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CHAPTER 8 Germans from Russia The Political Network of a Double Diaspora Renate Bridenthal There are Germans whose dream landscape is not forests and mountains but wide open plains under a big sky. These are the Russian Germans , transplanted farmers whose origin was in the crowded Southwest German states in the eighteenth century but whose paradise and souls’ Heimat became the Russian steppe, a paradise lost after a century and resought on the plains and pampas of North and South America. Volk auf dem Weg, the name of the newsletter of the Germany -based Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, aptly captures their identity as colonists on the move, as economic migrants in the beginning and later as postwar transferred populations. In this chapter, I attempt to trace how this identity was constructed and maintained over the course of a century and a span of three continents by a select group of intellectuals, variously motivated to mobilize this far- ›ung constituency for a commonly understood interest. Germans from Russia were land-hungry farmers who emigrated from the Southwest German states in the late eighteenth century as colonists to Russia. In 1763—enticed by special privileges, including tax and military exemptions, self-governance, and cultural autonomy —they accepted the invitation of the German-born tsarina Catherine the Great of Russia to settle hitherto uncultivated land along the Volga River and to model then-modern agricultural techniques to the surrounding Russian peasants. Others followed. In 1774 a victorious war against the Ottoman Empire brought the Black Sea area into the Russian Empire, opening more lands to such colonization . In 1803 a pioneering contingent from Swabia arrived in that region around the newly founded (1794) Odessa, followed by a larger immigration from Württemberg, Baden, Alsace, and the Palatinate upon special invitation in 1804 by Tsar Alexander I. Other land-hungry 187 German farmers settled in other parts of the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century—Bessarabia, Wolhynia, and Transcaucus— alleviating social tensions in the German states. There was no “German question” in Russia until the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, when their condition of indebtedness and resulting land hunger made a stark contrast with the prosperity enjoyed by German colonists, who, thanks to their privileges, had succeeded, especially in the Black Sea area, in acquiring ever more land for their burgeoning population.1 This class distinction carried ethnic stereotypes, with Germans being accused of arrogance and clannishness. However, not until the establishment of a united German state in 1871 did suspicions of possible treason seriously raise a “German question.” In the 1880s the Russian military began to fret over the security risk posed by these potential enemy aliens in the border areas, while the nationalist press agitated against the “peaceful conquest” by German property owners. Further inland, near the Black Sea, these Germans became scapegoats for the lack of land reform that disadvantaged Ukrainian and Russian peasants.2 Late-nineteenth-century state building and the accompanying rise in nationalism made Russo-German relations ever more precarious. Furthermore , Tsar Alexander II attempted to equalize the recently freed serfs with German colonists by removing the latter’s century-old privileges . With this, the ‹rst of the Russian German Volk got on their Weg. Some went back to Germany. But more followed the lure of American railroad recruiters, who sought cheap labor and settlers for government -granted land. In 1905 the outbreak of war and revolution in Russia stimulated further emigration. In the ‹rst year of World War I, Tsar Nicholas II sought to solve land hunger by expropriating the German colonists. He also threatened to deport them eastward, away from the possibility of serving as a ‹fth column for the advancing German army, as Stalin actually did in the next world war. Hence, the February Revolution of 1917 seemed to promise relief to the colonists, but the October Bolshevik Revolution brought many of them in on the side of the Whites. The defeat of the latter caused an exodus to Germany, a way station for many who continued on to North and South America. In all, from 1870 to 1920 an estimated 120,000 Russian Germans entered the United States, settling mainly in Dakota territory.3 Those who remained in Russia had their private landholdings expropriated, and they either remained to work on the collective farms or moved into the cities and other professions. Early Soviet nationalities policy allowed the estab188 The Heimat Abroad lishment of an Autonomous Volga Soviet Republic with cultural prerogatives...

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