3rd ARC reaction shot and sundry other matters

nz_navigatress is the third ARC winner; she has a nonspoilery post here.

To answer a question asked in the comments to nz_navigatress's post, the paperback of Corambis will probably be out in April 2010, if Ace adheres to the schedule they've followed with the other books. There's no guarantee of that, but it's the best answer I can give.

Speaking of answers (I've got my segues down cold today *g*), I will be doing another round of Q&A to celebrate the release of Corambis; the phone lines internet will be open for your questions on April 7. I have had a couple people send me questions in the past few months, and to the two of you, I say, Fear not! Your questions will open the festivities.

Speaking of festivities (see? I'm totally on a roll), I have cause for same: Fantasy Magazine has bought my short story, "After the Dragon."

And I think that's it.

UBC: Harvest of Despair

Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.

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This is a very difficult and painful book to read because, to put it vulgarly, the people of Ukraine could not catch a fucking break. They go from Stalin and the Terror-Famine to the Nazis, who quite deliberately starved the urban population and generally behaved like, well, Nazis, and at the end of the war, of course, they are doomed to go right back to Stalin; in post-WWII Soviet Ukraine, people were persecuted for having survived the occupation:

Red Army veterans, former partisans, and Soviet ideologists lost no time in developing their mythical interpretation of Ukraine under the "German fascist occupants." Like many historians of western European countries, they claimed that resistance had been massive. Official interpreters also, as during the war but in contrast to their Western peers, declared passivity under the Germans a virtual criminal offense. The myth reflected an apparent view that the people in Nazi-ruled Ukraine had been traitors, as a former Soviet partisan recalls being told in Moscow as early as 1942. In 1946, when Petro Vershyhora, a former partisan under Sydir Kovpak, defended those who had lived their lives under the Nazis against people who attacked them merely for that reason, official critics denounced him and censors modified subsequent editions of his book. The survivors of the Nazi regime received little understanding. Well into the 1980s, they had to mention on job applications and other forms whether they had "been in occupied territory" and a positive response resulted in discrimination. Only the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the survivors of the Holocaust and of forced labor the chance to accept a decades-old German offer of compensation; yet post-Soviet bureaucrats illegally appropriated part of the funds and kept applicants waiting for years.
(306)

Solzhenitsyn also has things to say about the treatment of survivors in the post-WWII USSR, none of them good.

And what makes the whole mess even worse, the part of the book where I kept wanting to shake something to make reality realign, is that the Ukrainian partisans were just as bad as the Nazis and the Stalinists. They started their own genocide against the Poles, and they followed exactly the same pattern of mass murder against civilians for helping "the enemy" (whoever "the enemy" was defined as by the murderers) or for being suspected of helping "the enemy" or because someone else helped "the enemy" or for not helping the murderers or not helping them enough or any other reason that came to them. Ukrainian partisans murdered people they suspected of supporting Soviet partisans and vice versa. It's like everyone in this patch of Europe suffered homicidal psychosis at the same time, and it is ghastly.

Berkoff's English is sometimes awkward; he is a native of the Netherlands, and by my best reckoning must read Russian, German, Ukrainian, and possibly Polish as well, so this is not in any way a denigration, just a fact about reading the book. One of the things I think is particularly useful about it is that Berkoff has chosen to present the experiences of the people who lived in Ukraine, rather than the Jews or the ethnic Germans or the Poles or the Russians or the Ukrainians (it's also very clear from what he writes that "Ukrainian" was a slippery term and not necessarily a useful one in talking about the people who lived in Ukraine). He's looking at what happened to people who lived in this particular place at this particular time and the suffering they went through for other people's ideologies.

my mightiness is not exactly great, but it did show up on time

Project Valkyrie this weekend was walking, both Saturday and Sunday.

Today I used our new Wii Fit for 30 minutes. I have somewhat mixed feelings about it (see entry tag), but it provides variety--and it counts reps for me, which is also a plus.

And now my feet hurt.