by | 12 March 2008 · 10:28 pm

Overcompensating Kids of ‘Kulaks’

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 143-145:

Many ‘kulak’ children ended up as ardent Stalinists (and even made careers for themselves by joining the repressive organs of the state). For some the transformation involved a long and conscious process of ‘working on themselves’ that was not without its psychic costs. Stepan Podlubny is an example. Born in 1914 to a peasant family in the Vinnitsa region of western Ukraine, Stepan and his mother fled to Moscow in 1929, after his father had been exiled as a ‘kulak’ to Arkhangelsk. Stepan found a job as an apprentice in the factory school of the Pravda printing plant. He joined the Komsomol, headed a brigade of shock workers, edited a wall-newspaper (a form of agitprop), became a member of the factory board, and at some point it seems he was recruited as an informer by the police. All this time he carefully concealed his ‘kulak’ origins. He kept a diary which charted his own struggle to purge the ‘sick psychology’ of his peasant ancestors and reconstruct himself as a Soviet citizen. He tried to read the correct books, to adopt all the correct attitudes, to cultivate himself by dressing neatly and learning how to dance, and to develop in himself the Soviet public virtues of activity and vigilance. He drew up a ‘balance sheet’ of his ‘cultural progress’ at the end of every year (just as the state’s own planning agencies drew up annual balances of economic progress in the Five Year Plan). His ‘kulak’ background was a constant source of self-loathing and self-doubt. He saw it as an explanation for his own shortcomings, and wondered whether he was capable of ever really becoming a fully equal member of society:

13.9.1932: Several times already I have thought about my production work. Why can’t I cope with it painlessly? And in general, why is it so hard for me? … A thought that I can never seem to shake off, that saps my blood from me like sap from a birch tree – is the question of my psychology. Can it really be that I will be different from the others? This question makes my hair stand on end, and I break out in shivers. Right now, I am a person in the middle, not belonging to one side nor to the other, but who could easily slide to either.

Podlubny was constantly afraid that his origins would be exposed, that he would be denounced at work (a ‘snake pit’ filled with ‘enemies’), leading to his sacking and possible arrest. Eventually his ‘kulak’ origins were indeed discovered by OGPU, which told him it would not take action, provided he ‘continued to do good work for them’. It seems likely that Podlubny began to inform on his work colleagues. In his diary he confessed to feeling trapped – he was repulsed by his public persona and he clearly longed to ‘be himself’.

8.12.1932: My daily secretiveness, the secret of my inside – they don’t allow me to become a person with an independent character. I can’t come out openly or sharply, with any free thoughts. Instead I have to say only what everyone [else] says. I have to walk on an uneven surface, along the path of least resistance. This is very bad. Unwittingly I’m acquiring the character of a lickspittle, of a cunning dog: soft, cowardly, and always giving in.

The news that a fellow student had not been punished after he had been exposed as the son of a ‘kulak’ was greeted by Podlubny as a ‘historical moment’, suggesting as it did that he no longer needed to feel so stigmatized by his social origins. He embraced this personal liberation with joy and gratitude towards the Soviet government.

2.3.1935: The thought that I too can be a citizen of the common family of the USSR obliges me to respond with love to those who have done this. I am no longer among enemies, whom I fear all the time, at every moment, wherever I am. I no longer fear my environment. I am just like everybody else, free to be interested in various things, a master interested in his lands, not a hireling kowtowing to his master.

Six months later, Podlubny was accepted as a student at Moscow’s Second Medical Institute. He had always dreamed of studying at a higher institute, but knew his ‘kulak’ origins would be a stumbling block. The fact that the Komsomol at the Pravda plant had supported his application was for him the final affirmation of his new Soviet identity.

It sure would be nice if a lot of people who are either born into ‘class enemy’ status or educated into it could work out their feelings of guilt and entitlement outside the political realm. Let them manage hedge funds, not governments.

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by | 12 March 2008 · 9:42 pm

Trouble Filling the Quotas for ‘Kulaks’

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 86-87:

The destruction of the ‘kulaks‘ was an economic catastrophe for the Soviet Union. It deprived the collective farms of the work ethic and expertise of the country’s most industrious peasants, ultimately leading to the terminal decline of the Soviet agricultural sector. But Stalin’s war against the ‘kulaks’ had little to do with economic considerations – and everything to do with the removal of potential opposition to the collectivization of the village. The ‘kulaks’ were peasant individualists, the strongest leaders and supporters of the old rural way of life. They had to disappear.

The ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ followed the same pattern nationwide. In January 1930, a Politburo commission drew up quotas of 60,000 ‘malicious kulaks’ to be sent to labour camps and 150,000 other ‘kulak’ households to be exiled to the North, Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan. The figures were part of an overall plan for 1 million ‘kulak’ households (about 6 million people) to be stripped of all their property and sent to labour camps or ‘special settlements’. The implementation of the quotas was assigned to OGPU (which raised the target to 3 to 5 per cent of all peasant households to be liquidated as ‘kulak’) and then handed down to the local OGPU and Party organizations (which in many regions deliberately exceeded the quotas in the belief that this demonstrated the vigilance expected by their superiors). Every village had its own quota set by the district authorities. Komsomol and Party activists drew up lists of the ‘kulaks’ in each village to be arrested and exiled. They took inventories of the property to be confiscated from their homes when the ‘kulaks’ were expelled.

There was surprisingly little peasant opposition to the persecution of the ‘kulaks’ – especially in view of Russia’s strong historical traditions of village solidarity (earlier campaigns against the ‘kulaks’, in the Civil War for example, had failed to split the peasantry). Certainly there were places where the villagers resisted the quota, insisting that there were no ‘kulaks’ among them and that all the peasants were similarly poor, and places where they refused to give up their ‘kulaks’, or even tried to defend them against the activists when they came to arrest them. But the majority of the peasantry reacted to the sudden disappearance of their fellow villagers with passive resignation born of fear. In some villages the peasants chose the ‘kulaks’ from their own number. They simply held a village meeting and decided who should go as a ‘kulak’ (isolated farmers, widows and old people were particularly vulnerable). Elsewhere, the ‘kulaks’ were chosen by drawing lots.

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by | 7 March 2008 · 8:28 pm

Early Soviet Outer vs. Inner Life

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 37-38, 46-48:

Increasingly, there was nothing in the private life of the Bolshevik that was not subject to the gaze and censure of the Party leadership. This public culture, where every member was expected to reveal his inner self to the collective, was unique to the Bolsheviks—there was nothing like it in the Nazi or the Fascist movement, where the individual Nazi or Fascist was allowed to have a private life, so long as he adhered to the Party’s rules and ideology—until the Cultural Revolution in China. Any distinction between private and public life was explicitly rejected by the Bolsheviks. ‘When a comrade says: “What I am doing now concerns my private life and not society,” we say that cannot be correct,’ wrote one Bolshevik in 1924. Everything in the Party member’s private life was social and political; everything he did had a direct impact on the Party’s interests. This was the meaning of ‘Party unity’—the complete fusion of the individual with the public life of the Party.

In his book on Party Ethics, Solts conceived of the Party as a self-policing collective, where every Bolshevik would scrutinize and criticize his comrades’ private motives and behaviour. In this way, he imagined, the individual Bolshevik would come to know himself through the eyes of the Party. Yet in reality this mutual surveillance did just the opposite: it encouraged people to present themselves as conforming to Soviet ideals whilst concealing their true selves in a secret private sphere. Such dissimulation would become widespread in the Soviet system, which demanded the display of loyalty and punished the expression of dissent. During the terror of the 1930s, when secrecy and deception became necessary survival strategies for almost everyone in the Soviet Union, a whole new type of personality and society arose. But this double-life was already a reality for large sections of the population in the 1920s, especially for Party families, who lived in the public eye, and those whose social background or beliefs made them vulnerable to repression. People learned to wear a mask and act the role of loyal Soviet citizens, even if they lived by other principles in the privacy of their own home.

Talk was dangerous in this society. Family conversations repeated outside the home could lead to arrest and imprisonment. Children were the main source of danger…. The playground, especially, was a breeding ground of informers….

Many families did lead a double life. They celebrated Soviet public holidays like 1 May and 7 November (Revolution Day) and conformed to the regime’s atheist ideology, yet still observed their religious faith in the privacy of their own home…. The secret observance of religious rituals occurred even in Party families. Indeed it was quite common, judging from a report by the Central Control Commission which revealed that almost half the members expelled from the Party in 1925 had been purged because of religious observance. There were numerous Party households where Christ rubbed shoulders with the Communist ideal, and Lenin’s portrait was displayed together with the family icons in the ‘red’ or ‘holy’ corner of the living room.

The nanny, another carrier of traditional Russian values within the Soviet family, was a natural ally of the grandmother. Nannies were employed by many urban families, especially in households where both parents worked. There was an almost limitless supply of nannies from the countryside, particularly after 1928, when millions of peasants fled into the cities to escape collectivization, and they brought with them the customs and beliefs of the peasantry.

Virtually all the Bolsheviks employed nannies to take care of their children. It was a practical necessity for most Party women, at least until the state provided universal nursery care, because they went out to work. In many Party families the nanny acted as a moral counterweight to the household’s ruling Soviet attitudes. Ironically the most senior Bolsheviks tended to employ the most expensive nannies, who generally held reactionary opinions.

I have a hard time conveying to people who’ve never experienced it what life is really like in a totalitarian dictatorship—whether communist or theocratic, it matters not. To academics, I like to say that the level of paranoia is as if everyone is constantly under evaluation for tenure, but can never be sure the evaluation period is over. Few are more paranoid than pretenure academics whose future careers ride on the outcome. But the passage cited above suggests another parallel. It’s as if everyone is constantly running for political office and can become the object of oppo research by anyone who resents them for whatever reason, whether real or imagined.

The other side of the coin in totalitarian societies is the rare friendship that allows you to puncture the public tatemae and get to each other’s inner honne, even when you know your treasured friend (or lover, as in Orwell’s 1984) may have to betray you to placate those who can do real harm to both of you. The shared danger of revealing one’s apostasy heightens the sense of intimacy, as does your appreciation of the duress that leads your intimates eventually to betray either you or themselves. Is it all that different among candidates and their staff in electoral democracies?

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by | 6 March 2008 · 5:46 pm

St. Olaf Website on Hidden Christians in Japan

Japanese Bible verseIn 2006, Brendan Eagan put together an impressive online documentary on the history of Kakure (Hidden) Christians in Japan, based on firsthand interviews and site visits in southern Japan by a team from St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Here are links to the Statement of Purpose, Historical Overview, Photographs, and Interview Transcripts.

via The Marmot’s Hole

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by | 4 March 2008 · 7:18 pm

Spreading Chinese Reforms in Africa

The cover story of the March issue of Prospect magazine is China’s new intelligentsia by Mark Leonard. Although interesting in its own right, the part that most grabbed my attention was China’s attempts to export its economic reforms, especially to Africa.

In February 2007, Hu Jintao proudly announced the creation of a new special economic zone complete with the usual combination of export subsidies, tax breaks and investments in roads, railways and shipping. However, this special economic zone was in the heart of Africa—in the copper-mining belt of Zambia. China is transplanting its growth model into the African continent by building a series of industrial hubs linked by rail, road and shipping lanes to the rest of the world. Zambia will be home to China’s “metals hub,” providing the People’s Republic with copper, cobalt, diamonds, tin and uranium. The second zone will be in Mauritius, providing China with a “trading hub” that will give 40 Chinese businesses preferential access to the 20-member state common market of east and southern Africa stretching from Libya to Zimbabwe, as well as access to the Indian ocean and south Asian markets. The third zone—a “shipping hub”—will probably be in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam. Nigeria, Liberia and the Cape Verde islands are competing for two other slots. In the same way that eastern Europe was changed by a competition to join the EU, we could see Africa transformed by the competition to attract Chinese investment.

As it creates these zones, Beijing is embarking on a building spree, criss-crossing the African continent with new roads and railways—investing far more than the old colonial powers ever did. Moreover, China’s presence is changing the rules of economic development. The IMF and the World Bank used to drive the fear of God into government officials and elected leaders, but today they struggle to be listened to even by the poorest countries of Africa. The IMF spent years negotiating a transparency agreement with the Angolan government only to be told hours before the deal was due to be signed, in March 2004, that the authorities in Luanda were no longer interested in the money: they had secured a $2bn soft loan from China. This tale has been repeated across the continent—from Chad to Nigeria, Sudan to Algeria, Ethiopia and Uganda to Zimbabwe.

But the spread of the Chinese model goes far beyond the regions that have been targeted by Chinese investors. Research teams from middle-income and poor countries from Iran to Egypt, Angola to Zambia, Kazakhstan to Russia, India to Vietnam and Brazil to Venezuela have been crawling around the Chinese cities and countryside in search of lessons from Beijing’s experience. Intellectuals such as Zhang Weiying and Hu Angang have been asked to provide training for them. Scores of countries are copying Beijing’s state-driven development using public money and foreign investment to build capital-intensive industries. A rash of copycat special economic zones have been set up all over the world—the World Bank estimates that over 3,000 projects are taking place in 120 countries. Globalisation was supposed to mean the worldwide triumph of the market economy, but China is showing that state capitalism is one of its biggest beneficiaries.

States are among the worst robber barons on earth, but if state capitalism can build wealth that improves the lives of state citizens, I’m all for it.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 3 March 2008 · 9:04 pm

Marksena, the Little Red Princess

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 11-13 (reviewed here and here):

Anna Karpitskaia and her husband Pyotr Nizovtsev were high-ranking Party activists in Leningrad (as Petrograd was called after Lenin’s death). They lived in a private apartment near the Smolny Institute with their three children, including Marksena,* Anna’s daughter from her first marriage, who was born in 1923. Marksena rarely saw her parents, who left for work before she awoke in the morning and returned very late at night. ‘I felt the lack of a mother’s attention,’ recalls Marksena, ‘and was always jealous of children whose mothers did not work.’ In the absence of their parents the children were placed in the care of two servants, a housekeeper and a cook, both peasant women who had recently arrived from the countryside. However, as the eldest child, from the age of four, as far as she recalls, Marksena had ‘complete authority and responsibility for the household’. The cook would ask her what to make for dinner and ask her for the money to buy food from a special store reserved for Party officials. Marksena would report to her mother if the servants broke the household rules, ‘or if they did something I didn’t think was right’, but more often, she recalls, ‘I would tell them off myself if they did anything I did not like.’ Marksena felt responsible—she understood that it suited her mother to leave her in charge—and accepted this as natural: ‘My mother made it clear that what went on at home was no concern of hers, and I never questioned this.’

Brought up to reflect the values of the new society, Marksena was a child of 1917. She was regarded by her parents as a ‘small comrade’. She had no toys, no space of her own where she could play freely as a child. ‘My parents treated me as an equal and spoke to me as an adult,’ recalls Marksena. ‘I was taught from an early age to be independent and to do everything for myself.’ On her first morning at primary school, when she was only seven, her mother walked her to the school and told her to memorize the route—a complex journey of nearly three kilometres—so that she could walk home on her own that afternoon. ‘From that day on, I always walked to school,’ recalls Marksena. ‘It never crossed my mind that anyone should walk with me.’ Marksena bought all her own books and stationery from a shop in the city centre which took her an hour to reach by foot. From the age of eight she was going to the theatre on her own, using the pass her parents had for Party officials which let her sit in one of the boxes by the side of the stalls. ‘No one ever told me what to do,’ recalls Marksena. ‘I brought myself up on my own.’

Marksena’s parents were distant figures in her life. Even during holidays, they would travel on their own to one of the resorts for Party officials in the Crimea, leaving the children in Leningrad. Her parents did, however, impose their ideological rigidities, which Marksena recalls as a source of annoyance. Her mother would reprimand her for reading Pushkin and Tolstoy instead of the didactic books for children favoured by the Party, such as Vladimir Obruchev’s scientific adventure Land of Sannikov (1926) or The Republic of Shkid (1927) by Grigorii Belykh and Aleksei Panteleyev, a story about homeless orphans sent to school in Leningrad, both of which were brought home by Anna and dutifully read by Marksena but then put in a cupboard and forgotten. Marksena was forbidden by her mother to invite friends home from school, because, she said, it was better that they did not see how comfortably the Party’s leaders lived—albeit modestly and in a Spartan style—compared with their families. She was very seldom praised or given compliments by her parents, and almost never kissed or held. Her only source of affection was her grandmother, who looked after her when she was ill. ‘I liked going to her house,’ remembers Marksena. ‘She paid me lots of attention. She taught me how to sew, how to thread a bead necklace. She had toys for me and even bought me a little wooden toy kitchen, which she set up in the corner of her room, where I liked to play.’

An absence of parental affection was described by many children born to Party families after 1917. In this respect the child-rearing customs of the Soviet elite were not that different from those of the nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy, which took little interest in the nursery and left the children, from their earliest days, in the care of nannies, maids and other household servants.

*After Marx and Engels—one of many Soviet names made up from the annals of the Revolution after 1917. Other common ‘Soviet’ names included: Vladlen (Vladimir Lenin), Engelina, Ninel, Marlen (for Marx and Lenin) and Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution).

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by | 2 March 2008 · 9:25 pm

Braille Family Resemblances and Mutations

Matt’s recent post on No-sword about Japanese Braille prompted me to look at other varieties, all of which derive in one way or another from the system first invented in France between 1821 and 1824 by Louis Braille (1809-1852), who was himself inspired by a more complex system of night-writing designed to allow military units to communicate in the dark without betraying their positions.

All varieties of Braille render the characters of their respective languages in a six-dot matrix (or did until until recently); all are read from left to right, even in Hebrew; all use word-spacing, even in Chinese and Japanese; and all tend to place diacritic characters before the characters they modify.

14   0_   0_   00
25   __   0_   __
36   __   __   __
EN:  a    b    c 

14   __ 0_   __ 0_   __ 00   _0 0_   _0 0_   _0 00
25   __ __   __ 0_   __ __   _0 __   _0 0_   _0 __
36   _0 __   _0 __   _0 __   00 __   00 __   00 __
EN:     A       B       C        1       2      3
   = cap-a   cap-b   cap-c   num-a   num-b   num-c

In English, the same formation of dots can represent either a letter or a number, depending on the preceding context. Each formation can also serve as a contraction, so that b = be, c = can, d = do, e = every, f = from, j = just, l = like, v = very, and so on.

The designers of Japanese Braille (点字) retained the letter = number equivalency, marking numbers with the same prefix, but introduced some genetic mutations to adapt to the kana syllabary. They redefined a b c d e as the vowels a i u e o, which is how everyone nowadays begins to recite the kana syllabary. The dots for these five letters are confined to positions 1-2-4 (a = 1, i = 1+2, u = 1+4, e = 1+2+4, o = 2+4), leaving positions 3-5-6 to render the consonant on each syllable, so that k = 6, s = 5+6, t = 3+5, n = 3, h = 3+6, m = 3+5+6, r = 5. The syllable n is written as m without any vowel in positions 1-2-4.

There are no capital letters in Japanese kana, but the same method is used to add the dakuten and handakuten marks to following consonants: a prefix with a dot in position 6 is used to transform h- into p-, while a prefix with a dot in position 5 is used as a to transform voiceless initials into their voiced equivalents.

14   0_   0_   00
25   __   0_   __
36   00   00   00
JP:  ha   hi   hu

14   __ 0_   __ 0_   __ 00   __ 0_   __ 0_   __ 00
25   __ __   __ 0_   __ __   _0 __   _0 0_   _0 __
36   _0 00   _0 00   _0 00   __ 00   __ __   __ __
JP:    pa      pi      pu      ba      bi      bu
   =  '-ha    '-hi    '-hu   ''-ha   ''-hi   ''-hu

Braille takes up a lot of space, so its regular users rely a lot on contractions. (There’s also a kind of Braille shorthand.) The word Braille itself is usually written with just the letters B-r-l. These contractions can have different meanings even in closely related members of the Braille family, like French and English. For instance, the French circumflex vowels are rendered by adding an extra dot in position six (which I will show as ^) to the first five letters of the alphabet, so â = a+^ (1+6), ê = b+^ (1+2+6), î = c+^ (1+4+6), ô = d+^ (1+4+5+6), and û = e+^ (1+5+6). (The filled dot 6 also adds a circumflex to Esperanto versions of Braille.) In English, these same contractions respectively indicate ch/child, gh, sh, th/this, and wh/which.

English double letters are contracted and rendered within a single cell by a different method: shifting the position of the dots but retaining their shape. Thus, the dots for b/but occupy positions 1+2, while bb drops to positions 2+3; c/can sits at 1+4, while cc drops to 2+5; d/do sits at 1+4+5, while dd drops to 2+5+6; and g/go sits at 1+2+4+5, while gg drops to 2+3+5+6.

A similar principle plays a key role in Korean Braille, invented in 1894 by a Canadian missionary who introduced some radical (and brilliant) mutations to adapt it to the (equally brilliant) Korean alphabet. Korean vowels occupy their own cells, while some diphthongs take up two cells. The letterㅏ(a) occupies dots 1+2+6, whileㅑ(ya) occupies its mirror image, dots 3+4+5. Similarly,ㅓ(eo) at 2+3+4 is a mirror image ofㅕ(yeo) at 1+5+6; ㅗ (o) at 1+3+6 is a mirror image ofㅛ (yo) at 4+3+6; ㅜ (u) at 1+4+3 is a mirror image ofㅠ (yu) at 1+4+6; and ㅡ (eu) at 2+4+6 is a mirror image ofㅣ(i) at 1+3+5.

The possible syllable structures of Korean are too numerous to fit into a six-dot matrix, so Korean syllables are written sequentially, typically (C)V(C), just as in French or English. In order to avoid putting spaces around each syllable, so that readers can distinguish initial from final consonants, Korean braille has two versions of every consonant, one for initial position, the other for final. Each consonant has the same shape in each position, but the one in final position is either lower than its initial counterpart or a mirror image.

Thus,ㄴ(n) occupies dots 1+4 if initial, but drops to 2+5 if final; ㄷ(d) occupies dots 2+4 if initial, but drops to 3+5 if final; andㅁ(m) occupies dots 1+5 if initial, but drops to 2+6 if final. Meanwhile, mirror-image consonants don’t drop, they flip:ㄱ(g) flips from dot 4 in initial position to dot 1 in final position; whileㄹ(r) flips from dot 5 to dot 3; andㅂ(b) flips from dots 4+5 to dots 1+2. As a result, Korean 점자 ‘dot characters’ display the same kinds of symmetry and inversion that the Korean alphabet itself displays.

Chinese Braille comes in at least two flavors, Cantonese and Mandarin. Both represent Chinese characters in three cells, one for the onset, the second for the rime, and the third for the tone, just as in Zhuyin/Bopomofo. In practice, however, tone is frequently left unmarked, generating a good deal of ambiguity. Perhaps the new system designed in the 1970s, which represents all three components in just two cells, will eventually solve that problem.

UPDATE: Matt has added a new post about attempts to render Japanese kanji in Braille. The more complicated method is geared to the shape of the kanji and requires two extra dots in each cell. The other method uses three six-dot cells per kanji. The first cell broadly classifies the type of character to follow, the second gives one mora of the Sino-Japanese reading of the character, and the third gives one mora of the native Japanese reading of the character. The second method strikes me as akin to the structural division of many written kanji into one part that broadly classifies the semantic domain, and another that indicates the (Sino-Japanese) sound value. The combination of native and Sinitic reading is also how Koreans routinely distinguish similar-sounding Chinese characters. It’s as if English speakers routinely distinguished similar-sounding Latin roots by saying ‘foot-ped-‘ vs. ‘child-ped-‘. The typical Japanese strategy, by contrast, is to cite a well-known compound in which the kanji occurs, just as English-speakers might distinguish ‘ped- as in pedestrian’ from ‘ped- as in pediatrics’.

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by | 28 February 2008 · 7:59 pm

False Memories of the Occupation

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 373-376:

Just as the constraints of the occupation were often mediated through the social structures of family and community, so they were also mediated through the cultural structures of people’s understanding. In some ways, historians who ‘demythologize’ the period actually move us further away from understanding it because people’s perceptions and actions were so heavily influenced by false information. False information affected political views. Historians may know, to take the most obvious example, that Laval did not force Pétain into collaboration with the Germans, but the fact that many people saw Pétain as somehow distinct from his own government goes a long way to explaining why loyalty to the Marshal was sometimes so durable. False information also explains many more small-scale decisions taken by people with regard to their daily lives. Prisoners did not make the most of the chance to escape before being taken to Germany in the summer of 1940 because they believed, wrongly, that they would soon be released. Similarly, many young men agreed to go to Germany when called up for Service du Travail Obligatoire in 1943 because they believed, again wrongly, that sanctions would be taken against their families if they did not do so.

Diaries and memoirs of the occupation are full of beliefs that we know, in retrospect, to be false, but diaries and memoirs are usually written by people who are relatively well informed and educated. Imagine how a thirty-nine-year-old illiterate woman from Chartres, who had taken two German lovers and then volunteered to work in Germany, can have understood her experience. Assuming that, like nine-tenths of women who worked for the Germans, she spoke no German, she can only have communicated with her lovers and employers in simple pidgin French. When her first lover was posted to the Russian front, she can have had no means of staying in touch with him. Did his comrades explain where he had gone? Did she try to get other people to write letters on her behalf? Did she hope to resume contact with one or other of her lovers by going to Germany? She would, presumably, have been unable to read the documents that she signed when she went to Germany, and she can have had few means of staying in touch with anyone she knew in France when she went there. By the time that she returned, she seems to have abandoned all attempt to explain or justify herself. She insisted to her interrogators that she had never denounced anyone, but beyond that her responses were autistically uncommunicative….

The memory of the First World War was a unifying one. A very substantial proportion of the French adult male population had undergone similar experiences and those experiences were increasingly seen as sources of pride. By contrast, there was no single unifying experience of the Second World War. Experience in the Loire, where food was relatively plentiful, was different from that in Marseilles, where food was very scarce. Experience in the Pas-de-Calais, where Germans were present in large numbers from 1940 until 1944, was very different from experience in a hill village in the Auvergne where the Germans barely appeared until the summer of 1944. Experience of liberation in Normandy (the scene of heavy fighting between Allied and German troops) was different from that of the south-west, which was largely liberated by the Maquis and which, consequently, often saw the violent settling of scores between French people.

Memories were divisive as well as divided. This was not simply because of explicit political divisions that pitted collaborators, Pétainists and Resistance fighters against each other. It was also because of more small-scale and local animosities that involved communities and even families….

Memory of day-to-day life under the occupation was influenced by something else. During the thirty years after the Second World War, the years that the French know as the ‘trente glorieuses’, the French economy grew fast. The division between countryside and city diminished. Distinctions of locality that had mattered so much during the occupation were blurred by transport, television and social mobility. People writing autobiographical accounts of their lives during the occupation, the kind that many men wrote for the benefit of their grandchildren during the 1980s, were aware that they were trying to evoke a world that would seem distant and inexplicable to many of their readers. This was not simply because the prospect of foreign invasion or highly repressive government became remote. The social conditions that had governed many people’s lives during the occupation had completely disappeared.

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by | 28 February 2008 · 5:56 pm

France after Liberation: Revenge

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 343-345:

The trials, executions and imprisonments that followed the liberation came to play a large part in the mythology of the right. The very fact that many victims of the legal purge were men from bourgeois backgrounds made their punishment seem all the more striking: the chaplain of Fresnes prison talked of the time when ‘le tout Paris’ was in the cells. Pétainists made much of their status as victims. Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, a collaborationist and brother of the undersea explorer, began one of his books with the memorable words: ‘On 23 November, a large, smooth man, wearing a splendid red robe, trimmed with white rabbit fur, told me rather coldly, that I was condemned to death.’ Cousteau’s sentence was subsequently commuted….

Many defendants were acquitted, many death sentences were commuted and most of those convicted were released within a few years (there were two large-scale amnesties in 1951 and 1953). Some men who had come very close to the firing squad served little time in prison. A thirty-nine-year-old member of the Milice, who had sat on an illegal court martial that condemned Resistance activists on 2 August 1944, was then himself sentenced to death. However, the sentence was overturned on a technicality (he had been prosecuted in both the civilian court and a court martial). A retrial in March 1945 reduced his sentence to twenty years. In 1951 he was released and in 1966 he was officially ‘rehabilitated’. Those who could afford good lawyers were particularly likely to survive. Defence lawyers became the new heroes of the right, which had often in the past been rather disdainful of the pays légal.…

The relations between the various forms of formal and informal purges varied with time and place. Generally, the épuration sauvage was most extensive in the south of France. The south was, to a great extent, liberated by French forces, and sometimes by the Resistance, rather than by the Allies. It was also the area where the Maquis had been most extensive and where the Franco-French struggles that pitted Milice against Resistance had been most severe. More generally, the purge was most restrained in areas where conflict during the occupation had been lightest; it was most violent in areas with a history of massacre and reprisal. However, legal and extra-legal punishment did not function independently of each other. Often popular violence pressured the authorities into taking more vigorous action. Sometimes victims were dragged from prison by lynch mobs. Popular violence sometimes increased as it seemed that central government was becoming too lenient. Public anger flared in 1945, at the end of the war, when three different processes coincided. First, de Gaulle seemed ever more inclined to pardon collaborators or to commute death sentences. Secondly, internment camps were closed so that suspected collaborators who had been put in protective custody were released. Thirdly, concentration camp victims, including some Resistance activists who owed their imprisonment to denunciation by their compatriots, began to return to France. Attacks on suspected collaborators, often involving the placing of explosives near their houses, continued into at least 1946 and such illegal and clandestine attacks seem to have increased as the state was seen as less effective in punishing collaboration.

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by | 26 February 2008 · 1:42 pm

Some Unusual Interrogatives

The December 2007 issue of Oceanic Linguistics (on Project Muse) contains a squib by Frank Lichtenberk about a typologically unusual interrogative word in Toqabaqita (wherein q = glottal stop), a language in the southeast Solomon Islands.

In that language, the Proto-Oceanic question word *sapa ‘what?, which?’ has two reflexes: the independent word taa (with one long vowel) ‘what?, which?’ and the suffixed noun tafa- ‘which part of person’s or animal’s body?’ According to Bernard Comrie, the latter type of interrogative is very rare among the world’s languages. However, Lichtenberk shows that it follows quite naturally from the way alienable vs. inalienable possession is grammatically distinguished in many Oceanic languages.

Toqabaqita is typical. Alienable possession is indicated by a separate possessive word, as in waqi qoe ‘basket thy(sg)’, while inalienable possession is indicated by a suffix on the noun denoting the possession, as in gwau-mu ‘head-your(sg)’. (I’ve simplified the glosses here and below.) The types of possession considered to be alienable or inalienable vary a bit from language to language, but whole-part and kinship relations are typically marked as inalienable.

Toqabaqita is a little more unusual in marking the same distinction in questions of ‘what’ and ‘which’.

  • Taa no thathami-a? ‘What you want-it’ = ‘What do you want?’
  • Tafa-mu ne fii? ‘What-your(sg) it hurt’ = ‘Which part of your body hurts?’

However, similar patterns turn up in a few other Oceanic languages, like Nadrogā Fijian (in which c = voiced th):

  • Mu-cā e raci-a? ‘Your(sg)-what it hurt-it’ = ‘Which part of you hurts?’

When the question asks for a kinship term, it often translates into a question like ‘What relation is X to Y’, as in Pohnpeian (where h marks vowel length) and Kiribati (where /t/ is pronounced [s] before /i/).

  • Depehne-i? ‘What.relation.its-my’ = ‘Where/What is it/he in relation to me?’
  • Ra-m Te Mautake ‘What-your ART Mautake’ = ‘What relation is Mautake to you?’

This got me thinking about interrogative verbs, ones that translate into ‘do-what’ or ‘what-happen’. I know of several languages that have such verbs, mostly in the New Guinea region, but when I googled ‘question verbs’, I found (Te taetae ni Kiribati), a Peace Corps textbook for Kiribati, which seems to have the most elaborate set of question verbs I’ve ever encountered. Here’s a quick summary.

  • Ngaa ‘be where’ – E ngaa to kai-ni-b’ati? ‘It be.where the stop-of-bus?’
  • Aera ‘do what’ – Kam na aera? ‘You(pl) will do.what?’
  • Uara ‘be how’ – Ko uara? ‘You be.how?’
  • Nakea ‘go where’ – Ko na nakea? ‘You will go.where?’
  • Kangaa ‘do/be how’ – E kangaa ana taeka? ‘It be.how his words?’ (= said what)
  • Rikea ‘pass where’ – Ko na rikea? ‘You will pass.where?’ (= take which route)
  • Iraanna ‘do how’ – Ko iraanna ni kateia? ‘You do.how of build.it?’

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