Q&A with History | Part 2

In our last blog post, we started a Q&A with one of our experts in the history of the German-Russian people. We've broken the interview into two sections, since it's a lot of information to digest.

This week, the focus is on the imprisonment of these people during what has been called the Great Terror...

(Note: The photograph above is of Jeff Stewart (in the role of Jakob). It was created for the movie by our props department as Jakob's prison "mug shot"... after his arrest during the Great Terror in 1938.)

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

Q: What was the Great Terror?
A: The Great Terror was a series of campaigns during 1937 and 1938 conducted by the Stalin regime in which over 1.3 million people were convicted of political crimes against the state. More than 680,000 of these people received death sentences. Most of the reminder ended up in Gulag labor camps.

Q: How many German-Russians were arrested during this period?
A: According to the work of Okhotin and Roginsky, between 69,000 and 73,000 Russian-Germans were convicted during this time of which between 53,000 and 56,000 or over three fourth received death sentences. Russian-Germans were over represented among those shot in the USSR during the Great Terror by factor of more than eleven. Over half of these people were shot during an operation aimed specifically at rooting out "German spies."

Q: What happened to them after arrest? Were they given trials?
A: They were tried by NKVD troikas, but sentences had largely been decided in advance and in no sense did they receive due process. Only about 20,000 Russian-Germans ended up in Gulag camps at this time since as noted above the NKVD shot 50,000 of them out of hand.

Q: As a historian, why are you interested in the history of the German-Russians?
A: This is a very long story and I can only give you the very short version. But, my heritage is part Russian-German and I have a long standing interest in issues of national repression and resistance in the USSR. These interests intersected with the new availability of previously classified information on the group starting in the early 1990s. The explosion of scholarship on the group since the 1990s is quite outstanding. Unlike a lot of other groups there is no shortage of primary or secondary source material on the Russian-Germans. Indeed it is impossible even to keep up with new publications of primary source documents on the ethnicity.

Q: The movie, Under Jakob's Ladder, tells a story about these people. In your opinion, why is it an important story to tell?
A: It is not a story that is well known or talked about on a popular level. So much so that there has been an almost complete rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia and Central Asia. Forgetting this past has consequences and the movement towards authoritarianism and increased violation of human rights in the former Soviet states has been one of them.

Q: Any other comment you'd like to add?
A: I just want to say I think the Moon Brothers deserve a great deal of thanks for taking on this project.