Emily Baran begins with the denouement: in June of 1949, the Soviet state arrested seven members of the obscure Jehovah's Witnesses in an equally obscure village of Bila Tserkva on the western borderlands of Soviet Ukraine. After a brief trial, all received sentences of twenty-five years in the gulag. In her engaging study, Baran investigates why this happened, and what it tells us about the Soviet state in the aftermath of World War II.
Baran divides her work into nine chapters and a conclusion. She introduces the reader to Bila Tserkva and its inhabitants in her first chapter. Situated in Transcarpathia, and not to be confused with a similarly named village close to Kyiv, Bila Tserkva only entered the Soviet Union after 1945. Part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1914, the newly formed Czechoslovakia claimed it after 1918 even though the region was fiercely contested by the newly formed Hungary and the villagers were ethnically Romanian (the region's Jews had largely been deported during World War II). Borders had shifted by 1945, such that this now Soviet frontier region adjoined Romania, separated only by an easily fordable Tisza River. No wonder Baran (20) cites Paul Magosci's depiction of Transcarpathia as “a borderland par excellence.” A significant number of the region's residents converted to Jehovah's Witnesses during the inter-war period, a movement with strong links to the United States.
The core of Baran's work is found in chapters two through seven, titled successively as: The Passport; The Draft; The Ballot Box; The State Bonds; The School; and The Farm. Baran sees these as the components on which the Soviet state sought to establish its edifice in the newly claimed borderlands after World War II. Thus, Moscow refused to issue passports to almost all collective farmers in this period, but those in the borderlands were treated differently. Here, where security concerns dominated, officials began already in 1946 to issue mandatory passports to the entire rural population. Coincidentally, the state imposed universal military service on its newly acquired citizens, and it expected them to participate in Soviet-style elections and to purchase bonds that effectively put their money into state coffers. Officials mandated that parents send their children to Soviet schools where they would learn how to be good citizens, while the adults would actively participate in newly formed collective farms (the region was overwhelmingly rural).
In every instance, Baran demonstrates how the seven accused villagers of Bila Tserkva refused to participate in the workings of the Soviet state lest they betray their faith. For example, the local school principal claimed that Ivan Ona, one of the Witnesses, had refused to purchase bonds with the declaration: “I have money, but I am never giving it to the state because Jehovah God forbids it” (82).
The strength in this study lies in Baran's ability to demonstrate nuance and complexity in situations that could be easily caricatured. For example, she continually points out the challenges faced by both state officials and the seven Witnesses by the inability of the latter to speak either Ukrainian or Russian. They only spoke Romanian, for which only selected state officials had a rudimentary grasp. In addition, the onset of the Cold War meant that the Witnesses of Bila Tserkva were denied access to a lively debate that their religious counterparts had undertaken in the west about the possibilities of engagement with a modernizing state. She suggests that the failure of the collective farms to root themselves in the borderlands had as much to do with a broad lack of support, which local officials could easily blame on a handful of recalcitrant religious sectarians. Baran also reflects on the difficulty of reading the summaries of state interrogations of the seven, or even the trial transcripts.
Baran follows the fate of the convicted seven as they entered and eventually departed from the gulag. In her conclusion, she reflects on how her study points to the Soviet state's inability to impose its will on its newly acquired borderland. Both Witnesses and state officials were in a dance that neither could fully control.
Nuanced, well-researched, and rich in detail, Baran's fascinating study deserves a broad readership. McGill Queen's has published a strong work at the intersection of Soviet, religious, and minority studies.
