to independent political activity was through Nation’s Aid (Tautas pal¯ıdz¯ıba) and the Latvian Lutheran Church. Neither was initially prepared for political work. Nation’s Aid was the remnant of the pre-war Latvian Red Cross. Neither the Soviets nor the Nazis tolerated the continued operation of the Red Cross, but nor did the occupation authorities completely disband it. Charitable and relief organisations maintained some continuity in personnel and institutional memory. After the war, the organisation returned to its international Red Cross roots and was instrumental in assisting or just drawing attention to displaced Latvians.12 The chapter in Belgium, for example, coordinated the shipment of pharmaceutical supplies to DP camp hospitals. They also supervised the distribution of clothing donated by the US

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to refugees in the Netherlands and Germany and attempted to match American ‘godparents’ with Latvian refugee orphans. This was a determined effort to keep these children (particularly the Latvian boys who had manned Nazi anti-aircraft guns) from leaving the camp system to return to Soviet Latvia.13 Despite the international organisation’s need to be apolitical, Latvia’s Red Cross was drawn into the growing political debate within the Latvian refugee community. The Latvian Lutheran Church was also initially concerned most with its own survival and did not see itself as an emerging political centre. The leadership of the Church sought to remain on Latvian territory. During the Soviet occupation, Archbishop Teodors Gr¯ınbergs, the highest-ranking figure in the Lutheran Church, prepared the Church for his potential deportation by naming a series of successors. When Soviet troops pressed on into Latvian territory, the elderly Gr¯ınbergs, never previously a refugee, resolved to stay in Riga. German authorities, however, evacuated him to Liepaja and then, under duress, to Germany. Gr¯ınbergs lobbied Nazi authorities in Berlin to allow church services to be conducted in Latvian wherever there were Latvian refugees, but his efforts were met for the most part with prevarication. After the war Gr¯ınbergs slowly tried to piece together the authority of the Latvian Lutheran Church by presiding over the more or less spontaneous and independent work of Latvian Lutheran pastors scattered across dozens of DP camps. Gr¯ınbergs saw in these congregations a national calling; as he put it, ‘in foreign parts, Latvia is in Latvian churches’.14 This belief had an interwar precedent; in the 1920s and 1930s, ethnic political tensions spilled over into congregational jurisdictional battles. This national political motif continued to be the single defining undercurrent in Latvian religious life and guided Latvian émigré churches for more than 50 years. More than 120 pastors also made their way to Germany. But most of them found it tremendously difficult to leave Latvia. In his diaries, Pastor Arnolds L¯ usis struggled with his commitment to his parish flock as well as to his wife and children. He looked repeatedly in vain to the Bible to justify flight. He was unable to convince his mother to join him and saw his initial hopes to flee to Sweden (on an LCC boat) dashed. Before he finally left Latvia for Germany, L¯ usis was presented with a stark reminder of the decision he had made. His father-in-law, an officer in the rebellious Kurelis group, remained behind and was executed. When L¯ usis learned of the Kurelis group’s fate and his father-in-law’s execution he came to understand how Kurelis’s chief-ofstaff had argued that none of his men could be considered deserters because they had refused to leave Latvia and had chosen to fight the communists in their homeland.15 These sentiments must have been particularly bitter for L¯ usis to digest as a refugee far from the same homeland. L¯ usis’ diaries reveal how overwhelming it was for a Latvian refugee, clergy or not, to arrive in Nazi Germany. He was distraught about the fate of Latvia, the family and friends he left behind, and the daunting challenge


of providing for himself and immediate family in a war-torn Germany. Starvation, disease and inadequate lodging were the constants of his daily life, while he underwent a profound metaphysical crisis. Some of L¯ usis’ entries tried to identify in Latvia’s war experience some sort of divine punishment. In others his faith and calling waver, yet other entries come close to expressing suicidal thoughts. Through all of these tribulations, L¯ usis sought to establish connections with other Latvian refugees and Latvian clergy, and to find any reliable information about the larger political picture. In these darkest moments, in late 1944 and through most of 1945, L¯ usis tentatively began to re-examine Latvian identity. He writes critically about some aspects of pre-war Latvian policy and about Latvian support for the Soviet and Nazi occupation, and suggests that the war was divine retribution against the modern, secular world. This critical approach to the past is most apparent while L¯ usis was isolated. Once he entered the DP camp system, he immersed himself in national political activity and developed the commonly shared, unquestioning defence of the Latvian nation. Still, L¯ usis’ diary hints at the general doubt and unease that many Latvian refugees, including clergymen, experienced on their arrival in Germany. The surviving congregation bulletins and newsletters from 1945 share this sentiment and mark the Church as a more spiritual and reflective institution than an organ of political mobilisation.16 Their contents are inspirational or penitent. This changed in the DP camps as Latvian DP identity became cemented and ‘packaged’ as national identity for Allied consumption. The decision to enter DP camps was a difficult and even dangerous commitment. Rumours abounded (supported by individual cases) that Western forces were turning Latvians over to Soviet authorities.17 The territorial adjustments of the occupation zones prompted panicked movements by Latvian refugees who fled territory now controlled by the Soviets. Other rumours suggested that Soviet authorities would have access to DP camps (which they did), but little was known of what power and rights they would have over the residents. Furthermore, the screening process to enter a camp (and the occasional second screening) was immensely unpopular and distrusted by Latvian refugees. Some Latvian DPs, fearful of how their wartime activity would be judged, had good reason to dread these screening processes and attempted to avoid having their true identity revealed. Examples of such subterfuge are commonplace in émigré literature, and often presented with comedic overtones. The historian Valdis Lumans describes how his father ‘slipped into civilian clothing and thereby avoided capture and a POW camp’.18 But for others the DP camp was best avoided, at least initially. As a result, in the summer of 1945, only 82,000 Latvian refugees were registered in DP camps. Once it became clear that there would be no forced repatriation, the number quickly rose and exceeded 120,000 in 1946. L¯ usis, like many of these other refugees, took his time and was duly struck from the registrar after screening, but he appealed and was reinstated as a displaced person.

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For the Western powers, the dilemma quickly became what to do with the DPs in the camps. For Latvians, DP life unleashed a bitter political debate about identity, memory and representation. Latvian national elites competed with each other on a dual campaign: for the hearts and minds of Latvian refugees, and for the image of the Latvian refugee and nation to be presented to the Western democracies. Initial political manoeuvring among refugees came from Latvians linked to Nazi occupation institutions, chiefly the Self-Administration (pašp¯arvalde) and the Latvian Legions. During the war, these Latvians did little to press for greater Latvian autonomy in the belief that loyal service and exemplary performance would eventually produce concessions and rewards from Germany. Before Riga fell, Latvian civil administrators were evacuated to Germany in September 1944. Latvian officers in the German army were similarly passive. The highest-ranking Latvian officers in the German army did not consider mutiny, but they disingenuously communicated to the rank-and-file that their struggle was for Latvian survival. During the final week of the war, Colonel Roberts Osis presided over an aborted attempt to found a people’s council in Latvia. His resolve, however, buckled under German pressure on the last day of the war and he fled to Germany on one of the last boats to leave Latvia.19 Despite this track-record, these Latvians were still in a position to play an influential role in Latvian DP camp life and in nascent national, political organisations. They had organisational capacity, experience and a habit of working on behalf of a Latvian constituency. Furthermore, Latvian officers who served in the German army maintained the loyalty of their troops and fostered an esprit de corps among them. In May 1945, one such officer surrendered his troops to British forces and simultaneously submitted a memorandum about political conditions in Latvia and the nature of Latvian forces under German command. The memorandum included a request for all Latvian troops to be held together in one camp, for this camp to be placed under British authority and for these prisoners to be considered as ‘political immigrants’ to be placed in the care of Latvia’s National Committee – LNC (Latvijas Nacion¯al¯a Komiteja). The LNC was a thinly veiled rump Latvian administration created on 20 February 1945 in Potsdam by the German Foreign and Interior Ministries along with the remnants of the Latvian SelfAdministration and Latvian Legion Officer corps. The LNC had relocated to Lübeck and renewed a chapter of Latvia’s Red Cross on 26 April to create an Office of Latvian Refugee Relief. The LNC, however, had little legitimacy or authority in the eyes of most refugees. They were at best irrelevant, and at least partially seen as German puppets. When some members claimed that the LNC was the acting government-in-exile that could ‘accredit Latvia’s agents and ambassadors for further work’, they were met with opposition in Lübeck and across Germany. Although the LNC claimed lofty goals and ultimate authority, few recognised either. The Allied military command dismissed the memorandum


and even considered arraigning the LNC chair, General Bangerskis, at the Nuremberg war trials. Refugees were similarly unresponsive to the LNC and suggested alternative arrangements. One option was to follow the example of the First World War, enabling local Latvian Red Cross organisations to operate as refugee care committees. These committees would then elect a central refugee aid committee that could use the refugee constituency as a means of speaking for the Latvian nation. Dismissing this proposal, the LNC attempted to improve its public face by removing its entire board on 30 May 1945. The LNC hoped to co-opt apolitical but popular Latvian figures to a new board that would be perceived as less closely linked to Nazi era institutions, but was largely unable to do so. A truncated board of four was cobbled together on 8 June, which then sent its president, Bangerskis, to southern Germany to contact other nascent Latvian refugee political organisations. British authorities detained him and the LNC hurriedly appointed a former professor from the University of Latvia, Fricis Gulbis, to the vacant post. Allied authorities, however, notified the board that citizens of a neutral power could not organise politically.20 Latvian refugee organisations in central and southern Germany had formed separate national committees in Thuringia, Saxony and Bavaria. These committees were hostile to the Lübeck Latvian committee’s direct connection to the Nazi-approved Potsdam Latvian National Committee. They urged the Lübeck group to disband to effect a total and final break with its troubled past. An alternative Latvian Red Cross without a Nazi pedigree was reestablished in the south of Germany, but the activities of the southern Latvian refugee groups were hampered by the Allied decision to include Saxony and Thuringia in the Soviet occupation zone. As a result, these national committees, along with many of the resident Latvian refugees, fled to Bavaria. The problem of geography and the collapse of the postal and transport systems continued to hamper efforts to create a central Latvian refugee organisation. In July and August representatives from different regions agreed on a new organisation, the Latvian Central Committee (Latviešu centr¯al¯a komiteja). To defuse potential politicisation, three former professors of the University of Latvia (one representing Lübeck Latvians, one Munich Latvians and a neutral arbiter) formed the first presidium. They in turn hoped to create an advisory institution, the Latvian Council, which would include parliamentarians, officials from the Red Cross and other non-affiliated representatives. On 9 September, the Committee met and awkwardly defined itself as an apolitical temporary body that would work towards a democratically elected Latvian Central Council (Latviešu centr¯al¯a padome) representative of all Latvian refugees in Germany and Austria. This Council would in turn elect a permanent Latvian Central Committee. To hold elections, however, the Central Committee had first to circumvent the Allied powers’ decision that national committees could not act as central organs, but only as local refugee relief agencies. They decided on a clandestine and indirect electoral

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system. Germany and Austria were divided into seven electoral territories in each of which 500 citizens of Latvia (whether in camps or not) could choose a delegate. These territorial sessions elected regional committees and representatives to the Latvian Central Council. The Latvian Central Council held its first session in Detmold from 18 to 21 November 1945. The Council elected various governing, supervisory and review bodies, ratified the work of the temporary Latvian Central Committee and began to formalise the documentation of refugees. The new Central Committee devoted particular energy to finding ways to ameliorate the immediate physical conditions and the longterm legal status of Latvian prisoners of war. It also elected a supreme court to monitor DP behaviour. As an early observer noted: The legal foundations of the work of refugee Self-Administration in exile were laid so far as was permitted by the occupation powers and the economic conditions of the war-devastated lands. But since neither the Latvian Central Committee nor the Latvian Central Council was an officially recognised institution, and since they had no prospect of getting such recognition, all the further work relied largely upon the moral authority of the Latvian Central Committee and the people’s own national discipline.21 This moral authority and national discipline began to break down almost immediately. Financial weakness plagued the Central Committee, which responded by imposing a monthly poll tax on all Latvian adults. But it had difficulty collecting this tax. The relatively wealthier Lübeck Latvians did not contribute and did not completely extinguish the more tarnished LNC. As a result, the large and vibrant Esslingen refugee camp, often referred to as the Latvian ‘DP capital’, threatened to leave if the Central Committee did not dismiss individuals who were closely associated with Nazi rule in Latvia. This contentious issue resurfaced regularly and led to repeated walkouts, reorganisations and the creation of extremely unpopular ‘honour courts’ (uztic¯ıbas kolle´gija, literally ‘loyalty collegiums’), which acted as self-screening commissions until the end of 1946.22 By the summer of 1946, activists who drew their legitimacy from roots in parliamentary action or the resistance further challenged the Latvian Central Committee’s moral authority. Latvia’s largest wartime resistance movement, Latvia’s Central Council (Latvijas centr¯al¯a padome), began to renew its national political work among Latvian DPs. The Central Council had been formed in the summer of 1943 to protest at Soviet and Nazi occupation. Although the Council initially opposed flight, when Soviet return became inevitable most of its members who were not under arrest fled westward. They attempted to flee to Sweden, but were intercepted by Nazi authorities and sent to the Reich. In October 1945 they gathered in Austria to renew their political work, with a considerable concentration of leading Social Democratic parliamentarians in


their midst. These parliamentarians argued that legitimate authority rested with the surviving members of the last sitting parliament (prorogued by the coup of 1934) and its presidium. Since many of these parliamentarians were active in Latvia’s Central Council their claims of authority often merged. Initially, they concentrated on lobbying American, British, French and UN representatives. Council representatives regularly travelled to Switzerland to submit memoranda on the nature of Nazi and Soviet occupation in Latvia. One such visit to Geneva in May 1946 coincided with the visits of many of Latvia’s ambassadors and independent Red Cross representatives. Although the Central Council and the diplomats differed in recognising the legitimacy of the 1934 coup, they distrusted the Latvian Central Committee’s claim over refugees and, by extension, to Latvia’s political mantle. They collectively declared that because the Latvian Central Committee had been created in exile as an agency for the relief of refugees and prisoners of war, they should have no objection to the Geneva group’s work on matters that affected ‘ the land of Latvia, its people and state’.23 This stance sparked an angry turf war. In July 1946 two prominent Central Council members called for a compromise organisation ‘that would collectively create a unified centre of all working organisations in Germany in order to end parallelism and to express the desires of the Latvian nation’.24 Latvian activists did not form this unified organisation until the spring of 1948. Through the second half of 1946 and throughout 1947, the broad outlines of such a unified organisation were apparent, yet all of the contesting parties found it impossible to bring it about. Ostensibly procedural issues complicated the various organisations’ efforts to move closer together, but the underlying issues were about control, authority and egos. Latvia’s Central Council opposed the continued presence of leading Nazi era politicians in the Latvian Central Committee and categorically refused to work with them specifically or with organisations in which they were active. Much of this concerned Alfr¯eds Valdmanis, a former Ulmanis regime minister who became a leading figure in the Nazi Latvian Self-Administration.25 Valdmanis eventually rebelled against German rule, was dismissed from his post and arrested. Among refugees he remained a dynamic, yet divisive political figure.26 Ultimately, in April 1948, the various parties formed an umbrella organisation, the Latvian National Council or LNC (Latviešu Nacion¯al¯a padome). The LNC included representatives from between 14 and 16 organisations, although the ‘big three’, Latvia’s Central Council, the Latvian Central Committee and soldiers’ representatives, comprised more than half the total number of council members. The soldiers’ representatives increasingly came from Daugavas vanagi (‘Hawks of the Daugava’), an organisation committed to relief and welfare for veterans of the Latvian Legions, which found common ground with the more conservative Latvian Central Committee. The LNC defined itself as a new, global representative organisation whose goals were the liberation of Latvia, national cooperation and the preservation of the nation.

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To cement ties with Latvia’s ambassadors, the LNC also declared that its work did not challenge the constitutional legal rights and authority vested in Latvia’s premier ambassadors, Zarinš ¸ in London and Bilmanis in Washington. The LNC established a budget that relied largely on donations from refugees and from the proceeds of the Latvian embassy’s sale of Republic of Latvia passports to refugees in Germany. Most of the budget was spent on presenting the cause of Latvian refugees and the Latvian state to the Allied powers and to various international conferences. Delegations attended UN conferences in Paris and sessions of the European Council in Strasbourg. Yet political divisions among the different components of the umbrella organisation kept the LNC in a state of perpetual crisis. As before, parliamentarians and members from Latvia’s Central Council pushed for a more complete and radical break and denunciation of German collaborationists. The Latvian National Council responded that it had become the central political organisation of Latvians in exile and had the right to curb the Central Council’s independent political activity on the international arena. Not surprisingly, the parliamentarians and Latvia’s Central Council objected. Intermittent elections seemed to strengthen the claims of the Central Committee and the Daugavas vanagi that refugees supported a more conservative course for the LNC and were less indignant about Nazi ties. The organisation of these elections favoured larger camps where conservatives were strongest. Furthermore, fewer and fewer refugees voted in these elections, further straining the credibility of the LNC to speak on behalf of all Latvians. Political divisions also emerged within Latvia’s Central Council. During the war, Voldem¯ars Salnais represented the Central Council in Sweden and aided some activists in relocating to Sweden, which emerged as an early political centre of Latvian activity. Refugees there seemed to have greater individual rights and translated these into more open political activity. Many activists still in DP camps, such as Pastor L¯ usis, continued to dream of emigration to Sweden. Several events, however, tore the LCC apart and diminished the prestige of Sweden in Latvian refugees’ eyes. First, Dr Pauls Kalninš, ¸ the senior member of the parliamentarian faction, a founding member of Latvia’s Central Council and the most senior member of Latvia’s Social Democratic Party, died in Austria in August 1945. Kalninš ¸ had acted as a unifying, conciliatory figure and the Council continued to work in his spirit through 1946. His son, Bruno, eventually succeeded him. Bruno Kalninš ¸ was an ideological and confrontational social democrat in the parliamentary years. He was tried and deported by the Ulmanis regime and returned to work briefly as a political instructor in the army during the first year of Soviet occupation. He ultimately broke with Soviet rule and worked against it. But if the Left could not forgive Valdmanis for his links to Ulmanis and later the Nazis, the Right could not forgive Kalninš ¸ for his opposition to Ulmanis and his Soviet collaboration. With Bruno Kalninš ¸ leading the Swedish chapter of Latvia’s Central Council, the parliamentarians from clerical and conservative parties


abandoned the Council. Refugees began to identify Sweden and the Bruno Kalninš-led ¸ Central Council with more narrow social democratic interests. When the Council failed to overturn the Swedish government’s decision to deport 140 Latvian prisoners of war to the Soviet Union, many Latvian DPs concluded that both were weak in their opposition to the USSR. Many Latvian refugees in Sweden decided that they had had enough. Latvia’s Central Council and the Latvian National Council struggled with this new reality which overwhelmed their constant political bickering; the contested constituency of Latvian DPs was set to depart. Slowly at first, but at an increasing rate, the DP camps emptied as refugees emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Not only did the various Latvian political organisations have to contend with losing their claimed constituents, but their board members were also leaving. At the end of 1950, the chair of Latvia’s Central Council in Germany, the parliamentarian J. Ranc¯ans, decided to emigrate to the US. Three other parliamentary members of the board joined him. Soon afterwards the Central Council essentially ceased to exist in Germany. Similarly, the Latvian National Council lost a slow war of attrition as its constituent organisations emigrated or fell dormant because of the emigration of their rank and file. New challenges of legitimacy emerged as all of these former DPs and their organisations formed Latvian organisations in their new host countries. The Latvian national movement in exile entered a period of reconstitution around the new defining reality of long-term emigration and settlement far from Latvia. Archbishop Gr¯ınbergs was one of the very few national activists who remained in Germany to minister to his new flock of unwanted DPs, most of them very old, infirm or handicapped. Pastor L¯ usis and many others who were desperate to leave the camps accepted positions through the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church rather than the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church, the former being prepared to pay the costs of relocation. As befitting their entire refugee experience, these pastors had to undergo a fresh round of theological screenings from representatives of the Missouri Synod.

A balance sheet Competing Latvian national organisations stated that their overriding goal was unity, but national politicians within the DP camps failed to create a unified movement or a consensus about Latvia’s political legacy. Individual refugees, such as Pastor L¯ usis, bemoaned the organisations’ failure to compromise and unite. L¯ usis regretted the constant divisiveness and the petty, vindictive and frequent clashes of personality. Latvian national politicians failed to create a unified national movement out of the chaos and displacement of refugeedom, something that the previous generation of politicians had managed to do at the end of the First World War.

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What was different about the displacement of Latvians in 1945? Of course, the geopolitical situation dashed any hope of restoring an independent Republic of Latvia at the end of the Second World War. The First World War produced ‘the perfect storm’ for Latvian nationalists – a defeated Germany and Russia combined with a stream of Western military aid and interest in the region. The Second World War produced the opposite scenario: a triumphant Soviet Union and Western powers with no capacity, interest or resolve to continue hostilities for the sake of Latvia. No amount of unity among Latvian refugee organisations could have changed this, but the reason for their failures compared to earlier Latvian refugee achievement lies elsewhere. Essential to the success of the post-1918 Latvian national movement was the collective act of creating something new. Although most of the leading activists had political or revolutionary careers before the war, war and displacement led them to a sublime realisation – their shared goal was a democratic, independent national state. The idea of creating a new state allowed for a kind of sleight-of-hand solution to potentially insoluble conflicts. The idea of a democratic, independent Latvia was sufficient to mobilise politicians, refugees and soldiers alike. The existing class, national and philosophical differences within the Latvian state could be resolved after the state was achieved. The political kingdom had to be sought first. Displacement at the end of the Second World War did not produce this same sentiment. Instead of creating something new, Latvian national political movements were essentially competing, flawed restorationist projects. Even in the early 1950s, a close observer of the crises of the Latvian National Council concluded that there was ‘a shortage of mutual loyalty because the LNC represented two different eras of Latvia’s political history and the activists looked differently at solvable questions which often produced long and unfruitful debates’.27 Latvia’s Central Council hoped to restore the state based on the constitution of 1922 with a place for the activities of the resistance organisation in the Second World War. The logical extension of this would be to push Latvia’s Central Council away from embracing troops who served in the German army and even away from the pre-war ambassadors in London and Washington. The Latvian Central Committee hoped to restore something akin to the Ulmanis regime which abrogated the aforementioned Constitution, had decidedly turned away from the idea of a democratic state and had a place for Latvians who had worked in the Nazi Self-Administration of occupied Latvia. As Latvian prisoners of war were released and entered the political fray through their refugee aid organisation, Daugavas vanagi, the political balance between these two competitors tipped decidedly towards the Latvian Central Committee’s vision. Latvia’s Central Council refused to embrace this vision and the quest for national political unity was lost. If national unity was elusive, Latvian leaders did agree on two components of Latvian identity. The first common reference point was that the Soviet Union (and Russia) was the enemy of Latvia and the Latvian people. Almost


immediately, and in line with developing international ideas of crimes against humanity, Latvian refugees saw the Soviet occupation as a project of genocide.28 Furthermore, this crime was particularly egregious because the Latvian people and Republic of Latvia were remembered as part of the democratic mainstream of Western states and innocent victims of totalitarian aggression. This narrative fitted standard East European national narratives, it cemented refugees’ own troubled sense of identity and it staked Latvia’s claim to international attention and justice. Their larger claim that their Republic ‘always correctly fulfilled their international obligations and did not ask or expect anything, except one – to enjoy peace and live in good accord with their neighbours’ placed an obligation on Latvians to ‘continue knocking at the doors of great Western democracies’ for justice.29 The second common reference point for all of these competing Latvian émigré national projects was ethnic homogeneity. At the end of the First World War, the project to build something new included a slim but significant place for like-minded Baltic Germans, Jews, Russians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Poles. None of the post-1945 organisations had any place for political activity by these communities within the framework of Latvian national politics. The Latvian Central Committee and the Latvian National Council codified this exclusion in their very name, by using the word for ethnic Latvian (Latviešu) and not the geographic concept (Latvijas). The parliamentarians were no more inclusive. They did not include in their political organisation surviving minority representatives from Latvia’s last parliament. The minorities of interwar Latvia, politicians, intellectuals and communities faded in the émigré collective memory. They resurfaced only in inaccurate émigré claims of liberal and exemplary minority legislation used to bolster émigré claims of Latvia’s democratic pedigree or as veiled fifth columns of Soviet and German occupations. This line of reasoning began in camp-era publications intended for Western audiences such as the Latvian Central Committee’s ‘The Problem of Latvian Displaced Persons’, which made no mention of minorities or the Holocaust in its historical summary.30 Ambassador Bilmanis’s full-length History of Latvia, which would become a standard reference for more than a generation, was an even more egregious example. Writing in 1948, Bilmanis heaped blame on minorities for political instability and crises and decried their ‘alien’ economic interests which ‘did not favour the employment of Latvian stock’. His greatest sin of omission, however, was his curt summary of the Holocaust: ‘the early advent of the Gestapo in the Ostland satrapy presaged the programme of persecution for the Jews’.31 Bilmanis’s successor, the more intellectual Arnolds Spekke, authored a history of Latvia which discussed the ‘massacre of the Jews’, but highlighted Latvian protests and omitted all mention of their participation. Still, Spekke almost delighted in minimising the Baltic German role in Latvia’s history and commented that the German ‘repatriation’ in 1939 was the removal of a people that were ‘not autochthonous but had come from Germany’ and ‘had for

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centuries consciously erected an insuperable barrier between itself and the majority of the population’.32

Conclusions The idea that Latvian national politics failed in the DP camps of postwar Germany is anathema to existing Latvian émigré organisations. As proof of success, they point to the incredible educational and cultural renaissance of the camps. Indeed, the camps did produce a dynamic school system from kindergarten through to university from practically nothing. Camps large and small fielded theatre troops, choirs, fine arts sections and even opera and ballet. The literary output of DP camps was remarkable, and all the more so considering the shortages of paper and funds and the long list of official permits needed to publish at all. Finally, defenders of refugee political organisations would point to their nearly constant efforts to ameliorate refugee conditions, to defend the rights of Latvian prisoners of war, and ultimately to help displaced persons find homes and employment in host countries. In all of these important arenas, Latvian refugees can rightly claim many successes against long odds. But individual DPs acting on a mass scale deserve more credit than do the leaders. As a contemporary observer noted: we must stress that in relief work, success more or less comes from the work of thousands of the nation either in camp, regional or provincial committees whose idealism and abilities solve the innumerable daily needs upon which all refugee life in Germany depends.33 The educational, cultural and social vitality of the camps therefore begs the question as to how much the political bickering among the national elite mattered to ordinary displaced persons. Initially, the competing organisations could point to high voter turnout as proof of their legitimacy and relevance to rank-and-file DPs, but subsequent elections saw declining participation, particularly in the smaller DP camps. Likewise, the national elite could claim a loyal following evidenced by the large turnout for the occasional demonstrations and protests. Still, can we assume that such activity means a vote of confidence for the entirety of a national political organisation’s programme? There are just as many clear, if anecdotal, suggestions of a growing chasm between the priorities of DPs and their so-called national leadership. L¯ usis’s diaries record many complaints by DP leaders about DP ‘inertia’, truancy, unattended church services, lax morality, profiteering, racketeering and even drug trafficking. Of particular concern were Latvian girls’ amorous relations with GIs and married women’s extramarital affairs in their husbands’ absence. All of this behaviour, however, can be equally understood as a rejection of the national leadership or as survival mechanisms. However, the minutiae of the relationship between the DP elite and masses must remain unclear until we have more meticulous research in the archives of Latvia’s Central Council.


¸ Mi kelis Valters, who worked for the founding of Latvia in 1918, complained bitterly that Latvian DPs had by 1948 become like the émigrés of the French Revolution, who ‘did not want to learn from their mistakes’.34 He believed that Latvia’s political crisis extended beyond Soviet occupation into the still open sores of interwar politics and wartime affiliations. We might add alienation between elites and masses as well. Valters did not underestimate the Soviet threat to the Latvian nation, but realistically concluded that DP squabbles would not end Soviet occupation. He hoped that Latvians would use the DP experience collectively to reappraise both national accomplishments and shortcomings in order to resolve old rivalries. Failure to do so would lead some to continue the partisan quarrels of old, while others would simply walk away. Emigré Latvians’ disdain of those Latvians who quickly assimilated in host countries should be understood in this light. The decision to assimilate had as much to do with what was deliberately left behind as it did about what was acquired.

Notes 1. The quotation used in the title is a loose translation from a poem by Andrejs Eglitis dated 1 March 1945. A. L¯ usis (1984) Cilv¯eks bez m¯ajas: M¯acit¯ajs B¯eg¸lu Gait¯as, Dienas gr¯amata, second expanded edition (Lincoln, NB: LELBAs Apg¯ads), p. 161. 2. Dovilé Budryté sees this narrative of the nation as a larger trope in East Europe. See D. Budryte (2005) Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the postSoviet Baltic States (Aldershot: Ashgate). 3. M. Eksteins (1999) Walking since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of our Century (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin). 4. A. Nesaule (1997) A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile (New York: Penguin Books). 5. A. Purs (2007) ‘Working towards “an Unforeseen Miracle” Redux: Latvian Refugees in Vladivostok, 1918–20, and in Latvia, 1943–44’, Contemporary European History, XVI(4), pp. 479–94. 6. V. Lumans (2006) Latvia in World War II (New York: Fordham University Press), pp. 371–3. 7. Purs, ‘Working towards “an Unforeseen Miracle” Redux’, pp. 487–8, 494. 8. Lumans, Latvia, p. 197. 9. ‘Epilogue’, in Lumans, Latvia, pp. 390–1. 10. A. Ezergailis (ed.) (1997) The Latvian Legions: Heroes, Nazis or Victims? A Collection of Documents from OSS War-Crimes Investigation Files 1945–1950 (Riga: Institute of the History of Latvia). 11. M. Elliott (1982) Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in Their Repatriation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). 12. ‘Latvijas sarkanais krusts’, in A. Šv¯abe (ed.) (1952) Latvju Enciklopedija (Stockholm: Apg¯ads Tr¯ıs Zvaigznes), pp. 1409–10. 13. ‘Latvijas Sarkan¯a Krusta Bel´gij¯a Priekšnieces Zinojums ¸ 1946. gada 8. septembra pil¯ naj¯a biedru sapulc¯e’ and ‘Letter from Erika Valters to Mrs. Valija Turina, 30 October ¯ 1946’, both in Erika Valters collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA.

66 Aldis Purs 14. As quoted by E. Kiploks ¸ (1970) ‘Ienaidnieku un draugu vid¯ u (1939–1962.g.)’, in Archib¯ıskaps Dr. Teodors Gr¯ınbergs: Rakstu kr¯ajums 100. dzimumdienas atcerei (Latvijas Ev.-lut. Bazn¯ıca un Latviešu Ev.-lut. Draud˘zu apvien¯ıba Am¯erik¯a), p. 139. 15. Entry dated ‘3 January 1945’, in A. L¯ usis (1984) Cilv¯eks bez m¯ajas: M¯ac¯ıt¯ajs B¯eg¸lu Gait¯as, Dienas gr¯amata, second expanded edition (Lincoln, NB: LELBAs Apg¯ads), p. 61. Likewise, in the Kurelis group diary of J¯anis Gregors, there is considerable disdain for Latvian activists that flee to Germany. See E. Andersons and L. Silinš ¸ (eds) (1994) Latvijas centr¯al¯a padome LCP: Latviešu Nacion¯al¯a pretest¯ıba kustiba 1943– 1945 (Upsala: LCP), p. 269. 16. See the Hoover Institution collection on Latvia’s Central Committee, Box 9, folders 1–3, ‘Camp periodicals’. 17. The most frequently cited case involved 120 POWS at Giesen on 16 August 1945. See A. Memenis (1994), Karav¯ıri b¯ed¯aj¯as: St¯asts par Latvju Tautas l¯ıdzdal¯ıbu II pasaules kar¯a (Riga: self-published), pp. 171–7. 18. Lumans, Latvia, p. 386. 19. Purs, ‘Working towards “An Unforeseen Miracle” Redux’. 20. A. Vilks (1947) Latvieši B¯eg¸lu Gait¯as (n.p: P. Mantnieka Apgads), p. 29, copy in the Hoover Archives, Latvia’s Central Council collection, Box 9, folder 9.8. 21. Vilks, Latvieši B¯eg¸lu Gait¯as, p. 31. 22. Vilks, Latvieši B¯eg¸lu Gait¯as, p. 31. 23. Vilks, Latvieši B¯eg¸lu Gait¯as, p. 33. ¯ 24. Adolfs Kl¯ıve and Voldem¯ars Bastjanis are quoted in ‘Latviešu Nacion¯al¯a padome’, in Šv¯abe (ed.) Latvju enciklop¯edija, p. 1322. 25. For more on Alfr¯eds Valdmanis, see G. P. Bassler (2000) Alfred Valdmanis and the Politics of Survival (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 26. Valdmanis was appointed Director-General of Economic Development in Newfoundland, Canada in 1950. His infamous tenure is amusingly related in the historical novel by Wayne Johnson (2000) The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: A Novel (New York: Anchor). 27. ‘Latviešu Nacion¯al¯a padome’, in Šv¯abe (ed.) Latvju enciklop¯edija, p. 1323. 28. An immediate undertaking of the refugee organisations was the chronicling of the Soviet deportations of 1940-41. See Hoover Institution Archives’ collection of the Latvian Central Committee, Boxes 10-30. This work was ultimately published in Sweden as These Names Accuse. On the longer relevance of this narrative see Budryte, Taming Nationalism? 29. ‘The Problem of Latvian Displaced Persons, 1947’ (Germany: Latvian Central Committee in Western Germany) in the Hoover Institution Archives’ collection of the Latvian Central Committee, Box 9, Folder 9.9 ‘Camp Periodicals and Exile Publications’, p. 8. 30. ‘The Problem of Latvian Displaced Persons, 1947’, pp. 1–2. 31. A. Bilmanis (1951) A History of Latvia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. vii, 346, 351, 405. 32. A. Spekke (1951) History of Latvia: An Outline (Stockholm: Zelta Abele), pp. 383, 402. 33. Vilks, Latvieši B¯eg¸lu Gait¯as, pp. 35–6. 34. Quoted disdainfully in A. L¯ usis (1986) D.P. (Lincoln, NB: LELBA Apgads) p. 116.

4 The Quaker Internationalist Tradition in Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–48 Jenny Carson

Introduction ‘The Society of Friends does not have an internationalist tradition; the Society of Friends is an internationalist tradition.’1 This evaluation of the Quakers, by the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas, highlights the importance of international concern in the work undertaken by Friends in war and peace. But how is that ‘internationalist tradition’ converted into practice? Their commitment to relief work is born out of a sense that ‘as Quakers we are impelled by our faith to make our lives an active witness for peace and justice’.2 Translating religious belief into ‘positive action’ in the face of human tragedy has frequently taken the form of relieving human suffering and supporting efforts at rehabilitation.3 However – and this tends to set them apart – Quakers also believe in the importance of playing their part in eradicating the causes of war, through mediation, disarmament and education, as well as through personal example. Following in the footsteps of their founder, George Fox, Quakers have attempted and continue to attempt to live ‘in the virtue of that life and power that [take] away the occasion of all war’.4 Quaker calls to abolish war stretch back to William Penn’s appeal for the establishment of a European Diet in 1693. Later, John Bright, a Quaker MP whose opposition to the Crimean War led to the loss of his Manchester seat, called for the British to ‘cultivate friendship with all nations. . . . The past events of our history have taught me that the intervention of this country in European wars is not only unnecessary but calamitous.’5 When it comes to providing practical assistance, Quakers insist that aid should be offered to ally and enemy alike, without attaching political or religious conditions. This principle has profound implications. Quaker relief and reconstruction efforts have been imbued with the spirit and practice of reconciliation of former enemies. . . . All Quaker workers and organizations agree that assistance should be 67

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granted each individual as a child of God in a manner to promote good-will and reinforce the dignity of the recipient.6 The Quaker commitment to providing aid to both friend and foe was clearly evident in the case of William Hughes, whose eviction from Germany in the early years of the Second World War for his efforts to assist Jews did not deter his efforts after the war to bring help to 50,000 ‘suspected Nazi leaders’ held in an internment camp.7 Quakers hope that in providing aid without discrimination they will accomplish ‘the true object of it all in reconciling love’.8 Quakers also recognise that private philanthropic efforts are insufficient to address international emergencies. They have consistently put pressure on governments to recognise their responsibility for social and political action.9 At the same time, Quaker relief workers place great importance on the need for aid to be provided on a person-to-person basis. Large-scale schemes undertaken by governments and non-governmental organisations are sometimes conducted such that ‘there is a danger of forgetting that it is people, and not stomachs only, that are empty; the gift without the giver is bare’.10 Like the Quaker tradition of involvement in post-conflict relief and reconstruction, the affirmation of a Quaker ethical position goes back a long way. Members of the Religious Society of Friends are famous for their adherence to corporate testimonies concerning truth, equality, peace, simplicity and community. The most famous of these is the Peace Testimony, which does not merely call for the refusal to bear arms, ‘but rather the awakening of a peaceful and understanding spirit’.11 The belief that there is ‘that of God in everyone’ is a foundation of Quaker faith: ‘to say we love God . . . and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature . . . was a contradiction in itself’.12 Mark Deasey, a modern-day relief worker with Quaker Service, observes that ‘at root, it could be said that the practice of recognising “that of God in everyone” enabled them more easily to bypass racist assumptions about the people with whom they were working, and to introduce methods of rehabilitation which gave scope for their strengths and skills’.13 In their work Quakers use the terms ‘conciliation’ and ‘reconciliation’ interchangeably to describe a range of activities that are ‘intended to bring persons to a closer understanding and to make a more harmonious and constructive climate for human fulfilment’.14 As an organisation the Religious Society of Friends has always been ‘particularly anxious to help where a need is an unpopular one, which does not for that reason obtain the help it otherwise would’.15 The Quakers are renowned for their commitment to providing aid to ally and enemy alike during and after periods of conflict. When the First World War prevented the provision of aid to Germany, British Friends took up the plight of enemy aliens interned in camps in England, earning the name ‘Hun-coddlers’ from the Evening News.16 With the redrawing of European boundaries after the First World War the

The Quaker Internationalist Tradition in Displaced Persons Camps 69

Quakers assisted in cross-border programmes. Quaker International Centres, established by Carl Heath from 1919 onwards, became involved in mediation efforts to relieve the suffering of those minority groups whose efforts to retain their national identities in an alien country had led to oppression. ‘Wherever persecuted minorities were, whatever their politics, the Quakers attempted to plead their case with the ruling authorities.’17 It is, however, important to emphasise that the Religious Society of Friends has long resisted defining itself as a ‘humanitarian’ agency.18 Roger Wilson, who served as Secretary of the Friends Relief Service (FRS) from 1940 to 1946, stated that the Quakers preferred to be known as a religious society with the conviction that Christian discipleship expresses itself in service in an effort to answer that of God in other men, rather than as a relief organisation with peculiar religious ideas, probably unsuited to the spiritual needs of those we desire to serve.19 The history of Quaker relief prior to the Second World War, for example in Ireland, Russia and Germany, has been researched by only a handful of non-Quaker scholars, whilst studies on Friends’ actions after 1945 have so far been almost solely written by members of the relief teams themselves.20 The relative absence of academic study of the Society’s relief activities might imply that its efforts were insignificant. Such a conclusion would, however, be erroneous. Whilst the relief work undertaken by Quakers was often overshadowed by the substantial amounts of money donated by governments and other voluntary organisations, their activities are nevertheless remembered in Germany and elsewhere because they insisted on the provision of aid without political or religious conditions being attached.21 A Quaker critic has herself noted that their work frequently ‘suffers from an over-reliance on public sources’, including official records and newspapers, and makes little attempt to ‘explore the personalities, motivations, or ideologies behind the work’.22 The standard texts include two works on the FRS by Roger Wilson, Quaker Relief and Authority, Leadership and Concern, both of which outline the work of the FRS and examine the motivation of members and the administration of Quaker relief during this period. Wilson’s work provided a good overview of the organisational structure of the FRS but he deals with Quaker relief efforts with DPs in a mere 16 pages, much less than the space he devoted to FRS work among German refugees and to the ‘reactivation’ of German welfare services. Published memoirs include Eryl Hall Williams’ A Page of History in Relief, based on his diary entries and the letters he sent from Germany to his parents, and Margaret McNeill’s ‘novelised account’ of her time in Germany, By the Waters of Babylon, in which she recounted real events, based on her diary entries, but changed dates and the names of FRS members. By comparing McNeill’s diaries and journals it has

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been possible to establish accurate dates and provide real names to link to the events she describes. Assessments of the work of the FRS in the general historical literature are also notable for their absence. Like most voluntary societies that worked with displaced persons after 1945, FRS relief work has been overshadowed by concentration on the successes and failures of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). According to Mark Wyman, ‘UNRRA’s creation marked another step in the growing concern for the uprooted of war in the twentieth century’.23 As of March 1946, 1,165 of the 6,276 UNRRA employees working with DPs in Germany had been drawn from voluntary agencies, yet there is no discussion of why individuals joined UNRRA and no real analysis of the efforts of these voluntary societies, other than to state that ‘their dedication impressed outsiders’.24 Michael Marrus discusses UNRRA’s early days in the field, when the ‘inexperienced and sometimes inept UN organisation dithered and fumbled’. Overall, however, he is positive in his evaluation of the organisation and does not attribute its failures to the structure itself. UNRRA had too many administrators and not enough field workers, and its subordination to British military command stripped away its capacity for independent action.25 In their classic studies, Malcolm Proudfoot and Jacques Vernant tended to focus on the ‘aggregate’ numbers and qualities of the voluntary societies, as compared to UNRRA staff. Despite the criticism they received over their inability to clothe, feed, house, repatriate or resettle DPs, Proudfoot concluded that UNRRA was successful in ‘rehabilitating’ the displaced. However, he did suggest that without voluntary relief workers’ exertion of pressure on foreign governments to relax immigration laws the IRO may not have been quite as successful in discharging its responsibilities.26 This chapter investigates the work of the FRS, the relief assistance branch of the Religious Society of Friends, in DP camps in Germany between 1945 and 1948. It discusses the FRS’s role as an illustration of practical Quaker internationalist action and examines the tensions this generated. It also assesses the FRS’s view that DP camps perpetuated what Quakers termed competitive nationalism.

Creating the Friends Relief Service in Germany In 1945 the British Religious Society of Friends had ‘no standing machinery for the carrying on of relief work at times of national or international disaster . . . for a church can easily be diverted from its real purposes if it finds it easy to plunge into social crisis’. As Roger Wilson explained, this machinery, in the form of a ‘specially constituted organization or sub-organization’, was only constructed when the Society felt a strong sense of purpose.27 In November 1940 the Friends War Victims Relief Committee (FWVRC) had been established to support Quaker workers who had already begun to


provide aid to Londoners affected by aerial bombing raids. The FWVRC was the fifth such Quaker body to have taken that name. Previous war victims committees had been responsible for relief work after the First World War. During the 1920s a permanent Friends Service Council (FSC) had taken over the organisation of overseas inter-war relief work, although this had always played a minor part in the overall work of the organisation. Its lack of experience in emergency relief experience encouraged the Society of Friends to create a special ad hoc postwar service committee which brought together the FSC, FWVRC and the Friends Ambulance Unit. Each separate organisation had the capacity to get workers into the field, but these arrangements did not allow for unified Quaker action overseas, in terms of relief interests and experience. The new committee’s lack of machinery for putting relief workers in the field eventually led to the establishment of the FRS in the late summer of 1943. The FRS operated as an emergency committee that handled shortterm work at home and abroad; it was expected to hand over responsibilities to the FSC when the wartime emergency drew to a close. Between 1945 and 1948 the FRS kept between 24 and 30 relief workers in Germany working with DPs. The two principal teams were Team 100 in Brunswick and Team 124 in Goslar. On 25 April 1945 Team 100 entered the newly liberated camp of Bergen-Belsen under the authority of the British occupying forces and under the direction of the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad (COBSRA) and the Red Cross Commission. COBSRA (originally the Consultative Committee of Voluntary Societies for the Relief of Suffering and Aiding Social Recovery) began work in March 1943. It consisted of 22 voluntary organisations and was chaired by Sir William Goode, the UK government’s Director of Relief after the First World War and administered in part by its secretary, W. D. Hogarth. Whilst many voluntary societies in COBSRA signed agreements with UNRRA, their slow entry into the field meant that many continued to deal directly with the military and refused to be subordinated to UNRRA. ‘In the British Zone, UNRRA was frowned on in high places as an uncertain substitute for the old and well established British Red Cross and the other relief agencies included in COBSRA.’28 By July 1945, COBSRA already had 1,500 relief workers in the British zone of Germany.29 The FRS teams in the field came under the direction of the Quaker administration at Friends House, London. Whilst Friends House and Quakers in the field maintained generally positive relations, the latter had grave misgivings about what they regarded as a lack of action on the part of Friends House over the issue of forced repatriation. Following the forcible repatriation of 20 people by the British army’s Worcestershire Regiment from three Ukrainian camps in Goslar on 1 February 1946, Yvonne Marrack, the leader of Team 124, called on the British army to establish an urgent enquiry. She also asked the Quaker administration to enquire into the action that had been taken. During a meeting with Colonel Todd, the second-in-command of DP affairs, Marrack secured his agreement that no DP would be removed from a camp

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without a public explanation. She also arranged for other DPs to accompany any individual if he or she were asked to attend any military board of enquiry. After this meeting, Marrack wrote to Friends House to persuade them to make political representations to ensure the safety of the DPs. However, whilst the FRS relief workers championed the DPs’ cause in Germany and harangued British military headquarters if they felt any injustices had been committed, the official conduct of the Society was far less proactive. From the summer of 1945 onwards, FRS relief workers in the field, especially those in Team 124, made frequent appeals to Friends House in an attempt to protect DPs against the perceived dangers of repatriation. In a report on forced repatriation and the Quakers’ official policy, Roger Wilson later wrote that, in retrospect, ‘we feel that we waited too long . . . before making a protest against this inhuman treatment of people who cannot under any circumstances be regarded as Quislings or war criminals’.30 Tension was further raised by the apparent inability of some ‘Weighty Friends’ to understand the situation in Germany, and who often came over ‘more weighty than friend’.31 The FRS workers who entered Germany in 1945 did so without wages – they saw their role as a ‘duty’ not as a profession.32 As one member of Team 100 put it: Our inspiration lies in Christ’s words that by ‘feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless and visiting the sick’, we give expression to our love for God himself. And providing that we remain faithful, always remembering that it is in his power that we work, we may become a channel through which his love comes into the world.33 Their work in Germany was intended to allow them to express themselves as Christians and Quakers, ‘a means to enact their ethics’ and fulfil their sense of duty.34 The importance of the correct expression of Quaker values through action was well expressed by a member of the American FSC who joined an UNRRA team at the end of the war, and who said that ‘the tug between administrator and Quaker becomes daily more difficult. How one can mix in the world’s necessary and dirty business and yet lead the life I want to, still escapes me’.35 As we shall see, other Quakers too found that ‘dirty business’ was being transacted.

Encountering the DP camp The FRS teams worked in DP camps within an institutional system not of their devising. This had profound implications for Quaker action. Social scientists who work within the broad field of refugee studies recognise the importance of the framework of refugee relief. Liisa Malkki argues that, through its documentary output and sponsorship of academic scholarship, the UN has played a ‘decisive, instrumental role in consolidating ‘the international refugee


system’.36 The privileged position of the UN has led to the widespread adoption of its preferred approach to repatriation, integration and resettlement, the three ‘durable solutions’ to refugee displacement and to a ‘bureaucratic’ stance on the incarceration of refugees in camps. Several critics have also pointed out that the ubiquity of its programmes has led to the ‘relative absence of critical questioning of the refugee camp as an apparatus for the control of space and movement’. Malkki shows that it is not only through relief agency literature that a universalisation of the ‘refugee’ has occurred, but that in the very act of grouping individuals together in camps, organisations are effectively setting them apart and ‘producing’ the generalisation of ‘the refugees’.37 The FRS teams that entered defeated Germany inherited the majority of the DP camps in which they worked either from the retreating US forces who had liberated Brunswick or from the British army who wished to hand over control of camps in Goslar. During the war the Allies had assumed that after liberation, DPs would be anxious to return to their homes. To prepare the ground for repatriation and to prevent any confusion as well as the risk of infectious diseases, the Strategic Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) arranged for DP camps to be established. Malkki has argued that the constitution of displaced persons as a military ‘problem’ and the use by SHAEF of existing military barracks helped shape the postwar refugee administration: ‘there is a bitter irony in the fact that many of the hundreds of work and concentration camps in Germany were transformed into “Assembly Centres” for refugees when the war ended’. The camps not only exposed refugees to close scrutiny but created an ideal space for their control and management.38 Many Quakers understood full well how the DP camp served this purpose and curtailed the freedom of action of DPs. But they also grappled with the consequences of incarceration in terms of fostering a greater sense of national self-awareness, which flew in the face of the Quakers’ international outlook. As Ilana Feldman has noted in her study of the work of the American Friends Service Committee in Gaza, Quaker relief workers frequently struggled with the dilemmas posed by their work among people displaced by conflict.39 The same struggle can certainly be detected among Quaker relief workers in Germany at the end of the Second World War. These dilemmas were essentially ethical in nature. Quakers expressed dismay at the ‘bondage of dependence and uselessness’ which refugee camps seemed to create and questioned how they could work for the benefit of refugees.40 Other questions were raised both by Quakers in the field and the Friends House administration over the acceptance of government enforced neutrality.41 As in Gaza, Quaker relief workers in Germany were ‘grappling with these problems before they were familiar’ with them.42 Modern humanitarian commentators argue that relief structures which do not insist on the participation of the refugees themselves can never initiate the construction of a self-supporting productive community.43 In Barbara

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Harrell-Bond’s words, ‘aid which is imposed from outside not only usurps the ideas of the host, suppresses the creative energy of the refugee who could have been helped to help himself, but provokes responses which are hostile and unproductive for all concerned’.44 James Appe argues that in order to help the refugee ‘rediscover himself’ he should be ‘assisted on a very small scale’.45 Whilst the provision of basic food and medical security is essential in the recovery of refugee communities, refugees should be involved in the construction of homes and latrines, and food should be provided in moderation.46 Without the investment of their own labour, refugees are argued to feel less self-respect for their homes and personal welfare.47 The non-participatory nature of large-scale humanitarian assistance has been created by the assumption that ‘left to their own devices, refugees would remain perpetually dependent on relief; outsiders are therefore needed to get the refugees to be self-supporting’.48 Modern commentators contend that there is a need to engage with the refugees as ‘subjects and interlocutors rather than as helpless, hapless “others”’.49 It is agreed that in order to have a ‘beneficial impact’ humanitarian work should concentrate less on converting the displaced into ‘suspicious subject populations, figures, and numbers’ through concentration on ‘how much, what kind of aid, where, who are when’ and more on ‘who should make the decisions’.50 Humanitarian agencies need to move away from the ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘conservative tradition’ of assuming that an ‘expert on the refugees’ problems’ will be able to ‘solve the problems of assistance’ and ‘give refugees greater responsibility for assisting themselves’.51 The language used by the FRS administration at home and workers in the field talks of building ‘responsibility’, ‘independence’, ‘normal community life’ and ‘rehabilitation’, and clearly shows that they aimed at much more than the mere resolution of the emergency; they wished to get to the root causes of population displacement and ‘work for change’. The idea of such work incorporates the Quaker conviction that political action is necessary in combating social injustice. FRS workers were not content only to provide material relief to those who needed it, they further wished to aid in their rehabilitation, including the building of trust and cooperation with other nationalities in a bid to create internationalism. The FRS workers felt a desire not only to assist in the rebirth of DP communities, but to play an active role as friends and colleagues, attending church services, weddings, national celebrations and parties.52

The challenge of ‘competitive nationalism’ versus ‘internationalism’ The Allied armies’ division of DPs into national groups made the control of camps easier, because it required one language only in the delivery of orders and, more importantly, meant that displaced people were already assembled for rapid repatriation.


When FRS workers began work they became concerned over the segregation of nationalities and the forging of ‘competitive nationalism’ which seemed to be occurring.53 One member of the AFSC working with DPs in Germany wrote of his concern over ‘the growth of nationalism among them at a time when the world at large is suffering from too much nationalism’.54 A report on the refugee situation noted: they are living in large groups (all with the same background of opposition to the Soviet or Tito regimes), which, in addition to the language barrier, are virtually closed communities. In these circumstances their hatreds become even stronger and they merely aggravate each other’s conditions.55 The nationalism that FRS workers witnessed in the camps was not limited to distrust of other nationalities, there also existed deep internal divisions within each national camp, especially among those Poles who left with their families and moved to Germany with some aspect of choice and those who were later forced to migrate. Elisabeth Bailey of the FRS recalled the reaction in one camp to Margaret McNeill’s suggestion that all the single men give up their milk allowance to the Polish children, ‘There was a deathly silence, then suddenly one man, shouted out “Polish children! We see no Polish children – only children who speak German. We will not give up anything!”’56 Evidence of individual FRS members’ dislike of the construction of these large mono-ethnic camps can be seen in Quaker publications and correspondence between FRS members and the Quaker administration. One letter to a relief worker in Germany from the Assistant Overseas Secretary reads: [I] hope that your suggestion of doing welfare work among the small DP settlements in the town will be accepted. The transplanting of DPs into the vast inhuman barracks of which you speak should certainly be avoided if it is at all possible.57 The FRS workers in Germany were idealistic in their response to increasing nationalism within Germany, believing that if the DPs could live privately outside the camps, ‘national groups, including British, could meet and share their cultural, recreational, and social activities, and through this sharing arrive at a better understanding, and a fuller sense of appreciation of one another’.58 One report on the ‘Psychological Condition of Refugees’ was used by the FRS to call for the disbanding of DP camps and the establishment of freer societies living in barracks and mixing with the local populations. The report argued that whilst DPs remained enclosed in camps surrounded only by their own national group they would ‘psychologically be caught in a vicious circle’ of increasing nationalism. Commenting that ‘Perspective is impossible when there is so little contact with, or understanding of, the

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outside world’, the report also stated that movement of DPs to large camps not only led to the construction of closed communities, but, following a forcible repatriation by the British army in February 1946, also served to increase DP fears of such actions. [T]he majority prefer to live in abject poverty [in the towns] because they fear that a DP Camp is the first step towards forced repatriation. Although official policy is now against forced repatriation, the damage has been done, and the word of military or other organisations is no longer trusted.59 Malkki’s comparison of Hutu refugees living in the refugee camp Mishamo with those living independently in the town of Kigoma suggested that: grouping the Hutu together into an immense collectivity, and by enclosing them all together in a place set apart and marked especially for them (a place which systematically excludes others), the camp fixed and objectified them as ‘the Hutu’ and as ‘the refugees’. Life in the town, on the other hand, was marked by continued interspersing of people and negotiation of relationships and did not provide the possibility of such an homogenizing objectification. Indeed it actively denied it.60 Malkki found that those in the camp saw themselves as ‘as a nation in exile, and defined exile in turn, as a moral trajectory of trials and tribulations that would ultimately empower them to reclaim (or create a new) “homeland”’. In contrast with those in the camps, the refugees in the towns did not construct such totalising categories of identity, producing instead more ‘cosmopolitan’ forms. Those in the towns tended to operate on a more ‘individual basis’ and ‘responded to the practical needs of the immediate, lived present . . . and not with contemplating a millennial return’.61 According to Malkki (whose findings have not gone unchallenged), the camp refugees created a ‘mythicohistory’, ‘not only a description of the past, but a subversive recasting and reinterpretation of it in fundamentally moral terms’, a construction of the past in opposition to others, leading to ‘heroising the past and the Hutu as “a people” categorically distinct from others’.62 In Germany, this focus on the distant return to a ‘free Poland’ and heroisation of the past can be seen in the inhabitants’ naming of the main Polish camp in Brunswick ‘Tadeusz Kosciuszko’, after a Polish national hero who led the 1794 uprising against the Russian Empire. Similarly, the DP camp at Einbeck was named after the Polish hero General Sikorski. Malkki found that there was great concern inside the camp with the ‘outside world’ and ‘international opinion’ and for legitimatisation of their stories, seen in the documenting of personal histories and their delivery to international organisations. In Germany, this desire for international support and legitimisation


can be seen in DP publications such as ‘An Appeal for Freedom of Estonia’, which took the form of a memorandum signed by 18,000 Estonian refugees in Germany and addressed to the US President and the British Prime Minister.63 Whilst undertaking their work in Germany the members of the Friends Relief Service worried about the competitive nationalism which the camps seemingly produced, yet at the same time they supported and assisted in the reviving of national religions, languages, crafts and cultural festivals in order to occupy the inhabitants of the camps productively. FRS members believed that engaging DPs in educational, cultural and employment programmes was an essential means to confront national sentiment head on. Margaret McNeill of Team 100 wrote that in persuading Polish DPs to work for the North German Timber Company, the team dreamt of ‘contented DPs working off their nationalism on a stout tree stump’.64 In occupying the DPs the FRS encouraged them to take responsibility for their own lives, for ‘it was not the policy of FRS teams to contribute directly more than the initial impetus to the organization of DP camp life’.65 However, in relinquishing this responsibility, members of the FRS team recognised that they had become ‘more aware of national differences . . . one of the biggest Quaker jobs at the moment lies in attempting to direct emotional energy into constructive channels and to prevent misunderstanding’.66 The revival and maintenance of culture in the DP camps was a great concern of relief workers in Germany and many individuals’ have described the DPs’ determination to construct churches and hold national festival days. One relief worker recalled: It was so important for them to retain this part of their background, their nationality, it really was. Nowadays we wonder about it a little bit, perhaps we shouldn’t have been quite so keen on keeping them as Poles or Ukrainians or whatever, but it was so important to them, they had lost everything and they wanted to keep that bit of their being.67 However, FRS members also believed that through their relations with DPs they should also attempt to foster ‘the spirit of internationalism’, with an aim that through clubs and social meetings reconciliation between the defeated and persecuted peoples of Europe could be achieved. In one report to Friends House regarding an FRS-organised DP handicraft exhibition, Margaret McNeill stated that the teams’ activities were undertaken in the hope that they would foster national pride and a self-supporting instinct in the displaced persons. However, she noted that: It is foolish to paint a sentimentally enthusiastic picture. The DPs do not pursue creative work unhindered by the common feelings of greed, sloth and vanity anymore than anybody else does . . . and while we may delight

78 Jenny Carson

in the various national characteristics displayed in the work, unending vigilance must be maintained against competitive nationalism.68 Maintaining ‘vigilance’ was easier said than done. One means was to enable more positive encounter between DPs and German civilians. Members of the FRS teams believed that through their role in Germany they should use the ‘trust’ they had established with the DPs to ‘try to help them to understand the problem of the ordinary German people and to realise, even if dimly, that their future and that their children is bound up in the way in which things are tackled now’.69 Quaker relief workers expressed concern about the ‘new nastiness [that] was in the air’ and the anti-German feelings that existed in the camps. ‘The consequences of the widely held belief that all Germans were evil was the justification it gave to theft from farmers as well as in the towns, the killing of pigs, chicken, and even the odd cow or calf.’70 FRS workers envisaged the formation of international youth groups for those over 14 years of age, with strict instructions that division of the 40 children was to be ‘based on interest and NOT nationality’.71 ‘Co-operation between DP and German youth groups would be of great value if it could be brought about and might indirectly lay the foundations of a real measure of international understanding.’72 In other words, cooperation and trust were at least as important as external ‘vigilance’. One attempt to foster adult international relations was the establishment of a DP cultural club, which the FRS hoped would be organised by a multinational DP committee. However, their dreams were quashed when the committee sat for three weeks arguing about the club’s constitution and debating each nation’s allocated time slot. Despite the success of the club’s opening ceremony, which included an exhibition of handicrafts from all nations and a display of national dancing and singing, it finally closed after little over a month. Margaret McNeill reported that: We wanted to bring the nationalities together, but we seem to have succeeded only in raising more strife than ever before. . . . To the DPs culture was something extricably associated with their shattered past; it was something that was the outcome of a stable self-respecting society, something far too delicate and complex to be goaded into living growth by tournaments and discussion groups. She explained how Quaker relief workers held themselves responsible for the failure of the club, blaming the fact that they had imposed it on the DPs: ‘We had yet to learn that, unless there is first goodwill, a love of culture does not necessarily draw people together.’ However, she added that their good intentions remained intact and eventually the Quakers revived the ‘spirit of internationalism’ with a weekly folk dancing club in the neutral territory of the Quaker House in Goslar. The only rules of the club were that it was to


have ‘no secretary, no statutes, no membership and no arguments!’ As many DPs as could be fitted into the Quaker House received an invitation. Now, McNeill explained, ‘we no longer tried to organize culture for the DPs, but simply shared with them the things that gave us so much pleasure ourselves – which was perhaps what we had really wanted to do all the time’.73 So far as one can tell, sport did not have a prominent place in the DP camps in which the FRS operated. The few references which have emerged mention one table tennis tournament which took place between the members of one camp and the British army, not against other nationalities.74 A proposal for the organisation of an international ping-pong competition raised fears in some FRS members over its ‘competitive’ nature, ‘the [handicraft] exhibition has roused enough national feeling as it is’.75 The preference for folk dancing over sports appears marked in the archives, with emphasis placed on the non-competitiveness of dance and its ability to bring nationalities together to share each other’s cultural heritage. The Quakers saw dance as a way to build mutual relationships in which groups could appreciate each other’s cultures, from the outset the teams planned on teaching Scottish, English and Irish dances with the hope that DPs would ‘teach their own national dances’.76 Margaret McNeill talks of the reciprocal relationship formed between the teams and the nationalities: ‘we brought the gramophone along with us and taught them “The Waves of Tory” and Scottish reels and in return learnt the Lithuanian Harvesters’ Dance and others’.77 When he met the German youth leader at the birthday celebration of one FRS member, the Polish youth leader invited him ‘to bring his young people’s folk song and dancing groups to the camp for an evening with the Polish Youth Groups’.78 The use of dance as kind of encounter and even as a means of reconciliation continued until the teams left Germany in 1948, although its impact is difficult to gauge. Two FRS relief workers hoped to use the transfer of DPs into requisitioned German houses as an opportunity to contribute to international reconciliation by introducing each party to the other: As our two friends came away they thanked the Russian woman for what must have been to her a rather embarrassing visit; but she answered that she had had to turn out of her home when the Germans came and knew what it meant, and that it was all quite alright. Our friends felt perhaps something had been done to take the edge off a rather bitter situation.79 According to Tim Evens of FRS Team 124, one of the most rewarding acts of reconciliation between nations involved the production of a nativity play which was written by Elizabeth Sullivan and Margaret McNeill and performed in Goslar in December 1946 by Germans, British and Eastern Europeans. Evens wrote that the different nationalities were practically forgotten in the exigencies of production and, except that the different groups wear their own charming national

80 Jenny Carson

costumes, the 40 children now standing so quietly behind me waiting for their entrance, represent far more childhood the world over, just as the Shepherds and the Kings, lurking in the shadows of the transept, represent the common people and the rulers of the world. For indeed all these players express in their parts, to some extent, something that has been their actual experience. Biblical story and twentieth-century events have become inextricably mingled.80 The nativity play was attended by a high-ranking colonel in the military government who believed it to be ‘a sign of hope at a time of great darkness’.81

Conclusions This chapter has identified some of the main features of Quaker work in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Quakers associated the actions of large-scale humanitarian organisations with the provision of ‘impersonal’ relief; by contrast, the FRS adopted a broader focus that extended to the rehabilitation of the individual as well.82 As a result, the FRS criticised the UNRRA ‘experiment’ for being too limited in scope and for missing a grand opportunity for international reconstruction . . . As Roosevelt has said ‘rehabilitation’ may include seeds, implements and cows, but not everything that is needed to bring economies back to normal. ‘Rehabilitation’ must be understood in a narrow sense, ‘relief’ in a broad sense. UNRRA, in other words, is for the emergency, leaving long term economic policy to other bodies.83 Quaker involvement with DPs in Germany belonged to a long tradition of relief work. In some respects it marked a turning point in the activities of the Religious Society of Friends. Before 1945 the Society had no standing machinery with which to undertake relief work, but after the Second World War the Friends Service Council became a permanent organisation that took overall charge of Quaker relief work. (Since 2001 the FSC has been known as Quaker Peace and Social Witness, or QPSW for short.) Another significant step was the involvement of the Society of Friends in the work of new international bodies. Thus, the founding of the United Nations in 1945 encouraged Quakers to cooperate in its attempts to mediate in conflict situations and in its broad support for human rights. In 1948 the Society of Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) received consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council as an international non-governmental organisation. Quakers had no illusions about the situation in which they found themselves. Eryl Hall Williams, a member of FRS Team 100, wrote of the problems FRS workers faced inspiring internationalism amidst the ‘widely held belief’


in the inevitability of war with Russia: ‘indeed some even asked, not when it would begin but how it was going?’ In the light of these views, Quakers pinned their hopes on a united Europe. According to one eye-witness, ‘some of my closest acquaintances among the DPs whom I had known in the concentration camp and in Brunswick believed that “here is one of the cardinal points of all work in the near future” in terms of education and politics’. But Williams also went on to show how difficult it was to realise this vision in the light of the conduct of DPs and soldiers, all of whom had been profoundly affected by the doctrines of National Socialism: The Russians released from the camps had not been a very good advertisement, so many of them had gone wild on their release and turned to stealing, rape and murder. H.N. Brailsford had written in the New Statesman on 16 June 1945 something with which I strongly agreed: ‘the Nazis have indeed been crushed, but they have left behind them as an accursed legacy their racial theory in a new form, and with it, for our invitation, their models of ruthlessness’.84 As an organisation, the FRS did not judge its actions in Germany on whether they had provided solutions to the problems of postwar Europe but focused their judgement on whether they had made adequate witness to the principle of Christian love. To Quakers all actions are considered valid provided that they are carried out in true witness, whether or not they deliver results: ‘at least a candle has been lit, though the darkness continues’.86 Evidently, the issue of repatriation caused particular anguish in this regard, and tension arose between the Society of Friends’ administration in London and Quaker relief workers in the field. Unlike other organisations engaged in postwar relief and reconstruction, the Quakers demonstrated an impressive degree of self-awareness. As Tim Evens admitted in an interview, ‘there is such a good press for Quakers that it’s sometimes worth remembering that we weren’t always perfect either as a group or certainly not as individuals’.86 This tendency to critical self-reflection continues to characterise Quaker action. Mark Deasey, who undertook work with Quaker Peace Service in Lebanon for three years in the early 1980s and subsequently worked for Quaker Service Australia and the AFSC in Cambodia, summarised his experiences as follows: “‘Privilege” is certainly a term: any undertaking of service overseas involves the cooperation of a large number of people, and to be the one at the end of the long chain, who actually gets to the coal face and sees the changes for the good that can be wrought, can be an extraordinary experience.’87 This reflective stance has encouraged Quakers to become aware of the impact of relief work on recipients and aid providers. Person-to-person contact is encouraged, with both local relief actors and the recipients of aid,

82 Jenny Carson

with the intention of building trust and respect. The United States Institute of Peace remarks that faith-based NGOs, like QPSW, are important because of their intention to establish longer relationships with local communities and to follow their lead, seeking to facilitate and support the initiatives already identified or undertaken by local agents of social change. . . . Locally, activists appreciate the willingness of staff members of these NGOs to spend unstructured time getting to know them. . . . Foreign staff members are also praised for searching for ways to support local initiatives, rather than introducing their own pre-planned programs. . . . Beneficiaries have the sense that they have become connected to groups and individuals who will not abandon them with the next grant cycle, but who will be there with ongoing interest, concern, and support.88 One other finding from research on Quaker involvement with DPs in Germany after the Second World War deserves to be mentioned. It too bears on the question of reflexivity. In an interview, Tim Evens expressed something of the sense of disillusionment he felt when he returned from ‘the field’: If you do exotic things in far away places and you come home, and this applies to half the British Army as well, you suddenly find that not only does nobody want to know but they don’t really understand either and simply it’s a matter of people getting on with their boring ordinary lives and you’ve been out there, you know, talking to the Russians and all these exciting things you see and nobody wants to know. As I say you might have been 25 and a colonel somewhere leading a band of people through a frontier or something and nobody wants to know.89 The extended encounter with DPs and with officials in Germany had a profound and even a transformative effect on Quakers as individuals; we saw earlier how it also affected the Society as an organisation. But Evens questioned how great an impact these encounters had beyond a relatively small circle of active members. This point deserves further consideration.90 In 2001, responding to the request of one young Bosnian woman, who ‘came from a town that had been ruthlessly “cleansed” of its Muslim population during the war’, for funds to organise a meeting between local Bosnian Serbs and local Muslims who had lived in the town before their forcible removal, the Quaker Peace and Social Witness representative stated that they ‘would be eager and willing to support such a bold initiative (and even accept the proposal of outright failure) simply because of “the spiritual value of getting to the point that you are willing to try”’. The project had previously been turned down by other international agencies ‘interested only in funding large-scale projects in the region’.91 QPSW believe in the need to ‘confront the past’ in order to build a peaceful future, ‘different versions of recent history


create deep mistrust and hinder co-operation between those who were on different sides in the conflict’.92

Notes 1. Stanley Hauerwas, paraphrased by B. Phillips (2006) ‘Quaker Global Witness in the Twenty-first Century’, in B. Phillips and J. Lampen (eds) Endeavours to Mend: Perspectives On British Quaker Work In The World Today (London: Quaker Books), p. 13. 2. ‘Quaker Peace & Social Witness Central Committee’, in Quakers in Britain (2005) Quaker Faith and Practice (London: Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends) paragraph 8.09. 3. The Friends’ Quarterly, London, April 1948, p. 75. 4. George Fox, cited in Quaker Faith and Practice, paragraph 24.01. 5. R. A. J. Walling (ed.) (1930) The Diaries of John Bright (London: Cassell). 6. C. H. M. Yarrow (1978) Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 25–6. 7. Yarrow, Quaker Experiences, p. 61. Further information on the work of William Hughes and Corder Catchpool can be found in J. E. B. Bailey (1995) A Quaker Couple in Nazi Germany: Leonhard Friedrich Survives Buchenwald (York: Sessions). 8. H. Loukes (1960) The Discovery of Quakerism (London: Harrap), p. 152. 9. See H. E. Hatton (1993) The Largest Amount of Good – Quaker Relief in Ireland 1654– 1921 (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press). 10. Loukes, The Discovery of Quakerism, p. 154. 11. Loukes, The Discovery of Quakerism, p. 144. 12. John Woolman, cited in Quaker Faith and Practice, paragraph 25.05. 13. M. Deasey (2002) ‘To Do Justly, and to Love Mercy: Learning from Quaker Service’, The James Backhouse Lecture (Victoria: Australia Yearly Meeting), p. 35. 14. Yarrow, Quaker Experiences, p. xxi. 15. R. Fry (1926) A Quaker Adventure: the Story of Nine Years’ Relief and Reconstruction (London: Nisbet), p. 166. 16. A. B. Thomas (ed.) (1933) St Stephen’s House: Friends’ Emergency Work in England 1914 to 1920 (London: Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress), p. 43. 17. Yarrow, Quaker Experiences, p. 28. 18. By 1940 the Society had an established reputation for humanitarian assistance, having formerly been involved in the provision of relief both during and after the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–75, the Balkan wars of 1877–79 and 1912–14, and the Great War 1914-23. R. Wilson (1952) Quaker Relief: an Account of the Relief Work of the Society of Friends, 1940–1948 (London: Allen & Unwin), p. 326. 19. Wilson, Quaker Relief, p. 122. 20. An important exception is the work of J.-D. Steinert (2007) Nach Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit: Britische humanitäre Hilfe in Deutschland. Die Helfer, die Befreiten und die Deutschen (Osnabrück: Secolo Verlag). 21. Yarrow, Quaker Experiences, p. 269; A. Von Borries (2000) Quiet Helpers: Quaker Service in Postwar Germany (London: Quaker Home Service and American Friends Service Committee). 22. F. Mendlesohn (2000) ‘Denominational Difference in Quaker Relief Work during the Spanish Civil War’, Journal of Religious History, XXIV(2), p. 181.

84 Jenny Carson 23. M. Wyman (1985) DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 (London: Associated University Press), p. 47. 24. Wyman, DPs, p. 130. 25. M. Marrus (1985) The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 311, 345. 26. M. Proudfoot (1957) European Refugees, 1939–1952: A Study in Forced Population Movement (London: Faber and Faber). 27. Wilson, Quaker Relief, p. 1. 28. Proudfoot, European Refugees, p. 237. 29. Proudfoot, European Refugees, p. 186. For further detail on COBSRA, see Steinert, Nach Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit, pp. 28, 74. 30. Roger Wilson, Threatened Forced Repatriation of Ukrainians from Kreis Goslar, 10 June 1946. Friends House Archives: File 3, Secretariat Germany, 1944–August 1946, FRS/1992/70. 31. Margaret McNeill, Diary Entry, 4 March, 1947. Document D, Margaret McNeill Papers. The term ‘Weighty Friends’ referred to people including Margaret Backhouse, Joe Brayshaw and Lettice Jowitt, all of whom came from prominent Quaker families and who went to Germany in order to assess FRS efforts. 32. Robert Rossborough (Overseas Secretary) to Eric Cleaver, 25 April 1946, File 2: Vlotho, February to June 1946, FRS/1992/76. 33. Letter, probably from Yvonne Marrack, sent on 24 July 1946 to all DP and German groups with whom 124 FRS was in touch in the Goslar area, File 4, Displaced Persons and Refugees ‘M2’ File – Correspondence 1944-46, FRS/1992/66. 34. I. Feldman, (2007) ‘The Quaker Way: Ethical Labor and Humanitarian Relief’, American Ethnologist, XXXIV(4), p. 692. 35. Wyman, DPs, p. 130. 36. L. Malkki (1995) ‘Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology, XXIV, pp. 495–523 (p. 505). 37. L. Malkki (1995) Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: Chicago University Press), p. 235. 38. Malkki, ‘Refugees and Exile’, p. 499. 39. Feldman, ‘The Quaker Way’, pp. 689-705. 40. M. McNeill (1950) By the Rivers of Babylon: a Story of Relief Work among the Displaced Persons of Europe (London: Bannisdale Press), p. 203. 41. Under the Condition of Service agreed between COBSRA, the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad, and the Military Authorities in January 1944, voluntary societies agreed to ‘refrain from propaganda or political activities. . . . A team which has of its own free will undertaken to work under those conditions must sacrifice some of its freedom to make public comment. . . . The Committee accepted these limitations reluctantly, realising that a point might be reached when they had to sacrifice their right to relieve suffering in order to bear witness to certain human standards’. Eric Cleaver to Yvonne Marrack, 13 February 1946. File 1, RS/124 October 1945-May 1946, FRS/1992/73. 42. Feldman, ‘The Quaker Way’, p. 690. 43. See B. Harrell-Bond (1985) Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 364; J. Appe (1984) ‘Obstacles in Assisting Refugees’, Disasters, VIII(4), pp. 271–2; J. Hyndman (2000) Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). 44. Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid, p. 4.

The Quaker Internationalist Tradition in Displaced Persons Camps 85 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

Appe, ‘Obstacles’, p. 272. Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid, p. 161. Appe, ‘Obstacles’, p. 272. Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid, p. 9. Hyndman, Managing Displacement, p. 115. Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid, p. 19; Hyndman, Managing Displacement, p. 25; Appe ‘Obstacles in Assisting Refugees’, p. 271. Appe, ‘Obstacles in Assisting Refugees’, p. 272. See Quaker Peace and Social Witness (QPSW) (2007) ‘A Quaker View On . . .’ leaflet series (London: QPSW); Eric Cleaver, ‘RS/124 Goslar’, Monthly Report, 19 September 1946, p.2, File 7, Germany: General, FRS/1992/70; ‘UNRRA and the Organisation of Relief’, FRS, Service Bulletin, (15), 10 February 1944, p.11. Wilson, Quaker Relief, p. 234. Wyman, DPs, p. 157. Report by Stanley Head, ‘On the Psychological Condition of Refugees’, File 4: Displaced Persons and Refugees ‘M2’ File – Correspondence 1944–46, FRS/1992/66. Elizabeth Bailey, journal entry, 23 September 1945, in the journals of Elizabeth Bayley (now Sullivan), June 1945–January 1946. Document J, Margaret McNeill Papers. RGT to William Broughton, 27 June 1945. File 1, RS 100 1945-46, correspondence, FRS/1992/72. Monthly Report, December 1947, 100A FRS, Part II, File 2, RT/100 Correspondence/ 2 1946-1948, FRS/1992/72. Head, ‘On the Psychological Condition of Refugees’. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 234. Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 2–4, 16, 169, 191. Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 54-5. For a critical response see G. Kibreab (1999) ‘Revisiting the Debate on People, Place, Identity and Displacement’, Journal of Refugee Studies, XII(4), pp. 384–410. Üleilmline Eesti Ühing (1946) An Appeal for Freedom of Estonia (New York: World Federation of Estonians); Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 251. McNeill, By the Rivers of Babylon, p. 133. Wilson, Quaker Relief, p. 233. YM to EC, ‘Administration’, General Activities Report, October 31st 1946. File 6: RS/124, Goslar, Reports and Newsletters, p. 2, FRS/1992/73. Personal testimony of Janie Whitaker, interviewed by JC, 3 February 2007. Wilson, Quaker Relief, p. 234. Yvonne Marrack to Robert Rossborough, Report No: RS/124/47, General Activities Report No.6, 30 October 1945. File 1: RS/124 October 1945–May 1946, FRS/1992/73. E. Hall Williams (1993) A Page of History in Relief 1944 to 1946 (York: Sessions), p. 54. Margaret McNeill to Magda Kelber, General Activities Report, March 1947. File 6: RS 124 GOSLAR – Reports and Newsletters, FRS/1992/73. Minutes of the Second Germany Regional Conference held at Tannerhof, Remscheid from 6 to 8 September 1946. File 1: Regional Conferences – Germany – Correspondence and Reports 1945-1946, p. 4, FRS/1992/68. McNeill, By the Rivers of Babylon, pp. 152–4. FRS, Service News 73, 17 January 1947. File: Friends Relief Service – Service News 71–112 Incomplete (1947) p. 4.

86 Jenny Carson 75. McNeill, By the Rivers of Babylon, p. 148. 76. Monthly Report, 6 December–7 January 1948. File 6: RS/124, Goslar, Reports and Newsletters, FRS/1992/73. 77. Margaret McNeill, Scrapbook, p. 105. Document F, Margaret McNeill Papers. 78. ‘Bob’s Party’, Team Report, May 1947. File 2, RT/100 Correspondence/2 1946– 1948, FRS/1992/72. 79. RS Newsletter, 16-22 September 1945. File 2: RS/124 Newsletter Y. M Correspondence, FRS/1992/73. 80. Margaret McNeill, ‘The Nativity Play 1946’. File 6: RS/124, Goslar, Reports and Newsletters, FRS/1992/73. 81. Tim Evens, Copy of speech given at the ‘Stille Helfer’ exhibition. 82. Friends Relief Service, ‘Suffering’, Annual Report 1944-45, p. 3. 83. ‘UNRRA and the Organisation of Relief’, p. 11. 84. Hall Williams, A Page of History in Relief, p. 54. 85. Yarrow, Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation, p. 270. 86. Personal testimony of Tim Evens, interviewed by JC, 16 November 2006. 87. Deasey, ‘To Do Justly’, p. 12. 88. B. Peuraca (2003) ‘Can Faith-based NGOs Advance Interfaith Reconciliation? The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, United States Institute of Peace, Special Report no. 103, pp. 6–7, available at www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr103.pdf. 89. Interview with Tim Evens, 16 November 2006. 90. See J. Carson (2009) ‘The Friends Relief Service and the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany’, PhD dissertation, University of Manchester. 91. Phillips, ‘Quaker Global Witness’, p. 21. 92. QPSW (2006) Post-Yugoslav Reconciliation Factsheet (London: QPSW), available at www.quaker.org.uk.

Part II Return: Soviet Postwar Resettlement Practices and Population Management


5 Remaking Soviet Society: the Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49 Nick Baron

All of Russia was on the move, everyone, peasants, collective farmers, and especially people whose passports had been taken from them and who had only identification cards. An enormous percentage of the population. They had not been able to leave their district without an NKVD pass. But suddenly all that was overturned: the wave of war had destroyed even those barriers, and Russia was on the move. Aleksander Wat, My Century 1 Question: Narrate under what circumstances you were liberated [from Dachau] by the Americans, how long and where you were held by them, and what you did during this time. Interrogation of repatriate Nikolai Akimovich Lial’ko, 18 May 19492

Introduction The end of the Second World War in Europe brought liberation from Nazi captivity to several million Soviet citizens. Most had been taken westward by the Germans as prisoners of war or as forced labourers seized in occupied territories. A small minority of Soviet men had, voluntarily or not, joined the enemy’s armed forces. Over the subsequent months and years, the majority of these Soviet displaced persons returned to their places of origin. Their journeys home, however, were not simple trajectories. The time they had spent abroad, outside the purview of Soviet military commissars or intelligence operatives, marked them in the eyes of the Stalinist state as suspect. Both before and on their return to Soviet territory, repatriated citizens were confined in holding stations and camps, where they were subjected to ‘filtration’ (fil’tratsiia) pending their return home or alternatively their further resettlement or deportation. Referring to recently declassified political police records from Kiev region in Ukraine, this chapter considers the role and significance of the encampment, investigation and registration of 89

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returnees. It seeks to relate these practices of power to the postwar reconstruction of society and to the establishment of new normative identities and autobiographical narratives. I deal only briefly with the organisation of Soviet postwar filtration and numbers of repatriates, since there is already a substantial literature on these topics.3 Principally, I am interested here in filtration as a moment of intersection between state practice and social experience. On the one hand, the Stalinist regime instituted filtration to police the boundaries of postwar society: all returnees were screened and any perceived deviant or dangerous elements excised from the migrant mass. Such individuals may have rendered themselves suspect by their wartime activities, in particular by collaboration or association with the enemy, or because they had spent time in displaced persons (DP) camps in the Western zones of occupation. There, as a top Soviet repatriation official wrote, they would have been exposed to the ‘intensive influence’ of anti-Soviet interests; some ‘undoubtedly’ had been recruited and trained as ‘spies, terrorists, agitators’ to be infiltrated into the USSR.4 Filtration was in this sense a traditional border control practice. At the same time, the aftermath of the vast upheavals of wartime gave the Stalinist authorities a fresh opportunity to verify and register many of its citizens, especially those living in strategically crucial borderland regions. Among the repatriates, they believed, lurked previously hidden enemies who had now unmasked themselves by their wartime actions or failure to act appropriately, as well as new subversives of the postwar world, seeking to hide their hostile intent behind a false identity or a façade of anonymity. The state used filtration to restore and renew its knowledge of the population. In the formerly occupied territories it needed to rebuild bureaucratic archives which had been captured, lost or destroyed during the war.5 Filtration was a mass operation, but its procedures were therefore highly individualised. In this sense, filtration enabled the postwar Stalinist state to reconstitute itself, both discursively and in practice, in even more hegemonic form. However, filtration should not be viewed only as an instrument of excision and exclusion. As we shall see, most Soviet returnees were approved to resettle in their places of origin and only a minority was subject to repression. Why, then, did the Soviet authorities conduct such an immense and time-consuming campaign of individual verification and registration? For the Soviet regime, I suggest, the uncontrolled movement of its population during the war, especially across the state’s former borders, was seen as a threat to the social order in itself, regardless of the specific itineraries, places of sojourn and points of contact of the displaced. As Alexander Wat remarked, whereas before the war the vast majority of the Soviet population had been prevented from leaving even their local districts without a police travel pass, the ‘wave of war’ had ‘overturned’ all ‘barriers’ to mobility: ‘Russia was on the move’. The wartime uprooting of people had disrupted the regime’s carefully constructed pre-war networks of surveillance and control, intensified chronic chaos in its

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distribution of labour resources and shattered its attempts to impose norms of rootedness on a resolutely shifting population. Millions of individuals had experienced alternative sites and regimes of discipline; they were now to be individually processed before being resettled into Soviet structures of place and power. In this sense, the filtration procedure served to reconstitute postwar Stalinist society by inculcating in its subjects the officially sanctioned set of values, normative modes of self-identification and self-presentation and a reinforced awareness of their individual obligations in relation to the state. It placed all returning citizens in a space of transit, a period of probation during which they could try to make sense of and articulate their experiences of war and displacement in terms acceptable to the regime. Filtration afforded repatriates the opportunity to overcome not the trauma but the stigma of displacement. For those who might have experienced displacement as emancipation from Soviet authority, or hoped that their liberation from Nazi slavery indeed heralded liberation, filtration confronted them with the renewed and reinvigorated terms of the Stalinist regime’s relationship with society. The filtration procedure offered returnees the opportunity to reestablish or create anew their ‘Soviet persona’, equipped with a suitable – that is to say, credible – life history, with untainted moral character and political credentials, which could be traded with the state as a commodity (materialised in the form of the identity documents, fingerprints and photographs that were surrendered to the filtration commission) in return for implicit, but only ever provisional, assurances of personal security. Filtration thus created identities, subjectivities and subjects. It effected, in other words, a process of normalisation. The filtration camps functioned as ‘remoralizing institutions’.6

Wartime displacements and postwar returns The Nazi invasion of the western Soviet Union had momentous demographic consequences.7 Millions of inhabitants of these territories were evacuated eastward to operate Soviet factories and farms in the interior or to be mobilised into the army. In areas under German occupation, Nazi special units, often supported by local police, murdered vast numbers of civilians, particularly Jews, government officials and Communist Party members, in a ruthless campaign of racial and ideological annihilation.8 Nearly 4.3 million other Soviet civilians – the so-called Ostarbeiter – were drafted by the German forces and despatched to Central Europe to work as slave labour in manufacturing, mines and agriculture to sustain the Nazi war effort. Of these, just under 2.25 million were deported from Ukraine.9 Within the Soviet Union, the war disrupted social norms, generated further conflicts and created new expectations for postwar reconstruction.10 Soviet victory in 1945 confronted the Stalinist state with the challenge not only

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of repairing the immense destruction wreaked on its territory’s infrastructure and reasserting its political authority and control, but also of restoring the country’s demographic and social order.11 As Elena Zubkova has argued, postwar Soviet society ‘was no longer made up of the traditional categories – the urban and rural, industrial workers and civil servants, youth and pensioners – but rather of a mentality born of the war’.12 Many among the population shared a sense of personal participation in the victory, which engendered a ‘re-examination of conventional assumptions’ and gave rise to a new ‘spirit of freedom’.13 Demobilised soldiers constituted the most distinctive and assertive new social group, but the millions of displaced persons returning from abroad also presented the authorities with a problem of reintegration. By early 1946 approximately 5.2 million Soviet citizens had been repatriated, comprising 1.8 million former prisoners of war and 3.4 million Ostarbeiter.14 Civilian repatriates to Ukraine numbered just over 1.1 million. By 1950, approximately 1.85 million Ukrainian civilians had returned home, amounting to almost half of all Soviet non-military repatriates.15 To monitor, regulate and direct the flow of returnees, a vast network of institutions was established across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.16 All repatriates passed though one or more Ministry of Defence (NKO) Assembly-Transit Points (sborno-peresyl’nye punkty, SPP), mainly located outside Soviet territory, and Ministry of the Interior (NKVD) Verification-Filtration Points (proverochno-filtratsionnye punkty, PFP), at transport junctions in the borderlands. Most were given temporary travel documents and sent home.17 On arrival, they underwent a second verification, conducted by district-level filtration commissions, before being issued with new residence permits. This double-checking was designed to catch those who had made their own way home without passing through borderland transit or filtration points. If returnees failed to show up in their home districts within one month of being released from transit or filtration points, they were placed on a national ‘wanted persons’ register. Those who were not approved for resettlement were sent to NKVD Verification-Filtration Camps (proverochno-filtratsionnye lageri, PFL) for further investigation. At all these holding sites, run by military counter-espionage and the security police, returnees underwent interrogation, verification and registration lasting, in the transit and filtration points, between a few days and two months, and, in the filtration camps, between a few months and two years. Length of internment depended on many factors, including ease of identification, the health of the returnee, the existence of ‘compromising materials’ or other grounds for suspicion, or congestion and delay in conducting verification.18 Longer-term inmates in the filtration camps were often used as unpaid labour in local enterprises. Indeed, many camps were sited near major industrial objects, and some historians argue that one of the core functions of filtration was to provide a workforce to undermanned branches


of the economy.19 Returnees also received food and clothing at these sites, underwent screening for infectious diseases and, when necessary, received medical treatment – typhus and tuberculosis were widespread, and many female returnees were found to be suffering from venereal diseases (in part because of mass rape by their Red Army liberators).20 Most of the transit points and camps had facilities for the ‘political education’ of returnees. By October 1945, interned repatriates had listened to 78,000 lectures and held 360,000 group discussions. Every day, 215,000 copies of central newspapers were circulated. The Soviet Repatriation Administration, in one year, had itself published and distributed 600,000 pamphlets, 90,000 posters and 3 million flyers.21 Some camps produced their own newssheets, with titles designed to evoke longing to return: ‘The Motherland Awaits You, Comrades’, ‘Homewards’ [‘V rodnye kraia’] or ‘We Await You at Home’. Some of the holding stations and camps also had schools for child repatriates.22 Significantly, the 1.15 million Soviet citizens who had been displaced within Soviet territory during the Nazi occupation were also interrogated and registered, as well as subjected to health screening and ideological instruction, in filtration institutions following their liberation in late 1944.23 Rapidly advancing beyond Soviet pre-war borders, by early 1945 the Red Army had liberated 2 million Soviet citizens from German captivity.24 Anna Stepanovna Stupak was digging trenches in eastern Germany when she was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945 (from 1942 until late 1944 she had been working in a laundry in Altdamm, near Stettin). She was first despatched to the Brest PFP in Soviet Belarus. There she was interrogated by a filtration commission comprising three political police officers, who filled in a questionnaire with her biographical information and noted down her wartime activities, took her fingerprints and, after three days, authorised her to return to her home village of Savintsy in Rokitianskii district of Kiev region (oblast’) in Ukraine. Her records were sent to the Ukrainian political police headquarters. Stupak’s interrogation in Brest, however, was only a preliminary procedure, as she had no documentation with her and her identity had not yet been verified. In April 1946, she was summoned to appear at the office of the political police in her home district. This time the district filtration commission had a letter from the Savintsy village council confirming her identity and biographical details. Stupak now gave the local commission the names of four ‘traitors to the Motherland’, although in Brest she had denied knowledge of any collaborators. The Rokitianskii district filtration commission signed off the second questionnaire as ‘verified’, one copy to be sent to the Ukrainian political police archive, another to be ‘retained in the operational records’.25 As the Red Army pushed forwards from the east, the British and Americans advancing from the west liberated another 3 million Soviet citizens from German forced labour and captivity.26 These Soviet DPs now found themselves in holding camps in US, British or French zones of occupation, facing

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the choice of returning home, as they were in principle obliged to do, or seeking refuge in a Western country.27 Nikolai Lial’ko was freed from the concentration camp at Dachau by US troops on 28 April 1945. To his Soviet interrogators he later stressed his steadfast refusal during captivity to join the Russian Liberation Army (a unit of Russian soldiers fighting for the Germans under the command of General A. A. Vlasov). Equally, he stressed that after his liberation he had resisted the Americans’ invitation to emigrate: ‘Before despatching us [to the USSR], we were asked in groups who wanted to go to America. Many girls and lads expressed the wish to go, and went to America, but I did not express this wish.’28 Other evidence confirms that many Soviet citizens in Western occupation zone were unwilling to return home if they had the option not to do so.29 A British diplomat touring DP camps in Austria in August 1946 reported that the Soviet Repatriation Mission had experienced ‘remarkably little success’ in recruiting people to return (most Soviet DPs, of course, had already returned home by this time). ‘I was told of one camp,’ he wrote, ‘where the only convert had been a small boy aged 10, and even he had changed his mind again . . .’30 The Soviet government’s Plenipotentiary for Repatriation General-Colonel F. I. Golikov (formerly chief of military intelligence), who was sent to Germany in October 1944 to organise the return of prisoners of war and displaced persons, assured hesitant repatriates in Western zones of occupation that rumours suggesting they would face repression on their return home were lies spread by their enemies (see Figure 5.1).31 ‘The Soviet land will remember and care for those of its citizens who have fallen into German slavery,’ Golikov declared, and continued: They will be received home as sons of the Motherland. In Soviet official circles they believe that even those Soviet citizens who, faced with German violence and terror, committed deeds contrary to the interests of the USSR, will not be held to account if they fulfil their duties honestly on their return to the Motherland.32 Despite such protestations of trust and clemency, the Stalinist authorities, while eager for the returnees’ labour power, remained deeply wary of all those who had lived outside Soviet borders and were now returning with ‘comparative experience’.33 Zubkova notes the regime’s distrust of DPs who had spent time ‘beyond the reach of the Soviet ideological machine’ and also the fear that they would ‘become a source of uncensored, uncontrolled information on life beyond Soviet borders’.34 In the postwar years of rising international tensions, domestic economic crisis and social instability, the Soviet regime intensified its surveillance and repression of the population. It sought not only to identify and punish wartime collaborators – between 1943 and the mid-1950s, over 320,000 Soviet citizens were charged with wartime collaboration, including approximately 94,000 in Ukraine – and to catch returnees


Figure 5.1 Anti-repatriation postcard distributed to Soviet displaced persons, 1945. The slogan on the card reads: ’We Returned Home!’ and the initial letters spell out MVD, the abbreviation for the Soviet Ministry of the Interior. The caption underneath the image reads: ‘ “The Soviet Committee” in the communist zone of Germany calls on the emigration to return home, promising forgiveness and the “good life”. We know this “good life” behind barbed wire”! No force in the world will be able to help those gullible people once the barrier has closed behind them separating the Free world from the huge concentration camp – the USSR. Be careful. Don’t fall for the MVD trap!’ Reproduced by kind permission of Pavel Polian.

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recruited as agents by anti-Soviet interests in the West, but also to anticipate the subversive intent of potential fifth columnists.35 The regime also undertook to galvanise and unify popular support, as it had done in the prewar years, by propagating a discourse of endangerment, encirclement and infiltration, necessitating constant vigilance and attention to ‘unmasking’ clandestine enemies.36 Undoubtedly, in some regions the Soviet leadership did not need to invent or exaggerate hostility. As other contributors to this volume show, there was widespread anti-Soviet sentiment throughout the DP camps. Especially the Baltic nationalities and western Ukrainians, among whom collaboration had been widespread, though by no means universal, now resisted repatriation to Soviet territory (or, in the case of some western Ukrainians, to lands only now transferred from Poland to the USSR).37 Approximately 150,000 Ukrainians stayed in Western countries, about 30 per cent of all Soviet nonreturnees in the postwar period.38 The British diplomat visiting Austrian DP camps in August 1946 described the remaining Ukrainians and Poles (these were mainly refugees from the Soviet-annexed eastern Polish borderlands) as ‘obstreperous elements’.39 Throughout the Soviet western borderlands, and especially in Ukraine, nationalist partisans waged a fierce guerrilla war against the extension or re-imposition of communist control during the postwar period.40 Nationalists and communists alike made extensive use of informers and infiltrators in a struggle that revolved around questions of identity and techniques of identification. When ‘Mykhailo’, head of the Ukrainian nationalist intelligence service and a leading figure in the partisan rebel army, died after being surrounded by Soviet forces in January 1947, he was found to have a large cache of genuine Soviet passports with various false names as well as identity cards for the Ukrainian Communist Party, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), police and Komsomol (Soviet youth organisation).41 It is no surprise, then, that procedures to verify the identity of Soviet citizens who had survived Nazi rule, as well as to confirm the validity of their official documentation and corroborate the veracity of written evidence and oral testimonies about their wartime movements and activities, were central to the Soviet postwar reassertion of political control and social order. This was particularly the case in Ukraine and other troublesome border republics, but applied in all Soviet regions.

Communities and contaminants: histories of filtration The Soviet filtration camps were established in 1941–43 by the Red Army’s counter-espionage service, Smersh (meaning ‘Death to Spies!’), to register and verify the identities and personal histories of soldiers and civilians returning from enemy territory to behind Soviet lines.42 The institution originated, however, in a convergence of several state discourses and practices of spatiodemographic regulation. First, as noted above, these procedures can be


considered as a ‘traditional’ border control mechanism, designed to monitor and manage flows of immigration, as well as to supervise the individual migrant’s presence on a state’s territory.43 In this process, the border control point is a crucial moment and site in the fixing of immigrants in the state’s purview before they disperse into the spatial and demographic landscape of the interior. This fixing entails not only the identification and registration of each newcomer, but the ascription to them of a normative identity that will serve to classify them and accord them a defined status – rights as well as obligations – so long as they remain inside the territory. Border controls are thus concerned not only with excluding undesirable outsiders, but with delineating and structuring the normative community – existing citizens as well as new immigrants – and their relationship with the state. State border controls are therefore bound up with measures to police social boundaries, including surveillance and record-keeping, identification procedures and restrictions on internal mobility and settlement. From 1919, the Bolshevik leadership selectively permitted the right of return to political opponents who had fled after the revolution, especially those who could offer military or administrative skills. By 1921, over 120,000 such refugees had returned.44 They were subject, however, to rigorous vetting before arrival, verification and registration on re-entry and continuing oversight afterwards. These checks and controls were designed to ‘filter’ undesirable elements from the general mass. Under a Revolutionary Military Council directive of 4 September 1920, all former White officers seeking to join the Red Army, after return from emigration or on release from prisoner-of-war camps, had to undergo a so-called ‘filtration’ procedure, during which their personal biography and service record with the enemy army were verified and documented.45 All East European states in this era similarly combined external border controls with regulating the boundaries of the new normative community.46 From the mid-1920s, the Soviet Union became obsessively concerned about the security of its state borders. Major crossing points were more tightly regulated and the visa regime was more strictly enforced both at the border and in the interior.47 From the end of the decade, the Soviet state border also played a significant cultural role in structuring the regime’s vision of spatial enclosure and encirclement. The Stalinist regime became increasingly ‘border-centric’, and border controls (together with controls over internal mobility and settlement) played a defining role in forming its self-image, perceptions of security and strategies of social order and control.48 Antecedents of the Soviet filtration procedure are also to be found in regimes of sanitary screening and quarantine which emerged in the midnineteenth century.49 New discourses of epidemiological danger and governance soon intersected with nascent legal and ideological conceptions of the nation-state as an organism, the purity and health of which could be protected only by strengthening surveillance at its outer wall against the contagion of alien elements. Corresponding medical practices at the border

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intersected with regulatory measures motivated by concerns of political, social or racial security.50 In fact, sanitary controls over human mobility pre-dated compulsory travel identity documents and therefore, as Alison Bashford notes, were among the earliest procedures to make ‘borders more than abstract lines on maps, but a set of practices on the ground’.51 As with other forms of state border control, these medical practices were about more than inspection, isolation and exclusion. As Amy Fairchild has shown in her study of the United States’ immigration policy in the early twentieth century, sanitary controls of newcomers served to initiate them into industrial culture and its values and to introduce them to ‘societal expectations’ regarding their role and worth. The ritual public line-up and subjection to the professional ‘medical gaze’ was less concerned to exclude potential immigrants than to order and discipline them, to create ‘docile bodies’.52 The Soviet authorities, naturally, established sanitary controls over immigration and internal population movements, first as emergency measures during the epidemics of the early post-revolutionary years and then as a permanent institution. In the winter of 1920 all newcomers to Petrograd had to pass through typhus screening and disinfection points at the railway stations.53 As Siobhan Peeling describes in chapter 6, such institutions were frequently re-established in subsequent years. Provisions for sanitary quarantine were also incorporated into or appended to international border treaties and domestic border legislation. From July 1923, for example, arrangements were put in place for the potential quarantine of all incoming rail and ship passengers from Finland in case of epidemic outbreaks.54 In August 1931, the Soviet government passed a law ‘On the Sanitary Guarding of the Borders of the USSR’, which aimed to halt cross-border transmission of infectious diseases (not only during epidemics) by a combination of medical interventions, such as inspections of all passenger and freight transport, and administrative measures, such as the prohibition of travel and imports, the sealing off of specific localities and closure of the state border. The state border guard, which was responsible for undertaking these actions, was then, as in the postwar period, a branch of the political police.55 Clearly, in the USSR, as elsewhere, notions of the state’s sanitary security were associated with concepts of the political and ideological integrity of the nation’s social and body politic, as well as its cultural and social order, and discourses and practices of medical vetting at the border interpenetrated those of migration control, security policing and moral regulation.56 Security and medical screenings required a site where migrants could be assembled, accommodated and subjected to appropriate checks, controls and admission rituals. Soviet Russia instituted ‘filtration camps’ for the temporary internment and verification of Red Army soldiers returning from White or foreign captivity in April 1920 towards the end of the Civil War. In these camps, the military authorities confirmed the identity of each former prisoner of war and conducted individual medical and political screening, to


separate out fit bodies from the feeble, and loyal souls from the lapsed. After these checks, most of the soldiers rejoined their units; others, however, were sent to forced labour camps.57 Some of the former White officers were also interned in camps while undergoing verification (see above). Filtration was not only a Soviet practice. During 1921, independent Latvia subjected former Red Army soldiers of Latvian nationality to scrutiny in ‘war refugee camps’ on their return to their new homeland. Each demobilised soldier had to respond to an extensive questionnaire, detailing their personal details, social status, level of education and military career, as well as conditions in the Red Army and the treatment of Latvians by the Soviet government (‘if bad’, stated the questionnaire, ‘give examples . . . ’). This procedure evidently combined an individualised verification and registration of returnees with a general intelligence debriefing.58 Between 1923 and 1925, the Soviet government issued amnesties to Kronstadt sailors and Karelian peasants who had fled to Finland after failed uprisings in 1921. In both cases, the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs first registered applicants for ‘re-evacuation’ permits in their refugee camps on the other side of the border, then passed the lists to party authorities and security police for vetting and issue of visas. On crossing the border, the refugees were immediately quarantined by the political police in ‘reception centres’ to be further investigated and registered before being resettled or sent to internal exile.59 During the early 1930s, immigrants who illegally crossed the state border into Soviet territory were also subject to internment in special camps for investigation by the political police. Depending on the result of the verification procedure, which sought to establish the identity of each ‘interloper’, their political loyalties and ‘true’ motives for migrating (in fact, most were simply fleeing economic crisis and unemployment in their home countries), some were released to work in distant territories away from borderland regions, some were arrested and sent to forced labour camps and some were expelled from the country.60 Significantly, the Soviet political police held the former Karelian refugees’ files on record and retrieved them in 1937–38 in order to fulfil their arrest quotas during the campaign of mass repression. All the Karelian repatriates who had escaped arrest were now accused of belonging to a network of Finnish-sponsored ‘espionagerebel organisations’ (in alliance with, among others, both legal immigrants and illegal border-interlopers) and were shot.61 Soviet filtration procedures, therefore, had a long prehistory and should be seen in the context of evolving state discourses and practices of security and social control, involving both prophylactic and pre-emptive measures at the border as well as productive strategies of identity construction. The Second World War and immediate postwar years saw practices of encampment, screening, selection and classification reach an apogee. In the DP camps, national committees and representatives of international humanitarian organisations sifted and sorted the refugees into manageable categories,

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while Western states sought to recruit the strongest and healthiest as immigrant labour to replenish their domestic workforces, and to persuade, and occasionally to coerce, the residual, less productive or reliable masses to go home. As other chapters in this volume indicate, displaced persons in these camps were faced with a barrage of questionnaires, identity checks, medical examinations and educational initiatives. In the new territories of western Poland, Upper Silesians and others were undergoing ‘verification’ and ‘rehabilitation’ procedures, involving detailed examinations of their political activities and national loyalties in the past as a test of their suitability for social integration in the future.62 The Soviet state, in other words, was doing nothing out of the ordinary.

Remaking Soviet society: procedures of subjectification The Soviet filtration procedure, like the similar practices of selecting and registering returnees and resettlers occurring elsewhere, can best be comprehended as a technique of ‘subjectification’. By this, I have in mind a process conceived in two interpenetrating senses: as the human subject’s construction of a relationship with the self and as the state’s transformation of the individual into a subject of power.63 Both facets of this process are related to operations of ‘government’, understood as ‘a mode of action on the actions of others’, a generalised power strategy effecting control by various means, including by propagating appropriate forms of self-control.64 This approach gives rise to three considerations. First, it impels us to recognise that the state itself is constituted and its actions legitimated or circumscribed through tactics of government that ‘allow the continual definition of what should or should not fall within the state’s domain, what is public and what private, what is and what is not within the state’s competence, and so on’.65 Soviet procedures of registering, verifying and regulating the returning population are to be understood not solely as a set of disciplinary actions directed at controlling a disordered and mobile demographic mass, but as part of the Stalinist state’s process of redefining and reconstituting itself after the war. Recalling his experience of filtration, M. M. Nikolaenko wrote: ‘Our Soviet officer sat at the table and asked the same thing over and over again some 20 times: “Had you left for Germany deliberately? Had someone sent you? What mission were you given?”’66 The state here articulates not only its fears but also its raison d’être. It was preoccupied with security and subterfuge. It was deeply distrustful of its own population, especially those individuals who had transgressed its spatial limits and experienced life outside. In relentlessly repeating the same questions to the returnee, the surveillance state was affirming the legitimacy both of its scrutinising impulse and of the bureaucratic apparatus constructed to register and record. It denied the status of the private. It was obsessed with the need to ‘read’ the motivations of its subjects, yet its technologies of subjectification


in fact rendered individuals less ‘legible’.67 Nikolaenko’s officer repeated the same questions 20 times over, ignoring responses he deemed inappropriate. He was defining the state and training the subject’s voice in relation to power. As a result, of course, he might well only hear the echo of his own words. Second, government is about not only the operations of an apparatus but also the operations of discourse, the ‘aims and aspirations, the mentalities and rationalities intertwined in attempts to steer forms of conduct’.68 With regard to the filtration procedure, this directs our attention to the state’s assumptions about its own role and also about the status of the citizen, the individual’s rights, obligations and relationship to power and the wider collective and normative ways of acting and being. During interrogation these assumptions dictated the structures, tropes and vocabulary of the knowing repatriate’s account of his or her wartime displacement and return. The naïve subjects who unwittingly violated these narrative norms, of course, rendered themselves vulnerable to state sanction or, at the least, to renewed interrogation until they submitted the ‘correct’ responses. I have already noted that Anna Stepanovna Stupak from Savintsy, during her initial filtration on 14 February 1945 at the Brest PFP, denied knowledge of any collaborators. After her return home, she underwent a second filtration at the Rokitianskii district police office on 9 April 1946. There she named four collaborators: two village elders, Davidenko and Potapenko, and two policemen, one of whom was named Mikhail Stupak (she did not identify him during examination as one of her close relatives).69 Anna Prokopovna Stupak, an older woman whom the Germans had also deported from Savintsy, but who had followed a different route into and out of exile, similarly kept silent about collaboration during her first interrogation at the Vladimir-Volynskiii PFP on 11 August 1945, but named three collaborators, Davidenko, Potapenko and Mikhail Stupak (whom she did not name as a relative either), when reexamined in her home district on 9 April 1946.70 It is clear that by the date of their second interview both women had learned what the state expected of them and how to fulfil their social role in order to ensure their own security. The naming of names in this sense constituted a form of ‘trade’ with the state, a ‘re-entry ticket’ into the collective. It is likely that since their return they had conferred to ensure that their stories were consistent. They would also by now have learned what was common knowledge in their village, what had been made known to the interrogators by others and therefore what they could or could not afford to hide without self-incrimination. Possibly, their belated ‘recollection’ of collaborators – including someone who was obviously related, even if not closely, to both of them – was also a means of resolving recent family conflicts in the village between those who had stayed during the occupation and those who had been forced to leave. Third, modern government presupposes, to a greater or lesser degree in different political settings, the freedom of the subject. At first, this may seem a perverse way of viewing the internment of Soviet returnees and their

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subjection to the regime following release and resettlement. However, our understanding of Soviet power will be enhanced by acknowledging that it operated not only through repressive policing but also by subtler technologies and tactics that worked to shape the subject’s ‘autonomous’ thoughts and behaviours. As Foucault noted, power is both productive of and embedded in individual experience and collective meaning; the exercise of power does not take place above or beyond society, but ‘is rooted deep in the social nexus’. Thus ‘to govern is to structure the possibilities of action of others’. Otherwise, as Foucault also points out, government would be merely ‘physical determination’.71 In terms of the filtration procedure, it is significant that every repatriate had to articulate his or her individual account of displacement and return, although the narrative was pre-scripted and sanctions for deviation were severe. Each person steered his or her own course between autonomy and necessity. It was in exercising their agency that subjects surrendered power to the state. In this regard, the use of torture during filtration, although it took place, was tantamount to ‘physical determination’ and counter-productive.72 A more effective means of generating autonomous self-discipline was for subjects to know that their testimony was recorded, processed, correlated and cross-checked, and that errors or omissions might be considered evidence of intent to deceive. We have already seen the two Anna Stupaks from Savintsy learning how to construct appropriate narratives, which included the identification of enemies. That they conformed to state expectations concerning mutual surveillance and denunciation does not exclude the possibility that they were also, probably in collaboration with one another, serving their own interests. At the end of each Soviet filtration questionnaire was a space for taking the repatriate’s index fingerprint, thus creating ‘a link between an individual body and a paper record held by the state’.73 The taking of fingerprints, as well as the placing on record of the signatures and photographs appearing on the diverse identity documents which some repatriates had with them (Soviet passports, Nazi work cards and books, certificates issued to DPs by British or American occupation authorities) may in this respect be understood as the state’s retention of a security in the form of a material trace of the subject’s body, against his or her potential breach of self-discipline when no longer physically in the presence of power. These tokens served as vivid reminders that each returnee was kept ‘in the operational records’. At the core of the filtration procedure was the interrogation and the structured life history of the subject that it generated, recorded by the interviewer on a questionnaire form. The document was then signed off by the filtration commission, combined with any additional evidence available (testimonials, witness statements, identity documents, photographs, etc.) and sent for further verification or filing. Autobiography, according to Pierre Bourdieu, entails ‘making oneself the ideologist of one’s own life’. That is to say, it


involves constructing a ‘life history’ that, in common with all history, strives for internal coherence and the consistent expression and ultimate realisation of a unifying principle and purpose.74 Individual returnee narratives produced in the course of filtration similarly articulated a rational, reasoned and teleological trajectory of displacement, which conformed to the normative patterns and categories of the official account of occupation, deportation, return and resettlement, and into which indeterminate personal itineraries were dissolved. This meant, first, that individual narratives elided the complexity of shifting spatial zones, mobile centres of power and porous ethnic, social, moral and political boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which had characterised wartime experience in the occupied borderland territories. The detailed questions in the filtration interrogation demanded not descriptions or explanations but raw information – dates and places, level of education, political activities, military service, employment, occupations during exile, names of relatives, and of known ‘traitors to the Motherland, turncoats and accomplices’ [izmennikov Rodiny, predatelei i posobnikov], and so on. Answers were expected to be precise and succinct: Under which circumstances did you find yourself on occupied Soviet territory? 1941. When the Germans occupied Ukraine. . . . How many times, when and where were you interrogated by military, police organs established on Soviet occupied territory? If you were convicted, by which court, on what charge, for what term of punishment, where did you serve your time and when were you released? What other repressions did you (or your family) suffer at the hands of the occupiers? Not subject to any repression …75 Second, the state’s position of imputing rational agency to the displaced person, when coercion or contingency had more often than not, in the brutal and chaotic conditions of war, determined their movements and actions, excluded any genuine evaluation of motive. It was the state which predefined the acceptable structure and substance of responses, and therefore generated ‘truth’. The returnees had ‘only’ to shape the raw material of their private stories into a cogent public history (into what Bourdieu termed a ‘socially irreproachable artefact’) to translate their private self-accounts into an acceptable accounting for the self.76 This in turn has further implications. First, the filtration questionnaire that formed the basis of the interrogation served to re-establish the autobiographical or confessional regime that had governed the lives of Soviet citizens before the cataclysm of war.77 When Anna Stepanovna Stupak was first questioned at Brest in February 1945, she listed three close relatives: her father Stepan (38 years old), her mother Aleksandra (35) and her brother Vlad (17). She indicated that all three lived in Savintsy and were collective farm workers, but that their present whereabouts and occupations were ‘unknown’. In her second interview, in her home district, she listed the brother as her only close

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relative. To understand this, we must refer to the testimonial letter submitted to the filtration commission by the Savintsy village council. This confirmed Anna’s identity, but stated that her parents, both poor peasants, had died in 1930 when she was five years old, and that she had been brought up as an orphan (it did not indicate who had raised her). We can only speculate on why Anna had earlier claimed that her parents were alive: was this fantasy or wish-fulfilment, trauma or confusion, perhaps a desire to hide her orphan status or to cover up the circumstances of her parents’ deaths (although recorded as poor peasants, perhaps they had perished during collectivisation or dekulakisation)? In any case, displacement clearly prompted Anna to dissimulate a significant dimension of her personal past. Her re-placement accordingly forced her to retract this deceit. The postwar Stalinist state had reasserted its ownership of her autobiography. Second, when repatriates spoke or wrote of their experiences of return outside the framework of the questionnaire they were still guided – or at least were meant to be guided, since not all understood the purpose of this ritual – by an official narrative of displacement and return conveyed to them by various formal and informal means (government proclamations, speeches by repatriation officials, propaganda and gossip, the interrogator’s prompting, etc.). An anthology of repatriates’ letters, published by the Red Army in 1945 and distributed among Soviet DPs to ease their fears of returning, clearly enunciated the official narrative as well as communicating it to future returnees. This is the returnee narrative in the genre of ‘socialist realism’, stressing the patriotic and personal joy, emancipation and self-fulfilment experienced on reabsorption into the collective: In the Motherland we have again found freedom and happiness. As citizens of the USSR with equal rights to all others, we are participating in all public and political work. All around us are our [svoi] people, and everywhere we hear our own language. Everyone around us is close, one of our own [rodnoi], familiar – and that’s the main thing!78 Finally, as noted earlier, the filtration interview and questionnaire are to be seen as part of a process not only of exclusion but of inclusion, of the performative regeneration of postwar Soviet social identity. Autobiographical narrative was an integral component of this strategy of identity-production, its constituent structures, dynamics and vectors implicitly or explicitly mediated to the putative narrator, its purpose and meaning produced in unequal collaboration between state-auditor and citizen-performer. Filtration in these terms was an enforced encounter designed to reassert not the subject’s but the state’s role as ‘ideologist of one’s own life’ – its prior right not only to reclaim its citizens but to recreate them as its docile subjects. ‘It’s your job to sit still and stay put [Vashe delo sidet’ i ne rypat’sia]’ was the filtration interrogator’s reply to repatriates grumbling about not being permitted to return home,


‘we’ll check you out, and then we’ll see [proverim, tam vidno budet]’.79 Displaced persons, in other words, were to be fixed in place, both spatially and in the matrix of social regulation (‘we’ll check you out …’) and surveillance (‘ . . . and then we’ll see’).

Repatriates in Soviet society after filtration As a result of filtration, approximately 350,000 Soviet returnees (about 6.5 per cent of the total number of repatriates from abroad) were arrested and sent to labour camps or into exile in ‘special settlements’.80 Using evidence in part derived from filtration, the Soviet Ukrainian authorities conducted 54,000 investigations into collaborationist activities in the republic during occupation and, as noted earlier, charged approximately 94,000 individuals with collaboration or war crimes.81 Significantly, however, the Soviets continued to identify and bring to trial prominent collaborators into the 1980s, indicating that filtration missed some of its principal targets.82 In any case, many Soviet specialists who had worked with the Germans in occupied territories were permitted to remain in their jobs for several years after the war owing to a shortage of qualified personnel.83 As I have argued, filtration was not solely, or even perhaps principally, about retribution and exclusion. How effective was filtration as a means of identity construction and social normalisation? Around 60 per cent of repatriates from abroad were permitted to resettle in their former places of residence.84 However, they were not all able to take up their former lives. As Zubkova has written: ‘suspicion became the lot of all those who had found themselves in occupied territory [and] . . . a drive to isolate them undoubtedly took place’.85 Between 1945 and 1947, around 60,000 communists who had remained in occupied territory were purged from the Party.86 Many local authorities were wary of receiving contingents of repatriates in their districts: ‘We are not allowing them to conduct counter-revolution’, declared one local official, ‘we are going to mobilize them and send them off to float timber down the rivers.’87 Hostility was evidently so widespread that the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a resolution on 4 August 1946 condemning ‘individual party workers [who] have started adopting a groundlessly [ogul’no] distrustful attitude to all repatriated Soviet citizens’.88 Regional party committees subsequently appealed to their local subordinates not to discriminate against returnees.89 On the basis of an extensive analysis of the experiences of former Ostarbeiter, Pavel Polian notes variations in social and bureaucratic attitudes to the deportees after their repatriation: some were considered pariahs, while others elicited sympathy and support. Interestingly, he denies that there was any difference in the treatment of those liberated by the Red Army and those who had spent time in DP camps in Western zones. The main variations were, first, between male and female repatriates, with the men, even those who had

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been sent into the army after filtration, being more harshly treated (though a third of women returnees reported receiving sexual insults, e.g. ‘German whores’); and, second, between urban and rural dwellers, with those in cities being subjected to substantially greater discrimination.90 One reason for this second variation was doubtless the greater social and professional mobility of the urban population. This meant that citydwellers had continually to fill out autobiographical questionnaires, and these included specific questions about wartime place of residence and activities. A way of combating discrimination was to keep silent about any period of time displaced in enemy territory. Among Polian’s respondents, several former deportees (all women) tried to do this, while others attempted, sometimes for decades, to avoid formal employment and other official situations when they would need to give an account of their past.91 This was no protection against actions by the political police, however, who, as noted above, retained all returnees’ files ‘in the operational records’. In 1945–46, 246,500 arrests were made of ‘socially dangerous persons’, most of whom were repatriates, former prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists and collaborators.92 Regardless of the Central Committee’s admonition against discrimination, the political police continued to monitor repatriates closely, using extensive networks of informers and agents. In this way, some collaborators were later identified who had passed the filtration procedure.93 Both police and Communist Party also took an interest in the general ‘mood’ of repatriates. In Kursk region in December 1946, two repatriated peasants were overheard declaring that ‘in Germany people live individually and so there’s plenty of food there – bread, butter, they live richly, while here on the collective farms they don’t even give us bread!’94 Such mutterings only served to confirm the suspicions of local authorities and intensify police surveillance. With the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s and the Soviet regime’s attempt to purge all ‘foreign influence’ those who had spent time beyond state borders came under increasing suspicion. In these years, many repatriates were arrested for espionage or for having allegedly fallen under American influence (these were referred to as the ‘padovsty’, derived from the acronym PAD – ‘Propaganda of American Democracy’).95 In 1949 the Ministry of State Security conducted a reverification of all repatriates and a nationwide trawl for those still on the ‘wanted persons’ lists.96 Only in western Ukraine and the Baltic republics, however, did the Soviet state undertake mass deportations of repatriates and their families. These must be considered, however, in the context of wider purges in the new borderlands.97 Nikolai Lial’ko, as mentioned earlier, had been liberated from Dachau by American troops on 28 April 1945. He had passed through an SPP and was then sent for filtration at the PFP in his home town of Pereiaslav-Khmelnitskii (near Kiev), where in March 1946 his resettlement had been authorised and his file placed ‘in the operational records’. In 1949, now 23 years old, he was serving in the Soviet military force and stationed in Azerbaijan. On the


1 May holiday, he drank a quarter of a litre of vodka and decided to visit a friend in the nearby town of Imyshly. He had only travelled five stops on the train when he was detained by state security police and returned to his unit, where he was placed under arrest for desertion and travelling without a pass in a prohibited border zone. On 18 May he underwent interrogation by Smersh officials. Central to this examination was his wartime experience. Lial’ko related how in late 1942, aged 16, he had been detained by order of the Pereiaslav-Khmelnitskii police chief Ivan Zakharovich Karmanov and had been deported to Germany, where he was assigned to agricultural work near Munich. After his second attempt to escape, the Gestapo had arrested him and sent him to Dachau. During nearly two years there, he had been summoned for questioning twice in relation to other prisoners’ escapes. Recruiters for the Russian Liberation Army had visited the camp on four occasions and each time he had refused to enlist. On the first two visits, he reported, many prisoners had signed up, evidently tempted by offers of better living conditions, but the third time no one had volunteered, and on the fourth occasion Vlasov’s own adjutant shot a number of those who refused to join the collaborationist unit. In Dachau, Lial’ko stated, ‘I didn’t do anything, cleaned the camp with some other prisoners, while the other inmates were forced out to work, and many were taken away in vehicles and never returned to the camp.’ After his liberation by the Americans, he had spent one month in another camp at Erding (30 miles north-east of Munich) in the charge of Russianspeaking American officers. Lial’ko noted, perhaps in response to prompting by the interrogator that is not recorded in the protocol, that the Americans ‘conducted no propaganda activities, no training and did not give us weapons’. After refusing the Americans’ invitation to emigrate to the United States, Lial’ko was sent back to the Soviet Union. In the course of his report, he mentioned no names other than that of police chief Karmanov, whom he said he had never met personally, claiming that in Dachau he had been forbidden to talk to other prisoners, and at Erding he had become acquainted only with two lads named Valentin and Iurii from Rostov region, about whom he remembered nothing else.98 Lial’ko’s account did not satisfy the 62nd Fighter Aviation Corps’ counterespionage officer, Captain Bestaev, who conducted the investigation. In February 1950, the chief of the corps’ counter-espionage unit, Colonel Kunchin, wrote to the special records department of the Kiev regional security police, requesting details from Lial’ko’s filtration files on how and why he had left for Germany (‘At the end of 1942,’ he wrote, ‘Lial’ko was allegedly driven [iakoby izgnan] to Germany ...’), whether there existed any ‘other compromising materials’ on him or his relatives, and whether there had been any personal link between him and Karmanov (who had been arrested after the war). Kunchin’s assumption clearly was that Lial’ko was guilty unless he could prove himself innocent, since the latter’s narrative of displacement,

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exile and return, even if true, did not conform in structure or substance to the required standards of authenticity and credibility, but was vague and indeterminate. It contained any number of suggestive silences on key matters. He had cast himself both as an active protagonist who tried to escape, resisted invitations to collaborate, despite enticements and threats, and refused an offer to emigrate, and as a passive cipher, who had done nothing in the camps and had known no one. His self-presentation was inconsistent. Having spoken too much, he said too little. In particular, Lial’ko had alluded to his potentially incriminating contact with Ukrainian police collaborators, Gestapo officials, Vlasovite recruiters, Russian-speaking American army officers and Soviet would-be defectors, while naming no one he encountered during his displacement, either to allow his story to be corroborated or to give the authorities a ‘trade’ for his security. He had now once again been caught on the move, without official sanction and in a restricted border zone. A short while later the Kiev political police informed Kunchin that Lial’ko’s original filtration had turned up no compromising information. The protocol of Lial’ko’s initial interrogation ended with his plea for clemency: ‘I want to declare that I left my unit without permission, violated Soviet military discipline, and committed a crime. I promise that this infringement will be my first and last.’ Again, he was being naïve. For the Stalinist regime, Lial’ko’s wartime displacement outside state borders and encounters with enemies had been his first violation. He had already committed a third in failing to construct an ‘irreproachable’ life story. It is not known what happened to him next; he had already been in detention for over ten months.

Conclusions Soviet filtration of returnees was an integral component of the process of systemic reconstruction after the war. It permitted the state selectively to reconstitute its population, just as it was sifting through the rubble for useable materials to rebuild its physical infrastructure. During the war, the regime had lost both its archive and capacity of surveillance over huge populations across wide swathes of territory. Filtration was an opportunity to reverify and reregister these displaced persons before deciding where to resettle them – in their communities of origin, to new places of isolation or exile, or to sites of forced labour. The huge military-intelligence apparatus of filtration also served, through both its practical and discursive operations, to reconstitute the bureaucratic, political and ideological order of the postwar security state. This was not dissimilar from its pre-war incarnation, but experience of total war and absolute victory had given the regime a new assertiveness and an ambition to rule more systematically and comprehensively. Filtration both reflected and contributed to realising this vision. It did so, I have argued, not only by enabling the state to regulate and direct repatriation according to its security and economic needs – verifying and


registering all returnees, and retaining them ‘in the operational records’ for future monitoring; exacting retribution on wartime collaborators; identifying and excising potential future enemies; and creating vast new cadres of forced labour. It was also designed to impress on each of the millions of returning citizens the terms of their relationship with the state, their role and status as individuals within the collective. Filtration was a re-initiation ritual that obliged each subject to demonstrate his or her loyalty guided by a script provided by the state. It gauged not so much the truth as the authenticity and credibility of the performance. It put displaced persons back in place. Soviet filtration was in no ways unique, but had its antecedents in discourses and practices of government that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Cross-cutting fears regarding the political, economic and epidemiological consequences of vast uncontrolled migration flows intersected with the need to create a productive workforce and a reliable and pliable citizenry. Border controls, the regulation of internal mobility, the quarantine and close scrutiny of the bodies of immigrants and the registration and recording of their biographical details for future reference, all served to impress on itinerant subjects the norms and values of the state and social collective into which they were seeking entry, as well as the provisional and probationary nature of their admission. These procedures also introduced prospective immigrants to the bureaucratic machinery of surveillance and served to legitimise – to both new settlers and the settled community – the overbearing structures and intrusive technologies of the modern state. Already in the post-First World War period, Soviet Russia and other successor states conducted procedures to verify and register returning émigrés and refugees. These not only determined who was eligible to be a citizen, but served to redefine what the new national community was, its relationship to the new state structures, what identities and values constituted it and where its boundaries lay. Filtration was a purifying practice. After the Second World War, procedures of identification, classification and selection were ubiquitous across Eastern European (and beyond) and more encompassing in their scale, design and purpose. In the Soviet Union, filtration excluded several hundred thousand real, imagined or potential enemies from the postwar community, directed many hundreds of thousands into the armed forces, work battalions and forced labour, and reinforced the regime’s mobilising discourse of hostile encirclement and internal subversion. Returnees were recreated as docile subjects whose autobiographical performance represented a tacit pact with the state: acceptance of norms in return for provisional personal security. Many repatriates, however, did not remain secure, their official persona and social status having been imprinted, like their identity documents, with the permanent stigma of displacement in a culture which formally validated only fixity or directed mobility. Only in July 1953, after Stalin’s death, were the millions of repatriates whose filtration

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files contained no compromising materials removed from the ‘operational records’.99

Notes 1. A. Wat (1998) My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (New York: New York Review of Books), p. 307. First published in Polish (London, 1977). 2. File of repatriate Nikolai Akimovich Lial’ko, from The State Archive of Kiev Oblast (DAKO), fond R-5597, delo 3286. All DAKO materials used here were sourced from the 2003 microfilm collection World War II Documents from the State Archive of Kiev Oblast. Part III. The Long Road Home: Documents of Ukrainian Forced Labor Workers Detained in Soviet Filtration Camps in Germany (Kiev and Woodbridge, CT: Ukrainian State Committee for Archives, Thomson Gale). Henceforth, I cite references as follows: DAKO, f. R-5597 (TLRH Reel 6), d. 3286 (Lial’ko, Nikolai Akimovich). 3. Especially V. N. Zemskov (2005) ‘Problema sovetskikh peremeshchennykh lits (1944–1956)’, in A. N. Sakharov (ed.) Rossiia v XX veke. Voina 1941–1945 godov: Sovremennye podkhody (Moscow: Nauka), pp. 512–32; idem (2004) ‘Repatriatsiia peremeshchennykh sovestskikh grazhdan’, in G. N. Sevost’ianov (ed.) Voina i obshchestvo, 1941–1945 gg v 2-kh kn. Kniga vtoraia (Moscow: Nauka), pp. 331– 58; idem (1995) ‘Nekotorye problemy repatriatsii sovetskikh peremeshchennykh lits’, Rossiia, XXI(5–6), pp. 183–92; idem (1995) ‘Nasils’stvennaia repatriatsiia ili schastlivoe vozvrashchenie’, Rossiia, XXI(5), pp. 7–15; idem (1995a, 1995b) ‘Repatriatsiia sovetskikh grazhdan i ikh dal’neishaia sud’ba (1944-1956 gg.)’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 5, pp. 3–13 and 6; idem (1993) ‘Repatriatsiia sovetskikh grazhdan v 1945–1946 godakh: Opiraias’ na dokumenty’, Rossiia, XXI(5), pp. 74–81; idem (1990) ‘K voprosu o repatriatsii sovetskikh grazhdan. 1944–1951 gody’, Istoriia SSSR, 4, pp. 26–41. Also Pavel Polian (2002) Zhertvy dvukh diktatur. Zhizn’, trud, unizhenie i smert’ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbeiterov na chuzhbine i na rodine (Moscow: ROSSPEN), esp. pp. 331–594; Iu. A. Arzamaskin (2001) Zalozhniki vtoroi mirovoi voiny: Repatriatsiia sovetskikh grazhdan v 1944–1953 gg (Moscow: Prilozhenie k gazette ‘Stanitsa’); idem (1999) Repatriatsiia sovetskikh i inostrannykh grazhdan v 1944–1953: voenno-politicheskii aspekt (Moscow: Voennyi universitet); A. A. Sheviakov (1994) ‘Repatriatsiia sovetskogo mirnogo naseleniia i voennoplennykh, okazavshikhsia v okkupatsionnykh zonakh gosudarstv antigitlerovskoi koalitsii’, in Iu.A. Poliakov et al. (eds) Naselenie Rossii v 1920–1950-e gody: Chislennost’, poteri, migratsii. Sbornik nauchnikh trudov (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii, RAN), pp. 195–222; idem (1993) “‘Tainy” poslevoennoi repatriatsii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 8, pp. 3–11. Bernd Bonwetsch (1993) ‘Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter vor und nach 1945. Ein doppelter Leidensweg’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, XLI, pp. 532–46. Two dissertations offer good regional analyses of repatriation and filtration: E. V. Vertiletskaia (2004) ‘Repatrianty v Sverdlovskoi oblasti v 1943 – nachale 1950-kh gg’, Dissertatsiia na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata istoricheskoi nauk (Ekaterinburg); I. V. Govorov (1998) ‘Repatriatsiia na Severo-Zapade RSFSR, 1944–1949’, Diss. . . . kand. ist. nauk (St Petersburg). 4. Letter of F. I. Golikov, Soviet Plenipotentiary for Repatriation (see below), to Ministers of State Security and of Internal Affairs, 1 October 1947, cited in V. B. Zhiromskaia (ed.) (2001) Naselenie Rossii v XX veke: Istoricheskie ocherki. V 3-kh t.. T. 2. 1940–1959 (Moscow: ROSSPEN), p. 152.

Remaking Soviet Society: Filtration 111 5. For example, P. K. Grimsted (1995) The Odyssey of the ‘Smolensk Archive’: Plundered Communist Records for the Service of Anti-Communism. Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 1201 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press); V. N. Shepelev (1991) ‘Sud’ba “Smolenskogo arkhiva”’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 5, pp. 135–38; M. Sorokina (2005) ‘People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, VI(4), p. 805, n. 25. 6. N. Rose (1999) Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 107. 7. For Russian population losses, Zhiromskaia, Naselenie. For Ukraine, J. Vallin, F. Meslé, S. Adamets and S. Pyrozhkov (2002) ‘A New Estimate of Ukrainian Population Losses during the Crises of the 1930s and 1940s’, Population Studies, LVI(3), pp. 249–64. 8. A. A. Sheviakov (1992) ‘Zhertvy sredi mirnogo naseleniia v gody Otechestvennoi voiny’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, XI, pp. 3–17; idem (1991) ‘Gitlerovskii genotsid na territoriiakh SSSR’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, XII, pp. 3–11; M. C. Dean (2000) Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 9. Figures from the ‘Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) for the Determination and Investigation of Crimes of the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices’, cited in Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 145. For different figures from Soviet sources: Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 43–4. On the Ostarbeiter: Polian, Zhertvy; G. G. Verbitskii (2004) Ostarbeitery: istoriia rossiian nasilstvenno vyvezennykh na raboty v Germaniiu vo vremia Vtoroi mirovoi voiny. Dokumenty i vospominaniia. (SanktPeterburg: Izdatel’stvo Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta). On the ChGK: N. Moine (2008) ‘La commission d’enquête soviétique sur les crimes de guerre nazis: entre reconquête du territoire, écriture du récit de la guerre et usages justiciers’, Le Mouvement Social, CCXXII, pp. 81–109; Sorokina, ‘People and Procedures’, pp. 797–831. 10. V. Dunham (1990) In Stalin’s Time. Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press), p. 11; J. Barber and M. Harrison (1991) The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: a Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman); R. W. Thurston and B. Bonwetsch (eds) (2000) The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press). 11. A. Weiner (2001) Making Sense of War (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press); E. Zubkova (1998) Russia after the War. Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe); P. Dukes (1989) ‘The Social Consequences of World War II for the USSR’, in A. Marwick (ed.) Total War and Social Change (London; Macmillan); S. Fitzpatrick (1985) ‘Postwar Soviet Society: The “Return to Normalcy”, 1945–1953’, in S. Linz (ed.) The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totawa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld), pp. 129–56. 12. Zubkova, Russia, p. 22. 13. Zubkova, Russia, pp. 16–17, 25. 14. Sheviakov, ‘Repatriatsiia’, pp. 210–11. Golikov’s Repatriation Administration (see below) recorded a figure of 5.35 million Soviet repatriates by 1 March 1946. Zemskov notes that this figure includes approximately 1.15 million internally displaced persons. Polian also includes returning first-wave (i.e. post-revolutionary) émigrés. Zemskov, ‘Repatriatsiia . . . ’; Polian, Zhertvy, p. 509.

112 Nick Baron 15. Ukrainian figures from Volodymyr P. Danylenko (2003) ‘The Long Road Home. Documents of Ukrainian Forced Labor Workers in Soviet Filtration Camps in Germany’. Introduction to TLRH (Reel 1). Soviet total figure, as of 1 January 1952, from Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, p. 45, n. 123. 16. On the development of filtration structures and procedures: Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, pp. 35–40, 83–6, 107–8, 124–5; Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 11–13, 45–54 and passim. For other types of camp: Polian, Zhertvy, pp. 363–5. 17. See n. 80 below. 18. On the terms of internment: references in n. 16, and P. Poljan, S. A. Zajontschkowkaja (1993) ‘Ostarbeiter in Deutschland und daheim. Ergebnisse einer Fragenbodenanalyse’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, XLI, pp. 547–61. 19. Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, p. 54. For the economic argument, see Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, pp. 105, 107, 110–15 and passim. Many of those who ‘passed’ filtration were assigned to labour battalions (see n. 80), and all those retained in or sentenced to labour camps or exile settlements were mobilised for labour, ibid., pp. 154–99. 20. Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 11, 52, 63–4, 66, 76–7; Zemskov (1995a) ‘Repatriatsiia . . . ’, p. 9. On Red Army rapes of female Ostarbeiter: Polian, Zhertvy, pp. 356–7. 21. F. I. Golikov, ‘God raboty po repatriatsii sovetskikh grazhdan’, Pravda, 4 October 1945. 22. Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, p. 42; Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 51, 64. 23. Most of these ‘internally displaced persons’ were civilians. Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki; Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 153. See also n. 14. 24. Zemskov, ‘Repatriatsiia …’, p. 513; Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 145. Based on Golikov’s total of 5.35 million Soviet displaced persons (see n. 14). 25. DAKO, f. R-5597 (TLRH Reel 14), d. 4519 (Stupak, Anna Stepanovna). 26. Zemskov, ‘Repatriatsiia …’, p. 513. See n. 24. 27. At Yalta in February 1945, the ‘Big Three’ agreed that repatriation would be obligatory for Soviet citizens as per state borders of 1 September 1939 (i.e. excluding the Baltic states and western borderlands of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldavia). The Western allies did not universally enforce this agreement, Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 147, n. 1*. Additionally, outside the terms of the agreement, there were several notorious forced repatriations of anti-Soviet Russians. See N. Tolstoy (1978) Victims of Yalta (London: Hodder & Stoughton); N. Bethell (1995) The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia, 1944–1947 (London: Penguin; first published by André Deutsch, 1974); Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 128–44; Polian, Zhertvy, pp. 408–32. 28. DAKO, f. R-5597 (TLRH Reel 6), d. 3286 (Lial’ko, Nikolai Akimovich). Note that Lial’ko did not make this statement during his initial filtration; see discussion later on. 29. From September–October 1946, the Western allies ceased to enforce the Yalta Agreement on compulsory repatriation; at the same time, they were generally unwilling to accept as immigrants the remaining ‘hardcore’ of Soviet DPs: Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 39–40, 67–107; Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 148, n. 1*. 30. The UK National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) Foreign Office (FO) 1020/2457, M. F. Cullis, ‘Report on Visit to Displaced Persons Camps in British Zone of Austria’, 26 August 1946, pp. 1–2. According to Zemskov, approximately 70 per cent of Ostarbeiter deported from pre-1939 Soviet territory expressed a wish to return and only about 5 per cent not to do so (the remainder were ‘vacillating’). Among residents of the new Soviet western borderlands, however, only 15 per cent


31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

wanted to ‘return’, while 15 per cent firmly desired not to do so and over 70 per cent were undecided. Zemskov, ‘K voprosu. . . . ’, p. 27; idem (1995a) ‘Repatriatsiia . . .’, p. 5. For biography of Golikov: Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, p. 16, n. 36. TASS interview with Golikov, printed in Pravda, 11 November 1944, broadcast on Soviet radio and later issued as an official proclamation to displaced persons, distributed in leaflet form to over 2 million Soviet displaced persons in late 1944 and early 1945. Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, p. 18. Zubkova, Russia, p. 18. Zubkova, Russia, pp. 105–6. Figures cited in T. Penter (2005) ‘Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Postwar Trials against Collaborators’, Slavic Review, LXIV(4), pp. 782–90, here p. 783, n. 2. I am grateful to David Fraser for bringing this source to my attention. For postwar attitudes to collaboration: J. W. Jones (2005) “‘Every Family Has its Freak”: Perceptions of Collaboration in Occupied Soviet Russia, 1943–1948’, Slavic Review LXIV(4), pp. 747–70. For the ChGK, see n. 9. The Soviet authorities punished not only collaboration but also passivity among those who remained in occupied territories, Weiner, Making Sense, pp. 107–14. S. Yekelchyk (2006) ‘The Civic Duty to Hate: Stalinist Citizenship as Political Practice and Civic Emotion (Kiev, 1943–53)’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History VII(3), pp. 529–56. W. W. Isajiw, Y. Boshyk and R. Senkus (eds) (1992) The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced Persons after World War II (Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press). Also see n. 30. Danylenko, ‘The Long Road Home’ (Reel 1); Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, pp. 157–8, 162–3. TNA: PRO FO 1020/2457, Cullis, ‘Report on Visit’, p. 6. J. Burds (2001) The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948. Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1505 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press); Weiner, Making Sense, pp. 162–90, 239–81. J. Burds (2001) ‘Gender and Policing in Soviet West Ukraine’, Cahiers du monde russe, XLII(2–4), pp. 279–320 (p. 280). Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 11–13, 45–54 and passim. J. Torpey (2000) The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); J. Caplan and J. Torpey (eds) (2001) Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), Part 3. A. F. Kiselev (ed.) (1999) Politicheskaia istoriia russkoi emigratsii, 1920–1940. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Vlados), p. 172. A. G. Kavtaradze (1988) Voennye spetsialisty na sluzhbe respubliki sovetov, 1917–1920gg. (Moscow: Nauka), pp. 173–4. N. Baron and P. Gatrell (eds) (2004) Homelands: War, Population Displacement and State-building in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Press). Iu. Fel’shtinskii (1991) K istorii nashei zakrytosti (Moscow: Terra). N. Baron (2007) Soviet Karelia: Planning, Politics and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920– 1939 (London: Routledge); G. Kessler (2001) ‘The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940’, Cahiers du monde russe, LXII(2–4), pp. 477–503. P. Baldwin (1999) Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

114 Nick Baron 50. A. M. Kraut (1994) Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace’ (New York: Basic Books); P. Weindling (2000) Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 51. A. Bashford (2006) ‘ “The Age of Universal Contagion”: History, Disease and Globalization’, in idem (ed.) Medicine at the Border. Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 7. 52. A. L. Fairchild (2003) Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 7, citing M. Foucault (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books). 53. V. A. Shishkin (ed.) (2000) Petrograd na perelome epoch: gorod i ego zhiteli v gody revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny (St Petersburg: Institute of Russian History, RAN), p. 61. 54. Decree of USSR Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), 24 July 1923, in State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 5546, op. 1, d. 1b, ll. 75–8. 55. Resolution of the Presidium of the USSSR Central Executive Committee, 23 August 1931, in GARF f. 3316, op. 13, d. 14, l. 90. This brought Soviet law into line with the Paris Convention of 1926. 56. On Soviet concepts of the bodies social and politic, see Weiner, Making Sense. 57. Circular of RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), No. 9001, 8 April 1920, cited in Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, p. 81. 58. ‘Zinu saraksts’ [Information Sheet], 1 October 1921. I am grateful to Aldis Purs for making this document available to me. 59. Karelian amnesties in (1925) Sbornik ‘Krasnaia Kareliia’ (Petrozavodsk: Izdatel’stvo Narkomiust AKSSR), pp. 55–6; Sobranie uzakonii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krestianskogo pravitel’stva RSFSR, No. 2, 1924, Art. 20; and No. 20, 1924, Art. 198. For discussion of procedures, to be modelled on the recent Kronstadt amnesty and repatriation, see Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 04, op. 41, d. 252a-53442, ll. 25–38. On Kronstadt repressions and refugees: V. P. Naumov and A. A. Kosakovskii (eds) (1997) Kronshtadt 1921 (Moscow: Fond ‘Demokratiia’), esp. pp. 339–41, 349–54. 60. For measures against Finnish perebezhniki see Politburo Protocol No. 59, 30 August 1931, in the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI), fond 17, opis 3, delo 846, list’ 2. 61. Report by Karelian UNKVD Chief K. Tenison to N. I. Ezhov, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, ‘On Results of Operation carried out on NKVD SSSR Directive No. 00447,’ in Archive of the Administration of the Federal Security Service (UFSB) of the Republic of Karelia, Fond sekretnogo deloproizvodstva, opis 1, poriadka 82, delo 1938-goda, listy 43, 54–9. 62. See the chapter 9 by Konrad Zielinski and chapter 10 Ewa Ochman both in this volume. 63. N. Rose (2000) ‘Identity, Genealogy, History’, in P. du Gay, J. Evans and P. Redman Identity: a Reader (London: Sage), pp. 313–25. 64. M. Foucault (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, in H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester Press), p. 221. 65. M. Foucault (2007) Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 109. 66. Cited in Danylenko, ‘The Long Road Home’ (Reel 1).

Remaking Soviet Society: Filtration 115 67. J. Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press). 68. M. Huxley (2007) ‘Geographies of Governmentality’, in J. W. Crampton and S. Elden (eds) Space, Knowledge and Power. Foucault and Geography (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 187. 69. DAKO, f. R-5597 (TLRH Reel 14), d. 4519 (Stupak, Anna Stepanovna). 70. DAKO, f. R-5597 (TLRH Reel 14), d. 4518 (Stupak, Anna Prokof’evna/Prokopovna Stepanovna). 71. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, pp. 221–2. 72. On torture during filtration, see Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, p. 150. 73. S. A. Cole (2001) Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 4. 74. P. Bourdieu (2000) ‘The Biographical Illusion’, in Gay, Evans and Redman, Identity, p. 300. 75. DAKO, f. R-5597 (TLRH Reel 14), d. 4460 (Dovgosheiia, Ol’ga Filimonovna). 76. Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion’, p. 303. 77. For the Stalinist autobiographical regime, see J. Hellbeck (2006) Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); I. Halfin (2003) Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). On Soviet confession, see O. Kharkhordin (1999) The Collective and the Individual in Russia: a Study of Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). 78. Cited in N. Brychev (1945) Domoi na Rodinu! (Moscow: Voenizdat), pp. 12–13, and in Polian, Zhertvy, p. 544. 79. Letter to Golikov, cited in Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki, pp. 53–4. In the margin, an official noted the receipt of many similar letters of protest from returnees. Internees’ submission of protests indicates a measure of autonomous agency, although their appeal to a higher bureaucratic level still expresses a belief (or a desired or professed belief) in the ‘just’ nature of the system. 80. As of 1 March 1946, 57.81 per cent of 4.2 million civilians and former prisoners of war returning from abroad (i.e. this figure does not include internally displaced persons who were also subject to filtration) had been sent home (note that this figure includes those who died while in filtration points and camps, as well as members of deported nationalities who after repatriation were despatched to their collective places of exile); 19.08 per cent had been sent to the army (often to ‘punishment battalions); 14.48 per cent had been mobilised to military labour battalions; 6.5 per cent (272,867) had been arrested and sent either to PFLs or Gulag corrective labour camps (ITLs); and 2.13 per cent were still at SPPs. Zemskov, ‘K voprosu …’, p. 36. Sheviakov states that of 5.2 million repatriates (including internally displaced persons), 62 per cent had been sent home by early 1946; 31.5 per cent mobilised to the army; and 6.5 per cent (338,107) handed over for further NKVD processing or punishment, including 283,092 former Vlasovites, policemen and members of Nazi special battalions, and 55,015 civilians. Sheviakov, ‘Tainy’, p. 10. A proportion of those mobilised to the army or labour battalions were arrested on their subsequent release and reverification. Most of those held in PFLs and ITL’s were transferred in 1946–47 to special settlements, often attached to industrial objects, for terms of six years, Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 161; Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, pp. 125–6. 81. D. Pohl (2008) ‘The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in Reich Commissariat Ukraine’, in R. Brandon and W. Lower (eds) The

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82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Shoah in Ukraine (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. 23–76, here p. 75, n. 237; Penter, ‘Collaboration on Trial’, p. 783, n. 2. I am grateful to David Fraser for these references. L. Hirszowicz (1993) ‘The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror’, in L. Dobroszycki and J. S. Gurock (eds) The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945 (New York: M. E. Sharpe), pp. 43–4. Jones, “‘Every Family . . . ”, p. 256. See n. 80. Zubkova, Russia, pp. 105–6. Zubkova, Russia, p. 105. Report of the Propaganda and Agitation Administration of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) on ‘Progress of Repatriation …’, 17 July 1945, cited in Zubkova, Russia, p. 105. Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 158. See the Dnepropetrovsk Regional Party Committee Bureau resolution, 12–5 September 1946, cited in Polian, Zhertvy, p. 560. Polian, Zhertvy, pp. 557–8. Polian, Zhertvy, pp. 556, 558–9. Zubkova, Russia, p. 130; Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, pp. 128–53. Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, pp. 51–2, 89–95. Cited in Polian, Zhertvy, p. 561. Zhiromskaia, Naselenie, p. 161. Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, pp. 99–104. Zemskov, ‘Repatriatsiia …’; Polian, Zhertvy, pp. 556–61. DAKO, f. R-5597 (TLRH Reel 6), d. 3286 (Lial’ko, Nikolai Akimovich). Vertiletskaia, ‘Repatrianty’, pp. 100, 150–3 on rehabilitations.

6 Dirt, Disease and Disorder: Population Re-placement in Postwar Leningrad and the ‘Danger’ of Social Contamination Siobhan Peeling

In September 1947, the daily Leningrad newspaper, Leningradskaia Pravda, published a letter to the editor from a local resident, expressing concern about the lack of cleanliness and order on the city’s streets. The author of the letter, I. Pikin, protested that: Leningrad was always renowned not only for the beauty of its architecture but also for exemplary order, for high levels of discipline. In this respect Leningraders could serve as an example for inhabitants of many other cities. After the war the composition of the population of Leningrad was significantly renewed. Many of the new arrivals have still not managed to acquire the skills which are demanded of inhabitants of a big city, have not cultivated in themselves a sense of discipline. They violate traffic regulations and throw cigarette ends, scraps of paper and wrappers from ‘Eskimo’ ice creams onto the pavement . . . A scrap of paper dropped on the street – that is a sign of a lack of culture (nekul’turnosti) and lack of respect for the city in which you live.1 In this complaint, Pikin wove together everyday encounters with heaps of rubbish in the postwar urban environment, the fact of the mass replacement of the population and a mythologised Leningrad identity, in a narrative which associated newcomers to the city with the degradation of the spatial, normative and sanitary order. This chapter argues that the publication of this letter is indicative of a set of practices and discourses, which treated those travelling to Leningrad after the end of the blockade as a threat to the health and purity of the city. It explores how these practices and discourses emanated in part from a state approach which linked the restoration of the population in a settled spatial order with the establishment of control over a menacing sanitary situation and targeted the itinerant population as bearers of 117

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disease. This was buttressed in Leningrad by the ambiguous relationship of the local authorities to the task of integrating hundreds of thousands of new arrivals annually into the physical and mythological post-blockade cityscape. It begins with a general discussion of scholarship that has theorised the constitution of the displaced or stateless as a dangerous and polluting category, and its particular pertinence to this period of postwar reconstruction.

Matter out of place: a theoretical framework War and invasion involve the rupture of the external boundaries of a state and also disruption of its physical infrastructure and social orders of place, roles and behaviour. The challenge of peacetime rebuilding in the aftermath of war entails reconstructing boundaries and also a ‘mode of communal order’.2 In the case of the Soviet Union after the Second World War, the state borders had shifted, millions of the population had been spatially dislocated within and across these borders and families had been separated. In the midst of catastrophic material damage, destruction of goods and services and massive population losses, new hopes and values had emerged among the population. Despite the surge of unifying patriotism, ethnic and social divisions had been exacerbated and new conflicts appeared, for example, between those who had spent the war at the front and in the rear. In short, the ‘whole social order was in disarray’.3 In the immediate postwar years, therefore, the Soviet state was engaged in the task of establishing and enforcing actual and metaphorical external frontiers and internal orders.4 The work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas on the symbolic functions of dirt argues that the process of organising the external environment and imposing orders and meanings on society is accompanied by a confrontation with matter which is deemed out of place in that order. This confrontation, according to Douglas, can generate rhetoric of pollution and contagion and purification behaviours. She proceeds from the premise that in any society dirt is a relative concept, constructed by the beholders in as much as it offends against their idea of order. In her view, if ‘dirt is essentially disorder’ or matter out of place, then the attempt to eliminate it, to purify, is part of a movement to structure the environment, to impose an ideal, unified order on it.5 Ideas of pollution and defilement work in the life of society to express and reinforce a general view of the social order, its morals and boundaries. This definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ also suggests why a society would be likely to fear contamination from people who have been physically displaced. Douglas writes that persons who are in a marginal state, ‘who are placeless’, transgress against the stable pattern and classifications of society and as elements deemed anomalous, ambiguous, contradictory, are reacted to as a pollutant.6 Liisa Malkki engages with these ideas in relation to

Population Re-placement in Post-war Leningrad 119

people displaced by violence from postcolonial Burundi. In what she terms an ‘ethnography of displacement’, she explores how refugees are regarded as an aberration of categories and a challenge to accepted boundaries within the system of nation-states, which place a moral value on rootedness, territoriality and a single national or categorical identity.7 She shows how the perceived danger and pollution posed by refugeeness as a liminal state was manifested in the administration of refugee camps in Tanzania. In this context, she notes the tendency for the governmental and international agencies to impose a spatial order on the displaced population in conjunction with establishing other kinds of order, including medical and sanitary regimes.8 The adoption of practices linking sanitary measures with control over uprooted populations has also been illuminated in the work of Paul Weindling in relation to fears about epidemic diseases in Europe from the late nineteenth century. Weindling charts how an evolving medical discourse of infection and parasites intertwined with the political stigmatisation of ‘surplus’ populations, migrants and minorities. The threat from lice as carriers of typhus was particularly prominent in public representations of epidemiological danger and became associated with certain groups of people, who were classed as human hosts of parasites and disease. In this way, migrants, deportees, seasonal labourers, vagabonds, apprentices, peddlers, Jews and Gypsies became demonised as ‘human parasites menacing national hygiene’.9 The medical discourse was soon extended to social ills and generated concerns about the ‘germs’ of deviant behaviour, which were connected with the same population groups.10 Exaggerated fears about the spread of typhus, which in fact could be contained and eradicated simply by sustaining rudimentary levels of sanitation and hygiene, translated into practices of sanitary policing directed at unwanted inhabitants of a locale and itinerant populations. Sanitary procedures of isolation, containment and cleansing began to operate as elements of state systems designed to control population movements, such as border points and passports. Delousing, disinfection and quarantine became routine in Europe during and after the First World War, such that ‘by the time of the Second World War migrants and deportees had become conditioned to expect the ordeal of delousing at border crossing, ports, railway junctions, and on entry to camps’.11 The next section depicts the dismal state of urban hygiene with which the growing population of Leningrad had to struggle at the end of the Second World War. It discusses the threat of the spread of epidemic diseases and the inadequate official response to the environmental deterioration. The following sections then examine how, in this threatening sanitary situation, it was those arriving in the city who were targeted in anti-epidemic measures as the main threat not only to the health and hygiene, but also to the purity of the culture of the city.

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Wastelands: the postwar urban environment and threat of disease The re-evacuees, demobilised soldiers, enlisted workers, factory school students and people arriving on their own initiative in Leningrad in the immediate post-blockade years found themselves in an environment severely blighted by a breakdown in sanitation. The author of a letter posted from Leningrad to Tashkent, which came to the attention of the Military Censor in spring 1946, contrasted conditions he found in the city with those of pre-war years and depicted the postwar streetscape in the following way: The snow was cleaned up badly in winter – there is soot, dirt and construction debris everywhere and it even floats along Nevskii – with an uproar, dirty, stinking streams shoot out from under gates, in the houses the gutters don’t work and all the water flows onto the pavement, onto passers-by. The public is grey, dirty, nervous.12 Daily reality in Leningrad in the years of reconstruction following the blockade corresponded to urban conditions across the Soviet Union, which have been explored by Donald Filtzer. Little rubbish was collected in these immediate postwar years and cesspits were rarely cleaned, many urban residents did not have indoor running water and there was an absence of sewerage systems. In this environment, Filtzer notes, ‘just maintaining basic levels of cleanliness and hygiene for yourself and your family was drudgery’.13 In the severe winter of 1941–42, Leningrad’s water supply system had suffered significant damage during the blockade and from 1945 it was necessary to construct it almost completely anew.14 The sewerage system had been incomplete even before the war, with sewage emptied into the River Neva and the city’s canals. After the war, the sewerage system in the city’s old districts had to be reconstructed, new networks built and wooden pipes replaced with concrete ones.15 In 1947 thousands of flats were still without water and a significant number of basements remained flooded with sewage.16 Transport available for clearing rubbish and cleaning the streets in the city fell dramatically during the war and did not recover quickly. At the end of 1947 there were still only 60 vehicles available for sanitary transport, as opposed to 180 before the war, and these were in such a poor condition that a third of them had to be written off. Regular organised rubbish collection occurred in only three districts of the city in 1948.17 Scrap iron, construction debris, household waste and sewage, along with tram tickets, cigarette stubs and paper littered the streets, waterways and backyards of Leningrad in these years.18 Unofficial rubbish tips sprang up in many of the yards at the back of the city’s houses and in urban wastelands created by the bombings and the demolition of buildings for firewood.19 An interviewee in a recent oral history project on the blockade recalled as a


child wandering around the postwar city and playing in the ruins of thousands of demolished houses. The rubble on central Leningrad streets served as weapons and hiding places when playing at war or as toboggan slopes in the winter.20 Areas of destroyed housing were put to other uses by the city’s population in the struggle with the breakdown in municipal services: in the first few months of 1945 up to 100 unauthorised rubbish dumps were recorded in these wastelands.21 Letters to the editor published in Leningradskaia Pravda in the years immediately following the blockade expressed the daily unpleasantness and tensions engendered by everyday encounters with the unsanitary streetscape. A resident of Stremiannaia Street, one of the central thoroughfares where the blockade project interviewee remembered playing in the rubble, wrote the following letter, printed in the newspaper in July 1944, describing a much more disagreeable experience of life on the street: The July heat has begun. In all the houses the windows are open. But we, residents of house number 19 on Stremiannaia Street, are deprived of this possibility. For more than two weeks outside our very windows. . . . there has been a tram platform [littered] with filth and garbage. Flies swarm over this dump. A horrible stench emanates all around. We struggle for cleanliness and order in our beloved city. But here, in the very centre, dirt and unsanitary conditions are multiplying.22 Marketplaces were a particular source of concern with respect to dirt and disorder in the city in letters published in the local press. A letter of April 1946 in Leningradskaia Pravda, for example, complained about the filthy state of three of the city’s markets, which, the writer claimed, were rarely cleaned. The author worried about the sale of foods in these markets, where ‘holes, puddles and diverse types of refuse were all underfoot’.23 The filthy conditions in one of these markets, Mal’tsevskii, had been associated in a letter of the previous September with other social problems, such as the formation of crowds and unruly behaviour. The author of this letter linked issues such as congestion at the market entrance, the dirt filling the market square and the endless swearing and fighting of drunken hooligans, who congregated in a corner where vodka was sold, as examples of the disorder.24 Many other letters described the struggle to maintain cleanliness at home when sewage was not removed and there was no water to clean stairwells and yards.25 The arduous task of maintaining personal hygiene in conditions where the domestic supply of clean water was erratic was compounded by the reduced capacity of the city’s public bathhouses and laundries. Laundries in houses often did not function due to a lack of fuel and only 25 public laundries existed at the end of 1947, compared to over 160 before the war.26 There were also fewer public baths. In order to wash at a bania or to have clothes laundered, it was often necessary to spend several hours, in some

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cases half a day, in a queue. Once inside the public baths, hot water and soap were provided intermittently and customers had to wait up to two months for the return of clean clothes from the laundries.27 The problems with fuel supply also meant that many people had to sleep in their clothes in order to keep warm. Access to soap became even more difficult when it was no longer given out by ration cards from the end of 1947.28 The concerns of the authorities about the consequences of this strain on sanitation were framed in terms of both the desirable aesthetics of the postwar urban environment and the threat of outbreaks of disease. In resolutions about improving the appearance and infrastructure of Leningrad, the City Soviet discussed the removal of plywood boarding up windows of houses on central streets, the repair and painting of railings and the cleaning of shop windows, together with the necessity of clearing rubbish from the city’s wastelands and dealing with dirt and disorder in the markets.29 An article in Leningradskaia Pravda in September 1944, titled ‘On the Culture of the City’, linked cleanliness of the streets with the restoration of the city’s buildings, which also entailed getting rid of dirty and ungrammatical posters displayed on houses and shops, in particular those bearing slogans left over from the blockade.30 A City Soviet resolution of February 1946, on the other hand, called for the necessity of improvements in cleaning Leningrad’s districts of rubbish and sewage, greater order in the work of public baths and laundries and overcoming the unsanitary conditions in houses, all as anti-epidemic measures to combat infectious diseases.31 Filtzer has pointed out how the postwar urban environment ‘made the population highly vulnerable to a whole host of diseases, including tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid, dysentery and upper respiratory infections’.32 The presence of lice and the threat of typhus were a particular concern of the authorities in these years and lice infestations were recorded in Leningrad, especially in dirty, overcrowded hostels, where inhabitants were observed sleeping in their clothes, on hay or dirty linen.33 The Anti-Epidemic Commission of one of the city’s central district soviets, for example, noted in 1945 that unsanitary conditions in eleven of the district’s hostels had provided an environment for the spread of infectious diseases, a number of the hostels were significantly lice-ridden and cases of typhus had recently broken out as a result in the hostel of the cadet school.34 In fact, despite the dreadful conditions, cases of typhus per 10,000 of the population in Leningrad fell from a peak of 43 in the severe blockade year of 1942 to roughly nine in 1946. Confirmed monthly cases of typhus did begin to increase rapidly in July 1947 in the midst of famine conditions, but levels began to drop again by December and by February 1948 were similar to those recorded in 1946. Other diseases such as dysentery were a much greater problem in terms of frequency, with over 80 cases of dysentery per 10,000 of the population recorded in both 1946 and 1947.


The authorities remained particularly anxious about the threat of a typhus epidemic, however, throughout this period.35 Regardless of these concerns, official measures to improve the state of the urban environment were inadequate and erratic. In Leningrad, as in other cities, efforts to improve the sanitary conditions mainly relied on the mobilisation of the population in mass spring cleaning campaigns, which were organised by the State Sanitary Inspectorate (Gosudarstvennaia Sanitarnaia Inspektsiia) and the city police. The Inspectorate (henceforth GSI) was founded in 1935 primarily to check the sanitary condition of enterprises dealing with food products, but was also given the task of working out anti-epidemic measures.36 The reports of the Leningrad GSI for the immediate postwar years demonstrate how, as Filtzer has discussed in relation to other cities, after the initial success of the spring campaigns the problems would reappear. Streets, courtyards and cesspits again became fouled and waste carted to makeshift dumps, often necessitating less successful autumn campaigns.37 In well-publicised campaigns each March and April in Leningrad from 1942 onwards, thousands of people and hundreds of vehicles were mobilised in ‘Sunday clean-ups’ (voskresniki), resulting in significant drops in the number of unauthorised rubbish dumps and filthy yards. By the end of every year, however, dumps had reappeared and the proportion of yards whose territory was deemed dirty by the inspectors had increased once more.38 At the end of the 1940s refuse still accumulated in pits in the yards of many of the city’s districts.39 In response to the concerns about the health and appearance of the city, which were inadequately addressed by measures targeting the dirtiness of the built environment, official bodies systematically targeted the itinerant population as bearers of disease and a threat to a Leningrad culture of cleanliness. The arrival of over 1.5 million people to settle in the city in the three years following the end of the blockade in January 1944, swelling the population from roughly 600,000 at the end of 1943 to almost 2 million at the start of 1947, placed further strain on the strapped urban infrastructure.40 The situation was exacerbated by the fact that enterprise directors desperate for labour called up workers without having prepared adequate accommodation for them, in spite of a central government decree prohibiting this practice.41 Immigrants to the city, in particular enlisted workers, students mobilised to trade schools and re-evacuees who had lost their pre-war housing, were often housed in premises completely unfit for habitation. A publicised ‘raid’ by employees of Leningradskaia Pravda in 1944 found new workers in the city living in appalling conditions. In one hostel for new workers, for example, the lack of working toilets meant that for people living on the fourth or fifth floors it was necessary to use the neighbours’ toilet on the third floor, find one in another hostel or go into the yard where ‘it is

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Figure 6.1 A ‘Sunday clean-up’ (voskresnik) on Kaliaev Street, Leningrad, during the blockade. Reproduced from S. K. Bernev and S. V. Chernov (eds) (2007) Blokadnye dnevniki i dokumenty. Seriia: ’Arkhiv Bol’shogo Doma’ (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskii Dom) by kind permission of the Registration and Archives Directorate, St Petersburg and Leningrad Regional Administration of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

possible to literally get stuck in the sewage’.42 Workers of a number of reevacuated factories were settled in the factory workshops, in basements, in the ruins of buildings and, in the case of the Kirov factory, under the stands of the factory’s stadium.43 The sanitary situation was so poor in these temporary ‘hostels’ that the GSI insisted in 1946 that part of them be closed down and those living in them resettled.44 The measures and rhetoric adopted by official bodies, however, treated the displaced population entering Leningrad not only as an extra burden on infrastructure but as an inherent threat to the city’s health, hygiene and appearance. In the following sections, I turn to the sanitary practices and discourses which were directed not at the dirtiness of the urban environment but at that other ‘matter out of place’: people arriving into the city and displaced groups living at its margins.

‘Control over the itinerant population’: sanitary processing and the passport regime Fears about the spread of epidemic diseases during and after the war in the Soviet Union translated into a number of measures which sought to clean up


and contain the population on the move. In its report of 1945, the Leningrad GSI stated that one of the most important tasks facing its workers, more urgent than organising clearing rubbish from the city, was to prevent acute infections, chiefly typhus, from being brought in to the city. To this end, its staff had to organise the regular quarantine and sanitary processing of the incoming population.45 The annual reports of the Leningrad GSI from 1945 to 1948 contained detailed sections on its activities under headings such as ‘Sanitary control over the itinerant population’. These laid out how the inspectorate had ensured that those arriving underwent compulsory observation and treatment at sanitary checkpoints or in polyclinics before they were settled in the city.46 During this sanitary processing migrants were inspected for signs of disease or lice, went through obligatory washing and had their clothes and belongings disinfected.47 The GSI’s responsibility for controlling the sanitary treatment of people travelling to Leningrad was set out in a number of resolutions of the Leningrad City Soviet between 1943 and 1948, which coupled compulsory sanitary processing with the system of internal passports and residence permits. These resolutions of the city authorities made mandatory, as a vital anti-epidemic measure, the sanitary treatment of all citizens arriving in the city, regardless of whether or not they had already undergone sanitary processing in their places of departure or on the journey.48 The local police (militsiia) were forbidden to give residence permits to anyone in these years until they had presented a certificate attesting that they had passed through sanitary observation or treatment on their arrival to Leningrad.49 According to the GSI reports, re-evacuees and enlisted workers and trade school students, brought to the city in large organised trainloads particularly in 1945 and 1946, were kept in isolated premises on their arrival, until specially reserved places were made available for their treatment in the city’s sanitary checkpoints. Most of the trainloads were processed on the day of arrival, but large groups especially were kept in isolation over two or three days. Subordinate GSIs in the city districts were charged with control of the quarantine and accommodation of these groups following their treatment. People arriving individually, rather than in organised groups, were required to undergo sanitary inspection in observation centres at polyclinics in Leningrad and those suspected of carrying lice infestations or typhus were sent to sanitary checkpoints for treatment.50 The population arriving in Leningrad may well have already been through several obligatory inspections and disinfection treatments during their journey to the city, as the resolutions of the Leningrad City Soviet formed part of a system of measures across the Soviet Union, which were aimed at the hygienic regulation of the itinerant population. An article published in the journal of the Soviet Ministry of Health in June 1945 represented all those displaced by the war and its aftermath as the major sanitary-epidemiological threat to the Soviet state. The author argued

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that the mass population shifts of armies on the move, prisoners of war, refugees, evacuated and re-evacuated populations, labour reservists, settlers, unaccompanied children, the homeless, vagrants and demobilised soldiers had an exceptional epidemiological significance and harboured huge dangers to the well-being of the motherland. He reassured readers, however, that this transient population could be rendered ‘completely harmless, both for themselves and for the population with whom they will come into contact’.51 This could be achieved by strengthening the activities of institutions which had already been responsible during the war for the sanitary treatment of the population on the move, such as evacuation centres and sanitary-control points along transport routes, as well as sanitary checkpoints in cities. The role of these institutions in regulating the movement and sanitary condition of re-evacuees and other displaced groups as the war drew to an end had been set out in 1944 by the Chief State Sanitary Inspectorate. Evacuation posts near railway stations, wharfs and population centres had to be equipped with premises where the population on their journey home could be housed temporarily, fed and where they would be registered. They also had to contain isolation wards, medical and quarantine premises and bathhouses with disinfection chambers for the treatment of re-evacuees on their arrival and departure from the centres. A network of sanitary control points operated also at smaller train stations and at localities along the railway routes. Their staff checked and ‘cleansed’ the itinerant population while the trains and steamships were being loaded or unloaded or while transports halted at stations and wharfs.52 At the main railway junction of the city of Sverdlovsk in April 1944 up to 2,000 re-evacuees each spent about three hours being treated at the sanitary checkpoint on their arrival. Most were then stranded at the regional evacuation centre or on the train station premises with other people in transit for up to 13 days in unhealthy, filthy and overcrowded conditions while they waited for transport.53 The displaced population was not, however, a passive object of state intervention and discipline. Official measures aimed at the bodies of the itinerant population could be avoided or challenged and people adopted a variety of responses to the imposed sanitary conditioning. Accounts of arrival in Leningrad which deal with sanitary treatment have proved hard to find. However, evidence regarding sanitary processing during the evacuation from the city suggests a range of reactions. One evacuee from Leningrad describes the experience thus: ‘the bath for the evacuated was an event which cannot be scorned. It allowed one to be cleansed not only from dirt but from black thoughts’.54 An interviewee in the recent oral history project on the blockade mentioned above, however, recalled how the journey into evacuation was particularly unpleasant because of the periodic sanitary stops, when the train suddenly halted and passengers were divided by sex to undergo ‘all these things’.55 Another interview respondent remembered how it was


possible to refuse to undergo the sanitary treatment. On arrival in evacuation her mother, she recalled, would not have anything to do with the disinfection, baths and head shaving, and they were left with their hair to deal with any lice themselves.56 Many people after the end of the blockade came to Leningrad on their own initiative, regardless of the strict legal restrictions on settlement in the city. They were able to evade the residency controls and also, therefore, the sanitary measures, because employers were desperate for labour and officials open to bribery. The authorities found it impossible to effect total control over the movement of the population.57 This is reflected in a letter intercepted by the Military Censor in 1946, whose author wrote that ‘the majority [of people], like me, arrive without permits’.58 The necessary documents were often obtained retrospectively through employers or by means of personal contacts (blat). Those who circumvented the passport system and settled in Leningrad without residence permits were among those targeted in anti-epidemic measures implemented by the Leningrad City Extraordinary Anti-Epidemic Commission at the end of 1947 as famine conditions persisted and levels of typhus rose. These practices were aimed especially at unaccompanied children and people without fixed employment or place of residence, as well as those newly entering the city, as categories posing the main danger to the health of the city’s existing population. The city militsiia was mobilised to reinforce the passport regime and combat those leading a ‘vagrant form of life’ as an anti-epidemic procedure. They were required to improve their supervision of the passport regime and ensure the timely registration of new arrivals to the city, as well as providing for their preliminary sanitary treatment.59 The police carried out mass checks at houses, hostels, flats and workplaces. These checks combined a search for people who were carrying a disease or were infected with lice with the rounding up of ‘unauthorised outsiders’ who did not have residence permits and as a result were held to administrative account or referred to the criminal courts and in many cases expelled from the city. In the city’s disorderly marketplaces, miltisiia stationed at special sanitary posts, sometimes accompanied by medical personnel of mobile anti-epidemic brigades, detained beggars, waifs and others deemed by these officials to be ‘slovenly’ or ‘dangerous for the spread of typhus’ and sent them for treatment at sanitary checkpoints.60 Other sanitary measures which were emphasised at this time focused on the the city’s railway stations. This involved work to repair the infrastructure and improve the appearance of stations, including the provision of station toilets connected to the sewerage system, and competitions for the station in the best sanitary condition.61 In addition to improving the cleanliness of the environment of stations, these measures charged the Ministry for State Security (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or MGB) guard on the Leningrad railway with systematically checking and ‘cleansing’ stations

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and train depots of unaccompanied children, homeless people, beggars, people without documents or train tickets and anyone infringing the station rules and causing disorder.62 These groups had to be detained, removed from the station premises and subsequently sent for sanitary processing and disinfection. On the trains themselves, medical workers were deployed to make checks of passengers travelling towards Leningrad and conductors were exhorted to lead the anti-epidemic struggle against those without tickets, waifs and ‘touring’ elements (gastroliruiushchego).63 In these procedures, sanitary measures intersected with the legal regulation of the movement and settlement of the population and also with disciplinary sanctions to maintain order in the city’s public spaces. The measures were maintained and bolstered in the first quarter of 1948, even as occurrences of typhus were declining. Interestingly, the Extraordinary Anti-Epidemic Commission made note of only one recorded case of the illness being spread by a homeless person in December 1947. The ‘homeless’ person singled out as the source of infection was N. Tarasova, a woman who had been given work and accommodation by a vegetable processing plant in the city but who was an ‘illegal’ settler, without a passport or resident permit and, it was noted, was also wanted by the police for theft.64 The attempt at mass inspection, cleaning and delousing of Leningrad’s newly arriving, mobile and marginal populations can be understood not simply in terms of the tendency of states to construct unregulated migrants as sources of epidemiological contamination. It was also conducted in the context of a specific Soviet drive to purge urban areas of unwanted elements, perceived as ‘carriers’ of social disorder, cultural degeneration and potentially political danger. Weindling has explored how the modernist European state ethos, which incorporated the regulation of the cleanliness of social space and containment of the flow of populations, became intertwined in Germany with a Nazi ideology of racial purification. The Soviet Union, as the work of Amir Weiner has shown, was engaged in its own quest for purity. In the Soviet state, according to Weiner, the modernist European ethos of social engineering combined with a Bolshevik Marxist eschatology in a revolutionary campaign to transform society into a beautiful, pure and harmonious body.65 This campaign entailed the excision of those who did not belong in the cleansing operations of the purges, alongside practices to transform individuals and society into an ideal image. As Mary Douglas argued, belief in dangerous contagion arises during the process of imposing an idea on the external environment and serves to define social rules, uphold values and establish an orderly pattern of what and who belongs inside the boundaries of a society, clarifying what should be rejected and what can be incorporated.66 In the Soviet case, the Bolshevik regime was confronted by major disorders resulting from their policies of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the wake of the upheavals of the collectivisation and industrialisation campaigns of the early 1930s, fears about the


contamination of the body social increasingly began to focus on the population arriving in urban areas and in particular the ‘ruralisation of the cities’ by millions of uprooted peasants.67 It was in this context that the system of internal passports and residence permits was introduced both to control the movement of peasants and to facilitate the cleansing of the cities of undesirable elements.68 Paul Hagenloh has illuminated the way in which, during the 1930s, local police forces used the passport system to ‘quarantine’ urban areas from a broad category of unwanted marginals termed ‘socially harmful elements’, who were believed to be the cause of crime and disorder.69 At the same time, attempts were made to transform the newly arrived population into the loyal and cultured urban workers the regime desired. A major facet of the campaign to inculcate cultured-ness (kul’turnost’) was the attempt to impose norms of hygiene in the new workers’ barracks, which were seen as repositories of filth and deviance. The civilising of the barrack space was intended to be instrumental in changing people’s standards of cleanliness and, in turn, their attitudes and manners, producing, in this way, public order.70 Neat and clean curtains, lampshades and tablecloths in the barracks were intended both to transform the uncultured people and to function as symbols demonstrating their ability to live in accordance with the norms of kul’turnost’.71 In the Ukrainian industrial region of the Donbass before the Second World War, the Soviet authorities had developed medical provisioning centres for migrant workers from the Tsarist era into a network of large sanitary observation centres. These centres conducted sanitary inspections, treatments and sometimes quarantine of newly arrived and seasonal workers before they could be assigned to urban accommodation.72 The Soviet response to fears of typhus epidemics during the war and postwar period engaged both of the above approaches in relation to the itinerant population. Postwar anti-epidemic measures built on previous practices which entailed rounding up, detaining, processing and sometimes excising people who did not belong in the desired cityscape. They also employed methods used in the past in attempts to ensure that those permitted to settle in towns were appropriately clean and not carrying infection before they could come into contact with the urban environment. In Leningrad, the rounding up of marginals for sanitary conditioning by the police in the late 1940s followed the pattern of campaigns conducted by the local police to purge the city of undesirables, which had begun in the 1930s and continued throughout the war and beyond. In 1942, for example, in parallel with a re-registration of passports, the militsiia had carried out operations to ‘cleanse the city of a criminal, social-parasitic and undesirable element’.73 The sanitary control points along routes to the city were explicitly based on the precedent of the Donbass sanitary observation centres for migrant workers, as well as on the isolation permit points which had carried out mass sanitary treatments on displaced people during the Civil War, in

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particular in Petrograd where sanitation had completely broken down and there were outbreaks of cholera, ’flu and typhus.74 The expression of concerns about the effect of the incoming population after the end of the blockade on the sanitary, social and cultural order of the city also had a distinctive local dimension in Leningrad. The final section of this chapter examines how new arrivals to the city were marked discursively as a potential threat to the clean and neat appearance of the cityscape, in relation to a powerful local wartime myth of a purified community of Leningraders.

Repopulating a mythologised place: integration into postwar Leningrad In January 1944, Petr Popkov, chairman of the Leningrad City Soviet, sent a memorandum to the secretaries of the city’s Party Committee, Andrei Zhdanov, Aleksei Kuznetsov and Iakov Kapustin, on issues related to settling the prospective growing population of the city in the devastated housing stock. Popkov suggested that in connection with the lack of living space, several exceptions should be made to the Soviet housing laws in the case of Leningrad. These proposals included a rule that accommodation should only be given to people who had lived in Leningrad previously, had their own living space and were returning to the city with the permission of the municipal Soviet. None of the re-evacuees should be guaranteed their pre-war housing, however, as this would necessitate the resettlement of many city dwellers who had been forced to move into alternative premises during the blockade and who had lived in them and looked after them for more than two years in siege conditions. Those citizens who had arrived in the city during the war as a result of the occupation of the Baltic republics, Karelian isthmus and Leningrad oblast’, as non-Leningraders, should be deprived of the housing they had been given and returned to their regions. Andrei Zhdanov responded with the resolution that it was not right to make such a division into ‘pure’ (chistye) and ‘impure’ (nechistye) Leningraders.75 This exchange is suggestive of the way in which the arrival of a large number of people into the city after the lifting of the blockade was seen not merely as a concern in terms of an additional strain on infrastructure but as a risk to the identity of the population. It also hints at the way these complex questions of identity and belonging were played out in the language of purity and cleanliness. The attitude of the Leningrad city government to those arriving after the war was clearly ambivalent. On the one hand, Leningrad officials needed to promote the speedy integration of hundreds of thousands of people into the postwar urban environment. On the other, they had participated in creating a powerful local wartime myth of the city and its inhabitants during the


blockade as a special, unique moral and cultured community, purified in the course of withstanding unprecedented suffering and barbarism. Local officials were concerned with the integration of new arrivals not just into the physical environment of the city but also into this discursive community, which they feared might thereby be weakened or dissolved. The process of integration was complicated by the varying classification of different groups of immigrants according to their proximity to ‘indigenous Leningraders’. Re-evacuees could be most readily understood in this way, whereas new arrivals and youths mobilised to the trade schools, and who came from other cities or had spent their formative years in evacuation, proved more problematic. The confrontation with this ambiguity generated a discourse which often centred on issues of cleanliness. Articles appeared in the press in which the inclusion of people in the community of Leningraders was formulated in terms of their relationship to the cleanliness, tidiness and culture of the city’s spaces.76 Lisa Kirschenbaum has demonstrated the way in which official local media accounts of the blockade during the war and for several years afterwards infused and shaped the experiences and memories of ‘Leningraders’ with mythic narratives that encouraged them to understand themselves as heroic defenders of a moral and civilised community. A recurring element of this shared narrative of local officials and inhabitants of the blockade city was the spring cleaning of the city in 1942.77 The narrative that ‘Leningraders in spring 1942 voluntarily went out to clean their native city despite the cold and hunger, as a result of which heroic effort no epidemics appeared in the city’, was continually repeated in the media at the time and after and recurs in interviews with blockade survivors decades later. A front page article in Leningradskaia Pravda of March 1944, for example, reiterated the message that Leningraders risked enemy fire to clean yards, streets and squares out of a love for their native city which was stronger than cold, tiredness and hunger, thus demonstrating their culture and heroism.78 That the 1942 spring cleaning became one of the standard symbols of the resilience of the city’s population during the blockade is demonstrated by interviews conducted during the recent oral history project on the blockade. Almost identical phrases about the spring cleaning occur in over 20 of their 73 transcribed interviews with blockade survivors. The following statement of one blokadnik can be seen as representative: ‘in March 1942 Leningraders achieved a real feat. They saved the city from epidemics . . . you could barely hold the spade in you hands . . . This is love for the city.’79 It was into this particular imagined purified community, underpinned in part by tales of the blockaded population’s efforts at maintaining the cleanliness of a beloved native city, as well as into an unsanitary physical environment, that people arrived at the end of the blockade. The local mythology of a clean and moral city, alongside the reality of an unsanitary

132 Siobhan Peeling

postwar urban environment, formed the background for the process of integration of newcomers to Leningrad. Re-evacuees could be assimilated into the narrative of cultured, moral Leningraders, concerned with the cleanliness and order of the city, by means of several narratives. These narratives were utilised by respondents in interviews over five decades later. Those who were in the city during the most terrible blockade winter of 1941–42 and who did not leave until after the spring clean-up, of course, mobilised the standard version of the feat of morally good Leningraders in their accounts.80 Others emphasised their upbringing as Leningraders, which, for them, meant precisely that they did not drop rubbish after the war.81 Another interview respondent, who had not taken part in the spring cleanup before she was evacuated, nevertheless emphasised her connection to these events, and thereby to the city’s revival. She described how she had witnessed exhausted people with spades cleaning Leningrad’s main street, Nevskii Prospekt, before she left and, moreover, how she had heard about the clean-ups in evacuation where ‘we lived the life of Leningrad’.82 This view of an extended Leningrad community, living for news of the city and spreading ‘Leningrad values’ in evacuation, was supported by many articles and letters in the city’s press before and after the war. Once evacuees returned, therefore, the authorities did not necessarily need to engage in a public discourse on their belonging and cleanliness. This was not the case with two other groups: adolescents mobilised into trade schools, whether they had been evacuated from Leningrad as children or were new to the city, and new arrivals in general. An article printed in Leningradskaia Pravda in September 1944, for example, discussed the arrival of 1,000 new workers to the city who were, in the main, women, village youths and trade school students. Respect for the city must be cultivated in these newcomers, it claimed, and they must ‘conquer [zavoevat’] the honoured right to call themselves Leningraders’.83 One of the tests which they had to pass in order to earn their place in the community of Leningraders was to demonstrate their concern for the cleanliness of the urban environment. There were many public representations of these groups, by the municipal authorities and native population, which expressed doubts about their sanitary discipline and the requirement for them to prove they had been ‘acculturated’ on the city’s terms. An article of February 1944 about a trade school dealt at length with the issue of whether the new arrivals at the school were ‘Leningraders’ or not. Interestingly, many of them were originally ‘natives’ of the city. The article noted that most of them had lived in the city before the war and ‘only some had left at the start of the war and do not know how we lived and others were taken away in spring 1942. They lived together with us that winter.’84 Even though these young ‘Leningraders’ had now come ‘home’, the article emphasised that they had needed actively to reintegrate into the trade school


community and ‘family’ by learning, or relearning, and demonstrating what were termed Leningrad manners. The article described how the new arrivals had made an effort to integrate with the others to demonstrate by their conduct that ‘we are also Leningraders, we won’t let you down’.85 The most basic commandment of the work collective, which the new arrivals had managed to grasp, was to ‘do everything ourselves’, in particular cleaning the hostel. It was emphasised that the youths themselves, both new and old, were now responsible for the cleanliness in the hostel, the smell of freshly washed floors and the neatly arranged bunks. As a result of their proper conduct, the article concluded that they could indeed now properly be considered ‘Leningraders’.86 Adult migrants arriving in Leningrad for the first time were also depicted as in need of sanitary instruction in order to belong to a cultured community of Leningraders and as potentially susceptible to the malignant influence of disordered and dirty surroundings. A newspaper article of September 1944, for example, titled ‘Concern about the Living Arrangement and Labour Use of New Workers’, admonished factory authorities about the dirty conditions in hostels and the breakdown of the water and sewage systems. The article framed its accusations not just in terms of the welfare of the new inhabitants, but also in terms of the need properly to educate workers who had been sent ‘from all ends of our motherland’. Care, it continued, had to be shown towards the environment of these new workers so that they knew ‘their place’ in the workshop and could assimilate ‘not only the culture of production but also traditions of the collective [and] join the glorious family of Leningraders’.87 The association of a dirty and scruffy environment with the habits of newcomers can also be found in an article published a few weeks later, which purported to describe a textile factory ‘through the eyes of a newcomer’: such a picture: in the centre of the factory yard, where the display case of the factory’s indicators stands, several bushes have been planted. On top of their branches has been thrown linen, some sort of rags. In the factory administration itself there are dirty staircases, corridors which have not been washed for a long time. In the office and in workshops an ungrammatically written slogan stands out vividly.88 The article noted the workshops’ dustiness and a scrapheap found in one of them as further elements of what did not fit with the desired cleanliness, order and ‘cultured external appearance’. The author praised the newly arrivals from factory schools for not yet succumbing to the influence of the dirty surroundings and frequently washing the dust from their machines. At the same time it urged the factory’s directors to ensure that newcomers, not accustomed to industrial work and vulnerable to the influence of messy surroundings, were taught how to be neat and orderly from the very first day of

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their arrival. People were now arriving at the factory having not worked in the industry before: It is necessary to ensure that they do not see scattered everywhere – on the floor, on windowsills, on staircases – spools, reels, wisps of cotton, skeins of threads. It is necessary immediately to teach them not to hang out or strew their personal things over windows, higgledy-piggledy (gde popalo). It behoved the management, the article concluded, to direct the attention of newcomers to the dirt and disorder in the workshops ‘in our city, which was always renowned for a high culture of production’.89

Conclusions The urban environment of Leningrad at the end of the blockade was characterised by a breakdown in sanitation, which was not quickly rectified. The unsanitary conditions obtaining in the city were understood by the authorities as a threat to both the health and the appearance of the city as it emerged from the blockade; however, their efforts to clean up the city’s spaces were irregular and inadequate. Against this background, fears about disease and dirt contaminating the cityscape were linked by the authorities to the hundreds of thousands of migrants who were repopulating the city annually. The groups arriving in Leningrad were treated in official practice and discourse as posing a sanitary risk and a danger to the social and cultural order of the city. The measures which marked the displaced population arriving in Leningrad as a risk to hygiene and to social norms are illustrative of the tendency of states to link regulation of the population in a spatial order with sanitary and other controls. This tendency was illuminated in the work of Mary Douglas, who argued that dirt is essentially what a society views as ‘matter out of place’. In her view, pollution beliefs function in societies to bind people to a set of roles, values and a place in the system. People who cross boundaries, who are placeless or who are on the margins of society threaten the patterning of society by their ambiguity and are therefore regarded as a potential source of deviance and contamination. The sanitary controls and rhetoric which surrounded migrants to Leningrad were employed to ensure that their integration did not endanger the urban order, as well as to process and remove certain groups of people that the authorities had determined did not belong in the postwar cityscape. In the particular case of Leningrad this tendency was buttressed by the problematic integration of newcomers in a city which had lost much of its population, just as it gained a powerful mythologised identity based on the purifying experience of the blockade. In this context newcomers were required to display habits of cleanliness as signs of the culture and respect which betokened those who belonged as inhabitants of the city.


Notes 1. Pis’ma v redaktsiiu: I. Pikin, Invalid Otechestvennoi Voiny, ‘Podderzhat’ chistotu i poriadok na ulitsakh nashego goroda’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 5 September 1947, p. 3. 2. D. Summerfield (1998) ‘The Social Experience of War’, in P. Bracken and C. Petty (eds.) Rethinking the Trauma of War (London: Free Association), p. 19. 3. V. Dunham (1990) In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 11. 4. On the material destruction and social dislocation caused by the war in the Soviet Union and the reimposition of order, see P. Dukes (1990) ‘The Social Consequences of World War II for the USSR’, in A. Marwick (ed.) Total War and Social Change (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 45–57; E. Zubkova (1998) Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (New York: M. E. Sharpe); E. Duskin (2001) Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite, 1945– 1953 (New York: Palgrave); S. Fitzpatrick (1985) ‘Postwar Soviet Society: the “Return to Normalcy”, 1945–1953’, in S. Linz (ed.) The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld), pp. 129–56; A. Weiner (2001) Making Sense of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 5. M. Douglas (1966) Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 2. 6. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 95. 7. L. Malkki (1995) Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 4. 8. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 112. 9. P. Weindling (2000) Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 7. 10. On the linkage of medical discourse, conceptions of cleanliness and perceived social ills beyond the borders of Europe as part of the exercising of colonial power, see D. Chakrabarty (2002) Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) on India, and T. Mitchell (1991) Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) on Egypt. Thanks to Jamie Furniss for pointing me towards these references and the concept of ‘colonial hygienism’. 11. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, p. xv. 12. Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv St. Peterburga (hereafter TsGASPb), f. 7384, op. 36, d. 186, l. 80. 13. D. Filtzer (2006) ‘Standard of Living versus Quality of Life: Struggling with the Urban Environment in Russia during the Early Years of Postwar Reconstruction’, in J. Furst (ed.) Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London: Routledge), pp. 81–102, here p. 93. 14. M. P. Viatkin (ed.) (1970) Ocherki istorii Leningrada, tom shestoi: Leningrad v period zaversheniia stroitel’stva sotsializma i postepennogo perekhoda k kommunizmu, 1946– 1965 (Nauka: Leningrad), p. 254. 15. Ocherki istorii Leningrada, p. 255. 16. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 25, d. 733, l. 154 and ‘O sostoianii eksploatatsii zhilogo fonda goroda Leningrada i podgotovke ego k zime’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 2 September 1947, p. 2. 17. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 254, l. 23; op. 25, d. 733, l. 44; Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f.A-482, op. 47, d. 4984, l. 5; ‘O meropriiatiiakh po tekhnicheskoi rekonstruktsii ochistki gor. Leningrada’,

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

published in Biulleten’ Ispolnitel’nogo komiteta Leningradskogo gorodskogo soveta deputatov trudiashchikhsia (30 March 1947, no. 6), pp. 2–3; R. A. Babaiants (1948) ‘O khode izucheniia i likvidatsii mediko-sanitarnykh posledstvii voiny i blokady v Leningrade’, Mediko-sanitarnye posledstviia voiny i meropriiatiia po ikh likvidatsii. Trud vtoroi konferentsii (17–19 dekabria 1946). Tom 1 (Izdatel’stvo Akademii Meditsinskikh Nauk SSSR, Moscow), p. 35. See, for example, the examples of litter in the city in a resolution of 1944, ‘O meropriiatiiakh po obespecheniiu sanitarnogo sostoianiia goroda Leningrada v letnii period 1944 goda’, Biulleten’ (July 1944, no. 15), pp. 6–7 and the description of the central Dzerzhinskii district in a City Soviet resolution of June 1947: ‘O sanitarnom sostoianii i vneshnom blagoustroistve Dzerzhinskogo raiona’, Biulleten’ (15 June 1947, no. 11), pp. 12–13. ‘Otchet o rabote gosudarstvennoi sanitarnoi inspektsii g.Leningrada za 1945g’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, l. 51; on the formation of wastelands see ‘O meropriiatiiakh po uborke proezdov, ulits, ploshchadei i naberezhnykh goroda v zimnii period 1944–45 goda’, Biulleten’ (November 1944, no. 20), pp. 4–5. Interview with V. N. N. (February 2002), Arkhiv Tsentra Ustnoi Istorii Evropeiskogo Universiteta St. Peterburga, Interview No. BL-1-001, p. 18. ‘Otchet o rabote’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, l. 51. Pis’ma v redaktsiiu: Egorov, ‘V tsentre goroda’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 19 July 1944, p. 3. Pis’ma v redaktsiiu: P. Liupin, ‘O chistote na rynkakh’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 24 April 1946, p. 3. Pis’ma v redaktsiiu: R. Semenov, ‘Na Mal’tsevom rynke’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 25 September 1945, p. 3. As a typical example, see Pis’ma v redaktsiiu: ‘Kogda privedut v poriadok nash dom’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 18 February 1944, p. 3. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 254, ll. 15–16. See, for example, ‘Ob obsluzhivanii naseleniia baniami i prachechnymi v Vasileostrovskom i Krasnogvardeiskom raionakh’, Biulleten’ (28 February 1945, no. 4), pp. 7–8; ‘Ob uluchshenii raboty prachechnykh’, Biulleten’ (15 April 1945, no. 7), pp. 4–5; ‘O sostoianii obsluzhivaniia naseleniia baniami’, Biulleten’ (30 April 1946, no. 8), pp. 7–8; Pis’ma v redaktsiiu: E. Punin, M. Lebedeva, N. Gurevich, ‘Uporiadochit’ rabotu prachechnykh’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 22 December 1944, p. 3. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 254, l. 16. See, for example, ‘O meropriiatiiakh po uluchsheniiu vneshnego blagoustroistva goroda Leningrada’ Biulleten’ (August 1944, no. 16), pp. 1–3 and ‘O vypolnenii resheniia Ispolkoma Lengorsoveta ot 28 marta 1946g “O meropriiatiiakh po uluchsheniiu vneshnego blagoustroistva goroda v Petrogradskom raione”’, Biulleten’ (15 June 1946, no. 13), pp. 2–3 ‘O kul’ture goroda’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 6 September 1944, p. 2. ‘O merakh preduprezhdeniia infektsionnykh zabolevanii v gorode Leningrade’, Biulleten’ (15 March 1946, no. 5), pp. 5–6. Filtzer, ‘Standard of Living versus Quality of Life’, p. 95; on how the scene is set for epidemics of typhus by ‘crowding, inadequate housing, lack of bathing facilities, lack of fuel, and such continued cold weather that people wear their garments for long periods of time’, see C. J. D. Zarafonetis MD (1963) ‘The Typhus Fevers’, in Medical Department, US Army, Internal Medicine in World War II. Volume II: Infectious Diseases (Washington, DC), pp. 143–223, here p. 144.

Population Re-placement in Post-war Leningrad 137 33. See ‘O sanitarnom sostoianii obshchzhitii dlia stroitel’nykh rabochikh’, Biulleten’ (June 1944, no. 12), pp. 5–6. 34. TsGASPb, f. 4948, op. 2, d. 19, l. 1. 35. Figures from TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 254, in particular ll. 149–50. 36. On the history of the State Sanitary Inspectorate, henceforth GSI, see ‘Predislovie k opisi’, GARF, f. 9226, op. 1. 37. Filtzer, ‘Standard of Living versus Quality of Life’, pp. 91–2. 38. ‘Otchet o rabote’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, ll. 51-3; ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti gossaninspektsii g.Leningrada za 1946g’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 728, l. 54; ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 799, ll. 58–63. 39. A. Z. Vakser (2005) Leningrad poslevoennyi, 1945–1982 (St Petersburg: Ostrov), p. 85. 40. These approximate figures are based on those of the Statistical Administration of Leningrad, in TsGASPb, f. 4965, op. 8, d. 738, ll. 4–5. Demographic figures in the Soviet Union should, of course, be treated with caution as extremely unreliable, due to their sensitive political nature as well as problems with precise data collection. On issues in studying demographic processes in relation to the Leningrad blockade, see, for example, N. Iu. Cherepinina (2001) ‘Demograficheskaia katastrofa blokirovannogo Leningrada’, in Zhizn’ i smert’ v osazhdennom Leningrade: istoriko-meditsinskii aspect. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii 26–27 aprelia 2001g (Petropolis, St Petersburg,), pp. 7–16 and ‘Skol’ko umerlo v Blokadu?’ (1995) Istochnik, V, pp. 89–92. The figures given here are intended as illustrative. 41. ‘Otchet o rabote’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, l. 82; ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 728, l. 103; ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti gossaninspektsii g.Leningrada za 1948g’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 897, l. 101. 42. ‘Reid “Leningradskoi pravdoi”: navesti poriadok v rabochikh obshchezhitiiakh’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 23 August 1944, p. 3. 43. Vakser, Poslevoennyi Leningrad, p. 91. 44. ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 728, l. 80. 45. ‘Otchet o rabote’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, l. 21. 46. GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, ll. 82–3, ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 728, l. 102; ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 799, ll. 118–19. 47. See, for example, ‘Otchet o rabote’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, l. 82 and A. N. Marzeev (1945) ‘Sanitarno-epidemiologicheskoe obsluzhivznie dvizhushchikhsia mass’, Gigiena i Sanitariia (June) pp. 37–40, here p. 37. 48. See ‘O prokhozhdenii litsami, pribyvaiushchimi v gorod Leningrada, obiazatel’noi sanitarnoi obrabotki’, Biulleten’, XXII (30 November 1945), p. 14. This resolution built on one from 12 October 1943, published in Biulleten’, XXI (1943). Subsequent resolutions called for strengthening systematic control over the timely sanitary treatment of those arriving in the city to prevent infectious illnesses in the city: ‘O merakh preduprezhdeniia infektsionnykh zabolevanii v gorode Leningrade’, Biulleten’, V (15 March 1946), p. 5 and ‘O prokhozhdenii litsami, prib pribyvaiushchimi v gorod Leningrada, obiazatel’noi sanitarnoi obrabotki’, Biulleten’, XXIII (15 December 1947), p. 20. 49. ‘O prokhozhdenii litsami’, Biulleten’, XXII (30 November 1945), p. 14 and ‘Otchet o rabote’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, l. 83. 50. ‘Otchet o rabote’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 685, l. 82 and ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 728, l. 102. 51. Marzeev, ‘Sanitarno-epidemiologicheskoe obsluzhivanie’, pp. 37–8. 52. ‘Materialy po mediko-sanitarnomu obsuzhivaniiu reevakirivaemogo naseleniia za 1944’, GARF, f.A-482, op. 47, d. 2342, ll. 1–4.

138 Siobhan Peeling 53. GARF, f.A-482, op. 47, d. 2342, ll. 5–13. 54. V.P. Zaitsev, quoted in A.M. Sokolov (2000) Evakuatsiia iz Leningrada. Neizvestnye fakty (Petrovskaia akademiia nauk i isskustv, St. Petersburg), p. 211. 55. Interview with E. S. M. (2001–2) Arkhiv Tsentra Ustnoi Istorii Evropeiskogo Universiteta St. Peterburga, Interview No. BL-1-010, p. 13. 56. Interview with G. I. G. (20 June 2003) Interview No. BL-2A-020, p. 10. 57. See, for example, the Leningrad GSI reports which detailed fines imposed on enterprises for recruiting workers independently, without regulation by the sanitary inspectorate: ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 897, l. 101. 58. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 186, l. 78. 59. This paragraph is based on a number of documents in ‘Perepiska s protivoepidemicheskoi komissiei o bor’be s zabolevaniiami i detskoi beznadzornost’iu v Leningrade’, TsGASPb, f.7384, op. 36, d. 254, ll. 6, 9, 21. 60. TsGASPb, f.7384, op. 36, d. 254, ll. 13, 17, 57, 101. 61. ‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti’, GARF, f.R-9226, op. 1, d. 799, ll. 118–19. 62. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 254, ll. 21, 112. 63. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 254, ll. 50, 112. 64. TsGASPb, f. 7384, op. 36, d. 254, l. 96. 65. On the Soviet purification campaign, see, for example, A. Weiner (1999) ‘Nature, Nurture and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism’, The American Historical Review, CIV(4), pp. 1114– 55, and I. Halfin (2003) Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 66. Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 1–6. 67. ‘Ruralisation of the cities’ is Moshe Lewin’s term, as cited in V. Volkov (1999) ‘The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.) Stalinism: New Directions (London: Routledge), pp. 210–30, here p. 214. 68. On the introduction of the passport system see G. Kessler (2001) ‘The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940’, Cahiers du monde russe XLII(2–4), pp. 477–503. 69. P. M. Hagenloh (1999) “Socially Harmful Elements’ and the Great Terror’, in Fitzpatrick (ed.) Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 286–308, here p. 287. 70. Volkov, ‘The Concept of kul’turnost”, p. 220. 71. Volkov, ‘The Concept of kul’turnost”, pp. 221–5. 72. Marzeev, ‘Sanitarno-epidemiologicheskoe obsluzhivznie’, p. 38. 73. TsGASPb, f.7384, op. 36, d. 186, ll. 14–18. 74. On anti-epidemic measures in the Civil War, see M. McAuley (1991) Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 263–67 and A. Shishkin (ed.) (2000) Petrograd na perelome epoch. Gorod i ego zhiteli v gody revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny (Dmitrii Bulanin, St Petersburg), pp. 117–22. 75. ‘Dokladnaia zapiska P.S. Popkova sekretariam GK VKP(b) A. A. Zhdanovu, A. A. Kuznetsovu, Ia.F. Kapustinu o poteriakh zhilogo fonda goroda i merakh po podgotovke k vozvrashcheniiu v Leningrad evakirovannykh’, TsGAIPD, f.24, op. 2-v, d.6687, as published in A. R. Dzeniskevich (ed.) (1995) Leningrad v osade. Sbornik dokumentov o geroicheskoi oborone Leningrada v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1944 (Liki Rossii, St Petersburg), pp. 559–60. 76. A series of letters, for example, appeared in Leningradskaia Pravda between 3 July and 17 July 1946 discussing the dirt, untidiness and uncultured external appearance, which met people walking around the city. These letters frequently referred to the identity of being a Leningrader.

Population Re-placement in Post-war Leningrad 139 77. See L. Kirshchenbaum (2006) The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York: Cambridge University Press), on myths of the blockade in general and that of the spring clean up in particular. 78. ‘Liubov’ k rodnomu gorodu’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 31 March 1944, p. 1. 79. Interview with A. V. L. (19 July 2002) Arkhiv Tsentra Ustnoi Istorii Evropeiskogo Universiteta St. Peterburga, Interview No. BL-1-032, p. 11. 80. See, for example, interview with E. A. D. (6 June 2002) Interview No. BL-1-021, p. 2. 81. See, for example, interview with V. I. V. (25 June 2002) Interview No. BL-1-025, p. 8. 82. Interview with V. V. K. (2 May 2002) Interview No. BL-1-047, p. 38. 83. ‘Politicheskoe vospitanie novykh rabochikh’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 27 September 1944, p. 1. 84. ‘Dvenatsatoe remeslennoe’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 26 February 1944, p. 3. 85. ‘Dvenatsatoe remeslennoe’. 86. This message was echoed in other articles, for example, I. Golovan’, ‘Shkola stroitelei’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 30 March 1944, p. 3. 87. ‘Zabotit’sia o bytovom ustroistve i trudovom ispol’zovanii novykh rabochikh’, Leningradskaia Pravda, 6 September 1944, p. 1. 88. L. Leshchuk, ‘Glazami novogo cheloveka’, in Leningradskaia Pravda, 18 October 1945, p. 3. 89. Leshchuk, ‘Glazami’.

7 The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia, 1945–49 Joanne Laycock

Introduction On 21 November 1945 a decree from Stalin authorised the return of Armenians living in diaspora to Soviet Armenia.1 Armenians displaced during the First World War and the genocide had been arriving in the Armenian Soviet Republic in sporadic waves since its creation in December 1920. However, the postwar repatriation scheme was designed to exceed all previous return movements in scale and significance.2 As a result, between 1946 and 1949 more than 100,000 Armenians left their homes in the Middle East, Greece, the Balkans, France and the US in order to resettle in Soviet Armenia.3 The Armenian repatriations are an unfamiliar aspect of the history of the post-Second World War period. Beyond the field of Armenian studies and the realm of Armenian social memory the Armenian repatriations (nerkaght) have received little attention.4 Most histories of Soviet Armenia make relatively brief reference to the repatriations. However, more recent scholarship on twentieth-century Armenia, including the work of Razmik Panossian and Susan Pattie, has drawn attention to the significance of this episode and highlighted the need for further investigation.5 In recent years, and especially since the creation of an independent Armenian republic in 1991, a number of memoirs of repatriation have been published.6 These accounts are largely unread by those outside Armenian communities and have not been integrated into broader critical historical scholarship on population displacement during this period. Nonetheless, these volumes offer important insights into the multiple experiences of repatriation and the strategies employed by repatriates to survive in a new land. It is, however, important to remember that these accounts were produced by repatriates who left Soviet Armenia as soon as political circumstances allowed.7 Meanwhile, popular perceptions of the nerkaght amongst Armenian diasporan communities focus almost exclusively on a narrative of betrayal and disappointment, as the patriotic enthusiasm of Armenians wishing to return to their homeland 140

The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia 141

gave way before the harsh conditions and persecution encountered in the Soviet state. The years that immediately followed the Second World War were characterised by population displacement and complex patterns of return across the whole of Europe. Civilians displaced by the war, the survivors of Nazi concentration camps, prisoners of war and soldiers seeking to return to their homes were amongst those who journeyed across Europe, many of them occupying a new network of DP camps.8 Despite the creation of new international agencies to manage and, it was hoped, resolve the crisis, postwar displacement and repatriation proved to be complex and long drawn out. As the other chapters in this volume demonstrate, the geopolitical transformations wrought by the war, not least the extension of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, meant that repatriation was a deeply politicised issue and a source of conflict at multiple levels. Whilst the Soviet authorities sought to ‘reclaim’ their displaced former citizens, many of these individuals resisted repatriation for a variety of reasons, including fear of persecution by the Soviet authorities or objections to Soviet rule of their ‘homelands’. In the case of Armenia the contours of population displacement and repatriation took a different form. Although some Armenians found themselves in European DP camps following the war, and indeed some of these individuals did resist demands to return to Soviet Armenia, the Armenian DP population was relatively small.9 In terms of scale and impact on both Soviet Armenia and the diaspora, much more significant were the diasporan Armenians who chose to repatriate. These repatriates were not coerced into returning but responded positively to the Soviet call. They arrived in convoys from Europe, the US and the Middle East from 1946 until the abrupt cessation of the repatriation programme in 1949. The Armenian repatriations have been addressed almost exclusively within the framework of a troubled Armenian ‘national history’. Here, I examine the Armenian repatriations in the context of mass displacement, repatriation and resettlement in the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than chronicling the repatriations as one of a series of traumatic events in Armenian history I seek to highlight the complexities and diversities of the repatriations. I examine the motivations and expectations of repatriates and the long and often fraught process of applications, arguments, planning, anticipation and sacrifice that the choice to repatriate entailed. Having endured weeks or months of anticipation, the start of the long journey to Armenia appeared to offer relief and even joy to many repatriates. For most of them this sense of elation was short-lived. Finally, I turn to repatriate experience in the ‘homeland’. Reaching Armenia did not signal the ‘end’ of the difficult repatriation process. For many repatriates setting foot on the soil of the ‘homeland’ did not offer the hope and comfort that they had anticipated.

142 Joanne Laycock

Repatriation before the war The prehistory of the Armenian repatriations is the forced displacement and genocide of the Armenian population during and after the First World War. The genocide resulted in the death of around 1 million Armenians and the displacement of over half a million more across Transcaucasia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 rendered the return of Armenian to their pre-war homes in Eastern Anatolia impossible. Armenian refugees therefore settled further afield, particularly in France and the US, swelling the ranks of Armenian expatriate communities there.10 During the interwar period both new and old Armenian diasporan communities expanded and developed. Living conditions in these communities varied, as did their integration into host societies. Some communities flourished, notably in the US, where many individual Armenians prospered. In the Middle East the situation was more complex. Certainly, many Armenians endured deprivation and less than ideal living conditions, but this was not a uniform state of affairs. In Lebanon, for example, new Armenian communities developed with their own schools, churches and social organisations promoting and preserving Armenian identity. During the immediate postwar period international attitudes to the Soviet Union were in a state of flux. The conflicts and divisions that characterised the Cold War were not yet fully formed. Attitudes to the Soviet Union within the Armenian diaspora were particularly complex and unstable, having been a source of division amongst diasporan communities ever since the creation of the Soviet Republic in 1920. Prior to the establishment of Soviet power in Armenia the nationalist Dashnak Party led the short-lived first Republic of Armenia established in May 1918. The imposition of Soviet power in December 1920 brought an abrupt end to Dashnak rule.11 The surviving Dashnak Party in the diaspora remained hostile to the Soviet Armenian state. According to Dashnak rhetoric, the Soviet takeover constituted an illegitimate usurpation of the Armenian nation-state. In consequence the Soviet rulers of Armenia harboured suspicions regarding Dashnak nationalism for decades. The other Armenian political parties active in the diaspora, the liberal Ramkavars and the less popular socialist Hnchak Party, adopted a more conciliatory attitude to the Soviet state, both of them taking the view that a Soviet homeland was better than no homeland at all.12 During the 1920s these two parties maintained contact with the Soviet state. Within Soviet Armenia the Armenian Aid Committee (HOG) was established in order to maintain ties with the diaspora, and particularly to ensure the flow of diasporan aid to a country only slowly recovering from the devastation of war and a prolonged refugee crisis. The Ramgavar-affiliated Armenian charitable organisation, the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), then active in Armenian diasporan communities across Europe,


the Middle East and the US, played an important part in this process and cooperated with the Soviet authorities in order to support their Armenian compatriots in the Soviet state.13 One dimension of this work was the attempt to repatriate to the Soviet Republic displaced Armenians living in camps in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This entailed raising funds, providing machinery and contributing to the building of new settlements in order to house the repatriates.14 However, the relationship between the Soviet Armenian state and even the most supportive diasporan organisations was sometimes tense and subject to fluctuations in Soviet power and policy. The first era of cooperation ended with the Stalinist purges in Armenia in 1937, which targeted those suspected of nationalist sympathies and those who had ties with overseas diasporan organisations. The Soviet authorities closed down HOG and its founder, Aramais Erzinkian, was executed.15 At this point the AGBU suspended all relations with Soviet Armenia. Formal channels for Soviet – diaspora cooperation therefore foundered until after the Second World War. The radical changes to homeland–diaspora relations during the postSecond World War period, including the repatriation scheme, were determined by conditions in postwar Armenia and the new geopolitical concerns of the Soviet Union rather than the priorities of the diaspora. The repatriation drive was directly linked to the experience of Soviet Armenia during the war and the postwar needs of the Soviet Union. Armenia had not been invaded or occupied during the war; indeed, the wish to motivate the Armenian population for the war effort had led to a relaxation of the repressions of the Armenian Church and other expressions of Armenian nationality. Nonetheless, the Armenians had not been spared the hardships and suffering which had affected the rest of the Soviet Union.16 Of the 500,000 Armenians soldiers who left for the war, 174,000 did not return. In a small country such as Armenia the effects of this loss were dramatic. As in the rest of the Soviet Union, the Armenian economy had been adversely affected. Whilst education and culture had advanced in Armenia in the years since the founding of the republic, industry and agriculture had been slower to develop and would be slow to recover from the damage inflicted during the war. To add to these problems, Armenia faced an acute housing crisis, which had its roots well before the war.17 These economic, social and demographic problems were compounded by the drought in 1946. These were less than ideal circumstances in which to welcome thousands of displaced Armenians into a new life in the homeland. But the motivation behind the repatriation scheme was not simply the return of Armenians to the homeland to enjoy a better life. Rather, Soviet authorities intended that the repatriates would help to reconstruct and invigorate Armenian society, compensating the population loss and developing the economy. An American Bureau of Intelligence and Research report observed that ‘the Soviets have issued visas on a selective basis and thus far most of the immigrants have been

144 Joanne Laycock

young people of child-bearing age, largely from the skilled worker or professional groups which are able to contribute most to the Armenian economy’.18 The drive for repatriation was not only intended to involve those who would actually return to Armenia in this process of reconstruction. In addition to gaining additional skills and manpower for Armenia, the repatriation was also designed to enlist the help of the remaining diaspora, reshaping homelanddiaspora relations in a way that would be beneficial to the development of Soviet Armenia.

Defining homeland and return Stalin’s decree in November 1945 officially inviting the Armenian diaspora to return was accompanied by a series of territorial claims.19 On 7 June 1946 Molotov issued the Turkish ambassador in Moscow with a formal claim for the return of the provinces of Kars and Ardahan. He reiterated these claims regularly over the next two years.20 These regions in eastern Turkey, bordering Georgia and Armenia, had been home to a large Armenian population prior to the First World War. The Treaty of Sèvres had ceded the regions to the Armenians in 1920. However, geopolitical realities had meant that the terms of Sèvres were never enforced and Kars and Ardahan were absorbed into the new Turkish Republic. Kars and Ardahan provinces had long been regarded as part of the Armenian ‘historic homeland’ or ‘Greater Armenia’, especially as they were the location of important Armenian heritage sites, such as the medieval city of Ani. However, their absorption into Turkey had gone largely unquestioned outside the Armenian diaspora. Whilst the diaspora could protest against the loss of these territories they could take no effective action to enforce their return. In the context of the extensive redrawing of national borders in Eastern Europe following the Allied victory, the extension of Armenian national territories must, for the first time since 1923, have seemed a real possibility. Diasporan Armenians now interpreted the Soviet Union’s formal claims on Kars and Ardahan as a belated recognition by the Soviets of Armenian national rights and national destiny. Despite their symbolic power for the Armenians, these controversial territorial claims went unsupported by Britain and the US. In 1947 Armenian faith in the territorial claims were undermined by the Soviet ambassador Vyshinskii, who demanded the return of Kars and Ardahan, but to the Republic of Georgia rather than Armenia. In 1953 Molotov finally announced that Armenia and Georgia had waived all claims against Turkey.21 Soviet claims to Kars and Ani were encouraged by many members of the Armenian diaspora. Prior to the announcement of the repatriation scheme diasporan organisations had begun to campaign for the return of these provinces. In spring 1945 Armenian diasporan organisations presented the San Francisco conference on the formation of the United Nations with a


memorandum demanding the reunification of Kars and Ardahan provinces with Armenia. A similar memorandum was presented by the Armenian National Council to the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. These requests were reiterated by the non-Dashnak Armenian organisations which gathered for the World Armenian Congress at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York in late spring 1947. In a letter to the New York Times in July 1945 the Los Angeles Armenian-American Leon Surmelian expressed his belief that Turkey should hand over Kars and Ardahan ‘and give the Armenian nation, crowded on a small barren territory, some breathing space’.22 While these hopes were dashed, there had been other signs of a readiness on the part of the Soviet Union to accommodate the wishes of diasporan Armenians. During the war the Soviet authorities had adopted a conciliatory attitude to the Armenian Church, permitting the election of a new Catholicos (leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church) in 1945. This created the impression amongst the diaspora that the Soviet authorities were concerned for the well-being and the future security of the Armenian nation.23 In December 1945, in Moscow, the Catholicos gave his apparent blessing to Soviet policy, expressing the wish that ‘justice will finally be rendered to the Armenian people by the “liberation of Turkish Armenia and its annexation to Soviet Armenia”’.24 Such endorsement from the Church was vital to the success of the repatriation scheme as a whole because, as Khachig Tololyan has pointed out, the Armenian Patriarchs and Catholicos were always ‘the symbolic and [often] the real leaders of the community’.25 The territorial claims were significant because of the need to portray Soviet Armenia as the natural homeland of all Armenians. They were also vital to the success of the repatriation scheme in that Soviet Armenia occupied only a small corner of what was traditionally regarded as the historic Armenian homeland. To be sure, in the eyes of some spokesmen in the diaspora, the Soviet presence delegitimised any claims to this region as ‘homeland’. Of course, what constituted the ‘true’ Armenian homeland was always a matter for debate. As Susan Pattie pointed out, until the independence of the Republic of Armenia in 1991 there had never been a clearly defined centre and periphery of the Armenian world and thus no fixed boundaries – geographical or cultural – of the ‘homeland’.26 What constituted ‘homeland’ was open to contestation, reconstruction and manipulation. The aftermath of the Second World War was a pivotal time in the construction of Armenian ‘homeland’. On the one hand, the Soviet authorities presented the Soviet Armenian Republic as a homeland to which all Armenians could return. On the other, sectors of the Armenian diaspora were suggesting that Armenians displaced by the war should be regarded as ‘homeless’. In 1947, under the auspices of the Dashnak Party, the ArmenianAmerican restaurateur George Mardikian founded the Armenian National Committee for Homeless Armenians (ANCHA) in order to assist Armenian DPs in Europe wishing to emigrate to the US.27 Characterising the Armenian

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DPs as ‘homeless’ jarred with the vision of Soviet Armenia as a national home for all Armenians, and the fact that they were invited to make a new home among the Armenian diasporan communities in the US made this distinction even more pointed. Thus, at this time of social and political upheaval, radically different visions of Armenian ‘home’, ‘homecoming’ and ‘homelessness’ were proposed, exacerbating existing divisions within Armenian society. The vast majority of diasporan Armenians targeted by the repatriation drive were originally from regions of Western Armenia incorporated into the Turkish Republic following the First World War rather than from the territory which from 1920 constituted Soviet Armenia.28 These Armenians had lived in diasporan communities for over 20 years. Soviet Armenia was not, therefore, the obvious choice for a place for them to call ‘home’. For them to conceive of the Soviet Armenian state as their ‘homeland’ – as a place to which they could ‘return’ – required an imaginative leap. It demanded a reconceptualisation of the meaning of ‘Armenia’ and perhaps of what it meant to be Armenian. The Soviet repatriation drive was accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign and great efforts were made to portray Soviet Armenia as ‘home’. In addition to the aforementioned territorial claims, frequent reference was made in repatriation propaganda to the importance of ‘homeland’ or fatherland (hairenik). The desire to settle in Soviet Armenia was presented as a natural longing inherent in all Armenians, and a strong familial bond between Soviet Armenia and the diaspora was posited. This is particularly striking in Jean and Lucie der Sarkissian’s description of French local repatriation propaganda, ‘retournez au pays de vos aïeux . . . Dans les cimetières, les os de vos ancêtres se lèvent vers vous.’29 The Soviet state made it explicit that they had decided to allow repatriation for the benefit of the diaspora, in order to ‘fulfil the wishes of Armenians living abroad to return to their homeland’.30 After 1945 Armenian diasporan organisations increasingly began to present Soviet Armenia as a legitimate and viable ‘homeland’. In order to support this argument they stressed the historic bonds between Armenians and the Soviet territories, citing features of the Armenian landscape which would evoke feelings of familiarity in all Armenians. ‘The Armenian expatriate has compellingly strong attachments for Hayastan, the land of his fathers, for Ararat, Etchmiadzin, Yerevan and the River Arax.’31 The end of the war and the announcement of the repatriation campaign heralded a healing of the rift between the Soviet authorities and the AGBU. In the AGBU press an idealised image of the Soviet state was presented, including articles describing ‘the return of Armenians from bondage, from a precarious existence under alien and inhospitable ties to native soil, native language, native culture’.32 As Anahide Ter Minassian has pointed out, the press played ‘un rôle exceptionnel dans la structuration de la diaspora’ and therefore had a vital role in shaping diasporan images of the ‘homeland’.33 In this connection much was


made of the capital city of Armenia, Yerevan, as a ‘promised land’ for the Armenians, a kind of ‘Armenian Jerusalem’.34 These biblical allusions perhaps served to reassure the Armenian Christians, drawing a veil over the fact that they would return to a country characterised by secularism, where their national church operated under severe restrictions. In other advertisements for repatriation the AGBU presented an image of life in the homeland. An image in the journal Houcharar (‘Reminder’) depicted a happy repatriate Armenian peasant girl standing in the shadow of that most potent symbol of the Armenian homeland, Mount Ararat. In reality Ararat lay across the border in Turkey, and so was inaccessible to the repatriates. The image may be read as a powerful reminder of the imagined nature of ‘homeland’, a fluid construction with ambiguous boundaries, drawing on a range of sites and symbols.35 Despite the emphasis on homeland and patriotism in the propaganda, the desire to go ‘home’ was bound up with economic considerations as well. To be sure, as Susan Pattie suggests in the case of the Armenian villages of Kessab in Syria, the primary motivation for return was ‘patriotism’.36 On the other hand, the AGBU asked that the quota of repatriates from Greece be increased, not for patriotic reasons but because their plight in Greece was ‘deplorable’.37 The AGBU also described the practical and material advantages of return to the Soviet Union: ‘in Yerevan and its environs alone, some 500 houses are being built for the repatriates . . . hundreds of other repatriates have set up their own collective farms’. They also claimed that work was being provided.38 For those Armenians who had experienced great social and economic uncertainty since the First World War promises of security and prosperity held an obvious appeal. Although the Dashnak Party initially expressed support for the repatriations, the fact that the recruitment process was in the hands of their rivals undermined their willingness to become involved.39 It seems that local processes of organising repatriation magnified the myriad political divisions and local grievances within the diaspora and created new hostilities and resentments. For example, a telegram sent to Soviet Armenia from the Armenian Youth Organisations of Egypt offered support for the repatriation scheme, but also referred pointedly to the fact that Dashnak organisations had refused to sign it.40 Sometimes repatriation was portrayed as a national ‘duty’ rather than a quest for personal betterment or happiness. According to this logic, through making the sacrifice of repatriation, the Armenian homeland and nation could be protected and strengthened. In a recent interview with the journalist Onnik Krikorian, Maurice Tatossian, the son of a repatriate, explained how, despite the difficult conditions they encountered, his father claimed that they had a duty to live in the motherland. He also had faith that the situation would improve. Maurice himself clearly no longer believed in this vision: he planned to leave Armenia for a new life in France.41

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The logistics of repatriation Although their motives may have been complex, in general Armenians responded enthusiastically to the call to repatriate. Yet despite the swift build-up of momentum behind the campaign in the diaspora, the transfer of tens of thousands of people was never going to be a straightforward process. The official Soviet channels for the organisation of repatriation were the Soviet diplomatic missions which now began to work with (and within) the diasporan communities. Soviet diplomats relied on the diaspora to recruit repatriates and organise the logistics of repatriation. To this end they called for the formation of local ‘Repatriation Committees’.42 Within the Armenian SSR a new committee, the Committee for Reception and Resettlement, was formed under the Armenian Council of People’s Commissars in order to coordinate the repatriation process. This committee was led by Babken Asvatzatourian.43 In an early letter to the diaspora the committee insisted that repatriation should become the primary focus of all ‘charitable and progressive’ Armenian organisations abroad. Such organisations were enjoined to shift their attention from maintaining cultural connections and to focus instead on recruitment and fundraising for the repatriation effort.44 Transnational networks, integrating international organisations such as the AGBU and local organisations such as the FNA (Front National Arménienne) in Paris, were thus mobilised in order to facilitate repatriation. This approach quickly proved fruitful. In Lebanon, by February 1946, the local repatriation committee was able to report that all sectors of Armenian society were showing an interest and 12,600 Armenians had already registered for repatriation.45 Despite the enthusiastic response of the diaspora, access to Soviet Armenia was in practice carefully monitored and highly restricted. Screening took place on a number of levels, both ‘offical’ and ‘unofficial’. The repatriation committees encouraged by the Soviet authorities consisted only of ‘progressive’ diasporan organisations. In practice this meant communist or socialist supporters of the Soviet regime, such as the FNA. These progressives had already worked with the Soviet authorities during the war and proved themselves ‘trustworthy’.46 Repatriation committees were also advised to ask Soviet representatives in their respective countries for guidance on drawing up lists of repatriates, which in effect provided another tier of screening.47 The repatriates did not arrive in Armenia directly, but instead arrived in convoys by ship in the port of Batumi, Georgia. Here they were housed in a ‘reception centre’ before continuing their journey to Yerevan. The reception centre, decorated with portraits of party and government leaders and political slogans, could ‘comfortably’ accommodate 1,000 people.48 The arrival of the repatriates in Batumi provided another opportunity for the Soviet authorities to observe them, check their paperwork and luggage, and identify potential problems.49 This period was frequently a source of anxiety and confusion for


arriving repatriates. The French repatriate Lazare Indjeyan described his first visit to Batumi as akin to having landed on the moon.50 Questionnaires were also used to assess and screen individual repatriates. The form distributed in North America asked for personal details, present employment and prospects for work in Armenia, along with details of any contacts in Armenia.51 This questionnaire was designed not only to identify any possible ‘threats’ to the Soviet Armenian state, but also to discover what prospective repatriates could contribute to their new home – whether they possessed useful skills and would be able to find work rather than become a burden on the already overstretched Armenian authorities. This system of recruitment was open to abuse and could become a vehicle for the settling of old scores or even for financial gain. The Soviet repatriation committee received a letter from one Egyptian Armenian complaining that a member of the Egyptian committee had broken the rules by trying to charge him £10 for each member of his family to repatriate. He had refused and had remained in Egypt, but was writing in the hope that the committee member in question, who had himself been repatriated, would be punished in Soviet Armenia.52 Whilst they were keen to be involved in the screening and selection of prospective repatriates, when it came to coordinating the complex business of repatriation local diasporan organisations were left to fend for themselves. The distance between the the central Armenian Reception and Resettlement Committee in Yerevan and the diasporan communities meant that recruitment, travel arrangements and arrival procedures had a distinctly hitand-miss nature and were often fraught with difficulties. For example, the local repatriation committee in Egypt realised that demand for repatriation was much higher than anticipated. Soviet Armenian authorities were slow to respond to the flood of applications which inundated the local Egyptian committee. In October 1947 urgent telegrams from the Egyptian committee to the Soviet authorities requested the formation of a further caravan of 2,000 repatriates, as the current allocation of 3,500 places was ‘absolutely inadequate’ to meet demand.53 To make matters worse, an outbreak of cholera delayed the repatriation even further. Whilst the Cairo committee assured the Soviet authorities that the repatriates were ‘safe’, they were not prepared to risk the dangers of transporting sick passengers or exposing the Soviet Armenian population to the threat of disease. The Cairo committee was reduced to sending an increasingly desperate series of telegrams to the Soviet Armenian authorities begging for aid in looking after repatriates who had sold all their possessions and were stranded in the city waiting to embark. Help was not forthcoming.54 This was a reminder that repatriation could in some cases exacerbate tensions rather than create bonds between homeland and diaspora. The Dashnaks, who after their initial support for the repatriation project became

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perhaps its fiercest critics, condemned the Soviets for disrupting and dividing the diaspora: It became plain that the movement was being given partisan colour, accompanied with overt and shocking acts of discrimination against the democratic groups, thus disrupting the Armenian communities of the world which were the source of the exodus.55 Pro-repatriation organisations such as the AGBU refuted these criticisms. An editorial in Houcharar in December 1946 argued that ‘the repatriation campaign is not an underhand movement; it is a humanitarian work of the first order to which no decent, fair-minded person, Armenian or nonArmenian, can object’.56 ‘Humanitarian’ in this context meant more than relieving material hardship or suffering; it also implied restoring a link between a people and their homeland, in the interests of the whole nation.

Repatriation: experience and representation In popular narratives of Armenian history the postwar repatriation has become laden with negative connotations. Informal questions regarding the repatriations often prompt tales of lucky escapes, last-minute decisions not to repatriate, coded warnings sent to families not to follow and stories of the hostile treatment of repatriates from the ‘native’ Soviet Armenian population, such as the derogatory use of the term aghpar (‘poor relations’).57 The emigration of several thousand repatriates from Armenia as soon as the political climate allowed is viewed as ‘proof’ of the sufferings and hardships that they endured. These have become the stock representations, ‘mini-histories’ of the repatriation. They are frequently treated as just one more incidence of displacement and suffering in a traumatic narrative of Armenian history which is, as Razmik Panossian has recently suggested, frequently interpreted through the prism of the genocide of 1915.58 Given these circumstances, it is important to highlight the fact that the experience of repatriation was more complex and multilayered than popular perceptions would suggest. Those Armenians who chose to repatriate during the postwar period were by no means a homogeneous group. They lived in vastly differing circumstances and were drawn from a variety of social, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds. The deep political divisions which marked these diasporan communities have already been discussed. Across the Middle East living conditions in Armenian diasporan communities varied a great deal. Anny Balakian presents a broadly positive picture: competing with relatively less modern sectarian and ethnic groups who shared their environment, a proportion of the Armenian population


appropriated lucrative niches in many domains and achieved social mobility in a very short while.59 However, other Middle Eastern Armenians had a very different experience, remaining in need of international assistance long after the First World War.60 After the Second World War these regions experienced social and political uncertainty, especially following the end of French mandatory rule in Syria and Lebanon and France’s withdrawal from these countries in 1945–46. These changes perhaps made repatriation a more appealing prospect for the Armenian population of the Middle East.61 An early report to the Committee for Reception and Resettlement in Yerevan from the ‘Immigration Committee of Syria and Lebanon’ described 90 per cent of those who wished to repatriate as ‘needy’ and stated that their repatriation would have to be funded by diasporan organisations or the Soviet authorities. On the other hand, it was reported that there were a significant number of ‘prosperous’ and a few ‘rich’ Armenians who were concerned about how best to bring their businesses and large sums of money to Armenia. Others worried that they would lose their pensions if they moved to Armenia. Clearly, many of these individuals wished to continue to build on what they had achieved in the Middle East; they did not intend to leave their relatively secure lives behind and start afresh.62 For the local repatriation committee in Syria and Lebanon the priority was the repatriation of the unemployed. (An unintended consequence of the repatriation decree had been that many Armenians had lost their jobs, as employers began to question their reliability and commitment.) In this respect the priorities of the local committee diverged from those of the Soviet authorities who, despite the rhetoric, did not intend the repatriations to be a charitable campaign to ease suffering in diasporan communities; rather, they hoped to gain a reliable cohort of workers for the Soviet reconstruction effort. Thus the repatriation campaign generated a range of social and economic effects that had serious consequences for the communities in the ‘host’ countries as well as causing unexpected problems for the Soviet authorities.63 It is not difficult to understand why the response to repatriation should have been less enthusiastic in the US, where an Armenian community was already well established before the genocide and where many Armenians had successfully integrated into American society. As a result only around 320 American Armenians chose to repatriate. The American ‘progressive’ diasporan organisations enlisted to help with repatriation explained to the Soviet Armenian authorities that, because of the good conditions they enjoyed, the demand for repatriation amongst American Armenians was likely to be low. Nonetheless some were interested in repatriation, their ‘life-long dream’.64 Those considering repatriation were clearly determined to protect their own interests and obviously did not wish to lose the material advantages they had gained in the US. They provided a long list of questions for the Soviet

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authorities, ranging from the electrical voltage in Armenia to provision of winter heating, the cost of buying a house, whether women would be allowed to work and whether they could retain American citizenship.65 One potential American repatriate asked if they could visit to make sure they liked Soviet Armenia before making a firm decision – not, of course, the kind of response the Soviet authorities hoped for. But it reflected the fact that the diaspora were neither wholly passive nor simply desperate to return; many of them had a clear idea of what was in their best interests and how to protect themselves.66 Repatriation did not proceed smoothly. Conditions in Armenia were even more difficult than in Cairo. The vast majority of the repatriates were sent to Yerevan, the capital and industrial centre of Armenia. Smaller groups were sent to other large towns such as Leninakan (present-day Gumryi). Yerevan had expanded rapidly since the imposition of Soviet rule in Armenia. An ambitious scheme for the construction and development of the capital city had been undertaken. However, the development of the city and its suburbs had not kept pace with the growth of the population or with industrial development there. Even before the Second World War, urban housing posed serious problems.67 The inadequacies and shortages of Armenian housing were a major factor in the problems encountered by the Armenians. Many were forced, at least initially, to occupy substandard accommodation. A 1947 report stated that the new homes provided for repatriates frequently lacked windows and doors. Older homes lacked even basic furniture. The problem extended beyond Yerevan, where most of the repatriates had been resettled in small towns and villages or on collective farms.68 In Leninakan, 22 families lived in rooms deemed completely unfit for habitation. There were also reports of three families living in one room.69 This situation was entirely a consequence of insufficient living space, not of ideals of communal living. Housing remained a persistent problem, despite the fact that the plans for repatriation included the extensive development of Yerevan whose suburbs were to be provided with schools, hospitals, cinemas and improved transport links, as well as housing. These plans continually lagged behind schedule.70 Inquiries into housing conditions conducted by the Repatriation and Resettlement Committee in Yerevan not only provide insight into the material circumstances of the repatriates, they are also indicative of Soviet attitudes to repatriates more generally. Housing investigations typified attempts to track their progress. Monitoring of repatriates began the moment they arrived on Soviet territory. Medical examiners boarded the ships and checks were carried out to ensure the new arrivals had the right papers. These checks were followed by housing inspections, tracking unemployment patterns and monitoring population growth amongst the repatriates. It was a source of frustration for the central authorities in Armenia that the regional authorities found it impossible to keep track of the repatriates, who did not stay in the locations assigned to them but moved in search of work or to be closer to relatives.71


Discrimination at the hands of the Soviet authorities and their ‘native’ Armenian compatriots was another serious problem. Of course, ‘discrimination’ is less tangible and more difficult to measure than material deprivation, yet it is a major theme of social memories and accounts of repatriation. Mary Kilborne Matossian reported that repatriates were ‘discriminated against by employers and university admissions officers and that it was generally harder for repatriates to get ahead’.72 Aside from this kind of ‘institutional’ discrimination there are widespread accounts of ‘unfriendliness’, symbolised by the use of the pejorative term aghpar. According to Touryantz, who had arrived from Lebanon, the negative reception of the repatriates was not simply due to unfriendliness; in the Stalinist climate of fear and suspicion, the natives ‘feared’ to befriend them.73 Discrimination and barely concealed hostility were all the more shocking to the Armenian repatriates as they were not being forced to make their homes in a ‘foreign’ country, but were going ‘home’ to be amongst their compatriots. In the words of Susan Pattie, ‘They were not migrating to a strange country but were simply going home. But it was not a home they recognised and the ‘family’ members in that home were not as welcoming as they expected.’74 Recent scholarship on other cases of ‘homecoming’ suggests that the negative response of ‘native’ Armenians to the repatriates was by no means unique. Anders Stefansson has suggested that those who returned to Sarajevo having fled the wars in the Balkans during the 1990s were not welcomed but greeted with ‘envy, lack of empathy and discrimination’.75 Greta Uehling’s work on the Crimean Tartars has also demonstrated that ‘homelands’ do not always live up to expectations: ‘Tatars returned to the Crimea on the basis of their profound nostalgia for the historic homeland, only to find that they then missed Uzbekistan.’76 Although the circumstances were very different, the same can be said of the repatriation of the Armenian diaspora to the Soviet state. In this case the resentment was probably caused by the arrival of culturally and linguistically different repatriates at a time of social upheaval and economic hardship. As Touryantz explains, when times became easier, relations improved: ‘Over the years, and especially during the Khrushchev era, the natives no longer feared becoming friendlier in their involvements with the newcomers, and increasingly more outspoken in confiding their true feelings, views, volitions, hopes and aspirations.’77 Claire Mouradian suggests that the difficulties the repatriates encountered may have been linked to the fact that they were new to the art of survival in the totalitarian Soviet Union. The situation in postwar Armenia was difficult for all Armenians, not only the repatriates. Ron Suny points out that, besides the economic privations, these years were ‘harsh and dark in cultural policy’ and ‘any slight expression of Armenian pride was condemned as nationalism’.78 They were therefore vulnerable and easily caught up in the last wave of repressions in Armenia in 1949–50.79 Of course, this raises the question of why some and not others were able to survive and succeed

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in Soviet Armenia, because for all of the negative connotations attached to repatriation, some repatriates managed to integrate and rise through the ranks of Soviet society.80 Certainly, the Armenian authorities viewed the repatriates as targets for ‘mass agitation’ and ‘cultural work’. In Yerevan especially, ‘systematic’ agitation work was undertaken amongst the repatriate population. In the Artashat region, they were unfamiliar with the constitution of the Armenian Republic and the USSR, and unaware of their rights and responsibilities as Soviet citizens.81 These perceived inadequacies might well have rendered the repatriate communities susceptible to the suspicions of the authorities. The suffering brought about by the repatriation programme should not be underestimated. Return to Armenia was followed in June 1949 by the deportation of 2,744 Armenians (along with Greeks and Turks) to special settlements in Central Asia on the pretext that they were anti-Soviet Dashnaks. Many of these Armenian deportees were repatriates.82 The sudden exile of these repatriates has, for many Armenians, become emblematic of the repatriation process. However, the precise circumstances and impact of the deportations require further examination.

Repatriation: private and public Repatriation reshaped Armenian lives in a dramatic fashion, impacting on family and personal relationships in unforeseen ways. The story of one Egyptian family is particularly striking. In 1948 a certain Mme Halebian wrote to the Armenian authorities from her home in Egypt. Her husband, she said, had repatriated in September 1947 as a single person, leaving her behind. She wished to join her husband and had tried to arrange this through the Russian consulate in Egypt, only to find out that her husband wished to remarry and did not want her to join him.83 This is a reminder that even without the difficulties of the social and economic conditions in postwar Soviet Armenia, repatriation could be a traumatic or heartbreaking experience for some individuals, but ‘liberating’ for others. State-level policies intermeshed with the personal on many levels; in this case it allowed a husband to start a new life and leave his wife behind. On the other hand, the state could be called on an attempt to resolve seemingly personal or family situations. Indeed, it seems that in this case there may have been a hope that the Armenian authorities would take revenge on Mme Halebian’s husband on her behalf. Whilst Mme Halebian suffered the problems and indignities of being ‘left behind’ others encountered complex problems on their arrival in Soviet Armenia. In January 1949, a French repatriate wrote to Anastas Mikoian, vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers, to report his plight. He was a taxi driver who hoped to continue his work in Armenia, but had not been allowed to take his car out of France. He had handed it over to the Soviet Ambassador in Paris and had been promised a new vehicle in Yerevan. Instead, he had


been given 2,700 roubles, which was not enough to buy a car. He therefore could not work. Repatriation was a complex problem and this French repatriate fell victim to the deceptions and difficulties occurring at every step of the process. His problems did not end with the fate of his vehicle. In common with many repatriates, he lost many of the possessions he wished to bring to Armenia in transit. This made establishing himself in an unfamiliar environment all the more difficult. These problems with material circumstances were compounded by the practical difficulties of integration. His French wife did not speak Armenian and found it hard to adapt. They lived in a ‘factory’ he explained, and no one visited them. His wife lived a lonely existence; she did not go out on her own because no one could understand her.84 This account of the loneliness and isolation of repatriation echoes other concerns that Armenian repatriates, rather than being welcomed into a ‘family’ of compatriots, found themselves stranded on the fringes of society, physically as well as metaphorically. Repatriates were concentrated in certain areas, often on the very outskirts of Yerevan.85 This division partly reflected their wishes; the Syria and Lebanon immigration committee reported that the Armenians did not want to be separated. For its part, the committee was not sure whether this was helpful or advisable and sought Soviet advice.86 The impact of this division was clearly complex, leading in some cases to isolation and failure to integrate. On the other hand, as Renée Hirschon describes in the case of Asia Minor refugees in Greece, this regional division could help adjustment and the building of new lives: ‘regional identification provided a means of orientation and adjustment, a way of creating a familiar geography out of an unchartered expanse’.87 What stands out from these two tales of isolation and misfortune is the faith still invested in the authorities. These appeals to Mikoian and other Soviet authorities suggest that they had not completely lost faith in the repatriation programme. They hoped that the Soviet authorities could resolve their situation, that their experiences were due to ‘mistakes’ and that he would be treated fairly if only they could contact the ‘right’ person. Indeed, the only thing the taxi driver requested from the Soviet authorities was a new car.

Conclusions In this chapter I have attempted to move on from the evaluation of the Armenian repatriations as a wholly ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ experience for the Armenian nation and to step aside from the question of whether Soviet Armenia should be regarded as a legitimate or illegitimate Armenian homeland. Rather, I have attempted to address these events in the light of Greta Uehling’s argument that we must develop a more complex and layered understanding of ‘homeland’ and ‘return’, viewing ‘ambiguous attachments, dual loyalties and alternate conceptions of home as normal’.88 Amongst the many organisations involved in the repatriation campaign views of the ‘homeland’

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and repatriation tended to vary. These variations frequently led to conflict or disappointment, intensifying division in the diaspora rather than strengthening or unifying Armenian national identity. This situation was compounded by the fact that Armenian repatriation was born out of poor social and economic conditions in both the ‘homeland’ and the diaspora. This difficult and sometimes unpredictable backdrop was reflected in the process of repatriation, which was far from smooth, beset by problems at local and individual levels such as the Cairo typhoid epidemic or the personal financial problems encountered by the Parisian taxi driver. These issues could have repercussions for the whole programme, changing attitudes and sowing seeds of doubt regarding the Soviet regime. The experience clearly did not fulfil the high hopes of the repatriates. Conversely, the repatriates did not fulfil the hopes of the Soviet authorities. Their presence caused myriad unforeseen difficulties for the Soviet authorities who, by the mid-1950s, bowed to repatriates’ demands to leave the Soviet state and return to their respective diasporan communities. The Soviet authorities hoped to gain manpower, skills and the means to reconstruct Armenia. However, they underestimated the impact of the repatriation programme on Soviet Armenia. Rather than a wholesale attempt to ‘persecute’ the Armenians, their policies should be seen as a series of compromises and improvisations in response to difficult circumstances.89 Even under these difficult circumstances the repatriates proceeded to build a new life. At least in the short term they had to find ways to live in a Soviet state. Some repatriates retained their faith that the Soviet authorities would ultimately solve their problems. Others relied on networks of family and friends for support. Almost all of them had to learn new ways to survive, be this through training in new professions, learning to trade on the black market or making contacts in high places. In the words of Touryantz, the repatriate from Lebanon, ‘to survive, we, the newcomers had to concede, to cope, each of us in our own way’.90

Notes 1. C. Mouradian (1997) ‘L’immigration des Arméniens de la diaspora vers la RSS d’Arménie 1946–62’, Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, XX(1), p. 80. 2. Between 1921 and 1936 around 40,000 Armenians had emigrated to Soviet Armenia. A. Ter Minassian, ‘La diaspora arménienne’, in A. Ter Minassian (1997) Histoires croisées: Diaspora, Arménie, Transcaucasie (Marseille: Parenthèses), p. 39. 3. A report of the Soviet Armenian authorities into repatriation claims that in total 110,000 Armenians repatriated, around 10 per cent of the Soviet Armenian population. National Archives of Armenia (NAA), f. 362, d. 2, op. 50, l. 7. A report of 20 January 1948 provides a detailed breakdown of the numbers of Armenians arriving in 1946 and 1947 along with their origins. In 1946, 50,945 individuals (10,801 families) returned from Syria and Lebanon, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania and, in 1947, 35,401 individuals (8,521) families arrived from Syria and Lebanon,


4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

Greece, France, Egypt, Palestine and the US. Exact figures for 1948 are unavailable. NAA f. 362, d. 2. op. 27, l. 7. Brief summaries of the postwar repatriations are offered in R. G. Suny (1993) Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press) and also the more recent S. Paysalian (2007) The History of Armenia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). See the work of Susan Pattie on the repatriation of Armenians from Kessab in Syria, ‘From the Center to the Periphery: Repatriation to the Armenian Homeland in the Twentieth Century’, in A. Markowitz and H. Stefansson (eds) (2004) Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). See also R. Panossian (2006) The Armenians: from Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (London: Hurst), chapter 7, ‘Strengthening National Identity Soviet Style’. R. Arnoux (2004) Arménie 1947: Les Naufrages de la Terre Promise (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud) and the following memoirs: R. Batrikian (2005) Jeff et Rebecca (Paris: Theles); H. J. Touryantz (1987) Search for a Homeland (New York : n.p.); J. and L. Der Sarkissian (1987) Les pommes rouges d’Arménie (Paris: Flammarion) ; A. Andonian (2000) Mémoires d’un Akhpar (Paris: Maisons des Ecrivains); A. Maloumian (1976) Les fils du goulag (Paris: Presses de la Cité). Robert Arnoux describes how, following the unexpected visit of the French Foreign Minister to Armenia in 1957, the Soviet authorities gradually began to grant repatriates permission to leave. French repatriates were the first to go. Arnoux, Arménie 1947, pp. 166–75. For general accounts population displacement and attempts to resolve it during this period, see M. Marrus (1985) The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and M. Wyman (1998) DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). According to Louise Holborn the Armenian DP population in Western Europe in 1945 was 4,100, another 500 had joined them from Eastern Europe by the end of 1945. L. Holborn (1956) The International Refugee Organisation: A Specialized Agency of the United Nations, its History and its Work 1946–1952 (London: Oxford University Press). John Roy Carlson produced a highly controversial article reporting his visit to the Armenians at ‘Funkerkaserne’ DP camp in Germany in 1950. His report should be treated with caution, because it was intended to condemn the Dashnak Party and suggests that they collaborated with the Nazis. J. R. Carlson (1949–50) ‘The Armenian Displaced Persons’, Armenian Affairs, I(1), pp. 17–34. In 1920 the population of eastern Armenia (the territory of the Soviet Republic of Armenia) was around 720,000. This was a decline of 30 per cent since the outbreak of the war and half of the population consisted of refugees. R. G. Suny, ‘Soviet Armenia, 1921–91’, in E. Herzig and M. Kurkchiyan (eds) (2005) The Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of a National Identity (London: RoutledgeCurzon), p. 113. On the Armenian Republic the standard work is R. Hovannisian (1971–96) The Republic of Armenia, 4 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). In the mid-1960s the Dashnak Party became reconciled to the idea that Soviet Armenia was better than no Armenia at all. During this period diaspora connections with the homeland increased and some travelled to Soviet Armenia to work or study. Studies of the changes in Armenian diaspora politics and political affiliations in the US include A. Balakian (1993) Armenian-Americans: from Being to

158 Joanne Laycock

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

Feeling Armenian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction) and J. Phillips (1989) Symbol, Myth and Rhetoric: The Politics of Culture in an Armenian American Community (New York: AMS Press). The AGBU is an Armenian charitable association founded in Egypt in 1906. Boghos Nubar Pasha was a founder and then president of the organisation. The AGBU continues to operate in Armenian diaspora communities throughout the world. On the relationship between the AGBU and Soviet Armenia, see V. Tachijian (2006) ‘The Union and Soviet Armenia: The Difficult Task of Working with the Soviet Regime to Reconstruct Armenia’. Unpublished manuscript. The case of Noubarachen is particularly interesting. The AGBU collaborated with the Soviet government in order to construct this village. See T. Ter Minassian (2007) Erevan: la construction d’une capitale a l’epoque soviétique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes), pp. 96–102. On the purges in Armenia, see M. K. Matossian (1962) The Impact of Soviet Policies in Armenia (Leiden: Brill), chapter 8. E. Zubkova, ‘Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments’, in D. Hoffman (ed.) (2003) Stalinism: Essential Readings (London: Blackwell), p. 280. Zubkova also highlights the housing shortages, work problems and insufficient food supplies. Sosnovy describes Union-wide problems in housing, such as declining amounts of living space, inequalities between the different sectors of Soviet society, lack of facilities and poor sanitation. Thus the problems encountered in Armenia were by no means unique. T. Sosnovy (1952) ‘The Soviet Urban Housing Problem’, American Slavic and East European Review, XI(4), pp. 288–303. Bureau of Intelligence and Research: Office of Soviet and East European Analysis, Soviet Sponsored Immigration of Armenians into Soviet Armenia, OIR Report No. 4227, 12 June 1947, American National Archives, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State. A Soviet Armenian report on the repatriation scheme highlighted the need for workers in Armenia after the war, stating that whilst most of the repatriates were peasants and craftsmen, there were also many ‘specialists’ and professionals, including doctors, teachers and writers. NAA f. 362, d. 2, op. 50. Suny suggests that claims to the territories were Stalin’s idea but with the encouragement of Beriia. Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, p. 285. R. G. Suny, ‘Soviet Armenia’, in R. Hovannisian (ed.) (1997) The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). The claims to Kars and Ardahan must be understood in the framework of broader antagonisms between the Soviet Union and Turkey. In March 1945, Molotov denounced the Soviet-Turkish treaty of non-aggression and neutrality and the Soviets also made demands regarding the establishments of bases in the straits. G. S. Harris, ‘The Soviet Union and Turkey’, in W. Vucinich and I. Lederer (eds) (1974) The Soviet Union and the Middle East: The Post-World War Two Era (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute). Suny, ‘Soviet Armenia’, p. 368. On these territorial claims and the related claims to Georgian territory and conflict in Iran, see G. Mamoulia (2005) ‘Les premières fissures de L’URSS d’après guerre: Le cas de la Georgie et du Caucase du Sud: 1946–47’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, XLVI(3), pp. 593–615, and idem (2004) ‘Les crises turque et iranienne 1945–47: l’apport des archives caucasiennes’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, XLV(1–2), pp. 267–92. L. Surmelian, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, 11 July 1945, p. 10.

The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia 159 23. The Armenian Apostolic Church had been without a leader since 1938. The newly elected Catholicos supported and encouraged the repatriation scheme, which added to its credibility amongst the diaspora. 24. L. Torosian (1958) ‘Soviet Policy on the Armenian Question’, Armenian Review, XI(2), p. 25. 25. K. Tololyan (1988) ‘The Role of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Diaspora’, Armenian Review, XLI(1), pp. 56–68. 26. Pattie, ‘Armenians in Diaspora’, in Herzig and Kurkchiyan, The Armenians, p. 132. 27. The ANCHA helped around 4,500 Armenians immigrate to the US. See Balakian, Armenian Americans, p. 11. See also the biography by G. Mardikian (1956) Song of America (New York: McGraw-Hill), esp. pp. 248–87. 28. Between 90 and 95 per cent of the repatriates were from western Armenia. Panossian, The Armenians, p. 357. 29. Sarkissian, Les pommes rouges, p. 22. 30. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 6, l. 12. 31. Houcharar (1947) XXXIV(15), p. 285. 32. Houcharar (1946) XXXIII(7), p. 253. 33. A. Ter Minassian, ‘La diaspora arménienne’ p. 36. 34. T. Ter Minassian (2002) “Erevan, ville promise”: le rapatriement des Arméniens de la diaspora’, Diasporas, I, pp. 1–17. 35. Houcharar (1946), XXXIII(7), back cover. Tsypylma Darieva shows that Ararat was incorporated into the Soviet Armenian cultural landscape in general, not only in reference to repatriation. T. Darieva (2006) ‘Bringing the Soil Back to the Homeland: Reconfigurations of the Representation of Loss in Armenia’, Comparativ: Leipzige Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, XVI(3), p. 90. 36. Pattie, ‘From the Centre to the Periphery’, p. 114. 37. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 30, l. 32. 38. Houcharar XXXIII (7) p. 203. 39. S. Atamian, in a book clearly supportive of the Dashnak Party, claims that the Dashnaks supported repatriation for the following reasons: the Soviet claim to Kars and Ardahan; the situation in the diaspora, ‘the sentiment to return and die on Armenian soil was undoubtedly great’; they felt that Moscow had had a change of heart towards the Armenian nation; lastly, there was a sense of futility and a belief that no other solution was possible. S. Atamian (1955) The Armenian Community (New York: New York Philosophical Library), p. 407. 40. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d.10, l. 24. 41. Onnik Krikorian, ‘Full Circle’, www.oneworld.am/journalism/articles/full_circle.htm (21 March 2008). 42. The Armenian Committee for Reception and Resettlement wrote to Armenian ‘progressive’ organisations within the diaspora to ask them to form repatriation committees. In Syria and Lebanon, for example, organising committees were created in early 1946 in Aleppo and Damascus. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 4, l. 13. 43. In January 1946 responsibilities for different aspects of repatriation were divided between the committee members. Astvatzatourian himself was responsible for housing, finance and ‘general leadership’, whilst others were responsible, for example, for liaising with diaspora organisations, health, reception points. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 12, ll. 1–5, Protocols of the Committee, 24 January 1946. 44. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 6, l. 12. It is implied that repatriation is a continuation of the fight against fascism.

160 Joanne Laycock 45. Report of Syria and Lebanon Repatriation Committee, NAA f. 363, op. 2, d. 4, l. 16. 46. For example, ‘The Committee [for Reception and Resettlement] is assured that all of the organisations which during the struggle against fascism gave many examples of their dedication to our Soviet homeland and demonstrated their organisational skills, will now, with great energy and dedication, approach the difficult but honourable and charitable great patriotic task – the task of organisation [of repatriation]’. Letter to FNA, Paris, May 1946, NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 6, ll. 14–15. 47. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 6, l. 14. 48. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 23, l. 2, Correspondence regarding the preparation of the Batumi reception point and the arrival of Armenian immigrants, 20 June 1946. 49. NAA f. 362, op. 2, dd. 32, 35, Reports on arrivals of repatriates in Georgia concerning luggage and logistics of arrival and Queries regarding individual cases. 50. Indjeyan, ‘Les années volées’, p. 124. 51. For examples, see NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 9, l. 39. 52. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 11, l. 73, Letter from V. Nazeretian to the Committee for Resetlement and Repatriation, Cairo, 10 November 1948.o 53. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 11, l. 21. 54. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 11. Iranian repatriates also found themselves ‘stranded’ in 1947 when they were not granted permits to leave Iran after committing to repatriation. 55. R. Darbinian (1948) ‘The Question of the Armenian Boundaries and the Repatriation’, The Armenian Review, 1(1), p. 105. The Armenian Review was published by the Dashnak Hairenik Association in Boston. 56. Houcharar (1947) XXXIV(15), p. 282. 57. George Bournoutian suggests that this expression, derived from the work for ‘brother’ is best rendered as ‘the poor relations’. G. Bournoutian (1994) A History of the Armenian People. Vol. II: 1500 AD to the Present (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda), p. 164. 58. Panossian argues that the genocide has become ‘a prism through which national identity is seen, politics interpreted and culture redefined’. Panossian, The Armenians, p. 228. 59. Balakian, Armenian Americans, p. 24. 60. D. Kévonian (2004) Réfugies et diplomatie humanitaire (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne). 61. On Armenians in Syria, see E. M. Lust-Okar (1996) ‘Failure of Collaboration: Armenian Refugees in Syria’, Middle Eastern Studies, XXXII(1), pp. 53–68. 62. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 4, ll. 17–20. 63. Richard Hovannisian explains that repatriation caused internal turbulence in Aleppo and Beirut and allowed the Arab population to move into the previously homogeneous Armenian quarters. R. G. Hovannisian (1974) ‘The Ebb and Flow of the Armenian Minority in the Arab Middle East’, Middle Eastern Journal, XXVIII(1), p. 23. 64. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 9, l. 11, Letter from American Repatriation Committee, New York. 65. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 9, ll. 12–15. 66. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 9. l. 41. 67. Matossian explains that the housing problems had their roots in the early years of Soviet rule. ‘Housing construction had been relatively neglected in the twenties,


68.

69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

and the shortage was already acute in 1929. New housing projects were undertaken in the thirties in Yerevan, Leninakan and the mining centres.’ Matossian, Impact of Soviet Policies, p. 135. On the development of Yerevan, see T. Ter Minassian, Erevan. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 24, ll. 12–17, Report to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia on Housing, Work and Material Conditions of the Repatriates. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 24, l. 15. See the reports for the Central Committee of the Armenian Communist Party and the Council of Ministers on the preparations for the reception and resettlement of repatriates. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 20, March 1946–March 1948. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 24, l. 12. After having attempted to illicitly travel back to the reception centre at Batumi the French repatriate Albert Andonian found himself without papers and virtually a prisoner in his father’s village. Andonian, Mémoires d’un Akhpar, p. 58. Matossian, The Impact of Soviet Policies, p. 176. Touryantz, Search for a Homeland, p. 35. Pattie, ‘From the Centre to the Periphery’, p. 117. A. Stefansson, ‘Sarajevo Suffering’, in F. Markowitz and A. Stefansson (eds) (2004) Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), p. 55. G. Uehling (2002) ‘Sitting on Suitcases: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in the Migration Narratives of Crimean Tatar Women’, Journal of Refugee Studies, XV(4), p. 401. Touryantz, Search for a Homeland, p. 74. R. G. Suny (1983) Armenia in the Twentieth Century (Chico: Scholars Press), p. 66. Mouradian, L’Arménie, p. 328. To take one famous example, Levon Ter Petrossian, the first President of the third Republic of Armenia, was the son of Syrian repatriates. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 26. Mamoulia, ‘Les premières fissures de L’URSS d’après guerre’, p. 601. NAA f. 362, op. 2 d. 11, l. 50. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 31, l. 58, letter addressed to Mikoian, January 1949. T. Ter Minassian ‘Ville promise’. NAA f. 362, op. 2, d. 4, l. 20. R. Hirschon (1989) Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: the Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Pireaus (Oxford: Berghahn) p. 23. Uehling, ‘Sitting on Suitcases’, p. 388. Of course, the deportations of 1949 which targeted Armenian repatriates as well as other minorities in Transcaucasia must be viewed in a different light. Touryantz, Search for a Homeland, p. 35.


Part III Border Crossings: State Practices of Displacement and National Reconstruction


8 Ukrainian–Polish Population Transfers, 1944–46: Moving in Opposite Directions Kateryna Stadnik

Introduction Shortly after the Red Army entered western Ukraine and eastern Poland in the summer of 1944, representatives of Soviet Ukraine and Poland, meeting in Lublin, agreed to the reciprocal transfer of Poles from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and of ethnic Ukrainians from Poland. This chapter discusses the far-reaching consequences of the Lublin accord on ‘evacuation’. Its implementation took place against a background of extreme violence which had already induced ‘spontaneous’ migration. The evacuation took much longer than expected, and only came to an end in 1946, by which time some 483,000 Ukrainians had been moved from Poland to Ukraine, while 790,000 Poles were transported from Ukraine to Poland.1 It represented one of the largest such transfers undertaken in postwar Europe.2 Nor did Ukrainians and Poles escape the consequences of further intervention. In 1947 the ‘Vistula Action’ (Akcja Wisła) affected a further 150,000 Ukrainians who had not already resettled.3 Another phase of transfers took place following the final series of territorial adjustments under the Polish-Soviet Agreement of 15 February 1951, as a result of which some 40,000 Ukrainians were expelled from territory annexed to Poland.4 Finally, more than 10,000 Poles from among the Soviet deportees (spetsposelentsy) and prisoners, who had been unable hitherto to exercise their right to return, were repatriated to Poland in 1955–56.5 The Lublin accord can be understood in terms of the ‘one nation – one state’ paradigm that so enthused Polish officials (in particular, the future President of Poland Bolesław Bierut), who regarded population exchange as a means to eradicate ‘irreconcilable’ differences between the two states and as ‘a necessary precondition of pan-European peace’.6 The Soviet line was that ‘bilateral transfer will encourage friendship between the two Slavic peoples – Ukrainian and Polish – and create the basis for stable state boundaries between the Soviet Ukraine and democratic Poland’.7 This chapter examines aspects of this complex bilateral programme in order to illuminate the experience of 165

166 Kateryna Stadnik

displacement and how it affected states, government agencies, social groups and individuals. Some preliminary consideration is given to the issue of how displacement contributed to the construction of postwar identities among Poles and Ukrainians, whether or not they had been displaced. The analysis makes use of material from two little known archives in Kiev which contain material on the population transfers. One is the collection of the Chief Plenipotentiary of the Government of the USSR on the evacuation of Ukrainian population from the territory of Poland;8 the other is the collection of the Main Representative of the Government of the USSR on the evacuation of Polish citizens from the territory of the USSR. I also draw on material compiled by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kikh Natsionalistiv, OUN) as well as on a number of personal accounts.9 Ukrainian–Polish relations during the 1940s were frequently characterised by violent episodes, including the anti-Polish terror in Volhynia, the massacre of Ukrainian civilians by Polish contingents in Pawlokoma and Zawadka Morochowska, the ‘Vistula Action’ and many others.10 Polish President Lech Kaczinski ´ acknowledged as much when he opened the Pawlokoma memorial in May 2006 with the words: ‘We cannot change the tragic past but we can prevent it from influencing the future.’11 These events require scholars to provide the foundations for informed debate. Secondary works that discuss the causes of the 1940s Ukrainian-Polish population transfer refer to these terrible events.12 They have been supplemented by newspaper articles, ad hoc research notes and collections of documents published by diaspora and local ethnic associations, although the scholarship embodied in these publications often leaves much to be desired.13 The study of population transfer in these countries also helps us to better understand an issue of current political concern, namely why states have so often been unable to build a secure and stable multinational society, demonstrating instead insufficient political will to prevent the oppression of minority groups.14 Population displacement inevitably disrupts established local communities, that is groups of people who have settled in a certain geographic space and who share everyday life, including cultural practices and religious beliefs; often these are mixed rather than ethnically homogeneous communities.15 As we shall see, attempts by politicians to ‘simplify’ these multi-ethnic landscapes, whatever their intentions, have been highly destructive in their outcomes. They wrenched apart thriving local communities at enormous cost in terms of welfare and cultural integrity; they imposed great suffering on families and individuals; and they had harmful consequences in helping to confirm and disseminate national stereotypes.

The Ukrainian–Polish border and population politics The Ukrainian–Polish population movements that took place during the 1940s were largely conditioned by previous disputes over the lands between

Ukrainian Polish Population Transfers

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the Rivers Zbruch and San. The disputed territory included ethnically mixed regions: Chełm (in Ukrainian, Kholm), Podlachia and Przemy´sl (Sanshchina), where Ukrainians nevertheless made up nearly two-thirds of the total population.16 After changing hands following the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, these regions were ceded to Poland in March 1921 under the terms of the Treaty of Riga.17 The ‘Friendship Agreement’ signed by the USSR and Germany on 28 September 1939 provided for the annexation of Galicia and Volhynia to Soviet Ukraine, while the eastern borderlands of Poland became part of the German Generalgouvernement.18 Subsequent Nazi aggression modified the openly hostile attitude of the Soviet government towards ‘bourgeois’ Poland. On 30 July 1941 the USSR and Poland signed an agreement restoring diplomatic ties and providing for joint action against Germany. The opening section of the agreement denounced the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939; Poland interpreted this to mean that after Germany’s defeat it could count on the restoration of the borders established in 1921, although the resolution of this issue did not become clear until virtually the end of the war.19 As soon as he gained the upper hand, Stalin adopted an inflexible stance on Polish border claims. Following a statement by the émigré Polish government in London on 23 February 1943 on the future extension of Poland’s eastern borderlands, Stalin rejected the claim outright and broke off diplomatic relations with the government-in-exile.20 In January 1944, as Soviet troops approached the disputed Polish-Soviet frontier, it became clear that a final decision about territorial boundaries could no longer be postponed.21 Poland’s position, as set out by the émigré government in London, remained unchanged: the 1921 border should be restored.22 The Soviet response was no less insistent: the lands assigned in 1939, which included western Belarusian as well as western Ukrainian lands,were an integral part of the USSR. However, Stalin also recognised Poland’s right to reinstate its historical border in the west, which Germany had wrongly appropriated.23 His statement was supported by the other Allies, who acted from the outset as interested parties in the difficult Soviet-Polish negotiations.24 During the summer of 1944, the consolidation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation as the pre-eminent executive body facilitated a compromise over the territorial question. On 27 July the two governments signed an agreement on the Soviet-Polish frontier, largely in accordance with Soviet demands.25 The subsequent resolutions at Yalta, together with the agreement on the Soviet-Polish border in 15 August 1945, assigned Poland’s eastern borderlands to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and extended Poland’s frontiers westwards at Germany’s expense. It was understood from the outset that the new borders were not in the interests of the local population and would inevitably be accompanied by evacuation, as happened five years earlier when the Soviet–German ‘Friendship Agreement’ of November 1939 provided for bilateral evacuation, resulting in the displacement of up to 20,000 people on both sides. In 1944 the new Soviet border largely corresponded to the areas of known Ukrainian


settlement, as revealed in local government documents, church and census records.26 Poland, however, retained Chełm and Podlachia, historical territories of the old Galicia-Volhynia princedom which had a considerable non-Polish population, including Ukrainians, Russians, Ruthenians and Lemkos. These ethnic groups had been targeted by Polish armed forces between 1942 and 1944,on the grounds that they espoused irredentist attitudes and supported the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, UPA).27 Numerous personal accounts testify to the fact that, from 1939 onwards, the non-Polish population of the disputed territories suffered as a consequence of disrupted social networks. Even where they remained in their native towns and villages, they gradually came to be regarded as ‘aliens’; neighbours who had hitherto been friendly now became openly hostile. We can gauge something of what occurred from the testimony of survivors. Ludmila, a Ukrainian woman born in 1925, who lived in Malaia Gorodnitsa near Luts’k (Łuck, Volhyn province, annexed to the USSR in 1939) with her half-Polish mother and four siblings suffered expropriation and repression at the hands of the Soviet authorities and recalls how each member of her family lived in fear of all authority.28 Her father had been arrested for having a large farm which he inherited from his father-in-law, a prerevolutionary Russian councillor of state, and he had been missing since being transferred to a camp in Saratov on the eve of the war. In 1943, Ludmila’s family faced danger from a different quarter, when Nazi occupiers started to ‘pacify’ the local Ukrainian and Polish populations. Several villages in the locality were burned down. When squads of soldiers approached, families packed up to move at a moment’s notice in order to hide in neighbouring Ukrainian villages, staying with relatives until it was all over. In one of these raids she lost her elder brother, who was just 16 years old. Knowing that the remaining livestock was an important means of survival for a family with several school age children and no breadwinner, the boy had turned back to catch a foal that lagged behind. After several hours elapsed, she returned to search for her brother, only to be told that he had been seized, along with several people from the same village, including the local Roman Catholic priest. They were all locked in a church and burned alive. Just before the start of the mass evacuation in 1945, Ludmila entered Luts’k Pedagogical School and married a Red Army lieutenant who, at the end of hostilities, was planning to return home. She was not allowed to tell people in her native village about her marriage, which would have exposed the whole family to danger; Soviet influence in the region had not yet been established and the local population was closely watched by Ukrainian guerrilla detachments (known to locals as banderovtsy), who mercilessly victimised anyone thought to be sympathetic to the Soviet regime. In any case it was difficult to move freely. Her husband therefore returned alone to his home in the


169

Donbass, eastern Ukraine, from where he issued her with an official invitation that enabled her to join him. The entire family, which had lost all its property and was by now exhausted by threats from all sides, quickly followed. It is worth adding that they all subsequently became settled in the Donbass, where the male members of the family graduated from the College of Mines and made a career in the coal industry.29 At the same time, Ludmila recalls that most young Poles were quite prepared to leave their native villages, which had by now been sovietised. In other words, cases of ‘spontaneous’ movement took place in advance of the formal implementation of the Polish–Ukrainian transfer, because the local situation had become unstable and it seemed as if a point of no return had been reached. To be sure, some Poles remained until 1946, hoping the old regime would be restored. Yet they also feared that the later they left, the more difficult their integration would be. Ludmila’s cousin, who was married to a Polish woman, registered for evacuation and left for Poland early in 1946, where his wife had relatives who insisted that they left before it was too late.30 Meanwhile, thousands of non-Polish inhabitants of the eastern borderlands petitioned the Kremlin, asking that their villages be annexed to Soviet Ukraine. They represented up to half a million Ukrainians in Vlodawsk, Chełm, Tomashevsk, Zamo´sc´ and other districts.31 The Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, initiated a series of top-level discussions on the incorporation of Chełm into Soviet Ukraine.32 As it happened, Khrushchev regarded the issue of Chełm not only as a political question but also an issue of personal importance, because his wife had been born in this region; in 1939, as a member of the Military Council of the Ukrainian Front, he whisked her parents away from Chełm as soon as he knew about the planned territorial changes.33 However, it became clear from the outset that Khrushchev’s vision for Chełm could not be implemented easily because of the multi-ethnic composition of this contested area. His plans anticipated a new administrative unit comprising eight large districts, a total area of 12,310 km2 and a total population of 797,000. Ukrainians and Russians made up 39 per cent of the total population in the new region, with Poles comprising 46 per cent and Jews 12 per cent. Some villages were almost entirely ethnically homogeneous.34 Further delays to the redrawing of the border created anxiety, provoked unrest and stimulated spontaneous migration among non-Poles in Poland and Poles in Ukraine. As one ethnic Ukrainian correspondent from Grubeshewsk district in Poland remarked in an inquiry into border crossings by the Lviv regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, ‘in our village [Shevekiv] all adult males under 45 have armed themselves and taken power. We are waiting for your [Soviet] representatives to help us administer ourselves and not allow the Poles to exterminate us.’35


According to a report by the Secretary of the Volhyn regional committee on the plight of Ukrainians in Chełm: Poles working in Luts’k [in Ukraine], particularly the men, have started to apply to join the volunteer Polish army. In private [in the words of a young maintenance technician] they argue that ‘if they sit around doing nothing, Poland will not accept them after all’. The custodian of the local administration office, aged 65, left his post and went to Lublin because, as he said, ‘it makes sense to get a move on, because the decent positions there [in Poland] will be snapped up, and I will have to work as a night watchman again’.36 Both sides applied psychological pressure, physical intimidation and economic sanctions to the unwanted ‘elements’ in order (as the language of the time put it) to expel ‘Poles across the Bug’, and ‘Ukrainians over Zbruch’. These slogans were frequently used in the rival agitation campaigns. Thus a Polish leaflet called on Polish soldiers to consider Ukrainians as members of ‘a society of criminals and enemies of Poland who are not eligible for any political rights’.37 By 1944 Polish communists had dropped all talk of the rights of minorities from their statement on ‘the Ukrainian problem’. In turn, the Ukrainian nationalist OUN frequently spoke of a Polish programme to eradicate Ukrainian statehood. Its leaders urged the UPA to kill ‘Polish lackeys of Stalin’ and destroy Polish property.38

Managing the transfers: structure and agency, collectivity and individual voice According to the statement made by the Polish émigré government in London in late 1943, before the decision on bilateral transfer was taken, even if a Polish–Soviet agreement is not signed or population exchange is not successful for any reason, Polish policy in the east-south lands should be aimed at creating a Polish majority with not less than 75 per cent in all provinces (województwa), counties (powiaty) and communes (gminu).39 Although official documents give no indication as to the origins of the farreaching political decision that followed, an agreement on a bilateral population transfer was signed in Lublin on 9 September 1944 by Khrushchev, representing the Soviet side, and Eduard Osóbka-Morawski, the head of the Polish Committee of National Liberation.40 As indicated above, the agreement directly concerned some 1.3 million people who moved from Ukraine to Poland and vice versa: 17 Polish districts and 16 districts in Ukraine were affected. The two signatories to the population transfer regarded it as a device


171

to ‘simplify’ the ethnic landscape and consolidate the nation-state within the newly agreed boundaries. The transfer quickly turned into a torment for thousands of people who had hitherto never left their place of residence, but who now found themselves the object of enforced exclusion. Those to be resettled included Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians and Ruthenians on the territory of Poland, all of whom were referred to as the ‘Ukrainian population’, and Poles and Polish Jews living on the territory of the USSR, who were described as ‘Polish citizens’, having Polish citizenship as of 1 September 1939 and who had ‘expressed their wish to resettle’.41 Just as in the earlier Soviet-German transfer campaign, the Soviet-Polish agreement on evacuation stated that movement should be voluntary. The process was expected to be completed by the beginning of February 1945. This expectation was confounded. Fewer volunteers than expected came forward. By September 1945 only one-third of the estimated total had been evacuated, and the number of new volunteers virtually dried up, making it necessary to extend the transfer until the end of 1946.42 Not until 14 February 1947 did the Ukrainian chief plenipotentiary feel able to confirm that, ‘as a result of the tenacious efforts of the evacuation personnel, the Agreement of 9 September 1944 as a political task has been virtually [sic] fulfilled’.43 What institutional framework for preparing, undertaking and supervising the transfer was in place during this lengthy process? It took the same form as in the previous evacuation campaign.44 Both governments agreed to establish a joint ‘Commission on Evacuation’. On the day after the agreement was signed, each side appointed a chief plenipotentiary based in Lublin. They in turn authorised representatives appointed regional commissioners, Polish and Ukrainian, in each locality or ‘evacuation region’. Both commissioners were responsible for enumerating people for resettlement from each district, processing applications, making an inventory of each settler household’s property, providing transport, compiling regular lists and reports on the progress of evacuation, and settling any claims that might occur. It was also their duty to encourage people to enrol on the resettlement list.45 The Ukrainian commission employed 375 workers by 1945, although illness and a lack of qualifications led to a drop in numbers during 1946. Overall, and taking into account turnover in personnel, around 1,000 Party activists, officials and other professionals took part in managing the transfer from the Ukrainian side. Most of them were reasonably well-educated Ukrainian men, with a background in industry and several years’ membership of the Communist Party.46 The Polish contingent was somewhat smaller.47 At this stage NKVD representatives played a key role in supervising the transfer, a list of their officers sent on a mission to the Ukrainian and Polish districts had to be approved at the highest level by the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.48 It is striking that most of the NKVD personnel held high rank and had long been members of the


Communist Party; but because most of them came from eastern and central Ukraine, they did not speak the local dialect and were unlikely to have been well informed about the areas to which they were sent.49 So far as language and other qualifications were concerned, the Polish representatives on the commissions were better qualified. They included Polish communists as well as non-party intelligentsia, members of governmental ad hoc commissions and committees, including, for example, the Main Relief Council (Rada Glowna Opiekuncza), an umbrella welfare organisation that had been allowed to operate intermittently during the war.50 The Polish and Ukrainian commissions cooperated closely with one another and with provincial governors in Poland and representatives of local soviets in Ukraine, as well as with leaders of religious communities, teachers and others. They made use of available channels of information, such as newspapers, radio, film screenings, leaflets and public talks, in order to promote evacuation.51 The whole process was underpinned by transport departments and by armed detachments and the police or militia, who had orders to guard detachments of evacuees and to monitor routes in order to guarantee their safety. From its inception, however, the evacuation demonstrated a lack of coordination both from inside the Commission and between the Commission and the various agencies responsible for the implementation of the campaign. Unable to control the flow of evacuees, the chief plenipotentiary of the Polish government gave instructions to limit the number of settlers to not more than 3,000 a month. As a result, during 1945 no transports took place for weeks at a time.52 Officials pinned some of the blame for the disruptions to the schedule on miscommunication among the evacuees who crammed their belongings on to carts and the trains, putting pressure on available capacity: Due to the dissemination of false information about the regulations, the evacuees take as many household goods and foodstuffs as they can, including grain, agricultural implements, clothes, etc. As a result, each family requires up to three carts. These carts and horses never get back to the village, so it becomes more and more difficult to arrange transport to get evacuees to the railway station.53 Problems did not end there. One official noted that ‘the Polish population has had to wait at the railway station for weeks on end’, while another complained about the lack of carriages on the Kovel and Lviv lines.54 Organisational confusion and ideological differences created another source of difficulty. The local situation was frequently chaotic, with a mixture of Soviet and Polish government officials, local parish authorities, Ukrainian nationalists (OUN and UPA) and members of the Polish Naro´ dowe Siły Zbrojne (National Armed Forces), who periodically joined forces with the UPA to attack Soviet offices.55 The Polish National Army (Armia


173

Krajowa) also exercised power in several districts.56 The reinforcement of personnel in the evacuation commissions and the more rigorous methods after February 1945 triggered a rigid reaction from national groups, which used various techniques to hinder evacuation, ranging from propaganda to outright anti-Soviet terror.57 A Soviet report on evacuation indicated that, due to the resistance of the ‘Polish reactionaries and Ukrainian nationalists’, after five months of intensive work by the Commission in some districts a mere 5 per cent of the expected number of people had registered for evacuation.58 Indeed, it was true that the UPA did not wish to see its support base eroded: The Polish-Bolshevik monsters were mistaken when they thought they could easily take over your houses and possessions when you left. In just one day Ukrainian rebels have killed 17 Polish and Bolshevik leaders, including one from the Ministry of Defence. . . . Turn out the Stalin occupiers and NKVD murderers who want to enslave you in the collective farm! Unite around the OUN and UPA and do as they tell you! Death to Stalin and his clique! Death to the Polish lackeys of Stalin!59 Local Polish officials sought to minimise its potential impact on the local economy and, where possible, to prevent people from registering for evacuation. As a report of the Soviet plenipotentiary explained: We frequently encounter not only an unhelpful attitude on the part of Polish parish (gmina) and district officials but also open resistance and provocation. For example, the head of Lubachevsk district, Mr Bednasz, refused to provide evacuees with transport, pointing to a lack of horses in Polish households. He also issued an order to the local militia to take away all cows and sows from the evacuees on the pretext that these were ‘pedigree breeds’. Of course, this order met with decisive resistance on the part of the evacuees, and he had to revoke the decision. Bednasz openly states that evacuation is ruinous for the district. He makes trips to neighbouring villages offering Ukrainians the possibility of converting to Catholicism in order to stay in Poland. Polish village leaders urged that evacuation be stopped for good or at least suspended during the spring sowing season.60 Other officials issued illegal orders to recover debts from the evacuees, even though the evacuation agreement freed them of all outstanding obligations.61 During the final phase of evacuation it was reported that ‘Polish authorities in the districts of Gorlick and Nowo-Sonchsk tried to hold back some Ukrainian families while encouraging the evacuation of politically disloyal, poor and physically or mentally ill people’.62 For several hundred rank-and-file staff, interpreters, statisticians, bookkeepers, agronomists and drivers drafted on both the Soviet and Polish sides,


the process of evacuation posed a significant physical and psychological challenge. At least a dozen officials were killed and a number of others were injured.63 To be sure, those employed in evacuation were guaranteed no loss of salary, accommodation or other benefits. They also received official recognition in the form of campaign medals.64 However, there were numerous complaints about unauthorised absence and many officers resigned on grounds of ill health or physical threats.65 Their families complained about the absence of the chief breadwinner and a lack of support from social services. The chief Ukrainian Plenipotentiary to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party reported that: Difficult work conditions encouraged some employees to quit the job on various pretexts and to return to their permanent place of employment. In spite of our efforts to discourage these attempts and indeed to reject any resignation, it became very difficult to avoid some turnover of staff.66 At the same time, members of the Commission who had access to official records, property assessments and transport were well placed to turn these opportunities to their own advantage. Some plenipotentiaries used ingenious stratagems to profit from people’s despair and from the prevailing chaos. They bought up property from evacuees at rock-bottom prices and misappropriated or stole goods. They took bribes to register for evacuation to Poland relatives of families who were otherwise ineligible. They issued fake documents and provided supplementary transport for a fee.67 To give an idea of the scale of profit that might be made, the price for obtaining papers to enable a family to go to Poland (or even on to Germany) might be as high as a truck and gold watch.68 The mounting evidence of corruption tarnished the reputation of the evacuation officials and created an atmosphere of suspicion and ill-will among the population. As is clear, some people tried their luck and moved from one country to the other at the very outset. Others held firm. Once it became clear that they could not evade evacuation, they were prepared to sacrifice a great deal in order to make the process as smooth as possible and to prepare for moving to a new and uncertain future. The obstacles that were sometimes put in their way severely tested the ability of individuals and families to cope with arrangements for departure and the journey itself.

Evacuees: nowhere people? The attitudes of the different social groups towards evacuation were mixed. For example, most educated Poles in newly sovietised Galicia, including teachers, doctors, engineers and technicians, expressed a willingness to move at the first opportunity on the grounds, as one put it, that ‘the earlier we leave the easier we shall find it to settle in Poland’. As a result, many enterprises


175

such as the gasworks, tram depots, power plants and railway stations in Lviv quickly lost their qualified staff. Members of the Ukrainian Commission sometimes attempted to retain qualified workers and the management of some enterprises imposed sanctions in an attempt to stem the ‘brain drain’69 . Many Ukrainian peasants in the eastern Polish borderlands were attached to their ‘homeland’ and were reluctant to abandon their homes and villages. For this reason Soviet officials maintained that speed was of the essence. In October 1944, Demian Korotchenko, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, put it bluntly during the preparatory conference in Lublin on how to implement the agreement in relation to Ukrainians: Certainly, the resettlement should be organised carefully, but also promptly. Remember a peasant will be leaving the place where his grandfather and forefather lived. This means that resettlement should be implemented as follows: get them to pack up and leave.70 Others, however, had nothing to lose and ‘uprooted’ themselves with less difficulty. So far as the Polish ‘non-working population’ [netrudovoe naselenie] is concerned, rabbis, parish priests and the former owners of shops and enterprises were reluctant to apply for registration, perhaps because they were fearful of losing their possessions or church property, perhaps because they hoped the old regime would be restored. The regional representative of the Ukrainian government in Lviv reported that, in his evacuation district, only 47,209 people of Polish nationality out of a total of 135,043 had registered for evacuation by the end of 25 March 1945 and a mere 8,964 had left. He explained this as follows: Polish nationalists have disseminated information through Catholic churches that Britain and USA do not acknowledged the Lublin agreement, and that Lviv will soon become Polish. Our notices about evacuation regulations were ripped down overnight and replaced with stickers announcing that evacuation is suspended.71 The Soviet–Polish agreement on the state frontier on 16 August 1945 settled this issue for good. Yet even when it became clear that Soviet writ would continue to run in Galicia, there were a few volunteers for resettlement. Frightening rumours began to circulate. One was that ‘all evacuees’ possessions will be seized at the border and that they then will suffer hardship in Poland’; another, that they ‘will be taken to Siberia instead’.72 Disturbing news also reached them from the first wave of Ukrainians who resettled from Poland in Soviet Ukraine and who described appalling conditions on the collective farms. Ukraine lay


in ruins. It was rare to find an undamaged house; food and livestock were in short supply; newcomers were regarded as a burden on the local economy. The resettlement plans were developed according to an assessment of local capacity: thus districts in the south and east of Ukraine were scheduled to house 267,640 evacuees from Poland, or 88 per cent of the total, while the western region was assigned the remaining 38,166.73 This meant that those moving to the east and south found themselves in a very different cultural and linguistic environment. Numerous documents testify to ethnic hostility and the reluctance of the local population to provide decent living standards to the ‘aliens from Poland’: Substandard living conditions for the resettlers are ubiquitous. No electricity, no heating, no food supplies, even for those who are already employed in the kolkhoz. Some local kolkhoz members are openly antagonistic to the newcomers. As a result, children of resettlers are beaten by the local kids.74 (Avdeevka region, eastern Ukraine) In Karlovka village, a Ukrainian resettler Ruzhanoskii is living in the house of ex-policeman’s wife Bozhko. She is trying to evict him, saying, ‘Go back to Poland. You came here for no reason’.75 (Volnovakha, eastern Ukraine) Only two families have stayed here. The rest have escaped to western Ukraine because they don’t have this kolkhoz system there. I stay because my children are little and I cannot move. We are all barefooted and poorly clad but we cannot earn a living here. I have no idea if our life will return to normal sometime soon.76 (from a letter of a resettler in Red Star Kolkhoz, Kirovograd region, eastern Ukraine, to relatives in the US) Our life is bad. Dear Mum and Dad, if you are planning to leave, don’t! Stay where you are. If we had stayed with you, we would not be living in such poverty.77 (from a letter of a resettler in Yambug, eastern Ukraine, to their parents who remained in Poland) In the next phase, after the autumn of 1945, officials increasingly adopted more forceful methods for those who resisted evacuation. An overwhelming majority of the remaining evacuees indicated that they want to settle in the western regions of Ukraine – Volhynia, Drogobych, Lviv, Rovno, Stanislaviv, and Ternopil. Indeed more than two-thirds of all evacuees were eventually transferred there, whether voluntarily or forcibly.78 Information on the number, origin and occupation of the evacuated population gives us some indication about the social problems that resulted (see Tables 8.1 and 8.2). Children and the elderly accounted for more than

Ukrainian Polish Population Transfers Table 8.1 1944–47

177

Ukrainian population from Poland registered and evacuated to the USSR,

Registered

Evacuated

families

persons

families persons

1.1 By administrative province Rzeszow 64,373 Lublin 56,827 Krakow 4,749 Total 125,949

266,860 208,258 22,564 497,682

62,751 260,110 54,795 200,690 4,908 21,311 122,454 482,109

Registered

Evacuated

1.2 By nationality Ukrainian Russian Ruthenian Other

439,135 23,846 18,759 369

91 per cent 5 per cent 4 per cent –

1.3 By age and gender Children under 13 Females aged 14–56 Males aged 14–56 Males and females over 56

141,907 158,887 129,585 51,730

29 per cent 33 per cent 27 per cent 11 per cent

1.4 By occupation Peasants Non-employed Artisans Industrial workers Clerical Teachers Agricultural labourers Transport workers Clergy Medical Other Total

288,444 182,603 4,447 1,817 1,176 759 750 733 287 118 975 482,109

60 per cent 38 per cent < 1 per cent

Evacuated per cent

99 96 90 97

Source: V. F. Panibud’laska (ed.) (1997) Natsionalni procesy v Ukraiini, istoriia i suchasnist’: dokumenti i materiali (Kiev: Vyshcha shkola), vol. 2, p. 391. This table (without the information on provinces) also appears in Subtelny, p. 165, who cites I. Bilas (1994) Represyvno-karalna systema, vol. 1, p. 232.

a third of the total. Professionals were a relatively small proportion of the total, particularly among Ukrainian evacuees. Peasants constituted a clear majority on both sides, and this meant that farm implements and livestock became a critical issue. Unfortunately, both were in totally inadequate supply in relation to the size of the evacuated population.

178 Kateryna Stadnik Table 8.2

Polish citizens evacuated from the USSR to Poland, 1944–47 Urban population

2.1 By type of settlement 328,909

Per cent

Rural population

Per cent

Total

42

458,766

58

787,675

2.2 By nationality Polish Jewish Other

742,455 33,105 12,114

94 per cent 4 per cent 2 per cent

2.3 By occupation Peasants Non-manual workers Manual workers Artisans Health workers Teachers Clergy Others Total

237,093 172,322 100,701 62,658 4,415 2,611 2,493 205,382 787,675

38 per cent 28 per cent 16 per cent 10 per cent

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