Response#9: A Biography of No Place by Kate Brown

Part 1: Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place is a book about the multiethnic border zone between the Soviet Union and Poland known as the kresy. The Soviets first ran into the problem of detailing the region on a census because mixed ethnic groups placed people into multiple categories. First the Soviets catered to each nationality, promoting each one’s culture and identity separately. However as the nationality policies failed, Soviet officials turned instead to force and coercion. With the war fears at an all time high, nationality was use to justified deportation and arrests; formerly promoted nationalities became pariahs.

Part 2: Once again we see an image of a weak Soviet state incapable of keeping control over its territory. The shocking levels of incompetency clash with the totalitarian image of Soviet Russia. However, by thinking about the conditions present at the time it is easy to see why the Soviets had difficulties with the region. The border area between Poland and Russia was filled with forests and muddy roads. With transportation slowed down to a crawl during the muddy seasons, Soviet administrative buildings became like outposts in the wilderness, cut off from the rest of the Soviet bureaucracy. Communist party officials were basically left to fend for themselves if anything went wrong. Thus, the rioting following the first collectivization campaign demonstrated how weak the state was. Officials had to run or hide as peasant mobs re-requisitioned state grain and livestock. In such as an unforgiving and rural terrain, the optimistic dreams of collectivization seemed doomed to fail. Yet the biggest impediment to Soviet efforts was the party’s inability to understand people.

The Soviets imagined shaping the kresy along the modern ideals of an organized state. Thus they did what a state does first when acquiring new territory, a census and a land survey. Unfortunately for them the people of the kresy did not easily fall into neat checkboxes on a list. The multilingual and mix nature of the kresy meant that the categories of people diverged radically throughout the area. Soviet officials simplified the lists to a specific number of categories that they recognized. From there they planned to embark on a huge nationality scheme to promote loyalty to the Soviet Union. The problem was that promoting a myriad of different cultures for different people always requires translators, something society always lacks in multicultural areas (Just look at NYC). Even worse for the Soviets was that the area was composed almost entirely of peasants, the most “backward” of people. Typical socialist high modernism would seek to transform these primitive people into the new proletariat. However, failed earlier attempts by the Socialist Revolutionaries prior to the revolution demonstrate that such efforts are futile. Problem being that the Soviets could not connect with the population on a spiritual or even cultural level. Soviets were too focused on class to see the human connection past that.

People of the high modernist state with all their technology and statistics could not understand why their plans continually fell short of expectations. So strong was their conviction that they believed spies and saboteurs were responsible for state failures, despite the area being composed mostly of poor peasants. The solution was to deport “dangerous” nationalities that were likely to harbor antirevolutionary forces. The targets were the very same nationalities that they were previously they were trying to promote, Poles and Germans. In the end, the Soviets traded in the pen for the sword.