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

Abstract

2004 George Louis Beer Prize, American Historical Association 2004 Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies This is a biography of a borderland between 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, the 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 heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed.