Warlands : Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945-50

The displacement of population during and after the Second World War took place on a global scale and formed part of a longer historical process of violence, territorial reconfiguration and state 'development'. This book focuses on the profound political, social and economic upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at this time. Front Matter....Pages i-xv From ‘Homelands’ to ‘Warlands’: Themes, Approaches, Voices....Pages 1-22 Front Matter....Pages 23-23 Living in the Displaced Persons Camp: Lithuanian War Refugees in the West, 1944–54....Pages 25-47 ‘How those Brothers in Foreign Lands are Dividing the Fatherland’: Latvian National Politics in Displaced Persons Camps after the Second World War....Pages 48-66 The Quaker Internationalist Tradition in Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–48....Pages 67-86 Front Matter....Pages 87-87 Remaking Soviet Society: the Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49....Pages 89-116 Dirt, Disease and Disorder: Population Re-placement in Postwar Leningrad and the ‘Danger’ of Social Contamination....Pages 117-139 The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia, 1945–49....Pages 140-161 Front Matter....Pages 163-163 Ukrainian-Polish Population Transfers, 1944–46: Moving in Opposite Directions....Pages 165-187 To Pacify, Populate and Polonise: Territorial Transformations and the Displacement of Ethnic Minorities in Communist Poland, 1944–49....Pages 188-209 Population Displacement and Regional Reconstruction in Postwar Poland: the Case of Upper Silesia....Pages 210-228 Front Matter....Pages 229-229 Locating Estonia: Perspectives from Exile and the Homeland....Pages 231-254 Violent Peacetime: Reconceptualising Displacement and Resettlement in the Soviet-East European Borderlands after the Second World War....Pages 255-268 Back Matter....Pages 269-276 During the Second World War, the Nazis deported millions of Soviet, Baltic and Polish civilians, soldiers and prisoners of war to Germany. Many others were uprooted within occupied territories. This volume examines the 'violent peacetime' that followed the war, as these displaced persons strove to return home or to flee westwards during a time of territorial changes, the brutal imposition or reassertion of communist power, widespread nationalist resistance, state strategies of socio-ethnic engineering and economic reconstruction, new forms of international humanitarian intervention and emerging Cold War antagonisms. Contributors discuss the politics, personnel, administrative structures and everyday experience of Allied displaced persons camps in Germany; the political 'filtration' and sanitary screening procedures which Soviet repatriates underwent before they were permitted to return to their homes; and governmental arrangements for sorting, classifying and transferring people throughout the contested borderlands. The book pays close attention to how displacement, internment, resettlement and diaspora were experienced by migrants, and how they have been remembered and commemorated. Warlands will appeal to anyone interested in population displacement as state practice and social experience