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Three QuesTions wiTh

BURLEIGH HENDRICKSON author of Decolonizing 1968

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

I first began primary research for the book in France in 2009. In late 2010, I started to get really excited about my upcoming travel to Tunisia, and I wondered about the challenges of studying past revolutionary activity there under the Ben Ali regime. As I was finalizing my research plan and preparing for travel, Mohamed Buʿazizi self-im molated, setting off the Tunisian Revolution. Unintentionally, I ended up studying a period of revolt in the immediate aftermath of a full-on revo lution. Consequently, I learned a lot from Tunisians who were generally open to discussing politically

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

First, I hope that when people study the global 1960s, they will consider some of the heroic activ ism that occurred in places like Tunis and Dakar alongside the more well-known cases in Paris and Prague. Second, I hope to advance debate on the role of decolonization in French and Francophone Studies. History is not always already either global, postcolonial, or decolonizing. But many parts of it are, and they can help us to identify patterns and experiences. Not every aspect of 1968 was about decolonization, but enough of its elements were to make it worthwhile to locate and understand them.

I ended up studying a period of revolt in the immediate aftermath of a full-on revolution.

sensitive topics.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

The first draft of the manuscript was divided up similarly to its current iteration, with six primary chapters on activism in 1968 and then in the 1970s in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar. At one point, I thought it would be a good idea to consolidate them by city into three large chapters. This took a lot of time and effort and, ultimately, the chapters became too unwieldy, so I basically went back to my orig inal framework in the end. I probably could have saved myself some time and energy had I known that outcome!

ALCOHOL AND VIOLENCE IN NAZI GERMANY

by Edward B. Westermann

The Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland in September 1939 and the government’s rapid surrender proved a humiliating experience for the entire population. Not only did the country’s defeat begin the process of Nazi expansion in the East, but it signaled the start of the genocide. Marianna Kazmierczak, a seventeen-year-old girl working at a restaurant in Zakrzewo, experienced the brutality and arrogance of the conquerors and the feelings of national and personal humiliation re sulting from Nazi Germany rule. She recalled how she was forced to serve groups of SS perpetrators beer and schnapps as they gathered during the week to celebrate mass killings. She described the men as “half-drunk” and “very merry” and recalled how they sang and danced. These drinking bouts sometimes included “chariot races” in which the men pushed each other in chairs around the room. Such acts of revelry lasting into the early hours of the morning forced Marian na to listen to salacious comments and to avoid the groping hands of the drunken men as she fought off their sexual advances.

For some perpetrators of genocide, alcohol, song, and physical and sexual violence functioned as a form of entertainment. During the invasion of Poland, one SS colonel in charge of a kill ing unit described his work as “a huge joy” in a report to his superiors. The pleasure taken by some of the killers in their “work” also was appar ent to Mieczyslaw Imala, a thirteen-year-old boy, who recalled how the SS brought groups of Poles “every several days” to a nearby forest. He heard shooting and saw trucks piled with the victims’ pos sessions leave the killing site. After the massacres, the trucks headed to a local restaurant where the killers divided the plundered goods, feasted, and engaged in massive drinking parties involving vast quantities of schnapps, beer, and cigarettes as they celebrated mass murder. Mieczyslaw remembered the intoxicated men and remarked “a wedding atmosphere reigned.”

During the invasion of Po land, one SS colonel in charge of a killing unit described his work as “a huge joy” in a report to his superiors.

In some cases, the killers fashioned the places of murder into sites of entertainment. One teen

aged boy described a mass killing of Jews in his hometown. From his house near the cemetery, he listened as shots rang out throughout the day and continued into the night. Creeping into the attic, he removed several roof tiles and watched as the shooters worked through the night under electric lights and saw them take breaks to drink vodka, smoke cigarettes, and eat sausages. He specifically recalled the actions of one drunk SS-man who entertained himself by making Jews perform exercises and ordering them to climb on gravestones and up trees before he shot them.

The integration of music and song into acts of mass murder is striking and highlights the cele bratory ritual enjoyed by the perpetrators. In one Ukrainian village, German policemen conducted an execution of some 400 Jewish men, women, and children. One member of the unit later testi fied about the presence of a music band that was playing as the Jews were led away to their deaths. He exclaimed, “It was loud just like a carnival.” At another Ukrainian village, drunken German policemen murdered groups of civilians and Soviet prisoners of war to the accompaniment of accordion music played by a unit member. At the no torious Majdanek camp, SS and policemen murdered 8,000 Jewish men, women, and children in November 1943 during operation “Harvest Festival.” Under this festive codename, the killers shot their victims as Viennese waltzes, tangos, and military marches blared over the camp’s loud speakers. Afterward, many of the men returned to their quarters and held a wild party, drinking much of the vodka they had received as a special reward for participating and some did not even bother to wash off the blood from their boots before they reached for the bottle. Ultimately, such drunken celebrations reveal the killers’ intoxication with the act of murder itself.

In a Ukrainian village, drunk en German policemen mur dered groups of civilians and Soviet prisoners of war to the accompaniment of accordion music played by a unit member.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction Pantheon as Past and Present

In 1929, on the cliffs of Mtatsminda (Holy Mountain) overlooking Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian Soviet So cialist Republic (GSSR), the Georgian Communist Party marked the centenary of the Russian writer and diplomat Alexander Griboedov’s death by inaugurating a pantheon as a symbol of Russian-Georgian friendship at the site where Griboedov and his wife, the Georgian no blewoman Nino Chavchavadze, were laid to rest. A renowned writer and friend of the poet Alexander Pushkin, Griboedov represented Imperial Russia in the Caucasus and Persia, married into the Georgian nobility, and, while serving as the Russian ambassador to Persia, was assassi nated at the Russian Embassy in Tehran during negotiations to end the 1828–29 Russo-Persian War that would bring what is today Armenia and Azerbaijan into the Russian Empire. Once his mutilated body was returned to Tbilisi, he was buried ceremoniously at St. David’s monas tery on Mtatsminda. A century later, the Russian Empire that Griboe dov served had fallen, and an enterprising native of Georgia, Joseph Stalin, had just solidified his power over the young Bolshevik state. The Russian-Georgian relationship that Griboedov embodied would thus need to be recast to fit the ideology and worldview espoused by the world’s first workers’ state.

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Map 1. GSSR borders, 1957–1991. Credit: Evangeline McGlynn.

Yet while the Mtatsminda Pantheon shrouded itself in the banner of Russian-Georgian friendship for its opening, it came to encapsulate modern Georgian national history: its origins, transformation, addi tions, erasures—and omissions. When the pantheon was inaugurated in 1929, it included other Georgian luminaries such as the “father of the Georgian nation” Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907). In the 1930s, the imperial-era writers Vazha-Pshavela (1861–1915) and Nikoloz Baratash vili (1817–45) and the educator who penned the seminal Georgianlanguage primer for schoolchildren, Jakob Gogebashvili (1840–1912), were added to the pantheon. When Stalin’s mother, Keke Geladze Jughashvili (b. 1858), died in 1937, she was interred in the pantheon (and remains there today). By the end of its first decade, the pantheon housed Georgia’s cultural giants—writers, poets, and civic leaders of the pre-Soviet era. Beginning in the 1940s, the “Old Bolshevik” politi cal leaders Georgia Pilipe Makharadze (1868–1941), Mikheil Tskhakaia (1865–1959), and Silibistro Todria (1880–1936) were enshrined on the Mtatsminda mountainside—until 1987, when vandals blew up

Makharadze’s tomb. They were joined on Mtatsminda by the Soviet Georgian historians Simon Janashia (1900–1947) and Nikoloz Berdzen ishvili (1894–1965), the writer Nodar Dumbadze (1928–84), and other Soviet-era cultural icons of film, theater, and dance. As Georgia began its exit from the Soviet Union, the dissident and national movement leader Merab Kostava entered the pantheon following his suspicious death in a car accident in late 1989. He was joined by his longtime collaborator and the first president of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia (1939–93), who likewise died under mysterious circumstances: only in 2007 was his body prominently reinterred from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, into the pantheon by President Mikheil Saakashvili.

The Mtatsminda Pantheon’s Bolshevik transformation in 1929 was likely inspired by the French example—a revolutionary effort to remake Paris’s church of Sainte-Geneviève into a secular pantheon for the country’s “great men.”1 The Soviets initiated plans to create a Moscow Pantheon, to be known as the Monument to the Eternal Glory of the Great People of the Soviet Land, in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953. It was to inter prominent Communists and relocate those already interred along the walls of the Kremlin. Yet the project never moved beyond the planning stage—likely the victim of de-Stalinization and the subsequent shift away from Stalinist monu mental architecture.2 The Mtatsminda Pantheon was a rare initiative in the Soviet Union: only in neighboring Armenia did a similar effort oc cur, with the creation of the Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan in 1936. The location of Mtatsminda presented opportunities in the Stalin era to remake the pantheon and its broader neighborhood in Stalin’s image, at the height of the construction of the Stalin cult in Georgia under the guidance of Georgian first secretary Lavrenti Beria. In the 1930s, the revolutionary heritage and corresponding links to Stalin were high lighted for the Mtatsminda neighborhood, as detailed in Beria’s history of the Bolshevik organization in the Caucasus. For a time, Holy Moun tain was even renamed “Stalin’s Mountain.”3

The Mtatsminda Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures, as it is now known, is a snapshot of the modern Georgian nation-building project, even if the site was created and largely populated in the Soviet era—a period that Saakashvili and many of his contemporaries folded into a narrative framework of “Russian occupation.”4 The pantheon fea tures dutiful servants of empire—both Russian and Soviet—alongside prominent voices of dissent. Yet perhaps more illustrative than what the pantheon contains is what it does not. Georgia’s premodern icons,

such as St. Nino (who brought Christianity to Georgia in the fourth century), Shota Rustaveli (a medieval lyric poet), and Queen Tamar, re mained under the auspices of the church even during the Soviet period, with burial sites and monuments in monasteries and cathedrals across Georgia—and beyond, in the case of Rustaveli (buried in Jerusalem). Further, some of the best-known political sons of Georgia are not included in the pantheon: the former president of Georgia, Soviet for eign minister, and first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Eduard Shevardnadze, was buried in a family plot at his residence just outside Tbilisi; his predecessors as first secretary, including Lavrenti Beria, likewise did not make it to the pantheon. The remains of Beria, who was executed in 1953, are interred in Moscow, as are the ashes of his onetime patron, leading Caucasian Bolshevik Sergo Orjonikidze (in the walls of the Kremlin) who committed suicide in 1937. Noe Jordania, meanwhile, the Social Democrat who led the independent Democratic Republic of Georgia from 1918 to 1921, fled the Bolshevik advance and never returned to his homeland, dying in Paris in 1953. And finally, Ioseb Jughashvili (known also as Soso, Koba, or Stalin), the most fa mous son of Georgia, was entombed next to Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square when he died in 1953 and was reburied in an individual grave along the Kremlin Wall in 1961.

Katherine Verdery has argued that “dead bodies have an additional advantage as symbols” in that they “lend themselves particularly well to politics in times of major upheaval.”5 While Verdery had in mind the context of post-1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, the example of the Mtatsminda Pantheon reveals a longer-term, evolving conversation about “dead body politics” in Georgia that closely paralleled projects of nation-building throughout the Soviet century and beyond. Yet this process was more convoluted than constructing and destroying Stalin statues, replacing Lenin Square with Freedom Square, and selectively adding to the pantheon. Georgians constituted a “historic nation” with religion as the key marker of ethnic identification in the premod ern period, and not until the late nineteenth century did a develop ing national intelligentsia, epitomized by the writer and politician Ilia Chavchavadze, recognize that a Georgian nation centered on culture and language needed to be actively constructed among the territory’s peasant populace. Yet with this basis, how did Soviet policies produce a “Georgian” Georgia (sakartvelo in Georgian) for the first time in mod ern history? Ronald Grigor Suny argues that the “re-formation” of the Georgian nation was the result of a 150-year project, which crystallized

in the post-Stalin era.6 The Mtatsminda Pantheon, which drew on a pre-Soviet site to create a Soviet national monument to Georgia’s “great men” (and two women), encapsulates this process—and its continued resonance as a site of Georgian nation-building into the twenty-first century. The pantheon shows the deep integration of Soviet-style na tional development in a broader trajectory of modern Georgian nation hood. Far from consigning the seven decades of the Georgian SSR’s existence to mere “Russian occupation,” the pantheon instead centers many of the cultural and political giants of Soviet Georgia. This sug gests that service to the Soviet state (even during high Stalinism or through significant ruptures such as de-Stalinization and the Soviet collapse), much like its imperial predecessor, was more than compatible with Georgian nation-building.

Georgian? Soviet? Georgian and Soviet?

The complex history of “dead body politics” uncovers important ques tions about identity in an evolving, nation-building state. What did it mean to be Georgian? Soviet? Georgian and Soviet? How and through which mechanisms did these concepts change over time across Georgia’s Soviet century? In particular, how did the rupture of de-Stalinization affect the trajectory of Soviet Georgian nationhood? I argue that the postwar and post-Stalin era was decisive in the creation of a “Geor gian” Georgia owing to not only the peculiar role played by the Stalin cult in the construction of modern Georgian nationhood but also the subsequent changes that de-Stalinization wrought among Georgia’s populace and in the unusual imperial relationship between Moscow and Tbilisi. More broadly, I ask how those individuals or groups who never sought to be a part of the Bolshevik project (a violent, worldwide revolution in the name of the proletariat) came to engage with and become a part of the postwar Soviet project (as active, participatory citizens living in developed socialism).7

Georgians were not exceptional in confronting this tension: peas ants throughout the country, for example, and other groups resisted Bolshevism (at times violently) yet ultimately came to be, in most cases, archetypal Soviet citizens.8 The Soviet experiment provided a unique environment in which to experience a national birth—or rebirth, creat ing conditions that influenced the senses of belonging and understand ings of the Soviet project experienced by the experiment’s children and grandchildren. In the case of Georgia, these conditions ranged from

the role of World War II and the cult of Stalin to a perceived loss of Union-wide status among Georgians during de-Stalinization, but with increased latitude for national development in the post-Stalin decades.

Building on a question posed by Bruce Grant in his study of the Nivkh, an ethnic group on Sakhalin Island, I argue that emphasizing the difference between Soviet and national forms of belonging ignores “the very mechanisms that enabled the Soviet administration to recruit a patriotic” Georgian “collective.”9 If the interwar period was a crucible of nationalities, it was only in the postwar period—and especially after 1956—that we can actually see what kinds of nations emerged from this crucible among second- and third-generation Soviet citizens.10 Moreover, moving beyond the implicit or explicit assumption that the Soviet Union was Stalinism (by focusing on the 1930s) exposes the sur prising variation in community and experience possible in the Soviet half century after Stalin.11 Historians are only beginning to explore the spectrum of national experiences of Soviet citizens in the postwar era.12 Thus, this book is one of the first among these to examine such postwar developments on the territory of the Georgian Soviet Social ist Republic, drawing from extensive research in Georgian archives and Georgian-language sources.13 With limited access to Soviet archives, Ronald Suny laid the groundwork for such an exploration in his longue durée study, The Making of the Georgian Nation, which he wrote in the 1980s and covered the late- and post-Stalin eras only briefly as a result.14 Stephen Jones, another pathbreaking historian of modern Georgia, has focused his monographs more on the pre- and post-Soviet periods.15 More recent work by Erik R. Scott has emphasized the important role of the Georgian diaspora in the Soviet empire rather than on the terri tory of the GSSR itself.16

The postwar period provides an important starting point for un derstanding this relationship between identity and nation-building, though for different reasons than one might see in other Soviet re publics. Although Georgians experienced some aspects of Soviet so cialization through the war effort and military service similar to many other non-Russian Soviet citizens in the face of the Fascist onslaught, the more important opening for Soviet Georgian nation-building came with the turning of the war’s tide in Europe and emerging Cold War environment. The shifting landscape presented new opportunities for Georgians, who benefited both from the Soviet system of nationality entitlements as well as a perception of privilege or status (sensed by Georgians and non-Georgians) because of their national patrons in

Three QuesTions wiTh TRICIA STARKS author of Cigarettes and Soviets

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

When I went to the Soviet Union in 1990, people advised me to take condoms and cigarettes for trade. Both were worth more than the ruble and neither was made in good supply. Not only did I gift cigarettes, but I also inhaled them with aban don. Tobacco became my companion through the dismal, twilight of a dying regime played out across the long, dark Leningrad winter. After I returned home and began to cough up blood, I quit. Only later did I realize how lucky I was to shed my habit so easily. My return left me with no addiction to tobacco, but an obsession with life

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

I am so heartened by the changes I am witnessing in the field— the influx of new scholars, with fresh ideas and an interesting in decolonizing the field, broadening interpretations, and centering new voices. My wish is more for the reception of the field and its research. I wish that governments and the policy community would incorporate these newer perspectives in their work to have more nuanced and better responses to events today.

in Russia and the Soviet Union that continues to drive my research.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I began researching this book when I was writing my dissertation. I just didn’t know it. Curious about the occasional reference to anti-smoking work in the early Soviet period, I didn’t realize that would be my next project, and an obsession for the next several decades.

“Tobacco became my companion through the dismal, twilight of a dying regime played out across the long, dark Leningrad winter.”

an inTerview wiTh Carolyn EiChnEr, auThor of Feminism’s empire, hosTed by JonaThan hall

The Cornell University Press Podcast

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Carolyn Eichner, author of Feminism’s Empire. Carolyn teaches history and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She is the author of Surmounting the Barricades, and the Paris Commune. Carolyn shared with us her re search documenting the major role that feminism played in the develop ment of 19th century French anti-imperialism, the important role that race played in feminist thought and activism of the time, and some of the most memorable stories of the five prominent French feminists she profiles in a new book. Hello Carolyn, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Jonathan. Thank you. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Well, we’re glad to be talking to you about your new book Feminism’s Empire that just came out. And before we start, I guess as an introduc tion, I’d love to hear you read the passage that starts chapter two.

All right. Crossing the Rocky Mountains Olympe Audouard reported in 1871. Quote, “one finds oneself in Utah, a state colonized by the followers of Brigham Young Frenchman, unhappily for French women also sup port polygamy. For those tempted to join the Latter Day Saints in order to benefit from this institution, I give a little charitable advice. in Salt Lake City, a man must feed all of the women he marries. wives have the right of divorce, but the husband does not. He must give his name and bread to all of his children. Frenchmen, so accustomed to taking pleasures, without any inconveniences, would undoubtedly miss the Napoleonic Code, which grants men complete impunity for all their bad passions.”

JonaThan

carolyn JonaThan carolyn carolyn

That was great. That was so funny and spot on too. So tell me, you know, this is just going to segue to the feminists that you cover in your book, tell us how this project came about, tell us the backstory of this project.

Okay, so my first book, Surmounting the Barricades, Women in the Paris Commune, looked at a feminists and feminism and feminist socialisms during the 1871, Paris Commune, which was a really tremendously influential revolutionary civil war in France. And doing that book, I was really looking at questions of gender and class. And so in, you know, as I was working in this project, especially as I was finishing it up, and I was thinking, What about race? What about imperialism? Because these were questions that were becoming increasingly important in the latter half of the 19th century in France. And so I was thinking about what about feminists engaging with Empire. And there has been scholarship

JonaThan

on this in the British context for a few decades, but there was virtually none. When I started this project, and when I finished this project, and not that much more, but um, so I was looking then, for the first few feminist, to engage with empire to go into empire, not just to even think about it, but to go into empire either physically, which was the case with four of these women or literarily, and with her imagination, which is one of them, Léonie Rouzade. And I was interested both in their ideologies, and their embodied experiences. So what you know what that meant, what the experience is of traveling into empire, and not just the French empire, but the imperial the larger imperial world, which would include like the Metropole, Turkey, of Russia, but Imperial and impure realizing contexts. And so I found these five women from ranging from around the 1860s into the end of the century, but by the end of the century, there’s much more of this. And they fall and this was kind of a lucky thing for me, they fall on an ideological range from left to right in terms of different kinds of feminism’s. And this is something really important to me, in my, in my work, and including in my first book, Surmounting the Barricades, is about the multiplicities of feminism’s that existed in France in the 19th century. Oftentimes, if I’m speaking to someone and I say something about feminism in 19th century France, they’re so sur prised and it’s like, no, there were many kinds of feminism and many conflicting types...the intersecting types. So these five women fall on a range from on the far left the revolutionary anarchist feminist, Louise Michel, to on the far right, which is really a center-right...it’s a relative thing...Olympe Audouard, who was a loyalist, but also had, like, had Re publican ideas and idea the like for the Republic, the Republic of France, not the United States idea of Republicanism. So, you know, much more conservative with the others falling along that range as more Republican socialist feminists who were not revolutionary, but advocated legislative change and move towards socialism, and pull a man who’s this sort of a second to the left, which, who was a revolutionary socialist feminist. And so and then later, as the project developed, I started to focus on oth er themes, you know, kind of emerged from the sources emerged from looking at their writings and writings about them. And that’s when really this question of pro- versus anti-imperialism emerged. And also the fig ure of the Jew and anti-Semitism. And this is not something I intended to write about going into it. But it really emerged from the sources be cause they spoke. They use this idea of this figure of the Jews so often for political reasons. And then questions of law, intimacies, education, translation, and morality and linguistics are all really significant themes that emerged as I said the project.

Wow. So it’s fascinating to hear, you know, there’s left-wing, right-wing feminism and, but all of them all of these feminism’s playing a major role in developing this 19th century French anti-imperialism. But this an ti-imperialism is a complicated mix, there’s, there’s there’s a lot of contra dictions, it’s very complex. Tell us the nuanced view from your research.

JonaThan

Okay, so all of the feminists were opposed to existing imperial programs that just saw the imperialism as it existed, they all thought it was ex ploitive, and wrong. And, you know, essentially, for all of them, there was a moral question about, you know, the rights of state doing this to another state or group or community. But at the same time, they all to varying degrees, and really different degrees, saw in imperialism, poten tial forum to bring about change and to bring about even progressive change, especially through a kind of a feminist imperialism. And so, only two of the feminists were self identified anti-imperialists. And that’s Louise Michel and Paule Mink, and especially Louise Michel, who was really vociferously about us. The Parliament was pretty vociferous about it too. And and Michelle, thought that a little Western education could be beneficial for helping indigenous peoples develop and evolve. And for her, it was very specifically the Kanak people in New Caledonia, which was a French prison colony to which she was exiled after the 1871 Paris Commune that I mentioned earlier. So I mean, she’s so anti-imperialist and yet, she while at the same time, she talks about learning from the connections like Western education, and she also referred to them as childlike, and occasionally savage, but compared to pretty much everyone else. In her era, she saw them as people and as people with a culture and a culture with value and language. And, and so from my perspective, it was virtually impossible or if not impossible, for, for someone, even with the most progressive values and ideas and the most openness to actually fully escape the ideas, all of the ideas of the era, especially the these are rooted in race and ideas of civilization. She didn’t think that white people were superior, but she thought that they hit advanced more rapidly. And that and this is she’s not alone in that. But she puts a lot of value in the in the in the Kanak and yet she still is infantilizing towards them and and so basically, what I come to argue is that the the binary between anti-imperi alist and pro imperialist of this period is impossible. There is no no clear binary, that every one is falling on a range because people cannot extract themselves from their time period. One of my pet peeves is when people say that someone is ahead of their time, you can’t be ahead of your time, your of your time, you may think more openly or more progressively than other people in your time. But everyone is up their time. And and that sort of became very starkly clear and this project.

Interesting, that’s tough to be able to, knowing what we know now, to be able to look back and be sympathetic with viess that today we would we would be horrified by but at the time, as you were saying at that time. You know, Michel was super progressive!

And this is a historian, it’s vital to not put our contemporary standards and understandings onto people in the past, because they they do not have the benefit of, of what we think of what our understandings are. I mean, you can certainly label things racism, anti -semitism, misogyny, absolutely. And even with feminism is the word feminism didn’t come into use until the 1880s. And I explained this in the book and I explained

JonaThan

carolyn

carolyn

this and anytime I’ve used feminism in this way that I it’s not an anach ronistic, it’s labeling something that had no label, but it’s it is consis tent with these ideas of gender equity, and in efforts to end a kind of a gender hierarchy and sexist and misogynist practices and structures. So thing that I found really interesting is that the contemporary Kanak in New Caledonia, today, see Louise Michel, in an extremely positive light, is it, they are able to recognize that the derogatory term she used towards them where she was a product of her time, but was so different in the way that she regarded them and one of the key things was when she was in she and 4500 other Communards, the revolutionaries of the Paris Com mune were deported to New Caledonia to the prison colony after this rev olutionary civil war. And while they were there in 1878, the Kanak rose up against the French, and they had risen up against the French a number of times before and after, and she was the only Communard to consis tently side with the Kanak. The other Communards, many of them even fought on the side of the French and the French, at the end of the Paris Commune 72 Day conflict, the French army slaughtered about 15,000 Persians in the streets of Paris during a week. So, the antipathy towards this government was intense, but when it came down to it, when the Kanak people who are, they’re Melanesian, they’re the south, the south ern South Pacific, and so they’re black. And so the French considered them like Sub-Saharan Africans to be the lowest of their colonized peo ple. So when it came down to it, the other commune are prisoners sided with whiteness, and not with another oppressed group. And while some of them had some sympathy, Michel was the only one who consistently sided with the cannot. And this is something that that contemporary can not really value and recognize.

It lasts through history. That’s, yeah, that’s nice. So we’ve heard a little bit about Michel, tell us some other memorable stories of the other fem inists that you featured in this book.

Okay, um, well, Olympe Audouard, she’s the most conservative of them. The one that the the quote, I read at the beginning, she, so she traveled to Russia to Egypt, she was in Jerusalem. She was in Turkey, she was in the kingdom of the Mormons, as she termed it, as she crossed the United States. And so she was there right after the end of slavery in the right after the Civil War, and speaking to people, if she’s in trouble to the American South, but she spoke to people about it, including some formerly enslaved people. And she was extremely interested in law. And with the exception of Louise Michel, the other feminists were quite interested in law, and Paule Mink was also not as interested because of the revolutionary politics that, you know, thought the whole system had to go and didn’t have this kind of value in legal structures. But But for the other three, they really did. And they saw law as a way of really understanding a society and trying to change the law as a way of bringing emancipation So Audouard always, she would study the law of a place before she went to it. And so she saw anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. And

JonaThan carolyn

so when she was writing about enslaved women, in one thing she and all these other feminists did was to compare what the legal situation and social situation was for women in different places in France. So when she saw what she believed that white men and black women could not even have sex, let alone be married, she thought that this protected the bodily protected black women from white men. And so when comparing the sit uation of enslaved black women, and married white French women, she said that in some ways, enslaved black women had had it better, because she spoke about that, you know, in the evening, after working in the fields, or in the house, they could go to their heart and have privacy and time to themselves. And that they could, that they, the one thing that they had was the right to say no to sex, and that French, married women did not have their right there’s no concept of marital rape and the Napoleonic Code that men were men, a man had, by law, access to his wife’s body. And so she thought, because the law said that white women, white men and black women could not have sex, that’s this meant that black women are not sexually exploited. So this sort of extraordinary misunderstanding was really, really profound. She also had a really idealized view of the United States in general, and this fit into it. And so this idealized view of the US and kind of an overemphasis on the word of the law, and a misun derstanding of it really shaped her misunderstanding of that context. So for Hubertine Auclert, especially, she’s was the next farthest right though she’s, she’s a socialist, she’s a Republican socialist, she believes in the vote, she is the motor of the French women’s suffrage movement, which was miniscule in the later 19th century, compared to the US or England, she had money and intense drive. And she started a newspaper called La Citroën, which is the woman citizen. And the main goal was women’s suffrage. But she also was really interested in the situation of women around the world, and also in imperialism. And she started editing and writing for this newspaper, and funding it when she lived in France. And then, a few years later, her partner who she did not want to legally marry for a number of reasons, because of the the mainly, she didn’t want to be under the Napoleonic codes, the way that you know, wives were basically lost all of their freedoms, and on how she was also opposed to taking a pa tronage. She was an advocate of women maintaining their birth names. And so but ultimately, her partner was the being sent to Algeria for to was posted there, he was a lawyer, and, and he was he had tuberculosis, and he was dying. And so she, she married him and went to Algeria, and then became even more interested in questions of imperialism. And so she, so the newspaper really, really reflected that. And she had a kind of a core group of male feminists and female feminists writing for this newspaper. And so this is this was a 10-year project that she really kept going.

Very cool. Very cool.

Yeah. And then moving on to Léonie Rouzade. And she’s the one and her politics are very similar to Auclert’s, Republican socialist feminist. And Rouzade is the one who did not physically go into empire, but literarily,

JonaThan

carolyn

and creatively did and she was a novelist, and she wrote kind of fantasy fiction. She’s actually some science fiction aficionados now look back at her as a science fiction writer because she wrote a number of kinds of fu turistic stories. And the one that I’m interested in is called the Le monde renversé (The World Turned Upside Down), in which a European a beau tiful young European woman is basically captured by pirates at sea and taken to an unnamed sultanate as a prisoner. And it’s clear this place is Muslim. And she gets there and she is able through her intelligence and beauty and you know, while to take over, and she takes over the society, and she flips the gender hierarchy, thus the world the or the world turned upside down. And she does it in a way like, like completely so that men have all the disempowerment that women in France is she’s using this as an example to show the, the situation in France and and that women have all the power and people are, you know, going nuts because the the men are like, This is absurd. How could this be and she’s making this point and then you know, and then ultimately she developed develops, she’s kind of lays out the plans for this to become a democratic republic. And with fit that where 50% of the legislature will be women and 50% of the legislature will be men, which foreshadows the French, the 2002, French law parité, wher which where the goal ultimately is a 50 5050 split in the legislature. And, and then she dramatically kills herself with the heir apparent to the throne. So to get rid of him and to get rid of the the non Democratic leader and then leaves this country as a true democratic republic.

Nice, nice.

It really is. It’s really very, I mean, and this is, this is 1870. She is a, I believe she’s the first leftist the first socialists to really write about impe rialism. Man or woman, and maybe if she’s, she’s doing this, you know, through the this fictional story, but she’s her interest in this is really cut ting edge.

And then we can move to Paule Mink, and she’s a revolutionary social ist feminist second from the left, so to speak. And she, she is she was involved in the Paris Commune. She’s very well known in France in the 1870s. And 80s. As a revolutionary socialist, she is flamboyant speaker, a speaker very committed. And when I was doing research on her, for my first book, there was a year long gap in the archives there was in the mid 1880s, it was like there was because the the parent of the French police followed her issues, threatening dangerous character. And they followed her every day of her life, from the time that she came back from exile after the commune until her death. At the turn of the century, there was a gap and it was ultimately retracted, contracted down and figured out that she was in Algeria for a year. So she went to Algeria on a anti imperialist anti-military, anti-clerical propaganda tour. And she was there for a year. And as she went from, from city to city newspapers would announce her arrival, there are some accounts of her of her talks and the way that Eu

JonaThan

carolyn

carolyn

JonaThan

ropeans and Algerians came to them. But then there was I found a book published by missionaries, a couple of missionaries, who, in their sort of story of their experience, their spoke of their how horrified they were that this terrible, cangerous woman was also there, and they apologize to the readers for even mentioning her, and how she was basically spoiling their potential converts by saying all of these negative things about religion, and it was a pretty impressive document, showing how afraid they were of her influence. And you know what that influence was, and so it’s pret ty, it’s extremely interesting to me that this kind of had disappeared from the historical record, given how significant it was, and how it shaped her subsequent politics.

Interesting. Do you know if she was followed by the Algerian police or the you know, the French authorities in Algeria? I assume?

That’s, that’s a great question. And I hadn’t found any evidence of that. But I it is actually possible that she was and I just didn’t find the evidence. That’s a great question.

JonaThan

Wow. Yeah, a revolutionary socialist, as you’re saying, you know, she’s a rabble rouser and, but also, you know, raising consciousness as well.

Exactly, exactly. That was it. That was her goal to you know, to go into talk about the ways in which imperialism was exploitative the ways in which I mean her her anti-clericalism was from her teens and this was pretty central thing to a lot of the French left. Um, in the period after 1848, a number of things changed. And, but she extended it to any kind of orga nized religion, you know, as did Louise Michel that they were just really opposed to any organized religion. So she was anti-clerical in a broader sense to an audience of mixed of Muslims and Christians and probably Jews. Also, I don’t really know much about the composition of the au dience besides audiences besides that they were in European attire and Algerian attire with papers describe them.

JonaThan

carolyn carolyn carolyn

JonaThan

Nice, nice. Wow. Well, these are great stories and I know that there’s many, many more fleshed out in your new book, Feminism’s Empire It’s just out now available on our website and all bookstores around the world. It was a pleasure talking with you, Carolyn.

It was a pleasure talking with you, Jonathan.

Thank you so much, you take care. That was Carolyn Eichner, author of Feminism’s Empire

THE EXCERPT

Introduction DISPLACED IN WAR AND PEACE

Aleksandra Mikhaleva returned to her parents in Kursk in September 1945. The last time she had seen them was in 1942, when she was just eighteen years old. German forces had deported Mikhaleva, her cousin Galina, and dozens of other teenagers from Kursk to the Third Reich. These young people were to be forced laborers who would produce arms for Germany’s strug gle against the Soviet Union. For three years Mikhaleva toiled for meager rations, scavenging and working odd jobs for Germans to get extra food. She also found boyfriends among relatively privileged non-Soviet forced laborers from Poland, the Czech lands, and Italy, who helped her with gifts of food and clothes. Liberation by American forces in April 1945 was a joyous moment. Mikhal eva spent two months in a scenic German town under Allied rule with her Ital ian boyfriend, Ugo. She briefly considered marriage to him but knew she could not live without her family in Kursk. Her journey back to the USSR lasted an other two months and was filled with new dangers: the search for transport and shelter, sexual predation by Red Army soldiers, and verification (so-called fil tration) by Iosif Stalin’s secret police. Despite the adversity she faced during her return, Mikhaleva arrived at her home safely. She was one of 5.4 million return ees, a figure that included people displaced within Soviet borders, former pris oners of war returning from abroad, and former Eastern Workers like Mikhaleva. Like most returnees, she was not sent to the Gulag by the secret police. Her re union with her family did not end her troubles, though. Constant suspicion from neighbors and Soviet authorities cost her friends and jobs. Her war time tribu lations were over, but the ordeal of return had only begun.1

This book explores the lives of people like Mikhaleva. They were more than seven million civilian forced laborers and POWs deported to work for the Ger mans and their allies (table I.1). In Nazi Germany they were Eastern Workers (Os tarbeiter) and POWs. In postwar Europe they were displaced persons. Those who returned to the Soviet Union became repatriates (repatrianty). Those who refused to come to the USSR became nonreturners in Allied-occupied Europe. Many of these Soviet-claimed people had lived in the country only from 1939, when the USSR annexed the western areas of contemporary Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and the three Baltic republics. Soviet accounts put the number of nonreturners at 450,000, but they were possibly more numerous.2 Forced labor, displacement, and

tABle i.1 Repatriation Administration assessment of dislocation of Soviet displaced persons, December 1, 1946 CAtegorY nUmBer*

1. Registered as taken from the USSR 6,834,708 Civilians 4,829,060 Former POWs** 2,005,648

2. Found after liberation 5,715,162 Civilians 3,709,514 Former POWs 2,005,648

3. Returned to Soviet control 5,415,925 Civilians 3,582,358 Former POWs 1,833,567

4. Sent to next disposition*** 5,382,990 Civilians 3,551,324 Former POWs 1,831,666

5. In occupied areas (“former front”) 32,935 Civilians 31,034 Former POWs 1,901

6. Subject to repatriation (i.e., nonreturners) 299,237 Civilians 127,156 Former POWs 172,081

7. Presumed dead (i.e., missing) 1,119,546

Source: GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 235, ll. 21–22.

*Totals include so- called internally displaced people, those who were deported within Soviet borders, and those who lived beyond Soviet borders.

**Former POWs registered as taken from the USSR include only those prisoners registered as alive after liberation and do not include the significant number of POWs who died during the war.

***The designation in the original document is “sent to place of residence,” which is inaccurate. This category includes people who passed through filtration, regardless of whether they faced repression, were sent to the army or labor battalions, were sent to exile, or went to their prewar residences.

repatriation all entailed deprivation and peril. Yet the period in Europe was also a moment of new experiences. For many it was the first time they had lived outside of Stalin’s rule, albeit as oppressed people in Adolf Hitler’s forced labor empire. After the USSR’s victory over Germany, Stalinist leaders were determined to return them to the motherland physically and spiritually.

Repatriation became a shameful chapter in the history of the USSR that raised uncomfortable questions about the Soviet experience of World War II. How had the Soviet Union allowed so many of its people to be taken as forced laborers and POWs? Was it only force that brought people to Germany? Through intimida tion and arrest, Stalin’s regime suppressed repatriates’ story of the war. In the West, Soviet repatriation became known as a notorious moment of Allied com plicity with Stalin’s regime. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, as victory over Germany neared, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Iosif Stalin agreed to the compulsory repatriation of all Allied citizens. The Allies would transfer millions of liberated civilians and former POWs back to the USSR. The decision became a source of controversy in the Cold War, when commentators presumed that the returnees went against their will to their arrest and perhaps execution.3 The loudest critic, Nikolai Tolstoy, scion of the Russian noble family in emigration, lost a libel suit and was ordered to pay 1.5 million British pounds for accusations he made against a politician who had participated in the decision to repatriate.4 During the peak of anticommunism in the Thatcherite 1980s, Britain’s Parliament authorized a monument to the “countless innocent men, women, and children from the Soviet Union and other East European states who were impris oned and died at the hands of Communist governments after being repatriated” (figure I.1). Despite the outcry over repatriation in the West, what happened after return to the USSR was largely unknown, obscured by the Iron Curtain.

Popular and scholarly notions of repression after repatriation have persisted, but works based on declassified post-Soviet archives have contained revelations about this story. On the eve of the USSR’s collapse, the historian Viktor Zemskov published evidence showing that far from all repatriates faced arrest at the time of their filtration. Among the 4.2 million returnees arriving from beyond Soviet bor ders, the secret police arrested 6.5  percent (table I.2). Stalin’s regime pressed ap proximately 35  percent of returnees into ser vice in the army or labor battalions, and, as this book suggests, 1 to 2 percent of repatriates faced arrest after filtration as well.5 Arrest was hardly a guarantee, and more than half simply went home, but these homebound returnees also faced discrimination. Pavel Polian’s mammoth Victims of Two Dictatorships followed Soviet people to Germany and back to con demn Stalin’s regime as using discriminatory and exploitative practices that mir rored those Nazi Germany had used against Eastern Workers.6 Other scholars

F

have presented more moderate findings than Polian, using regional state archives to reveal the connections and tensions between the Soviet state’s goals to root out wartime traitors and its aim to reintegrate returnees.7

The work of Polian and others owed much to increased German interest in the history of POWs and forced laborers during World War II. Many of these

ig U re i.1. Twelve Responses to Tragedy, London, Angela Conner, 1986. Photograph by the author.

tABle i.2

Dislocation

of Soviet displaced persons returning from outside Soviet borders, March 1, 1946

CAtegorY CiviliAnS % militArY % totAl %

Sent to place of residence (to the USSR)*

2,146,126 80.68 281,780 18.30 2,427,906 57.81

Conscripted in army 141,962 5.34 659,190 42.82 801,152 19.08 Labor battalions 263,647 9.91 344,448 22.37 608,095 14.48

Sent to the NKVD (“special contingent”) 46,740 1.76 226,127 14.69 272,867 6.50

Located in the collecting points and working in Soviet Military units abroad

61,538 2.31 27,930 1.81 89,468 2.13

Total 2,660,013 1,539,475 4,199,488

Source: Viktor Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie sovetskikh peremeshchennykh lits v SSSR. 1944–1952 gg. (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 2016), 127.

*Includes groups like ethnic Germans, whom Soviet authorities subsequently sent to exile.

works, like Christian Streit’s monograph on Soviet POWs and Ulrich Herbert’s on foreign laborers, focused on German responsibility for war time atrocities and exploitation.8 In the 1990s, debates in Germany over the state’s culpability for war time forced labor culminated in compensation for the survivors and moti vated a new focus on understanding their experience through oral history.9 A related historiography grew in the wake of international trials of former Soviet POWs like John Demjanjuk, who worked in German death camps. Scholars took advantage of the declassification of war crimes investigations in the USSR and Germany to consider the motivations of Soviet people who collaborated and their complicity in Nazi genocide.10

This book uses new archival evidence released in the 2010s in Russia and Ukraine to validate these findings and move beyond them. I use these materials, especially secret police investigations of repatriates from Ukraine, to employ a cast of figures to humanize the experience of forced labor and repatriation.11 Bio graphical depth provides a fresh understanding of war time displacement and its aftermath. The writing about Soviet forced laborers and repatriates has mostly adopted the perspective of the state—how Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union at tempted to control and exploit migrants and laborers. Insofar as it has been a so cial history, it has been the history of state-society relations, with most of the agency resting in officialdom. The war and the subsequent occupations, however, marked a chaotic period when states, stretching their resources to the limits, competed to mobilize contested populations. The end of the war in 1945 resulted in a vacuum of state control across Europe. The tumultuous postwar situation allowed individuals and groups to cultivate new identities—or to exclude others

from adopting them—according to notions of national belonging, wartime guilt and victimhood, and anticommunism.

The first theme of Return to the Motherland connects Soviet displacement to the history of Eu rope’s war and postwar, in which violence and turmoil created fluid identities and, at times, agency in society.12 Although this argument ap pears throughout the book, it emerges most strongly in the first five chapters, covering the period of World War II and its immediate aftermath. As forced la borers in the Third Reich, Eastern Workers faced the worst conditions of any group outside of concentration and death camps. Uprooted from their homes, they forged new communities in the barracks and among people from their home regions. Gender defined this experience in impor tant ways. Eastern Worker women typically received better treatment than men, and far better than Soviet POWs. Women were the objects of sexual coercion by Germans and foreign workers from Western Europe, but their recourse to sexual barter—the trade of sexual attention for goods or favors—si multa neously increased the danger to them while providing opportunities to improve their situation.13

Men, especially POWs, and a smaller number of women became targets for recruitment for formal ser vice in pro-German military formations and as camp personnel. Some became death camp guards, the people directly responsible for mass murder in the Holocaust. Before casting judgment on these men and others, though, it is critical to remember that Soviet prisoners faced brutal conditions in POW camps. Collaboration probably saved many from death by starvation— the fate of no fewer than 2.6 million of their comrades.14 A minority may have seen collaboration with Hitler’s regime as a path to oppose Stalinism.15 At the same time, as this book shows, some who collaborated in pro- German units si multa neously resisted their German superiors.

Those writing about collaboration have wrestled with morally charged ques tions: Were these people criminals who deserved righteous judgment and often received it at the hands of Stalin’s police? Or were they victims of the war, forced to cooperate with Nazi Germany against their will?16 This book avoids a categorical verdict but instead views these cases as an opportunity to explore wartime agency.17 Insofar as individual cases demand an assessment, it is necessary to con sider the range of action a person had, their intentions, and the impact of their deeds. In general, the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas’s arguments about agency in civil war fit Soviet collaboration well: people confronted with conflicting powers tend to do what is necessary to ensure survival and material comfort re gardless of individual ideological preferences.18 The most obvious pattern that emerges from the lives of Soviet-born people in Germany is that the demands and privations of war gave advantages—from food that allowed them to survive to po sitions of relative comfort and privilege—to people with a range of attributes: spe

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own domain—not only in wartime occupation, but also as an integral part of their em pires. As a borderland of both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the city became a battleground of revolutionary politics, radical upheaval, and extended encounters between the two regimes and their more or less willing representatives. This book is about how Königsberg became Kaliningrad—how modern Europe’s two most violent revolutionary re gimes battled over one city and the people who lived there. It offers a microcosm of the Nazi-Soviet conflict in the decade surrounding the Second World War. It explores how two states sought to refashion the same city and reveals how local inhabitants became proponents of radi cal transformation, perpetrators of exclusionary violence, beneficiaries of social advancement, and victims of oppression. The book focuses especially on the period from 1944 to 1948, when Germans and Soviets lived and died together, first under Nazi and then under Soviet rule, as they tried to make sense of the war that had drawn them together.

Königsberg, a port city on the Baltic Sea, was founded in the thir teenth century by the Teutonic Knights and grew to be the easternmost major city in the German lands, a vibrant trading port and cultural

capital of the German Enlightenment. After the First World War, the city and the surrounding territory of East Prussia became “orphans of Versailles,” cut off from the mainland of the Reich by the Polish Cor ridor, a twenty-to-seventy-mile strip of land designed to grant the new Polish state access to the Baltic Sea.1 East Prussia became an exclave: a symbol of the “severed body” of the Reich. Trapped behind the Cor ridor, with its inhabitants fearing invasion by hostile neighbors or the infiltration of Bolshevik communism, Königsberg became a breeding ground for radical German nationalism. By 1933, East Prussia became the territory with the highest Nazi vote and a stage for local National Socialist leaders to carry out their plans for German national renewal.2 During the Second World War, East Prussia became an epicenter for the apocalyptic encounter between two opposing ideologies, states, armies, and peoples. The region played an outsized role in the war as a launch ing point for Germany’s genocidal campaigns in the East, and Königs berg’s Nazi leaders enriched themselves by incorporating large swaths of neighboring Polish territory into East Prussia and dominating the Nazi civilian administration of German-occupied Soviet Ukraine.3 East Prussia was also the place where the war first returned to German soil. The Soviet invasion of East Prussia in the spring of 1945 began one of the largest offensives of the Second World War, triggered one of the greatest civilian exoduses in human history, and produced the most violent encounter between the Soviet army and a civilian population, as invading soldiers looted and pillaged the towns, raped tens of thou sands of German women, and executed German men in bloody revenge for the years of Nazi occupation.4

At the end of the war, East Prussia was divided into three parts, as the Allies resolved to strip the far-flung province from the postwar Ger man state. Königsberg and the surrounding countryside of northern East Prussia were granted to the Soviet Union as part of the agreement between Stalin and the Western Allies over postwar borders in Eastern Europe, and the remainder of the province was divided between Poland and Lithuania.5 The territory and its capital were renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 and were eventually incorporated as the westernmost oblast (district) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Kalin ingrad was among the most devastated territories in Eastern Europe, nearly razed by British bombing raids in August 1944, a scorched-earth Wehrmacht retreat and months-long futile defense, and the exception ally violent and prolonged Red Army occupation in the spring of 1945.6 The remaining population, between 150,000 and 200,000 German

civilians in the spring of 1945, were primarily women, children, and the elderly, as most able-bodied German men had been killed, interned, or deported as forced laborers.7 They were joined by Red Army soldiers and officers who served in the initial military administration and over 10,000 former Soviet forced laborers.8 Over the course of 1945–46, So viet citizens, primarily from Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, arrived to rebuild the region’s decimated industry and agriculture.9 For over three years, German and Soviet civilians, sworn wartime enemies and chosen peoples of mutually antagonistic regimes, lived together in the ruins of Kaliningrad.10 Soviet officials, unsure of what to do with the fascist population they had inherited, planned alternately for the Sovi etization of their German neighbors (with antifascist clubs, collective work brigades, and the promise of full citizenship) and their eradica tion (through starvation wages, imprisonment, execution, and increas ing marginalization). By the time the Soviets expelled the remaining Germans in late 1948, nearly half of the original population had died.11

The impulse to compare the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union is almost as old as the regimes themselves. Hannah Arendt, who had grown up in Königsberg and had first witnessed there the rise of radical revolutionary movements in the wake of the First World War, argued that the two states constituted novel forms of government—not just authoritarian dictatorships, but totalitarian regimes that systemati cally terrorized their populations to subject them to complete domina tion.12 During the Cold War, Western politicians used the specter of totalitarianism to cast Soviet communism as fundamentally opposed to the moral values of the liberal-democratic “free world.” A subsequent generation of historians rejected the totalitarianism model as grossly oversimplified and sought to analyze the Third Reich and the Soviet Union through more historically informed structural comparisons.13 Such works compared various claims, practices, and institutions of the two societies and revealed that there were indeed striking similari ties: both were authoritarian dictatorships built around the cult of the leader; both used an ideological party apparatus to dominate the activi ties of the state; both fabricated emergencies to break down the rule of law and resorted to terror in the name of security against perceived enemies, internal and external; both relied on imprisonment and en campment to eliminate political, social, and racial or ethnic enemies.14

But along with similarities, these comparative histories revealed some fundamental differences. Hitler, the undisciplined firebrand artist, left much of the implementation of his vision to his loyal

henchmen, whereas Stalin, the didactic bureaucrat, spent long hours at his desk micromanaging fine points of policy.15 There were crucial differences in all spheres, including government structures, approaches to the economy, attitudes toward culture and religious expression, and conceptions of the place of women and the family in revolutionary soci ety.16 In both cases, “totalitarian control” over society was a mirage—the two regimes suffered from widespread bureaucratic inefficiency, and it was often this political disorder, rather than the leader’s total grip on power, that escalated violence over time.17 But for all the nuance and insight of these comparative histories, such rule and system compari sons often replicated the top-down, theory-driven framework of the old totalitarian paradigm. They also tended to present the two regimes in an analytical bubble, presenting the two as deviations from normal European democratic development.18

The Third Reich and the Soviet Union were radically transformative and violent revolutionary regimes. The idea of revolution conjures up images of the masses rising up to overthrow tyrannical rule, but revolu tions are also about long-term transformative projects carried out by the state. Both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union aimed to solve the seemingly intractable problems of their age—the tensions of urbaniza tion, industrialization, widening economic inequality, nationalism, and the inefficiencies of parliamentary democracy—by envisioning the total refashioning of politics, the economy, society, culture, and geopolitical space. Both aspired to transcend the ills of modernity and bring about the end of history; both aimed to end pettiness and competition by eliminating the middleman between the individual and the state. Both rejected free-market capitalism and turned from bourgeois individual ism and the divisiveness of parliamentary politics toward dictatorships that promised to carry out the will of the people, foster collective unity, and heal the wounds of war losses and social divisions.

The Soviet Union has long been considered a revolutionary state. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, proclaiming themselves to be a revolutionary vanguard, fused Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism with the nineteenthcentury Russian intelligentsia’s fervent mission to liberate the empire’s peasants and workers from oppression. Even as the shape of the revolu tion changed once the Bolsheviks assumed power, the transformative urge remained—the drive to civilize and uplift the former victims of oppression from backwardness and to reshape the natural and built environments in service of the future communist society.19

Nazi Germany, by contrast, has been more often presented as an authoritarian conservative regime. Yet the Nazis also had radically transformative revolutionary visions for the state, politics, economy, and society.20 Although they rejected Marx’s logic of class struggle, they were decidedly anticapitalist and sought to break the German economy free from international finance capital. Although they embraced eth nic nationalism and biological racism to maintain the presumed Ger man racial purity, Nazi eugenic programs attempted to improve the German race through euthanasia and scientific breeding, and social programs sought to reshape German people into conscious National Socialists who would build a new collective culture around the val ues of the state. Their most ambitious transformative project was the genocidal impulse to reconfigure the multiethnic “land and peoples” of Eastern Europe into “spaces and races” under German control.21 When it came to the eastern territories of Prussia, the Nazi movement had an especially strong focus on revolution. East Prussia’s Nazis, in par ticular, as self-proclaimed “conservative revolutionaries” and “Prussian socialists,” shared with the Bolsheviks a strong emphasis on overcom ing economic backwardness without succumbing to the social ills and economic inequality of capitalism.22

Both states were revolutionary responses to the tensions of the “age of the masses”; however, the representatives of these two revolutions felt that what fundamentally divided them were their radically different terms for inclusion into the new societies they were forging. The Nazis sought to unify the German people through blood, excluding all those they deemed to be racial outsiders. The Soviets, rejecting such biologi cal racism on principle, sought to unify the entire world around the value of labor, excluding all those they considered actual or potential exploiters. The two regimes ultimately emphasized these distinctions, and by the mid-1930s, they became so preoccupied with the danger presented by the other that each increasingly defined its revolutions in opposition to its nemesis. Nazism pitted itself against Bolshevism, and Soviet communism defined itself against European fascism, in general, and the Third Reich, in particular.23

At early points in their revolutionary trajectories, the two regimes saw themselves as a rejection of the legacies of European civilization. During the war, however, both changed their tune, each side claiming to be defending European civilization against the other. The Nazis, down playing attacks against Western capitalism, emphasized Germany’s

Three QuesTions wiTh RAYMOND WIGGERS author of Chicago in Stone and Clay

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

My favorite anecdote is a series of anecdotes. All involve how my curiosity about what Chicago buildings are made of often provoked the curiosity of strangers I met while doing my research. When I was photographing or scrutinizing the stone or brick of some architectural landmark, people walk ing by would stop and ask me what I was doing. As a result, I had wonderful conversations with office workers, attorneys, joggers, concierges, and even one bomb-sniffing police dog and his human companion. Chicagoans sometimes have the reputation for being gruff and dour, but I found

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

I hope my book will help Chicago’s natural-history enthusiasts, architecture buffs, and visitors better understand just how much this great city can reveal, not only about its own history and geol ogy, but also about our planet and its past more generally. And I want to change the perception that science, art, and civil engineering are separate worlds of perception. In fact they flow into and inform each other. They can be fully appreciated only when they’re set in this larger integrative context.

“As a result, I had wonderful conversations with office workers, attorneys, joggers, concierges, and even one bomb-sniffing police dog and his human companion.”

them to be just the opposite.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I wish I’d understood earlier just how significant— both architecturally and geologically—each of Chicago’s neighborhoods really are. Fortunately, I quickly came to understand just how much there is to discover in communities as far-flung and culturally diverse as Pullman, Humboldt Park, Englewood, and Edgewater. This city really is a world in its own right, and one a naturalist could spend a hundred lifetimes exploring.

2023 AHA Collection Price List

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Balbale The Wolf King

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Balint Destination Elsewhere $44.95 $26.97

Blumin The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn $31.95 $19.17

Boczar An American Brothel $39.95 $23.97

Bouchard Negotiation and Resistance $19.95 $11.97

Brady Chained to History $39.95 $23.97

Branson Scientific Americans $39.95 $23.97

Bray The Anarchist Inquisition $36.95 $22.17

Brocades Zaalberg Empire's Violent End $44.95 $26.97

Carroll The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 $49.95 $29.97

Carruthers Flooded Pasts $59.95 $35.97

Ceen Roma Traversata $39.95 $23.97

Chiles New York History, Volume 103, Number 1 $20.00 $12.00

Colbourn Euromissiles $36.95 $22.17

Congdon George Kennan for Our Time $19.95 $11.97

Dabrowski The Carpathians $34.95 $20.97

Delury Agents of Subversion $34.95 $20.97

Doder The Inconvenient Journalist $27.95 $16.77

Dorn For the Common Good $24.95 $14.97

Effros Incidental Archaeologists $34.95 $20.97

Eichner Feminism's Empire $32.95 $19.77

Exeler Ghosts of War $35.95 $21.57

Fagel Protagonists of War $39.00 $23.40

Fujiwara From Country to Nation $54.95 $32.97

Galway The Emergence of Global Maoism $54.95 $32.97

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Green Separating Church and State $42.95 $25.77

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Maar Freeze! $51.95 $31.17

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Maskiell Bound by Bondage $39.95 $23.97 McCurdy Quarters $28.95 $17.37

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Meerwijk

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Mo Touring China $29.95 $17.97

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Pogue The Nature of the Religious Right $42.95 $25.77

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