Review

Reviewed by Gregory Ioffe P avel Polyan is one of the most prolific of currently active Russian scholars. He has published 10 books and over 300 articles. Originally trained as a human geographer, Polyan has written on such diverse subjects as urban agglomerations, history of forced migrations, and Russian literature, primarily poetry; he also has authored a book of his own poetry (Nerler, 1998). Polyan's previous book, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur (Polyan, 1996), was for the most part based on unique archival data and was devoted to Soviet citizens' forced migration to Germany and their, in many cases, forced subsequent repatriation. In contrast to that book, Not of One's Own Volition is about forced migrations of Soviet citizens within the USSR and of foreigners into the USSR in the final phase of World War II. Also in contrast to the previous book, this one is based primarily on published sources. These sources, however, were scattered in myriad original publications for the most part released in the 1990s. Polyan brought them together, systematized them, added archival documents, and created what amounts to the most informative and well documented handbook on forced migrations and the utilization of forced migrants' labor inside the Soviet Union. Because Polyan's narrative rests on time and space as principal organizing parameters, the genre of the book can be defined as historical geography. Forced migration is a signature of a totalitarian regime. In addition to the GULAGs that used prisoners' labor on a wide scale, millions were uprooted in the USSR without the slightest legal basis, real or fabricated—that is, without any legal grounds related to the individuals concerned. Rather, this uprooting was initiated and implemented by the top echelons of power as the manifestation of their attitude toward certain groups defined in terms of ethnicity and/or social strata. Between 1920 and 1952, over 6,015,000 Soviet people were deported for the most part to sparsely settled areas in Siberia, Central Asia, and the European North. Also, in 1944-1952, 5,460,000 Soviets previously deported to Germany by the Nazis were repatriated, and 300,000 foreign citizens, primarily Germans from the Reich and ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, were sent to work inside the Soviet Union. The latter were returned to their European countries of origin from the late 1940s to mid-1950s. The scale of human suffering inflicted by forced migrations is enormous and is by no means dwarfed by that directly and immediately caused by World War II. One of the book's objectives is to search for the logic, however perverted, behind these deportations, and the author has succeeded in uncovering it. The book begins with a brief analysis of the antecedents of the forced migrations practiced by the Soviets. Of particular interest here is information on mass deportations in Tsarist