Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic - History

History

The republic was created following the Russian Revolution, by October 29 (some claim 19th) Decree of the Soviet government, Volga German Workers' Commune, giving Soviet Germans a special status among the non-Russians in the USSR. It was upgraded to the status of Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on February 20, 1924 (claims of December 19, 1923), by the Declaration of the All-Union Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR. It became the first national autonomous unit in the Soviet Union after the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. It occupied the area of compact settlement of the large Volga German minority in Russia, which numbered almost 1.8 million by 1897. The republic was declared on January 6, 1924.

The ASSR was divided into fourteen cantons: Fjodorowka, Krasny-Kut, Tonkoschurowka, Krasnojar, Pokrowsk, Kukkus, Staraja Poltawka, Pallasowka, Kamenka, Solotoje, Marxstadt, Frank, Seelmann, and Balzer.

After the Russian Revolution the deeply religious Volga Germans, 76%of whom were Christians of the Lutheran faith, immediately came into conflict with the anti-religious Bolshevik revolutionaries.

As of 1919, pastors were labelled counterrevolutionary propagandists and sent to gulags in Siberia.

During the Russian Civil War some Volga Germans enlisted with the White Army and, as a result, fierce attacks by the Red Army on Volga German communities took place. In the aftermath of the war, the famine that swept the USSR took the lives of one third of the Volga German population.

To the moment of declaration of the autonomy an amnesty was announced. However it eventually was applied to a small number of people. According to the politics of korenizatsiya, carried out in 1920s in the Soviet Union, usage of German language was promoted in official documents and Germans were encouraged to occupy management positions. According to the 1939 census, there were 605,500 Germans in the autonomy.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the end of the Volga German ASSR. On August 28, 1941, Joseph Stalin issued a formal Decree of Banishment abolishing the ASSR and, fearing they could act as German spies, exiling all Volga Germans to the Kazakh SSR and Siberia. Many were interned in labor camps merely due to their heritage. The Republic was formally extinguished on September 7, 1941.

After the war, they were forced to sign contracts that promised they would never return to the Volga area.

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, the situation for Volga Germans improved dramatically. In 1964, a second decree was issued, openly admitting the government's guilt in pressing charges against innocent people and urging Soviet citizens to give the Volga Germans every assistance in their "economic and cultural expansion". With the existence of a socialist German state in East Germany now a reality of the post-war world, the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was never reestablished. The land area is now part of Saratov Oblast.

Beginning in the early 1980s and accelerating after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Volga Germans have emigrated to Germany by taking advantage of the German law of return, a policy which grants citizenship to all those who can prove to be a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such a person. This exodus has occurred despite the fact that many contemporary Volga Germans either do not speak German or have a poor grasp of the language. In the late 1990s, however, Germany made it more difficult for Russians of German descent to settle in Germany, especially for those who do not speak the German Volga dialect.