Archive for May, 2011
Czesław Miłosz relates the story of an independently wealthy Warsaw Jew named Felix, who had taken up residence in Vilnius’s Hotel Europa*. In 1939 Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had discovered just enough friendship for one another to partition Poland between them along the euphemistic “peace boundary” (or Molotov-Ribbentrop line), and Felix was now seemingly trapped in Vilnius within an enlarged Soviet Union. Moreover, in the summer of 1940 he was relieved of his moveable assets by a duplicitous lawyer acquaintance. However, Felix found a way out by Trans-Siberian rail across the continent-sized USSR to its Far-East border with Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This was even less feasible than it may sound, as the Soviets permitted such travel only to those with a Japanese visa – and by mid-1940 it was no longer possible to acquire such a visa legitimately.
However, in Vilnius lived a rabbi named Silberstein with preternatural gifts of prescience: while exit visas were still to be had, he had done the rounds of the overseas consulates and filled his passport with as wide an array of stamps as possible. There also existed in Vilnius at that time extremely gifted illustrators, graphic designers and printers. Rabbi Silberstein’s Japanese visa therefore served as a template and could be duplicated as needed but, as Miłosz writes, “it was marked by one defect: no one in the city knew the Japanese alphabet, and therefore could have guessed that each visa contained the name of its first owner. When the five-hundredth Silberstein passed over the Manchurian frontier, the Japanese began to worry…”
Whether this part of the story is apocryphal in whole or in part, Felix did escape to Shanghai and thence via Australia to USA, only to be killed in a motor vehicle accident in Hawaii.
It is also likely that the good rabbi’s original bona fide visa was one of those issued by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Vice-Consul in Kaunas in independent Lithuania, and one of the Righteous Among The Nations. His story can be read on Wikipedia.
*see the essay collection Proud To Be A Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory, pub Penguin, 2010.
In the 1881 census for England, a five year old girl named Flora is to be found residing with three sisters, her mother Sophia and her father, the curate, Samuel Dickson Sandes, at The Rectory in Monewden, Suffolk. The living for the rural parish of St Mary’s was valued at £265 in 1868. The National Archives’ handy currency converter tells us that this sum would be worth about £12,110 in today’s money – not much but then it was a small and obscure parish. By the time of the 1891 census, the family has moved a little cross-county to The Rectory in Marlesford.
At the next decennial census in 1901, the family is living in suburbia, at St Paul’s Road, Thornton Heath, Surrey. Rev Sandes, now 78, is recorded as “living on own means”, so one assumes that he has retired from the curacy of Anglican souls. Flora is still at home, a 25 year old spinster, described, like her sister Fanny, as a correspondent. In 1911, the most recent census of England & Wales currently publicly available, the family is still at St Paul’s Road. By this date the Rev Sandes, aged 88, is describing himself as a “retired parson and barrister”. He may have become curmudgeonly with age, or perhaps was registering a minor objection to the exclusion of women from the franchise (in tune with the “No Vote, No Census” protest): either way, the census return, which is neatly completed in most respects, records against the Ages of Females simply “full” against his daughter Flora and the other women in the house (excepting his wife Sophia, who is an acknowledged 78). The census enumerator, one William Warman, has pencilled in the remarks “will not give ages” and “refuses to give ages and any further information”, his irritation almost audible.
And as for Flora herself, the column Personal Occupation says: None. Yet five years later Flora Sandes was a Captain in the Serbian Army.
Flora volunteered for overseas service immediately upon the outbreak of WW1 in August 1914. She was rejected by the Volunteer Aid Detachment but got in to the American Mabel Grujić’s Red Cross Unit on a temporary three-month stint and headed to Serbia. She then returned home to fund-raise before returning in 1915 to join the Serbian Red Cross. She served in Niš, caught typhus in Valjevo, was attached to the Serbian Second Army, and worked as a medical orderly in Salonica and Monastir before making the transition from nurse to soldier. Commissioned as an army officer, she fought at Kajmakčalan before accompanying the retreating Serbs on their long winter march across Albania to safety in Corfu and Bizerte (Tunisia).
After the War, Flora Sandes lived in Yugoslavia and married a White Russian officer named Judenič (later imprisoned and killed by the Nazis), before returning to England in her sixties.
Flora Sandes was one of hundreds of British women who volunteered and served as nurses in Serbia during WW1, at places such as Kragujevac, Mladenovac and Valjevo. Some served under the aegis of the Red Cross, others as part of the independent Scottish Women’s Hospital for Foreign Service. Most came from relatively comfortable and privileged backgrounds and the contrast between their early life experiences and those of the war must have been acute and unimaginable.
For those researching an ancestor or family member who was one of those women, there is a significant collection of records in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London.
The former Russian Empire gubernia or province of Volhynia, part of the region which Poles know as kresy, was divided at the Treaty of Riga in 1921. The western side was joined to newly re-independent Poland, while the eastern side became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Towns such as Lutsk and Rivno became officially Polish Łuck and Równe; Zwiahel and Żytomierz became formally Ukrainian Novohrad-Volynskyi and Zhytomyr. In the Imperial Russian era, Poles had made up a minority of the overall population across Volhynia but held disproportionate influence, usually forming the local elite in both town and country areas.
The situation on the ground was not so straightforward, however. Volhynia was an ethnically mixed region, home to Germans (for whom it was Wolhynien), Jews (who called it Vohlin in Yiddish), Poles (who called it Wołyń) and Ukrainians (Volyn), with a corresponding mix of religions. Even this does no justice to the granular complexity. For example, Roman Catholics, unless they were German, were usually regarded as Poles, even if they spoke only Ukrainian; but it was a moot point as to whether they were Poles who had lost their mother tongue over time, or Ukrainians whose ancestors had converted due to Polish landowner or clerical pressure. Moreover, while the population may not have been especially literate, many peasants and other villagers were bilingual.
Furthermore, there was little national consciousness. Just as in neighbouring Polissia immediately to the north, also split after WW1 between Poland and, in this case, the Belarusian SSR, the peasantry identified themselves primarily by their religion or by their social estate as peasants: many, when questioned by early Soviet ethnographers, stated that they were “locals” and spoke the “local” language.
Of course the Soviets, having gained formal control over Ukraine at the Treaty of Riga, sought to modernise and develop what was still a largely traditional society, religious, insular and self-sufficient. The Soviets wanted the backward periphery to acquire the new forward-looking Soviet consciousness. One way in which the USSR of the 1920s and early 1930s tried to achieve this was through recognising and encouraging national minorities. This involved tidying up the particularities of “local” cultures – for example, Poles had to be Poles and, if they were not sufficiently Polish, they must be polonised, meaning that Ukrainian-speaking Roman Catholics were classified as Poles and encouraged to learn proper Polish. Each national minority was acknowledged and appropriate local administrative structures were put in place to develop and of course to try to Sovietise each national group. Within Zhytomyr okrug, a special Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region (Marchlewszczyzna in Polish) was set up in 1925, centred around the Polish village of Dołbysz (re-named Marchlevsk after the Polish activist Marchlewski), during this phase of Soviet enthusiasm for the minorities. However, this was not to last.
The Soviets found that the local population in Marchlevsk and elsewhere in Volhynia was not compliant. The locals were averse to collectivisation, they failed to fulfil command economy quotas, they persisted in their old ways of life, preferring to remain upon their scattered homesteads and in their small hamlets rather than congregate in efficient centralised nuclear villages and towns. The experiment in encouraging national minorities backfired, not on the Soviets but on the minorities themselves. Increasingly they began to be seen as wreckers, saboteurs, conspirators, collaborators, spies; not good Soviet citizens but consciously or subconsciously working for capitalist Poland or Nazi Germany.
Volhynia didn’t really have any fat exploitative kulaks to purge but, nevertheless, in 1930 some 15,000 “kulaks” and “enemy Poles” were identified. In 1935 the Marchlevsk polraion was dismantled. Some 35,000 Poles were deported to eastern Ukraine, and 4,000 volunteer eastern Ukrainian families brought in to take their place. In the following year, 1936, there were mass summary deportations of approximately 70,000 Poles and Germans from Volhynia to Kazakhstan. In 1937/38 an estimated 56,000 Poles and German were arrested, charged and then imprisoned or deported.
The deportees became so-called special settlers in the remote semi-arid northern reaches of Kazakhstan. By 1945 the number of national minority special settlers in Kazakhstan had reached 900,000, including minorities from Karelia, the Caucasus and the Russian Far East as well as from the kresy. They were expected to cultivate the previously uncultivated steppe grazing lands of the Kazakh nomads (who themselves had been deprived of their traditional manner of life, forced into collectivised or urban existences). The new special settlements each comprised a founder population of 1,500 people, and initially were simply numbered rather than named. Later, the settlers named them, often reflecting their places of origin (such as Podilske or Volynka). The conditions imposed on the special settlements were not entirely punitive but there were restrictions upon travel and a requirement to register monthly with officers of the NKVD, the state apparatus which managed them. Special settlers were not in receipt of internal passports – from 1932, when they were re-introduced by the Soviets, until reforms in 1956 during the post-Stalin thaw, these were granted only to Soviet citizens in towns or working on state farms, not to peasants or collective farm workers.
The national minorities were encouraged to assimilate and to become Homo sovieticus. Mixed marriages were commonplace. Native language fluency diminished at the second or third generation. A new Soviet identity was forged. Today one must expect there to be a resurgence of interest in roots, in ancestry and in the historic homeland, among these peoples who were made to colonise Kazakhstan, just as, in an entirely different context, the growth of identity politics since the 1970s in the melting pot of USA has led to an increased desire to understand one’s family history and the specificity of its immigrant experience.
*This blog owes much to Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place (Harvard University Press, 2004), to which the reader is referred for more on Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region and also on its German equivalent, the Pulin German Autonomous Region.
“Until not long ago, family histories were something to hide… Everyone had scars on their family tree, a repressed father, an exiled aunt, someone with a prison record. It was better not to pass that information on to the children. So now people don’t know anything about where they come from or who their family members were. They don’t even know recent family history… On my father’s side, I know seven generations back, but on my mother’s side I couldn’t even give you the name of my grandparents.”
Gennadii Romanovich, archivist at State Archives of Zhytomyr Province, Ukraine (quoted in Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place, Harvard University Press, 2004)
Who was recruited?
In the early 18th century, the expectation was that one man would be enlisted into the army from every 20 families within a community each year. All social estates, high and low, were liable for military service. However, over the decades many privileges and exemptions were granted so that by 1858 an estimated 20% of the otherwise eligible male population of the Empire was in fact exempt – this included landowners, members of merchant guilds, those with a higher education and the like, but also all those living in specific regions of empire such as Bessarabia. The burden of “other ranks” military service therefore fell heaviest on the peasantry and the urban poor.
How were recruits selected?
In rural Russia, the peasant community itself – the mir – was responsible for putting forward a list of candidates. While the mir or commune probably knew who among its members was eligible for the draft, the undertaking of the Russian censuses, producing the periodic but somewhat irregular revision lists (now of great value to family historians with roots in the former Russian Empire), formalised the process by identifying and recording the population. Unlike censuses in Britain, for example, which were used solely for social planning, the Russian revisions were used explicitly for taxation and conscription purposes.
Each year, the commune produced a shortlist of potential recruits which was then submitted to an army induction centre set up temporarily for the purpose in the nearest town in the volost or uezd (or district). The requisite number of men would then be conscripted into the army, while those not selected could expect to be put forward again the following year. Of course, some men were rejected by the army for not meeting its physical criteria and would unlikely to be conscripted in any year. Others, such as those with disabilities, were deselected by the commune itself and never made the list. To a certain extent, both the commune and the army were sensitive to the fact that each conscript was a lost worker and a lost taxpayer, with the peasants knowing that someone else would have to make up the deficit in labour and money. This meant that there was usually a conscious effort to spare only sons, or only working males in families. In a household of many brothers or sons, it was almost inevitable that one or more would be drafted. However, it was also possible for wealthier farmers to use influence or to purchase a surrogate from a different community to take the place of their brother or son who had been placed on the shortlist. Finally, commune members perceived to be unproductive, or exhibiting anti-social behaviour or committing petty crimes, would be sure to top the shortlist.
While therefore the commune exercised a measure of influence over who was recruited and who not, it is easy to see that the whole process of conscription was a source of stress and tension within each community. This was particularly the case as army service was neither short nor sweet…
How long did a soldier serve in the army?
- Before 1793, a soldier could expect to serve in the Russian army for life.
- From 1793, this was reduced to 25 years.
- From 1834, military service was reduced to 20 years.
- From 1874, the term of service was reduced to 18 years, of which initially the first 5 years were to be spent in the regular standing army and the subsequent 13 years in the reserves. However, later this was changed to 3 years in the army and 15 years in the reserves.
What happened to a new recruit?
Enlistment into the army was a transformational experience. Not only would the recruit very probably leave the vicinity of his native village for the first time but he would be unlikely to return for many years, if at all. Instead, he would be swallowed up into the army corpus, be billeted upon unwilling householders and endure all the hardships of army life which were severe even during peacetime.
However, something else rather peculiar immediately happened to a new recruit. His legal status in Russian society changed. That change was a form of emancipation, albeit deferred until such time as he was discharged from the army. Upon joining the army he ceased to be exposed to any of his former tax or labour obligations, whether to state, church or landowner. Effectively, he was now a free man, just a free man conscripted into the unfreedom of army life.
What about soldiers’ wives and children?
If a recruit was already married, with or without children, the usual scenario was long term separation. There was no easy mechanism for wives and children to go upon the strength, although some managed to continue to cohabit with their men when they were stationed in garrisons or fortresses. Instead, the recruit’s family was subject to great uncertainty and potential hardship. Wives, too, became legally free when the soldier attested. This meant also that they were entitled to an internal passport granting freedom of movement and employment. However, a disproportionate number of wives either drifted into prostitution in towns, or had illegitimate children; some remarried bigamously.
Soldiers’ children were a subcategory in the system of social estates. Sons, including until 1856 the illegitimate children of soldiers’ wives (where the soldier was not himself the father), were registered and expected to enter military service when they came of age.
In Imperial Russia, the status of women and children was determined by that of their husbands or fathers. This is why a soldier’s wife became free when he was recruited. However, this also meant that a soldier’s widow who remarried could become a serf or a peasant owing normal dues once again, and similarly a soldier’s daughter who married a serf lost her free status and became herself enserfed (until emancipation).
Unmarried recruits were of course strongly discouraged from marrying.
What happened to a soldier once discharged from the army?
If a soldier survived the hardships of a full term in the army, he would be discharged to enjoy for the first time and as best he could the freedoms he had acquired when he was recruited. Now he had theoretical freedom of movement; he was exempt from taxation; he did not have to labour for the landlord. However, at the same time he received only a small lump sum and had no immediate means of support. Therefore he was also free to become jobless and hungry and poor. In these circumstances, it was not unusual for a discharged soldier to have to live upon charity, or to become a hawker or a casual labourer, or to struggle to ply a trade. Other old soldiers entered state service as messengers or guards, or in the police or fire services. Additionally, until reforms in 1867, significant numbers of retired soldiers were settled in so-called veterans’ towns or on virgin lands owned or claimed by the state, often in frontier situations.
Others where they could returned to their native village to farm the family plot if it still existed, or to buy a new plot if they had the money. In fact, the 1867 returns henceforth required discharged soldiers to return to the community from which they had been recruited, at least partly to prevent the social problems associated with ex-soldiers which were a growing cause for concern in cities and towns.