THROUGH HARDSHIP TO THE RED STAR: THE FORGING OF GERMAN COLONISTS INTO SOVIET GERMANS

Abstract

Referred to commonly in scholarship as Soviet Germans, at the beginning of the Soviet Union these people did not represent a unified nationality. Instead within the early Soviet Union there existed many disparate groups of German colonists that had settled during the Russian Empire. While unified by the government's classification of them as German and application of policy towards them as German, these people often spoke separate dialects of German and had strong regional and confessional identities. However, by the end of the Soviet Union a community that would describe themselves as Soviet Germans would exist. This study hopes to understand how this situation came about. Through an examination of a broad range of sources, such as Soviet archival documents, trial records, diaries, and petitions, a deeper understanding of the policies and experiences that created a common Soviet German identity will be revealed. The primary policies that formed this nationality were korenizatsiia, deportations, forced labor, limitations of rights and movement, and eventually consideration for an autonomous region in Kazakhstan. This study also deals with the continuity of the Soviet Union’s policies towards Germans with the policies of the Russian Empire. As well as the aftereffects of these policies following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The shared experiences of hardship these policies served as the catalyst towards the formation of the Soviet Germans. This study employs theories of identity which consider identity to organize group experiences, as a method of involvement with ideology, and as a continual construction. It also uses theory about the Gulag to understand the transformative and redemptive nature of labor in the Soviet Union.