History of Germans in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union
The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, large groups of Germans from Russia emigrated to the Americas, where they founded many towns. During World War II, ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were persecuted and many were forcibly resettled to other regions such as Central Asia. In 1989, the Soviet Union declared an ethnic German population of roughly two million. By 2002, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many ethnic Germans had emigrated and the population fell by half to roughly one million. 597,212 Germans self-identified as such in the 2002 Russian census, making Germans the fifth-largest ethnic group in the Russian Federation. There were 353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan and 21,472 in Kyrgyzstan ; while 33,300 Germans lived in Ukraine.
Emigrants from Germany first arrived in Kievan Rus during the reign of Olga of Kiev. The Germans of Russia did not necessarily speak Russian; many spoke German, while French was often used as the language of the high aristocracy. Depending on geography and other circumstances, many Russian Germans spoke Russian as their first or second language. The large numbers of farmers and village tradesmen who arrived following Catherine the Great's invitation were allowed to settle in German-only villages and to keep their German language, religion, and culture until the 1920s.
Today's ethnic Germans who inhabit lands of the former Soviet Union speak mostly Russian, as they are in the gradual process of assimilation. As such, many may not necessarily be fluent in German. Consequently, Germany has recently strictly limited their repatriation. In addition, Kazakhstan Germans from Kazakhstan are moving to Russia rather than Germany. As conditions for Germans in Russia generally deteriorated in the late 19th century and early 20th century during the period of unrest and revolution, many ethnic Germans migrated from Russia to the Americas and elsewhere. They became collectively known as Germans from Russia.
Germans in Imperial Russia (partitioned Poland and Caucasus)
German merchants established a trading post at Novgorod, which they called Peterhof. In 1229, German merchants at Novgorod were granted certain privileges that made their positions more secure.The earliest German settlement in Moscow dates to the reign of Vasili III, Grand Prince of Moscow, from 1505 to 1533. A handful of German and Dutch craftsmen and traders were allowed to settle in Moscow's German Quarter, as they provided essential technical skills in the capital. Gradually, this policy extended to a few other major cities. In 1682, Moscow had about 200,000 citizens; some 18,000 were classified as Nemtsy, which means either "German" or "western foreigner".
The international community located in the German Quarter greatly influenced Peter the Great. His efforts to transform Russia into a more modern European state are believed to have derived in large part from his experiences among Russia's established Germans. By the late 17th century, foreigners were no longer so rare in Russian cities, and Moscow's German Quarter had lost its ethnic character by the end of that century.
Vistula Germans (Poland)
Through wars and the partitions of Poland, Prussia acquired an increasing amount of northern, western, and central Polish territory. The Vistula River flows south to north, with its mouth on the Baltic Sea near Danzig. Germans and Dutch settled its valley beginning at the sea coast and gradually moving further south to the interior. Eventually, Prussia acquired most of the Vistula's watershed, and the central portion of then-Poland became South Prussia. Its existence was brief - 1793 to 1806, but by its end many German settlers had established Protestant agricultural settlements within its earlier borders. By contrast, most Polish were Roman Catholics. Some German Roman Catholics also entered the region from the southwest, especially the area of Prussian Silesia. The shows the distribution of German settlements in what became central Poland.Napoleon's victories ended the short existence of South Prussia. The French Emperor incorporated that and other territories into the Duchy of Warsaw. After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, however, the Duchy was divided. Prussia annexed the western Posen region, and what is now central Poland became the Russian client-state known as Congress Poland. Many Germans continued to live in this central region, maintaining their middle-German Prussian dialect, similar to the Silesian dialect, and their Protestant and Catholic religions.
During both World Wars, the eastern front was fought over in this area. The Soviet government increased the conscription of young men. The rate of Vistula Germans' migrations to this area from Congress Poland increased. Some became Polonized, however, and their descendants remain in Poland.
During the last year of and after World War II, many ethnic Germans fled or were forcibly expelled by the Russians and the Poles from Eastern Europe, particularly those who had maintained their German language and separate religions. The Russians and Poles blamed them for being allies of the Nazis and the reason that Nazi Germany had invaded the East in its program of lebensraum. The Germans were also held to have abused the native populations in internal warfare, allied with the Germans during their occupation. Under the Potsdam Agreement, major population transfers were agreed to by the Allies. The deportees generally lost all their property and were often attacked during their deportations. Those who survived joined millions of other displaced peoples on the road after the war.
Volga Germans (Russia)
Czarina Catherine II was German, born in Stettin in Pomerania. After gaining her power, she proclaimed open immigration for foreigners wishing to live in the Russian Empire on 22 July 1763, marking the beginning of a wave of German migration to the Empire. She wanted German farmers to redevelop farmland that had been fallow after conflict with the Ottomans. German colonies were founded in the lower Volga river area almost immediately afterward. These early colonies were attacked during the Pugachev uprising, which was centred on the Volga area, but they survived the rebellion.German immigration was motivated in part by religious intolerance and warfare in central Europe, as well as by frequently difficult economic conditions, particularly among the southern principalities. Catherine II's declaration freed German immigrants from requirements for military service and from most taxes. It placed the new arrivals outside of Russia's feudal hierarchy and granted them considerable internal autonomy. Moving to Russia gave German immigrants political rights that they would not have possessed in their own lands. Religious minorities found these terms very agreeable, particularly Mennonites from the Vistula River valley. Their unwillingness to participate in military service, and their long tradition of dissent from mainstream Lutheranism and Calvinism, made life under the Hohenzollerns very difficult for them. Nearly all of the Prussian Mennonites emigrated to Russia over the following century, leaving no more than a handful in Prussia.
Other German minority churches took advantage of Catherine II's offer as well, particularly Evangelical Christians such as the Baptists. Although Catherine's declaration forbade them from proselytizing among members of the Orthodox Church, they could evangelize Russia's Muslim and other non-Christian minorities.
German colonization was most intense in the Lower Volga, but other areas also received immigrants. Many settled in the area around the Black Sea, and the Mennonites favoured the lower Dnieper river area, around Ekaterinoslav and Aleksandrovsk.
In 1803, Catherine II's grandson, Tsar Alexander I, reissued her proclamation. In the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, Germans responded in great numbers, fleeing their war-torn land. The Tsar's administration eventually imposed minimum financial requirements on new immigrants, requiring them to have either 300 gulden in cash or special skills in order to be accepted for entry to Russia.
The abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire in 1861 created a shortage of labour in agriculture. The need for workers attracted new German immigration, particularly from the increasingly crowded central European states. There was no longer enough fertile land there for full employment in agriculture.
Furthermore, a sizable portion of Russia's ethnic Germans migrated into Russia from its Polish possessions. The 18th-century partitions of Poland dismantled the Polish-Lithuanian state, dividing it among Austria, Prussia and Russia. Many Germans already living in those parts of Poland transferred to Russia, dating back to medieval and later migrations. Many Germans in Congress Poland migrated further east into Russia between then and World War I, particularly in the aftermath of the Polish insurrection of 1830. The Polish insurrection in 1863 added a new wave of German emigration from Poland to those who had already moved east, and led to the founding of extensive German colonies in Volhynia. When Poland reclaimed its independence in 1918 after World War I, it ceased to be a source of German emigration to Russia, but by then many hundreds of thousands of Germans had already settled in enclaves across the Russian Empire.
Germans settled in the Caucasus area from the beginning of the 19th century and in the 1850s expanded into the Crimea. In the 1890s, new German colonies opened in the Altay mountain area in Russian Asia. German colonial areas continued to expand in Ukraine as late as the beginning of World War I.
According to the first census of the Russian Empire in 1897, about 1.8 million respondents reported German as their mother tongue.