Mark Mallory

HIST 420

Dr. Richard Frankel

22 October 2018

From Borderland to Heartland: Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place

Kate Brown’s historical monograph, A Biography of No Place is a bold historiographical

revision in the conversation about the making of nation-states which focuses on the Polish-

Ukrainian-Russian borderland known as the kresy. The kresy, roughly occupying the area

between the Dniestr and Dnepr rivers west of Kiev, south of the Pripiat marshes and east of

Novograd-Volynsk evades common classification according to geographic landmarks – helping

to constitute its identity as an ambiguous borderland. Brown’s work details nationalizing policies

of the nascent Soviet Union on the 1920s which aimed to convert this borderland into national

units which it could saturate with communist sentiment and attempts to place those policies in

wider historical context. The text specifically examines how the multiethnic border zone of the

kresy became a homogenous part of the Ukrainian heartland over the period of 1923-1953.

Brown employs a unique method which attempts to sidestep the pitfalls of national

thinking inherent in earlier histories. She argues that “situating histories with national boundaries

often reinforces the very nationalized narratives which were created in the process of making

nation-states.” – an epistemological starting point inherent in sources often used: official records

and documents, such as censuses. In an attempt to incorporate a wider cultural perspective on the

nationalizing processes at play in the region, Brown employs a number of alternative sources in

addition to official records, such as oral histories, memories, material culture, folklore, and
positivized silence or omission in official records. She heavily qualifies this approach, conceding

that there are no hard citations, but that the reward is a potential inversion of narratives which

centrally place a strong state dominating a weak populace. These narratives are replaced, in

Brown’s work, with ones of a weak state threatened by the people they were nominally ruling.

Brown’s arguments upset the US cold war perspective as well as post-Soviet histories

which position the people of the region as weak and dominated by Soviet rule, instead

recognizing in their identity at the periphery of nation states a type of fluid, ambiguous power of

resistance to national and imperial rule. The United States’ criticism of Soviet imperialism in the

region during the Cold War, asserted existing national communities were being denied self-

governance by Soviet imposition, obfuscating how Soviet governance worked to create the

region as solidly Ukrainian throughout the period. Brown spends an entire chapter, however,

using the example of the kresy in the mid-20th century to complicate Foucauldian notions of state

governance as equivalent to the process of nationalization, instead focusing on how local

concerns took the guise of hybrid and fluid national identities to functionally obfuscate Soviet

governance.

This methodology points to her selection of the kresy as the region of study for this work,

which was chosen “because of its centrality in the shaping and dismantling of nationality policy

in the Soviet Union, and because of its marginality as a backwards place on the periphery of

several states.” She continues that “the gift of marginality lies in the amorphous, hybrid

flexibility of a place where cultures and historical periods have accumulated in sedimentary

layers.”

A key figure in the history of this region, identified by Brown, is the exclusion of Poles

from the imagined community of the region throughout the periods examined. Brown identifies
how first Tsarist authorities and later Soviet officials and Ukrainian nationalist leaders came to

view the Polish presence and power in the region as a threat – a threat which ultimately helped to

create policies of national homogenization for the region. She identifies a legacy of rhetorical

denouncement of the region as “backwards” – a legacy tied to the enduring Polish presence in

the region during the Tsarist and Soviet Regimes. Brown notes how one Soviet official remarked

on the profound backwardness of the Poles in the region, leading to his conclusion that their

political evolution – an explicit goal of the Soviet nationalizing process – was somehow

compromised. This in turn, helped lead to the unraveling of these nationalizing policies in the

1930s.

Brown is critical of the possibility of her own work to clarify a singular truth, and in her

self-criticism utilizes a first-person perspective to underline the text as her truth rather than the

Truth. In this sense, her work is incredibly compelling and successful, although as she points out

in the text’s epilogue, she has found no way, throughout the course of the text, to elude

modernizing dichotomied and the practice of categorizing facts into typologies. We might even

go so far as to argue that her work is valuable in a traditional historical sense. Through her

tracing of the attempted – and failed autonomous nationalizing project of the Soviet Union in the

region, Brown demonstrates that the region was transformed from a borderland to an element of

the Ukrainian heartland through a radical reconceptualization of space through the imposition of

national taxonomies, transforming the zone of cultural contingency into nation-spaces. “In this

way,” she argues, “the census and the map, created in order to provide progressive services in

appropriate language to the ‘backward,’ illiterate, and poor populations of the borderlands,

eventually served as taxonomies of control.” She succinctly summarizes this by remarking how

“this leadership in both national taxonomies and national persecution suggests how closely
intertwined were naming and counting with controlling and reconfiguring.” Brown concludes her

epilogue with an acknowledgement that the national reimagination of the region is an ongoing

process, even after the end of the Cold War, with deportees from the Ukraine again finding

themselves as national minorities without the imperial political identity to shield them from a

now independent Kazakstan nation-state.

Brown’s text is thoroughly creative, researched, and compelling. It succeeded in

conveying her truth about the shifting and reconfiguring landscape of the kresy borderland into a

homogenous zone of the Ukraine. Her critical qualifications of her work as now seeking to find a

singular truth might even be too self-critical in an attempt to hedge the reader’s critical

expectations, as her applied theoretical hermeneutics in the text do a successful job of

undermining existing historiography of both the region and of the process of nationalization in

general.