In reflecting upon the Introduction, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of “A Biography of No Place”, 3 big themes stood out: the way in which Brown gives us a history, the frame she uses to describe Soviet Union nationalization attempts (in comparison with ones we have encountered previously), and the large role of religion to subvert “assimilation” and “modernization”.
First, I was struck by the way we are getting history in this book. Brown acknowledges that her task is difficult in nature — to tell a history of a place that has been overlooked, indiscernible at times, and has faced erasure. The difficulty of this is that there are limitations as to what sources she can look at and analyze. So, this book gives us a mix of personal experience (traveling to the kresy), anecdotes, and some Soviet documents detailing observations about the region. She notes that she writes in the first person to reflect this unique experience and its unique conditions. History usually does not have these aims. The effect that the tone, point of view, and language of the book had on me was notable and I think it affected the way in which I read the book. To me, it read as a novel. Brown uses beautiful language and powerful stories to tell the untold story of Marchlevsk. It really had an effect on me and gave me an appreciation for this local culture, their traditions, and their noble fight against the Soviet Union. This account gave me a whole new perspective, mainly because of the way I was getting the information, being told the history. How does this way of history telling affect what we understand about this time and place? What do we get from a first person account of history than we do a third person removed account? Is this bad? Good? Or neither.
Next, I thought the way in which Brown frames Soviet nationalization attempts in her account is an interesting contrast to the way we have encountered other sources that document the same thing. In Hirsche, we were able to understand that from the Soviet perspective, nationalization was a form of liberation and self expression. In this account, we see nationalization as a form of suppression, with a great deal of construction in forming the nationalities. Is this simply because the kresy is a unique place of crossroads? Or is Brown saying something here about her own personal views of nationalization attempts in general?
Finally, I found Chapter 2 to be a really interesting aspect of nationalization, modernization, and unification because it focused on religion — more specifically the spirituality that pervaded most aspects of local life in the borderlands. I find it interesting that, while strong national identity is seen as a strength to nations in the Soviet Union, Soviet officials find religious identity so detestable in forming a proletarian union. Religion and spiritual practices seemed to govern the life of those that lived in the kresy. What is the thing that religious practice threatened most about the Soviet mission. Did it conflict with modernization, the search for a unified proletarian, coercive power of the state, assimilation, nationalism? Or even all of these things?
I share your confusion about how Brown seems to be judging the Soviet presence in the kresy. On one hand, she’s a lot more positive about the “prudent” developmentalism of the early Soviet presence in the kresy (p37) than she is about the later statistical fabrication of Polish Marchlevsk. On the other hand, she’s a lot more scathing about how Soviet “rationalism” could only misunderstand the spirituality of the kresy, and the strong spirit of cultural and economic independence that lay behind it. Is she for some pragmatic and non-ideological form of “development”, then, but against an ideology of development?
It’s hard to say: Brown seems to prefer to take worldviews without judging them, whether it’s the Stalinist “apparitions” of the kulak or the spy (can’t quite remember the page) or the spirituality of a kresy inhabitant (because to read “against” spirituality would be to rationalise it.) But that indecision’s understandable, since you note she’s writing in the first person to document how hard it is to synthesise sources on the kresy. Given those circumstances, I’d be as ambivalent about making sense of what happened in Marchlevsk as well.
I like the way you characterize the kresy as “indiscernible at times.” As perhaps the first idea brought forward in the introduction, this area’s status as a periphery bears some unpacking. Brown claims that not only was the region a Soviet borderland, it was in fact “always a periphery, whether rulers arrived from the north, west, or east” (3). It seems that in this description she circles around a sort of geographic determinism, claiming that the kresy could not be anything but liminal due to its spatial situation and topographical features. So is this discussion simply a literary tool confined to the introduction or an idea with bearing throughout Brown’s account? Is she coming to a similar conclusion as the Soviet officials tasked with administering this region who saw it as a “quixotic, hard-to-pin-down” mess which needed sorting out (2)?
I share in Isa’s confusion about why nationality seemed an appropriate way for proletariat individuals to form a union but religious identification was not, especially considering how the sectarian movements in the kresy were specifically egalitarian and anti-clerical. I would think that a particular religious formation that stressed the equality of individuals and decried hierarchy and authority would be ideologically compatible with communism (perhaps even more so than national identity).
Unfortunately, I think that there may be two main reasons this is not the case, the first being that the Soviet state was necessarily hierarchical and bureaucratic, and fostering an anti-hierarchical religious view was necessarily subversive to the state’s ends. The second reason would be that the discourse of “backwardness” and “primordial cosmologies” made officials look down upon religious identities that may be theoretically consistent with communism while emphasizing and embracing nationality identities because they were associated with the putatively modern and advanced western European countries.
Regarding your second point, I would in fact say that “the kresy is a unique place of crossroads.” Specifically, on page 82, Brown asserts that, “it[backwardness] was a formidable opponent, a diffuse, sprawling force that was effectively undermining the revolution.” It seems to me that one of the reasons it took “a great deal of construction in forming the nationalities” in the kresy, as you say, was because of how disruptive the level of ‘backwardness’ was toward Soviet efforts. Perhaps this was because the level of ‘backwardness’ here was so unique, as Brown says.
I also found that this book was written differently from other histories, with the seamless mixing of a personal travelogue and interpretations of Soviet records. It makes for a compelling read and removes some of the space that is often present between historian and subject. While reading this I wondered how this approach to writing, and also studying history, affects the history itself.
I was also interested in the role of religion in the Kresy. I was less surprised by the Soviet’s hostility towards religion than by the mixing of religion and Communism that occurred in the Kresy. Brown’s discussion with Leonid in Kiev (Brown, 56-58) showed what seemed to be an interesting case of embracing religion and Communism simultaneously despite the restrictions that the Soviet authorities put in place regarding religion.