Q&A with History | Part 1

This is a Q&A with one of our historical experts in the area of the German-Russian people.

Who are the German-Russian people? They are people that populate the world of our feature film, Under Jakob's Ladder. Jakob and the other prisoners, living in the Soviet Union in 1938, are known as German-Russians (or, as some call them, the Germans from Russia).

Chances are, you have never heard these people even existed. So, we've asked a few questions of our historian...

(Note: The photograph above shows a group of German-Russians working on one of Stalin's collective farms. It comes from the private photo collection of Marta, granddaughter to Jakob. One of the men pictured is Marta's father.)

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Film: Under Jakob's Ladder
Name: J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D
Role: Historical Consultant

Q: First of all, can you tell us who exactly are the German-Russians?
A: The Russian-Germans are descendants of immigrants from Central Europe that immigrated to the Russian Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries.

They settled initially in the Volga region and then later in the area of the Black Sea, Caucasus, Bessarabia and Volhynia. Most of them came from states that later became part of Germany, but others came from other regions of Europe. They are referred to as Germans because they all spoke various dialects of the German language. But, it should be noted that the vast majority of German settlers in the Russian Empire arrived before the unification of Germany in 1871.

Q: How did they come to live in the Russian Empire?
Empress Catherine II issued a manifesto on 22 July 1763 offering special privileges for Christian foreigners wishing to immigrate to the Russian Empire. Under the terms of this manifesto the immigrant colonists received free land, communal autonomy, freedom of religion, temporary freedom from taxation, interest free loans and a promise of eternal freedom from military service.

Q: How many German-Russians lived in the Soviet Union by the late 1930s?
A: The Soviet government conducted two censuses during the late 1930s. Neither are perfect, but they do give an indication of the number of Russian-Germans in the USSR at the time.

The 1937 census shows only 1,151,602 Russian-Germans and the 1939 census counted 1,427,232. The 1937 census is obviously an under count in that does not count the large German population living in Siberia at this time.

While the number for the 1939 census which took its place was artificially inflated to hide deaths from the 1932-1933 famine. Viktor Krieger estimates that the actual population in 1937 was between 1,350,000 and 1,360,000.

Q: What language did the people speak in their villages?
A: The Russian-Germans spoke various dialects of German in their villages. These dialects varied depending on their origins from Central Europe. They also acquired Russian words. Village churches and schools conducted their services in standard German.

Q: Did they live and work in the same villages and cities as the Russians and Ukrainians?
A: The rural villages were for the most part separate and isolated from the surrounding Slavic population. In cities and towns, Germans often lived as minorities surrounded by much larger Russian or Ukrainian populations. In 1937 the Soviet census listed 14,239 Russian-Germans in Leningrad and 11,825 in Moscow.

The population, however, was predominantly rural. Even in the Volga German ASSR the 1939 census lists the urban population as 60,000 Germans and over 58,000 Russians. In contrast the rural regions of the territory had over 300,000 Germans versus only about 100,000 Russians.

Q: How did Stalin's 5-Year Plans affect them?
A: The five year plan from 1928-1932 (they finished in four) coincided with the forced collectivization of agriculture and the liquidation of the kulaks from 1929 to 1931 and the 1932-1933 famine which disproportionately effected the Russian-Germans. In 1930 and 1931 over 1.8 million peasants were forcibly uprooted from their homes by the Soviet regime and deported to special settlement villages. This is about 1.2% of the Soviet population.

The number of Russian-Germans treated in such a manner was about 50,000 or 4% of their population. Likewise the man made famine that struck parts of the USSR in 1932-1933 claimed the lives of around 150,000 Russian-Germans or around 12% of the 1926 population. The death rate for the Soviet population as a whole was under 5%.

...Q&A to be continued next week.