A BIOGRAPHY OF NO PLACE. From ethnic borderland to Soviet heartland. Kate Brown 308pp. Harvard University Press. Pounds 29.95 ($45). - 0 674 01168 6.
HARVEST OF DESPAIR. Karel C. Berkhoff. Life and death in Ukraine under Nazi rule. 463pp. Harvard University Press. Pounds 19.95 (U$29.95). - 0 674 01313 1.
Kate Brown's Ukraine is a historical black hole, absorbing the worst horrors of Europe's twentieth century, while itself remaining obscure to the point of invisibility. Her "no place", west-central Ukraine, was a vulnerable frontier of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s, and a central part of the Nazis' Reichskommissariat Ukraine in the early 1940s. Though it is today a part of independent Ukraine, an eastern neighbour of the European Union, its history remains little known. Brown has heard something in the silence, and gone to see for herself. From the very obscurity of "no place", she maintains, emerges the opportunity for general truths. "No place" is an "epicentre of destruction", an extreme case of the failure of modernizing projects that reveals their general character. "No place" can stand for every place.
Or so one is tempted to believe, as one is drawn in by the fine prose of A Biography of No Place, and the gravity of the events it describes. Brown's appealing account takes its shape from the lives of three outsiders who arrived in "no place" in the hopes of civilizing it: Jan Saulewicz, a Polish organizer of a Polish autonomous region in Soviet Ukraine; Vsevolod Balyts'kyi, the Ukrainian police commander who reversed such experiments in national autonomy; and Karl Stummp, commander of a German unit that searched for Volksdeutsch after the German invasion of 1941. Each attempt seems to fail, and each failure seems to invite a new deluge of destructive state power.
The work addresses most directly the consequences of Stalinism. In Brown's telling, west-central Ukraine was a crucial part of the escalation of the Stalinist violence in the 1930s. Events often seen in isolation collectivization in 1930, famine in 1933, ethnic cleansing in 1935-6, State terror in 1937-8 are here united in a single narrative. In this last episode, more than 100,000 Soviet Poles (about half of them from Soviet Ukraine) were summarily executed. This was the bloodiest part of the terror, and until recently (the publication of The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin
(2001) was a turning point) the most poorly understood. Brown's is perhaps the most accessible account of these events.
Brown's vivid descriptions of investigations (the search for Polish names in telephone books) and death sentences (bound books of suspect profiles, condemned all at once) recall the modern literature of dystopia.
But was Stalinist repression truly "modernity" of an extreme variety? Brown treats deportation as ersatz progress, in which the forced removal of people substitutes for the voluntary movement of Western societies. She describes signed confessions as a victory of literate over oral culture. These insights would seem to suggest that Communism was, at least on its own terms, modernizing the country and building a State. Brown wavers between a desire to see Communism as full-blown modernity, and a wish to believe that Communism was meaningfully resisted in "no place".
