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

This is a biography of a borderland betwen Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernised and homogenised out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this no place emerged as a Ukrainian hearland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed. personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In great detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups. Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, this book reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth-century progress.