In 1993, the film Schindler's List provided what many commentators took to be simile and many others metaphor for the violence in Bosnia. The cinematic version of Thomas Keneally's 1982 book on the holocaust of the Jews of Cracow seemed to emblematize the horror of the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims from northern and eastern Bosnia in the summer of 1992 and thereafter, complete with wretched people in cattle cars and "concentration camps" with starving prisoners.

In his article, "Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers," Robert Hayden combines comparative history, political commentary, and amoral realism. In the process, he presents a number of arguments with which it is difficult to disagree, but also many that are provocative and, indeed, offensive. Because Hayden makes so many arguments in this piece (both primary, secondary, and parenthetical; explicit and implicit; open and disguised) my critique will not follow the organization of his paper. Rather, it will challenge Hayden's article on three counts: 1) its factual accuracy; 2) its lack of reference to existing literature on the topic; and 3) the logic, validity, and moral consequences of its arguments.

Robert Hayden is not alone in wondering why the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia in 1991 and 1995 was labeled a population transfer and even justified by the logic of nation-states, while the expulsion of Muslims by Serbs in 1992-96 from an area of Bosnia and Herzegovina that the Serbs claim for their state was labeled genocide and justified establishing an international war crimes tribunal. Hayden wants to protect the term genocide, and its legal standing internationally, for truly exceptional instances—to wit, the Holocaust, and nothing else until, God forbid, there should be another such instance. By contrast, he argues, population transfers, even on a massive scale and forced, are not pathological. "Ethnic cleansing" of territory in the former Yugoslavia, whether of Croatia or of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is unexceptional, a normal part of the history of the twentieth century. Although final solutions are not inevitable—Hayden criticizes Croatian President Tudjman for writings that seem to have justified the Serb expulsion as such—"ethnic cleansing" is a part of the history even of states that now sit in moral condemnation of the Balkan horrors and the Bosnian Serbs.

Bob Hayden is the unusual kind of scholar who makes us confront our darker side. Our choice examples of civic culture and democratic functioning seem to emerge less shining as a consequence of his exposition. When put into a perspective that includes contemporary ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, both Steven Spielberg's Hollywoodized Oskar Schindler and Vaclav Klaus's Czech Republic lose some of their luster.

When World War II came to an end, vast portions of Germany and Poland lay in rubble. And, as if this were not enough, both countries were immediately inundated by large waves of migrants. In the years from 1944 to 1949, displaced persons, refugees, and expellees made up more than one-fifth of the populations of Poland and Germany. For the purpose of this article, expellees (or forced migrants) are Germans or Poles who had been living in the eastern territories of both countries as defined by their borders in 1937 and who were forcibly and permanently removed from their homelands between 1944 and 1949.

As far as the Russian state and most educated Russians were concerned, assimilation in the eastern borderlands of the Russian empire in the late imperial period was supposed to be a one-way street. “Backward” eastern peoples were generally supposed to become more like Russians, while Russians, for their part, were expected to change others while themselves maintaining their language, customs, religion, and overall Russianness. In reality, of course, things were rarely so straightforward. In the mixed settlement worlds of the borderlands, both Russians and non-Russians influenced one another in multiple ways, and Russian influences were not always strongest. In fact, in certain cases, contrary to official and elite expectations, it was not so much the Russians who “Russianized” the “natives” as the “natives” who “nativized” the Russians. By the late imperial period, “nativized” Russians of one kind or another could be found throughout the imperial east. In the northern Caucasus, for example, whole Russian villages looked and lived like gortsy; in the Volga-Ural region, other Russian peasants performed “pagan” sacrifices like Voguls and Maris; on the Kazakh steppe, still others had converted to Islam; and on just about every frontier one came across supposedly “Russian” cossacks who lived according to native ways and preferred to speak native languages.

The world consists of nations. Nations are communities united by a common name, state, language, territory, culture, and physical type. Nations are defined by their origins. Yet the origins of the name, state, language, territory, culture, and physical type may have nothing to do with each other. Such was the Great Ethnological Predicament, discovered and sometimes discussed by eighteenth-century scholars as they pursued Jean Le Rond D'Alembert's “art of reducing, as far as possible, a great number of phenomena to a single one which can be regarded as the principle of them.”

In the last decade, state building and the problems of establishing state authority in the provinces in 1917 have begun to attract historians’ attention. Several works by Russian authors treat state building under the Provisional Government, with emphasis upon organizational activities “at the center.” Daniel T. Orlovsky and Howard J. White (with greater analytical rigor than their Russian counterparts) have studied the work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the provinces. But none of these works has offered a sustained discussion of the revolution in a single city or province. Local studies have concentrated on popular institutions (for example, unions, Red Guards, and the Soviets) and the process of social polarization but have paid litde attention to the state. My aim is to bridge the gap between institutional studies and local studies by looking at local government and the contested nature of state authority in Smolensk from March to June 1917, tracing especially the conflict between class-based politics and state interests.