A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland

Kate Brown. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004.Kate Brown's study, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, is a book about the fate of the inhabitants of a small region Zhytomyr oblast' (a part of Volhynia) from about the mid 1920s to just after the end of World War II. More precisely, the author writes about its Polish and mixed Polish-Ukrainian populace, with some attention also paid to those of German and Jewish heritage. prime geographical focus is on the village of Dovbysh, which from 1925 to 1946 was called Markhlevs'k (in Ukrainian) or Marchlewsk (in Polish). (The author writes Marchlevsk.) During the interwar period, this region was the Ukrainian SSR, but was close to the Polish border. From 1925-35, Markhlevs'k was the capital of the Markhlevs'k Polish Autonomous Region, a territorial-administrative unit created by the Soviet state reflective of the cultural autonomy granted its Polish inhabitants.The Markhlevs'k region was part of what is called the kresy Polish literature, which roughly corresponds to the eastern regions of the former Polish states. These territories constituted a borderland of sorts of Polish colonization. author implies that the book is a study of the kresy, although her primary focus is on a smaller geographic region.From the outset, it is clear that Brown views with sympathy the lives lived by the inhabitants of the borderlands on the eve of the great transformations that overturned the human landscape of the region. She approvingly stresses the uniqueness of its regional- and local-based cultures, and relative economic self sufficiency, which strikes one as somewhat romantic. Borderland residents at that time often described themselves not national terms but as local[s], since identity was tied to locality, class, profession, and social status rather than to nationality... borderland peoples, she writes, up a continuum of cultures that stood literally and figuratively on the border between Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, a place where mass media had not yet standardized vernaculars or made boilerplates of ritual and tradition.The author examines the lives of these inhabitants through the early Soviet period and then for the brief period of Nazi German occupation, and mentions, but docs not discuss, the mass deportations of Poles upon the return of Soviet rule. She focuses mainly on the policies of the Soviet and German states, explaining why they were formulated, how they were carried out and, finally, what effects they had on the lives of the borderland population. She also briefly writes on the policies and actions of non-state actors, such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army toward the Polish population of Volhynia.These policies, and the actions which followed from them, their totality, the author writes, transformed radically the region from a multi-ethnic border zone into a largely homogenous Ukrainian heartland: The progressive and punitive actions of Soviet polity, the enactment of National Socialist hierarchies, the OUN and UPA attacks on non-Ukrainian inhabitants, the postwar Polish and Soviet government population transfers sanctioned by the larger European community-all worked tandem with the generalizing, standardizing efforts of modern governance to arrange and simplify the region's cultural complexity.Generalizing from this, she concludes that today's independent Ukraine is a creation which the streamlining of hybrid identities into national groups, the deportation of people as national minorities, the Nazi imposition of racial hierarchies, the Holocaust, the Soviet annexation of Polish territory, and the Polish and Soviet population transfers all played major roles creating unambiguously Ukrainian nation-space. She makes this assertion not to call into question Ukraine's statehood, she claims, but rather to describe in depth a process which has occurred, and is occurring, many places across the globe-in Ireland, India, Lebanon, Palestine, Rwanda, the Balkans-in the hope of underscoring. …

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