Aoi

“toussaint louverture. chief of the black insurgents of santo domingo.”

Women of the revolutionary militia get military training in Tehran, Iran. 1979.

Spokesman of the Resistance: Abu Obeida

I don’t think there would be much disagreement with this supposition, but the corollary is my suspicion that this potentially has had major effects in the development of RF ex. a westwards shift of Russian population.

Coupled with the expulsion of the Poles and the Germans this might have made post-war Eastern Europe rather more Russian than it was in the 1930’s.

I think this is most noticeable in Belarus, where the Belarusian language has been seriously reduced in numbers of speakers and the Russian language is now the majority language in Belarus.

I doubt this was the case historically, and I suspect that it is due to the postwar migration of Russians into Belarus given the relative emptiness of the land due to German occupation.

This is potentially also the cause of the Russian language extending into eastern Ukraine, and into parts of the Baltic States.

Or, in other words, the presence of large Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and the majority in Belarus, are all of recent vintage.

Kulischer and Lorimer noted a sort of westward “shunt” of Europe’s population, a sort of chain reaction which interestingly (in my opinion) resembles the Volkerwanderung in the late Roman Empire.

The Germans and Italians moved west from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the Poles moved west from the Kresy, the Ukrainians and Belarusians moved west into the lands of eastern Poland, and the Russians moved west into the Baltic States and Ukraine / Belarus.

I have no idea how large any of these movements were. I cannot say with even an estimate how many Russians settled in areas of Ukraine and Belarus where historically they never were (outside of the cities, which tended to be Russophone).

But it is my theory that this movement was considerable.

This is why I often do find myself frustrated at the claim of the RF that these are “historic” Russian lands rather than the result of a very unfortunate Great War, bc I very much doubt there were many Russians there before 1945, with the exceptions of the Donbass and the Crimea. Just be honest.

I imagine that the Second World War had the effect of increasing the proportion of Russian-speakers in the Soviet Union, while decreasing that of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Estonian, and Latvian.

This was the cardinal question on the eve of the second World War: could the eastern territories still furnish a broad outlet for European Russia? Or would demographic and economic obstacles set up a serious barrier to migration from European Russia, forcing the mass of the Russian people to search for an outlet in another direction? The events gave an immediate answer to this fateful question. The Germans themselves, in their attempt to expand towards the East, pierced the immense dam [separating Soviet Russia from the Occident], and the inundation has begun. And let us not be mistaken: it is only the beginning. New conflicts will arise because of the German plans for expansion towards the East, and they will finally precipitate the fatal Russian advance towards the West. Then the problem of living space will indeed rise in terrible and fatal fashion between Slavs and Germans, but in the opposite sense to that planned by the Nazi adventurers. There is and there will be no room for the German colonists on the Russian earth, at best there will be room for them in the Russian earth. A policy which aims to reverse the peoples’ movements may reinforce its violence and even pile up corpses and ruins, yet the current will pass.

This was a remarkable prediction for the time. Kulischer foresaw that the current was running contrary to the German Drang Nach Osten. For a long time, as Robert Machray wrote, the movement was in the other direction. He even joked that there was a Slavic Drang Nach Westen as the Germans east of the Elbe migrated west to the industrial heartland of the Rhine, and the Poles and Lithuanians moved increasingly into Eastern Germany even during the Bismarckian period.

It’s very ironic that the world developed just as Kulischer said, with the problem of Lebensraum solved by Germany but not for the benefit of the Germans, as Eastern Europe became Lebensraum (to an extent) for the Russians. The Nazi concept of Lebensraum already made no sense since, as Antonin Basch pointed out, the German population was already beginning to decline in the 1930’s, and Eastern Europe was already overpopulated.

The relation of migration to war is an understudied subject, and the enormous upheavals + mass migrations attendant on the end of WWII are not given enough attention.

Tut-ench-Amun : ein ägyptisches Königsgrab, endeckt von Carl Carnarvon und Howard Carter. 1924. Cover art.