Category Archives: labor

by | 18 August 2026 · 5:01 pm

Overseas Filipino Workers

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 157-158, 164:

Economic and social failures combine with demography to create the issue for which Filipino people are world-renowned – migration. Of all the populous nations of the world which rely heavily on migrant remittances – Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico, etc. – none equals the Philippines either in its contribution to GDP (9 per cent) or in the diversity of its migrants or the range of the locations where they make their livings. Even the range of their occupations may come as a surprise to those overseas who may tend to identify them with specific occupations such as domestic helper or seafarer.

There are indeed plenty – 20–25 per cent each – in both of those categories but at least until the pandemic, the world had witnessed nearly five decades of steady expansion in both numbers and locations. By 2019, the total employed overseas and on ships had reached about 2 million. In addition, there has been a steady stream of permanent migrants, mostly to the US and Canada but also to Australia, and, more recently, Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy and other European countries. The US community has been growing steadily for decades and now totals some 4.1 million, roughly half migrants and half locally born. There are about 1.6 million in California though at 13 per cent, Hawaii has the highest percentage of the state population, partly reflecting the migration of agricultural workers in the 1930s (see Chapter 3). The established communities of settled migrants in high income countries have been as important a source of remittances as those of the OFWs on contracts. Permanent migrants also on average have higher qualifications than OFWs. Although their links to the motherland may gradually weaken, higher incomes ensure continuing large scale financial support.

…

As for permanent migrants, the relative ease with which they have melded into their new nation works against developing strong community organizations. They are for example far less visible than Chinese in California, though their numbers are only a little less. The organizations that they create among themselves are mostly based on province or other local identity not on the notion of Filipino. Further complicating their self-identity is the reluctance of many to be identified as Asian, which many, at least in the US, associate with being Chinese, Korean or Japanese. Culturally, many feel closer to Latinos or South Pacific Islanders because of Church and language links. That most permanent migrants have gone to English-speaking countries has had an impact back home. It helps sustain some of the links and cultural affinities created by 350 years of Spanish and American rule. Awareness of common linguistic and cultural bonds to Malay neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia, is weak despite the legacy of Rizal and of Macapagal’s Maphilindo proposal.

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Filed under economics, education, labor, language, migration, nationalism, Philippines, religion

by | 12 August 2026 · 2:13 pm

Philippines Under Japan

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 51-54:

At least initially, few of the elite saw reason to confront the Japanese. A majority of senators joined the Executive Commission; others kept a low profile. A few were enthusiastic, including Laurel who admired Japanese order and devotion to the nation. Laurel could reasonably claim that some cooperation with Japan was necessary for the good of the people. Accepting the Presidency of the supposedly independent republic, however, was another matter given that the elected president and vice-president had a government-in-exile in Washington.

Another key collaborator was Benigno Aquino, a lawyer and landowner from Tarlac, who had been Secretary for Agriculture under Quezon. The Japanese made Aquino head of a new appointed assembly, known by the acronym Kalibapi (the Association for Service to the New Philippines). Also banging the drum for Japan was the MaKaPili, the Patriotic Society of Filipinos, led by former Sakdal leader Benigno Ramos. Former revolutionary general, Artemio Ricarte, who had always refused allegiance to the US, returned in late 1944 after thirty years in exile in Hong Kong and then Japan. Even Emilio Aguinaldo resurfaced, urging close cooperation with Japan.

Spanish citizens, who were still numerous and influential as priests or from the old elite, were divided. Many had supported the Falangists during the Spanish Civil War and were thus prone to be sympathetic to Japan, but Andres Soriano of the giant A. Soriano Corporation stuck with Quezon as a member of his cabinet even though he had been the local leader of Spain’s Falangists. Others played an equivocal role. Manuel Roxas, who Quezon originally favoured as vice-president over Osmena, was captured by the Japanese and became an adviser to Laurel. The Japanese hoped to make him president in 1943 rather than Laurel but he declined. Late in the war Roxas may have provided intelligence to the Americans.

Whatever its notion of Asia for Asians, the occupation had several problems which fed on each other. The first was the arrogant and often brutal behaviour of the Japanese military for whom easy-going Filipino ways were alien. There was also a demand for comfort women for the soldiery, for which there was little local consent. Second was the quest for raw materials by Japan, combined with the inevitable shortages of a wartime economy shorn of foreign trade. The Japanese needed local resources to feed a 400,000-man army in the Philippines. Food shortages and unemployment were caused by Japanese demands for materials and the collapse of export industries which had been focused on the US market. A third factor was that antipathy towards the Americans was found more among the elite than lower down the social order where the US was associated with progress and aspiration. In exile, Quezon and Osmena provided a focus for resistance, there was pride in the Filipinos’ sacrifices in Bataan, and before long an expectation that the Americans would return.

Guerrilla activity developed, in many cases led by former soldiers, and provided some support brought by American submarines. As only Americans could defeat the Japanese, many Filipinos now longed for their return, past sins forgiven. They provided information and help to the Americans while appearing to be loyal to the puppet government. As resistance grew, so did reprisals and fear of the kempeitai, the Japanese military police. Disorder reigned too with some supposedly anti-Japanese activity becoming a cover for settling feuds between rival families. The resistance spawned many heroes but also, in the aftermath, many bogus claims to it. The most significant resistance, at least in the longer term, was provided by the Hukbong Bayan Laban na Hapon – the People’s Anti-Japanese Army – or Huks in Central Luzon, heart of rice and sugar cultivation, and of big haciendas. Feudal and paternalist tenancy systems, which at least provided stability for families, had been significantly replaced by sharecropping and small farmers, reduced by debt, into becoming wage labourers. As anti-landlord as it was anti-Japanese, some of the movement’s leaders drew inspiration from Mao Zedong. The movement was headed by Luis Taruc, a protégé of early nationalist and convert to Marxism, Pedro Abad Santos, brother of the Chief Justice. Taruc, who had been a full-time peasant organizer for the Socialist, then Communist, Party since 1934, was the leader of several thousand members from the sharecropper and landless workers, mainly in Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga and Tarlac. The Huks were, however, predominantly a peasant organization born of injustice more than ideology.

…

Post-war tales of Japanese atrocities and Filipino suffering during the occupation helped provide a focus for the nation in the early years of independence, which finally occurred on 4 July 1946. Yet not far under the surface of this massaged history was the reality that the elite recognized. There was little instinct for retribution against collaborators. Aquino was charged with treason but released on bail and died the following year. Laurel was likewise charged with treason but never tried. In 1948, as President, Manuel Roxas, whose own cooperation with the Japanese remained questionable, declared an amnesty. Only five years later, Laurel stood unsuccessfully for president as the Nacionalista Party candidate winning 37 per cent of the vote. The victor was Elpidio Quirino who, despite the deaths of many family members in the Battle of Manila, pardoned the Japanese convicted of war crimes. Vargas went from the puppet republic’s ambassador in Tokyo in 1945 to head of the National Planning Commission in 1946.

Whatever mixture of class solidarity, family relationships, Catholic notions of forgiveness or common nationalism, the quick post-war healing was in sharp contrast to experiences in many other countries occupied during the 1937–45 wars. There were also cross currents. Lingering Spanish and Church sentiments were in favour of the Spanish dictator, General Franco, as a bastion against atheistic communism and hence highly critical of the anti-clericalism of leftist nationalists. Those with Chinese affiliation, on the other hand, were influenced against Japan by its invasion of China. Nationalists came in different colours with some interested in sustaining the status quo but without the Americans. Only those on the far left were consistent in being anti both Japanese and US imperialism and even they were sometimes divided between middle class Marxist revolutionaries and rice farmers fighting landlords.

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Filed under Japan, Spain, military, U.S., war, labor, nationalism, Philippines, economics, food

by | 10 August 2026 · 4:59 am

Manila in Global Trade, 1600s

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 25-26:

Despite the best intentions of some Spanish officials and priests, the overall low standard of Spanish rule was exacerbated by the conflicts of interest between State, clerics and encomenderos. This was acknowledged at the time by officials on the ground.

…

Manila was a different story. As the main focus of Spanish rule and source, it soon acquired walls, stone buildings and a cathedral. The city flourished from the galleon trade established very soon after the conquest. Ships from Mexico brought silver, while traders arrived from China and Japan, and a few from Melaka and elsewhere, to sell luxury goods, spices etc. for silver. The trade was immensely profitable for the Spanish merchants in Manila and the growth of the city attracted thousands of Chinese workers in addition to traders. Chinese generally became known as ‘sangleys’ – derived from the Hokkien word for trader, a name still reflected today in Sangley Point, the little peninsula jutting out into Manila Bay and the location of a small US-built airport. Some Augustinian friars learned Hokkien and converted some Chinese to Christianity.

By 1603, there were far more Chinese – about 30,000 – than Spanish. Tensions rose to the point that the Chinese, fearing they were about to be forced back to China, revolted and had initial success. However, they were inadequately equipped and had to retreat to a camp in Batangas where they succumbed to a force of some 200 Spanish, 300 Japanese and 1,500 locally recruited men. The Chinese had appealed to their emperor for help but Ming China was unsympathetic to those who betrayed their country by settling abroad. About 20,000 Chinese were massacred. The emperor threatened the Spanish with retribution but did nothing. Trade was interrupted but only briefly.

Another impact observed by de Morga was the shortage of skilled manpower. Due to the influx of low-cost Chinese labour, the Indios had ‘forgotten husbandry, the rearing of fowls, flocks, cotton and weaving robes as they used to do in the time of their paganism and for a long time after the country had been conquered’.

The Chinese gradually returned to Manila so that they numbered 25,000 by 1636 but they were again the subject of killings in 1639 following a minor rebellion by Chinese relocated to the countryside outside Manila to grow rice. The Chinese and Spanish needed each other but the relationship was always uneasy due to Spanish (and some indigenous) fears of Chinese numbers. Although most were in Manila and major towns and dominated the retail trade and crafts, some did move to rural areas as petty traders and money lenders.

The galleon trade was very profitable for those involved in it and a right to space on one bound to Mexico one was highly valued. Two vessels a year usually made the journey – two out, two in. Losses at sea were quite small – twenty-six out of a total of 108 galleons over the 250 years. Most of these occurred in the vicinity of the archipelago, particularly the tricky passage from Manila to the open Pacific via the San Bernardino Strait between Luzon and Samar. Four vessels were seized by the English.

The flow of silver into China gave a major boost to its money supply and other trade, domestic and foreign. It is sometimes described as the first globalization, though in reality Manila was involved with little other than the galleon/China trade as trade with Europe via the Indian and Atlantic Oceans was controlled by others. Merchants from ports such as Melaka brought goods such as cottons, carpets and spices from India, to join the cargoes of Chinese and Japanese products, but Manila merchants did not go west. The galleons were the property of State which controlled access to space, which enriched officials. A committee headed by the governor and including the head of the audencia (supreme court) and representatives of the Church, city council and leading merchants allotted boletas, tickets providing a certain amount of cargo space on a galleon. These were not supposed to be traded but gradually the boletas became saleable to genuine merchants, at a price. By the eighteenth century, the system had become an income subsidy for a large part of the Spanish population, at the expense of the genuine merchants.

The galleon trade also existed within a bigger restrictive system which aimed to protect other production and trade interests of Spain and its American possessions. These necessarily were sometimes at odds with each other but in any case kept foreigners out of any non-Asian trade. Meanwhile, the Dutch and English grew fat on their Europe-Asia trade with which Spain could not compete effectively.

The galleons did little for the domestic Philippine economy or trade with other parts of Asia. Indeed, it took away the incentive for the local Spanish to develop the economy. There was little trans-Pacific export of local products. Over time some Filipinos settled in Mexico, having arrived as galleon crew.

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Filed under China, economics, labor, language, Mexico, migration, Philippines, religion, Spain

by | 27 July 2026 · 6:09 am

European Nationalist Revolts in 1905

This week’s edition of Culture.pl contains an article by Zachary Mazur written in 2022 that heralds his new book entitled To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe from Amsterdam University Press’s CEU Press imprint later in 2026. Here are excerpts from most of the text of the article, without illustrations.

For decades, the Revolution of 1905 has been tucked away in history books as a mere ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Soviet rise in 1917. But for the Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Ukrainians living under the Tsarist yoke, 1905 wasn’t a rehearsal for someone else’s drama – it was their own leading role. It was the moment the modern mass nation was born, an epoch-making explosion of culture and defiance that shattered imperial censorship and provided a blueprint for the independent states that would follow.

The catalyst: a war of hubris & machine guns

On the eve of the revolution, the Russian Empire was engaged in an embarrassing war with Imperial Japan. The two powers fought over control of northeast China (Manchuria) and the Korean peninsula. The Japanese, from the European perspective, were an upstart Asiatic power that had only recently emerged from isolation and the variable dark ages of feudalism. Fuelled by an unapologetic anti-Asian racism, most people expected that the tsar’s Russia would destroy the Japanese army in a matter of weeks when the war began.

Instead, Russian troops faced continuous setbacks. Japanese commanders used trenches and machine guns – new technologies of the day – to break the will of their opponents. On the seas, Japan’s gunships destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet, leading to an epic journey for the Baltic fleet around the horn of Africa, 18,000 nautical miles.

After the nearly 8-month ocean voyage, Russia’s sailors again faced a thrashing in May 1905. With two fleets destroyed and numerous losses on land, Russia admitted defeat in the summer. US President Theodore Roosevelt invited the sides to negotiate peace in New Hampshire at an American naval base and the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905.

On the home front, the people of the Russian Empire took the brunt of the war effort. Among the newly formed urban working classes, a concomitant economic slowdown put severe pressure on the people as they faced unemployment and hunger. Already in 1904, there were anti-war protests in Warsaw and in a few other cities around the Russian-controlled partition of the Polish lands.

The true beginning of the revolution, however, came when Russian subjects led by a charismatic young Orthodox priest tried to petition the tsar in January 1905. A crowd of calm marchers solemnly moved toward the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and despite the fact that the tsar was not even there, the guards panicked and opened fire on the people. The resulting mayhem and death became the rallying cry for radicals all over the empire. The tsar had tried to cultivate an image of a benevolent father figure, but after ‘Bloody Sunday’, even his most fervent supporters were disillusioned.

A hotbed of revolt: strikes & the October Manifesto

For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. The Polish part of the empire, that included the large cities Warsaw, Łódź, Radom, Kielce, Piotrków and Białystok, was the most industrialised region. As a result, it was poised to be a hotbed for revolutionary activity. Organisers went to work gathering support for strikes, and confrontations with police often turned violent. In Łódź, a huge centre for textile manufacturing, workers fought pitched battles on the streets with barricades and makeshift weapons.

General strikes, where whole industries stopped work, and especially striking railroad workers, forced the hand of the tsar. Finally, he had to give up some concessions to the protestors. In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. Though many of the protestors felt that this did not go far enough and continued their fight for further privileges, the so-called October Manifesto created an outpouring of publications, theatre and cultural life that the Russian Empire had never seen before.

Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian ‘heartland’ in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire.

The linguistic renaissance: breaking the imperial silence

Lithuanians gained the right to publish newspapers in the Latin alphabet as early as the spring of 1904, but the popular press exploded thanks to the Revolution of 1905. The proliferation of daily newspapers, such as the Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) signalled the beginning of a mass Lithuanian culture. The first great national assembly of Lithuanians took place in Vilnius, with 200 delegates, between 4 to 5 December 1905. All sections of society – from Belarus, East Prussia (where many Lithuania speakers lived as well) – took part.

They ended by demanding political autonomy for Lithuania, and to have their own provincial parliament with boundaries defined on ethnographic terms. Lithuanian scientific and artistic associations grew at the time, establishing the cultural arms of the Lithuanian national movement. These became vital just a few years later for the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state after World War I.

Yiddish too experienced a renaissance (or naissance) based on new-found freedoms in cities with large Jewish populations, such as Warsaw, Łódź and Vilnius. The tsarist authorities lifted bans on Yiddish printing and theatre in 1905, allowing for the creation of art and literature in a vernacular that practically all Jews used on a daily basis. Finally distinctly Jewish art could move to the public stage and reach audiences that had never experienced such forms of culture. The demand was clearly there, since four new theatres popped up in Warsaw almost immediately after the ban was lifted. In Mokotów, there was Bagatela, Elizeum on Karowa Street, Jardin d’Hiver on Chmielna and Muranower on Bonifraterska, all performing exclusively in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s play Scattered and Dispersed saw its debut at this time (directed by Mark Arnshteyn). Yiddish dailies also appeared, and their content shows the popularity of theatre at the time. Jardin d’Hiver was playing two shows per day, with the exception of Shabbat. In 1908, the dedicated journal Teater Velt (Theatre World) appeared. All this newfound energy for Yiddish culture caused a modernisation of the language and uniformity that did not exist before among the Jews of the Russian Empire. This emergence also allowed for literary theatre to grow. On top of that, American actors with new plays written in New York came over and were the most commercially successful pieces.

Shadows of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom

In the midst of the social upheaval and suffering, people looked for scapegoats to blame leading to one of the most bizarre episodes of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom. In the working class Warsaw neighbourhood of Wola (today the site of skyscrapers, giving it the nickname ‘Hong Kong’), a seedy underworld of pimps, prostitutes and the men who frequented these establishments operated with the approbation of the local police.

In the Russian Empire, the sex trade was officially regulated, requiring both brothels and individual prostitutes to register with the police. Pimps supported the Tsarist status quo rather than the revolutionaries, as they could turn a profit under the state’s protection. Consequently, the sex trade was seen as an extension of the Russian regime and its police – the same officers who beat protesters and fired into crowds. The violence, however chaotic, was a strike against the very infrastructure of Russian control.

A song from that time:

Oj, lumpy to szpiedzy, [Oh the pimps are spies]
Prowokatorzy; [Provocateurs]
Chodzą na ‘giełde’, podsłuchują [They go to the market, eavesdropping]
potem donoszą na policje [then they tell the police]

It’s unclear what exactly sparked the riots against the brothels, but at the end of May 1905, a series of events led workers to destroy dozens of brothels, leaving at least 15 people dead. They moved from one house to the next, destroying furniture, smashing mirrors, tearing up clothes and bedding.

In one bordello, the sex workers put up a fight. A prostitute grabbed a copper pipe and hit a rioter over the head with it. In response, someone stabbed her with a knife and she died on the spot. In another brothel, the pimps fled, leaving the girls alone. Frightened for their safety, they hid under beds and in closets. The rioters pulled them out and beat them. The women yelled hysterically, called them names and cried: ‘What do you want from us? What did we ever do to you?’

Although a majority of the pimps and prostitutes were Jewish, both Polish and Jewish workers gathered on the streets to exact vengeance. In this way, it was very different from anti-Jewish pogroms, many of which took place in the context of the revolution. Some historians see this event as a moral crusade, while others claim that the association of the pimps with the Russian police was the strongest motivator. There were also witnesses who claimed that competing pimps were the most virulent rioters, so some plain old business competition was at play too.

These events brought attention to problems with prostitution in the Polish lands, sparking some difficult public discussions about issues that were normally left undisturbed. It also inspired several poems, such as Leo Belmont’s Po Pogromie (After the Pogrom) and novels, mostly published in Yiddish.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, Japan, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, publishing, religion, Russia, Ukraine, war

by | 1 July 2026 · 12:33 am

Changing USSR Nationality Policy

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-21:

The USSR began its life with massive affirmative action for the non-Russian cultures outside the Russian Federation. But cultural Russification of the borderlands returned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as Lenin’s sole successor and began preparing the country for war. One reason for the change was industrialization, which, given Russian control of the all-Union party, came with the advance of Russian as the language of administration, science, and technology. Another reason was accommodation of the Russians as the largest nationality in the now Soviet empire, along with concern to integrate the non-Russian nationalities culturally so that they would not switch sides in the coming war.

In Ukraine, the largest non-Russian republic of the USSR, the change of nationality policy was signaled by show trials against the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The first such trial, which took place in 1929, was followed by an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres and the peasantry, which reached its peak during the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33. A number of key Ukrainian communists committed suicide, while others were dismissed from their positions and jailed. As many as four million people were starved to death as part of a concerted campaign to crush the peasant resistance to the collectivization and maximize grain delivery for Soviet industrialization. In the month leading up to the start of the famine, Stalin warned his associates that such measures were needed to prevent loss of control over Ukraine. The Holodomor turned Ukraine, previously known as the breadbasket of Europe, into a land devastated by famine.

World War II led to another shift in Moscow’s policy toward the nationalities. Although Russocentrism was not abandoned, more manifestations of Ukrainian and other non-Russian patriotism were allowed. The Soviet takeover of Poland’s eastern provinces following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was justified as liberation of fellow Ukrainians and Russians from Polish capitalist oppression. It was also celebrated in ethnic terms as the reunion of western Ukraine and western Belarus with the corresponding Soviet republics. The old imperial reunification paradigm was back, dressed this time in Ukrainian and Belarusian clothing. After Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, non-Russian nationalism was mobilized once again, especially in Ukraine, to encourage patriotic resistance to the German invasion. Once German forces occupied all of Ukraine with the assistance of their Romanian and Hungarian allies, Moscow did not mind promoting the Ukrainian language, culture, and history to mobilize resistance and inspire the loyalty of more than six million Ukrainians drafted into the Red Army. The Ukrainian card was also played at home and abroad to justify the military takeover and annexation of western Ukrainian lands ruled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the interwar period.

In 1914 the Russian army had captured the city of Lviv, then under Austrian rule, justifying it as liberation of fellow Russians—that was the tsarist authorities’ official term for the local population. As World War II drew to an end, the Soviets played not the Russian but the Ukrainian national card when they integrated Lviv into the Ukrainian SSR, although the city was largely Polish in ethnic composition, with Jews (largely exterminated during the Holocaust) as the second-largest ethnic group.

While the authorities were eager to exploit Ukrainian ethnicity to justify Soviet westward expansion, they did not welcome or tolerate every expression of Ukrainian patriotism and nationalism. The radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed in the western Ukrainian lands during the interwar period, was considered particularly dangerous. Its members were known to the Soviets as Banderites: their leader, Stepan Bandera, and some of his followers were imprisoned in German concentration camps after a failed attempt to declare an independent Ukrainian state in alliance with Germany and against the USSR in the summer of 1941. The Nazi occupiers, who regarded Slavs as subhuman, deported more than two million Ukrainians to Germany as slave laborers and persecuted Ukrainian patriots of every description.

The two branches of the OUN, one led by Bandera, the other by his less-known rival Andrii Melnyk, turned against the Germans by the end of 1941. In 1943 the Bandera faction assumed leadership of the 100,000-strong Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a guerrilla force that fought against the Polish Home Army and the Nazis and, later, against the Red Army for control of western Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalist insurgency was not completely crushed until the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin’s rule, earning the designation of the strongest and longest-lasting movement of resistance to the Soviets anywhere in east-central Europe.

The Soviets did their best to discredit the Ukrainian nationalists by condemning their early collaboration with the Germans and exposing the participation of some OUN members in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the German occupation of Ukraine. They also made major concessions to the Ukrainian language, which became dominant in western Ukrainian government institutions, replacing Polish. But the Sovietization of western Ukraine was carried out mainly by repression. Not only the captured fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army but also civilians suspected of helping the insurgents were resettled or deported en masse to gulag camps in the Russian SFSR, making Ukrainians the largest ethnic group of political prisoners in the Soviet Union—a phenomenon documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago.

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Filed under economics, food, Germany, labor, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 17 June 2026 · 8:59 am

Three Polities of Kyivan Rus’

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 83-86:

THE AUTHORS OF the Primary Chronicle (the laborious task of recording events and commenting on them passed from one generation of monks to another) had to reconcile three different historical identities in their narrative: the Rus’ identity of the Scandinavian rulers of Kyiv, the Slavic identity of the educated elites, and local tribal identity. While the Kyivan rulers and their subjects adopted the name Rus’, the Slavic identity associated with that name, not the Scandinavian one, became the basis of their self-identification. Most subjects of the Rurikids, who ruled their realm from the Slavic heartland, were Slavs. More importantly, the dissemination of Slavic identity beyond the Kyiv region was closely associated with the acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium and the introduction of Church Slavonic as the language of the liturgy, sermons, and intellectual discourse of Rus’. Christianity appeared in both the Slavic and non-Slavic parts of the Kyivan realm in the garb of Slavic languages and Slavic culture. The more Rus’ became Christian, the more it turned Slavic as well. The Kyivan chroniclers incorporated local history into the broader context of the development of the Balkan Slavs and, more broadly still, into the history of Byzantium and world Christendom.

On the local level, tribal identity gave way slowly but surely to identification with local principalities—the centers of military, political, and economic power associated with Kyiv. Chronicle references to the lands surrounding princely towns replaced references to indigenous tribes. Thus, the chronicler refers to the army that sacked Kyiv in 1169 as consisting of people from Smolensk instead of Radimichians, residents of Suzdal instead of Viatichians or Meria, and natives of Chernihiv instead of Siverians. There was a sense of the unity of all the lands under the rule of the Kyivan rulers, and despite conflicts and wars between Rurikid princes, the inhabitants of those lands were considered “ours,” as opposed to foreigners and pagans. The key issue was recognition of the authority of the Rus’ princes, and when some of the Turkic steppe nomads accepted that authority, they became referred to as “our pagans.”

The political and administrative unification of the diverse tribal territories entailed the standardization of their social structure. At its very top were the princes of the Rurikid dynasty, more specifically the descendants of Yaroslav the Wise. Under them were members of the princely retinue—originally Vikings but also increasing numbers of Slavs who merged with local tribal elites to form the aristocratic stratum called the boyars. They were warriors, but in times of peace they administered the realm. The boyars were the main landholding class, and depending on the principality, they had greater or lesser influence on the actions of the prince. Church hierarchs and their servants were also among the privileged.

The rest of the population paid taxes to the princes. The townspeople, who included merchants and artisans, had some political power that they exercised at town meetings, where they decided matters of local governance. Occasionally, as in Kyiv, or quite regularly, as in Novgorod, such meetings influenced the succession of local princes. The peasants, who accounted for most of the population, had no political power. They were divided into free peasants and semifree serfs. The latter could lose their freedom, usually because of debts, and reclaim it once they had paid their debts off or after a certain period. Then there were the slaves—warriors or peasants captured in the course of military campaigns. The enslavement of warriors could be temporary, but that of peasants was permanent.

…

The change in the geopolitical aims of the Kyivan princes, from Yaroslav the Wise to Andrei Bogoliubsky, reflects the reduction of their political loyalties from the entire realm of Kyivan Rus’ to a number of principalities defined by the term “Rus’ Land” and eventually to peripheral principalities that grew strong enough to rival Kyiv in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Historians look to those principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as a forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.

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Filed under Belarus, economics, labor, language, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Scandinavia, Ukraine

by | 10 June 2026 · 12:38 am

PCV Exit Interviews in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 239-241:

The COS [Close-of-Service] conference convened on a spring weekend at a campground that wealthy Russians used as vacation property. The Peace Corps staff had reserved us several cabins that overlooked the river separating Moldova and Ukraine. For the first time in two years, the entire group of remaining volunteers was in the same place at the same time. Our original class had dwindled from thirty-seven to twenty-two. The meetings were brief and confusing. Our boss, the Country Director, described how we should avoid areas like shopping malls and rock concerts when we returned to America; large groups of people would probably unnerve us. He read updates from the previous volunteers who had quit or been evacuated; Callie was teaching English in Turkey and Paul was completing his first year of law school in Cincinnati. They were happy. We listened less to their advice for readjustment, and more to where these people lived. America was a big place. Jesse would live in Minnesota, Colin in Virginia, Will in North Carolina. And Sadie would be in New Jersey. I wouldn’t be anywhere near those places. The medical officer asked that those of us who’d contracted ailments continue our medications when we returned home. Jesse—in direct relation to his refusal to ever seek medical treatment—was awarded recognition as the group’s healthiest volunteer over the two-year period. The safety officer asked that we not celebrate our final days in country with binge drinking; our final benefit package would be delayed if we were arrested and deported from the country at the last minute.

The lecture portion of the conference now concluded, the necessary advice for readjustment into American life dispensed, the Country Director congratulated us and excused us to our exit language interviews.

* * *

The Country Director’s secretary was the only one in the office who spoke Russian well enough to test Jesse and me. I waited outside as Jesse spoke with her for ten minutes. He came outside smiling and said, “Piece of cake.” The secretary had given him an advanced mark.

Inside the cabin, I found the secretary sitting on the bed, her feet not touching the floor. She pointed to a chair in the corner and asked me to sit. She asked me to spell my name and then we began. We talked about transportation using verbs of motion, of food preparation, of my likes and dislikes and specific events in the past and future. It took five minutes to finish her checklist of language proficiency.

“So,” said the secretary. “We have some time to kill. What shall we talk about?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s all the same to me.” The secretary giggled.

“Your accent is good. Your body language is good, also. Very Russian, it seems to me.”

I nodded, brushing aside the compliment.

“You live with Russians, I must guess. Is this true?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about them.”

“Not much to tell. Very good people. They treat me well.”

“Do you respect them?”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean by, ‘Of course?’”

We sat in silence for a moment as the secretary allowed me to compose my thoughts. My mind returned to my imagining Dima working across the border in Romania, taking orders in a language he hated. And in Bulgaria the women drank coffee on the street corners, I thought. Dima would never be happy anywhere else.

“I spend most of my time in family with the father, Dima. He’s a baker and enjoys working, perhaps not the amount that he must, but the work itself.”

I paused to see if the secretary understood me. She nodded encouragement and waved her hand in a rolling circle to keep me going.

“Like this there is happiness, which I respect. In Riscani, where we live, the streets are clean and pleasant; there is always someone to stop and chat with along the way on these roads. The purpose of life is open and understood, I think. Every day, life has a simple and direct purpose. Walk to work, don’t hurt anyone along the way, and get back home at night for a drink and a sleep.” The secretary nodded and then dismissed me from the cabin. She scored me advanced as well.

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by | 27 May 2026 · 2:34 am

Trekking Over Arctic Ice, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 245-247:

In high spirits, De Long and his men began their long march across the frozen ocean, inching toward the familiar world, or at least a place where other human beings might conceivably be found. Stretched out for miles across the ice, they resembled, said Melville, a straggle of “vagabond insects.” It was numbing, staggering work, and yet they were strangely happy—happy to be free of the confines of the ship, relieved to be moving again, eager to accept the bonds of their common struggle. They aimed for the middle of Russia and the Siberian Arctic coast, but in their minds they were heading home, to wives and mothers and girlfriends, to plump chickens and fresh garden vegetables, to soft beds and warm fires, to gossip and invention, and if not to glory, exactly, then to the cheers of an appreciative homeland.

De Long and Dunbar, equipped with field glasses and pocket prismatic compasses, clambered ahead of everyone else in the foggy distances to mark the way with black flags stuck in the ice. They called their path a “road,” but the route they staked was little more than a suggestion of lesser treachery, a devious course across ever-shifting mazes of fissures, hummocks, pressure ridges, and pools of shimmering meltwater. Which is to say, the captain and his ice pilot—whose earlier problem with snow blindness had cleared up—were merely going on their best hunches.

Keep to the road! they cried. Stay on the road! The men could only laugh at the absurdity of the word. As Danenhower put it, there was only “knee-deep snow” and “lumps of ice that would have taken a whole corps of engineers to level.” Yet they trudged on, sunburned and chapped-lipped, dressed in sour-smelling pelts, wearing slitted ice goggles, singing galley songs as they slogged over the impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge.

The June sun, whenever it burned through the fog, had a strange quality of penetrating intensity, as though it were training X-rays on the snow. The light revealed a dirty ice pack at times strewn with signs of life—crab claws, bear scat, mussel shells, bleached bones, goose quills, plant seeds, driftwood, ocean sponges. The gyre of the ocean and the churn of the ice had mixed everything up, old and new, animal and vegetable, into a kind of Arctic gumbo.

Dr. Ambler cared for the sick; Alexey and Aneguin tended to the dogs. But the others spent their days as draft animals, straining against their hemp ropes and canvas harnesses. They pulled more than eight tons of provisions and gear, on improvised sleds whose crosspieces had been fashioned from whiskey barrel staves and whose heavy oak runners were shod with smooth whalebone. In addition to the three battered boats, they hauled, among other things, medicine chests, ammunition, stew pots, cooking stoves, tent poles, oars, rifles, ship logs and diaries, canvas for sails, scientific instruments, the wooden dinghy, and two hundred gallons of stove alcohol.

As for food, they had inventoried, at the outset, 3,960 pounds of pemmican, 1,500 pounds of hardtack, thirty-two pounds of beef tongue, 150 pounds of Liebig’s beef extract, twelve and a half pounds of pigs’ feet, and substantial quantities of veal, ham, whiskey, brandy, chocolate, and tobacco. Every pound, every ounce, had been carefully weighed at the start, then just as carefully apportioned to the different sleds and crews so that everyone, aside from the sick, would pull an equal amount of weight.

There was far too much to haul in one trip, so they had to double back—and sometimes triple back—to bring up everything from the rear. This meant that for many of the haulers, each mile of forward progress actually represented a distance of five miles traversed. A full day of this Sisyphean business could mean twenty-five miles or more of ceaseless struggle. It would have constituted slave labor even on hard, dry ground, but this slob ice, with all its gaping holes and intervening sea-lanes, was the most trying terrain imaginable—as a landscape, said De Long, it was “terribly confused.”

The men often had to launch the boats, cross a narrow lead of water, and then hop right back out again to re-stow the boats on the sleds. Other times, they would use a large cake of floating ice as a ferry, employing grappling hooks and networks of ropes to tow it, and all their belongings, across the water to the icy shore beyond. The “road-building crew” would wield pickaxes to clear a smooth groove through encrusted ice, shave off the top of a high hummock, or fashion what De Long called a “causeway” or a “flying bridge” across emerald pools of meltwater.

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by | 19 May 2026 · 8:08 pm

Lifestyles Trapped in Arctic Ice, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 163-165:

FOR NOW, DE LONG had to focus on establishing a workable shipboard economy. A daily routine started to form: All hands up by seven. Galley fires roaring by seven-fifteen. Breakfast at eight. Onboard chores performed through the midmorning. Soundings at noon.

Then they headed out to the ice for two hours of exercise. Sometimes they put on snowshoes and clomped around the ship, often with rifles in hand, in case they spotted walruses, seals, or other game. Other days, if there was a nice flat spot in the ice, they laced up their skates. Often they held football games out on the floes.

Dinner was served at three p.m., after which the galley fires were put out to save coal. Tea and a light meal were taken between seven and eight. At night Danenhower led a class in elementary navigation for all comers, while other officers met in the wardroom for a smoke and a review of the day. Lights out by ten.

No rum or spirits were allowed except on a few festive occasions determined by De Long. The first of every month, Dr. Ambler conducted a medical examination of every officer and crew member—no exceptions. On Sundays, De Long would recite the naval Articles of War, then lead a short devotional service.

Day by day, this was the general choreography, but certain individuals had specific tasks. Danenhower spent most of his time taking meteorological and astronomical observations. Dr. Ambler, when he wasn’t examining patients, roamed the cabins testing for excess carbon dioxide and subjecting the drinking water to silver nitrate tests to ascertain its salinity.

The two Inuits, Alexey and Aneguin, mostly occupied themselves dealing with what De Long called “our hoodlum gang” of dogs, which were nearly always fighting, whining, and fouling the decks. Alexey and Aneguin hated the stuffy cabins of the ship so much that they constructed their own lean- to on the deck. They were formidable hunters—every other day a few fresh seals could be seen hanging up in the rigging—but the two Alaskans sometimes did strange things out on the ice, mystical things that spooked the other men. They spoke to the moon. They offered gifts of tobacco to the ice. They made predictions about the dogs’ behavior that often played out with astonishing accuracy. Once, after shooting a giant walrus, Alexey bared an arm, shoved it down the throat of his prey, and, pulling it out, wiped the warm blood on his forehead. “For good luck,” he said. Another time, after killing a seal, Alexey removed small pieces of each hind foot, as well as the gallbladder, and placed them carefully in a hole in the ice. “Make um more seal,” he explained. Still, De Long was impressed by the two Inuits and thought a “quiet dignity” pervaded everything they did.

The two Chinese immigrants, Ah Sam and Charles Tong Sing, kept to the galley, where they had learned to prepare such delicacies as seal fritters, roast “squab” of seagull, and the company favorite, walrus sausage. (“A rare good thing it is,” De Long pronounced it. Seal and walrus, he insisted, “are not to be despised.”) Sam and Charley slept in their cookhouse, too, in a little curtained-off area they kept spotlessly clean. Aside from singing and playing cards, they seemed to enjoy only one other diversion from their pots and pans: Out on the ice, they loved to fly colorful kites with long paper streamers, a spectacle that amused and delighted the other men. Sam and Charley were “seemingly emotionless,” De Long noted, in “all weathers, all circumstances … as impenetrable in this cold weather as if we were enjoying a tropical spring. They hold no communion with their fellow-men, but are nevertheless cheerful and contented with each other’s society.”

Newcomb, the Smithsonian-recommended naturalist, spent his days shooting birds, scavenging curiosities from the ice pack, and dredging the blue mud of the sea floor for marine specimens. His study had become something of an abattoir, piled high with the carcasses of decaying animals—or parts of animals—which, when mixed with the astringent chemicals his work required, gave off a nauseating stench. His collection already included a walrus fetus, numerous starfish and bivalves, various species of Arctic fish, several puffins, an albatross with a seven-foot wingspan, and two rare Ross’s gulls. Most of the men found Newcomb—some called him Ninkum—morbid and strange. Said Melville: “The less I had to do with him the better.”

De Long thought Newcomb a tad odd, too, but was impressed with his zeal. “Natural History is well looked out for,” De Long had to concede. “Any animal or bird that comes near the ship does so at the peril of its life.” Newcomb rarely mixed with the men. “He may be deemed to be our silent member,” De Long wrote. “But he has his little place in the port chart-room all fixed up with his tools, and is as happy as can be.”

All in all, the crew seemed more or less content. De Long called them “our little colony” and was pleased to note that “everybody is in good health and in good spirits … They have their musical instruments every night and play and sing. There are so many good voices that I am thinking of getting up a choir.”

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by | 17 May 2026 · 12:17 am

Mare Island Navy Yard, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 105-107:

Captain De Long scrutinized his weather-beaten ship in the golden California light, going over every valve and fitting, every strake of her long hull. He wondered where her weaknesses lurked. Were there rotten timbers? Leaky seams? The smallest flaw could mean his death, and the deaths of the men who would serve with him in the Arctic. The Jeannette had survived the trip—had performed admirably, in fact—but he knew she was not ready for the coming battle with the ice. There was still much work to be done, and only a few months in which to do it. To withstand the pressures of the pack, the Jeannette would have to be reinforced in a way that no Arctic-bound vessel had ever been reinforced before.

For most of the month of January 1879, the ship lay moored at the Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, awaiting inspection from a specially appointed board of naval engineers. Mare Island was the only Navy shipyard on the West Coast, a place where new vessels were sometimes constructed and where the existing ships of the Pacific Squadron routinely came in for maintenance and inspection. It was a complex of foundries, pipe shops, machine shops, pitch houses, sawmills, smokestacks, and derricks clustered around a floating dry dock, all of it set on a marshy island where the Napa River emptied into a remote estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Each morning, the bell announced the start of the shift, and the crews of tradesmen—carpenters and coppersmiths, tinsmiths and teamsters, plumbers and painters, caulkers and coopers—went about their smoky, cacophonous work. Mare Island was the western outpost of America’s burgeoning might, the well-equipped repair shop of her still tiny but soon to be ascendant Navy, which was slowly converting from canvas to steam, and from wood to metal. Perched atop the headquarters building was a copper-sheathed statue of an American eagle, the huge bird cocked at an angle toward the water, as if to bid farewell to the nation’s ships as they ventured to the far reaches of the Pacific.

Many great ships had been launched or overhauled at Mare Island—brigs, monitors, corvettes, schooners, sloops of war. But the shipyard’s most storied fixture throughout much of the nineteenth century was the old Boston-built fifty-four-gun frigate the USS Independence, which, according to one Navy historian, was for nearly seventy years “as much a part of the Mare Island waterfront as the seagulls.”

Among the warships moored beside the yard, the slender Jeannette looked fragile and unobtrusive. When Navy engineers commenced a formal study of her, they were not impressed. To withstand the ice, they thought, the Jeannette still needed a considerable amount of work—on her hull, especially. How this exploring yacht, as the Pandora, had survived three journeys in the Arctic was a mystery to them.

Of course, these men were paid to be cautious, and they knew their recommendations would carry little consequence within the Navy hierarchy, especially since Bennett would be covering all expenses. Still, the engineers’ assessment was sweeping: Decks would have to be ripped out, they declared, bulkheads constructed, new boilers installed, coal bunkers rearranged, the entire hull reinforced with additional layers of planking. They talked of adding ambitious networks of beams and braces. As their checklist of repairs and renovations kept growing, they envisioned a price tag as high as $50,000.

De Long was shocked, even though he knew many of the repairs were necessary, and even though he and his men would be the beneficiaries of the contemplated improvements. He saw deep trouble in the engineers’ recommendations. “We must stop them,” he wrote, “or they will ruin us.” While Bennett rarely blanched at a bill, De Long believed it his duty to make sure the engineers did not concoct unnecessary repairs in order to swindle the faraway—and notoriously profligate—publisher. “I consider your interest identical to my own,” De Long wrote Bennett not long after his arrival in California. “I am laboring to keep down expenses with as much zeal as if I were to foot the bills instead of you.”

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