Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Soviet Union

1922–1991: Russian: Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)

The term‘soyuz’– meaning ‘union’ or ‘federation’ – was intended to suggest that this new state entity was a voluntary confederation of independent regions and peoples, rather than a centralised state. The term ‘socialist’ drew on the terminology – which had also become widespread in revolutionary circles during the final decades of the Tsarist Empire – that foreign workers’ parties were already using in their names (such as the ‘Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany’, founded in 1875, SAP; renamed the ‘Social Democratic Party of Germany’ in 1890). The term ‘socialism’/‘socialist’ denotes a revolutionary movement that, in contrast to the political ideologies of ‘conservatism’ and ‘liberalism’, which sought to replace existing social structures with an egalitarian society and demanded equal rights for all citizens – equal rights and equal property for all.‘Soviet/s’– ‘council/councils’ – were formed during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 by workers, peasants and deserting soldiers: grassroots democratic cells or workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ committees, which called themselves ‘councils’. As an instrument of the Bolsheviks, the ‘councils’ had already claimed political and military power even before the February Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks relied on this base, but at the same time infiltrated and stripped it of its power. By the end of the 1920s at the latest, the ‘councils’ had lost their significance as a political force. The meaning of the term ‘Soviet/Council’ was gradually stripped of its political significance and transferred to state authorities at all administrative levels (for example, on 16 March 1946, the ‘Council of People’s Commissars’ was renamed the ‘Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union’).

The USSR comprised the whole of Eastern Europe, the whole of Northern Asia and large parts of Central Asia. To the east, the USSR was bordered by the Pacific Ocean; to the north, by the Arctic Ocean; to the west, by Finland, the Baltic Sea, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania; and to the south, by Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, China and Mongolia.

The USSR covered an area of 22,402,223 square kilometres and had a population of 290,100,023 (1991).^[1]

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Belarus.

The first state entity established on the territory of the former Russian Empire following the so-called October Revolution was the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (Rossijskaja Sovetskaja Federativnaja Socialističeskaja Respublika, RSFSR, founded on 7 November 1917). This was joined – partly under pressure from the Red Army – by the sovereign Ukrainian Soviet Republic (established on 22 January 1919), the sovereign Lithuanian-Belarusian Soviet Republic (founded in March 1919) and the sovereign Transcaucasian Federation (founded in 1918), which comprised Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. On 30 December 1922, they established the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR). In the years that followed, the remaining republics—which had emerged after 1917 and were still independent—on the territory of the former Russian Empire were more or less forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union.

The borders of the Soviet Union prior to the Second World War largely corresponded to those of the Russian Empire, which had collapsed in 1917. In the north-west, however, the former Russian Baltic provinces [Ostzejskie Gubernii] – Estonia, Livonia and Courland (= Estonia and Latvia) – had declared their independence from Russia in 1917, taking advantage of the weakness of the bourgeois ‘Provisional Government’ formed after the February Revolution of 1917 (Prime Minister: Aleksandr Kerensky [1881–1970]) – and had become independent states. Lithuania too, which, as part of ‘Congress Poland’ following the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) and since the Congress of Vienna in 1814/1815 had been incorporated into the Russian Empire along with Poland – was able to establish itself as an independent republic during the turmoil following the First World War, in the wake of Poland’s re-establishment and the reorganisation of Eastern Central Europe (1918, internationally confirmed in the Treaty of Riga/Rīga in 1921). The Grand Duchy of Finland also seceded from Russia amidst the turmoil of the revolution (6 December 1917), as did Bessarabia in the south-west: On 6 February 1918, Bessarabia’s Provincial Council (Sfatul Ţării) requested military assistance from neighbouring Romania against the Red Army, which was also threatening Bessarabia, whereupon Romanian forces occupied the territory. On 9 April 1918, the incorporation of Bessarabia into Romania was proclaimed (and recognised under international law on 20 January 1920).

In the west, too, the re-establishment of Poland led to various border changes. There was fundamental agreement between the two blocs that had fought in the First World War – the Central Powers and the Allies – on the restoration of Polish statehood. Whilst the western borders of the future Poland had already been largely defined in the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919), the question of the border between Poland and the future Soviet Union remained unresolved. When German army units withdrew from Eastern Central Europe in 1918, the Red Army – which was still in the process of being formed – advanced in order, according to the calculations of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Ulyanov, 1870–1924), – to foster revolutions in the West and gain political influence there. Polish politicians (notably Marshal Józef Piłsudski [1867–1935], later Prime Minister of Poland) sought to restore the territorial status quo of 1772. To prevent the Red Army from advancing into territories claimed by Poland, Polish troops occupied parts of Belarus and Ukraine in 1919. In view of Poland’s territorial claims, the ‘Supreme Council of the Entente’ in Paris established a demarcation line (based on linguistic and ethnic criteria) between Poland and the Bolshevik RSFSR on 8 December 1919: the ‘Curzon Line’, which roughly corresponded to the Soviet-Polish border after the Second World War. During the so-called ‘Polish–Soviet War’ (1920–21), the front line shifted dramatically on several occasions (Polish occupation of Kyiv from 7 to 15 May 1920, mid-August 1920: the Red Army advanced to just outside Warsaw, followed by a successful Polish counter-offensive [the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’]). Under pressure from Britain and France, an armistice was finally concluded (12 October 1920). In the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), Lenin – whose regime was under extreme pressure from several armies of the tsarist-loyal ‘Whites’ – accepted a border that was more in line with Polish expectations. It ran 200 to 250 kilometres east of the ‘Curzon Line’: Poland was awarded western Belarus (including Brest-Litovsk/Brėst/Breść nad Bugiem, Grodno/Hrodna, Baranovichi/Baranavičy/Baranowicze) as well as western Ukraine (Volhynia and Galicia, including Lemberg/L’viv/Lwów).

With the Secret Additional Protocol to the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (23 August 1939), in which Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Džugašvili, 1878–1953) and Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) delineated their spheres of interest in East Central Europe, the Soviet leadership aimed to revise the territorial losses enshrined in the Treaty of Riga of 1921. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, the Red Army crossed the eastern border of Poland (17 September 1939), as agreed in the Secret Additional Protocol. The border between the Soviet and German zones (including Warsaw) was essentially formed by the River Bug. On 30 November 1939, the Red Army invaded Finland (‘Winter War’), which was forced to accept its first territorial losses under the Treaty of Moscow/Moskva (12–13 March 1940). Following significant territorial gains by the Finns in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Finnish forces, yielding to the superior strength of the Soviets, withdraw from East Karelia in 1944 and conclude a separate peace with the USSR (19 September 1944). As the Second World War progressed, Finland eventually lost the region around Vyborg/Viipuri, the north-western shores of Lake Ladoga (including the monastic island of Valamo), the Fischer Peninsula in the north near Murmansk, and a strip of territory east of Salla in Finland to the Soviet Union.

In the spring of 1940, the Baltic states were occupied – initially on a temporary basis – by the Red Army; from 18 September 1940, Bessarabia andNorthern Bukovina, including Czernowitz/Černivci/Cernăuţi, were also occupied. During its advance westwards in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, the Red Army recaptured the Baltic states in 1944–1945, which had been occupied by the Wehrmacht since 1941, as well as the disputed territories in eastern Poland, which Stalin subsequently claimed for the Soviet Union at the inter-Allied conferences in Yalta (4–11 February 1945) and Potsdam (17 July–2 August 1945).

With the territorial gains made during and after the Second World War, the USSR not only possessed the same territorial extent as the former Russian Empire, but had even pushed its borders a little further west in Eastern Central Europe with the Finnish cessions, northern East Prussia, Eastern Galicia, Carpathian Ukraine and northern Bukovina, it had even pushed its borders a little further west.

Altai Region, the Baltic States, Bashkiria, Bessarabia, Bukovina, the Don Region, Galicia, Carpathian Ukraine, Crimea, Courland, Livonia, the Black Sea Region, Siberia, Turkestan, the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Volga Region, Volhynia.

The USSR emerged from the Russian Empire following the so-called October Revolution (25 October / 7 November 1917). Among the triggers of the revolution were the heavy losses suffered in the First World War, which led to widespread hardship across the entire empire and chaos in all areas of life (shortages of food and fuel, the collapse of civilian rail transport and the civil service), the incompetence of Tsar Nicholas II (Romanov, 1868–1918) and his government, and the war-weary sentiment amongst the soldiers. By early 1917, it was estimated that Russia had suffered one million killed in action, four million wounded and two million prisoners of war. The real cause of the masses’ anger lay in the untenable social conditions faced by both the rural and urban populations, and in the authoritarian regime, which denied landless peasants and the ‘Fourth Estate’ any say in political affairs.

The people’s anger found expression in uprisings, which culminated in strikes on a massive scale in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg/Saint-Pétersbourg/Leningrad) on 23 February / 8 March 1917 (‘February Revolution’). The garrison troops deployed against the insurgents showed solidarity with the strikers, with the result that the workers’ and soldiers’ councils (soviets) established by left-wing groups soon came to dominate events. The Duma (a sham parliament)^[2] did not dissolve itself, as ordered by the Tsar, but replaced the existing government with a left-liberal ‘Provisional Government’, which, however, was scarcely able to hold its own against the radical councils. Eventually, the pressure on Tsar Nicholas II from all sides, particularly from the general staff, became so great that he abdicated on 15 March 1917. Consequently, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returned to Russia from his Swiss exile in April 1917. Under the slogan ‘All power to the councils!’, he rallied sections of the divided left-wing parties – the ‘Social Democratic Party of Russia’^[3] and the left wing of the ‘Social Revolutionaries’ – behind him and deliberately exacerbated the political situation. With his key demands of ‘peace’ and‘land reform’, he sought to win over the masses.

On 7 November 1917, in the course of a largely bloodless coup, Lenin had the Provisional Government arrested and occupied all strategically and administratively important locations in Saint Petersburg. In the face of widespread resistance, he formed a workers’ and peasants’ government, the ‘Council of People’s Commissars’, which he himself headed and to which, amongst others, Leo Trotsky/Lev Trockij (Bronštejn, 1879–1940) as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and War, and Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin as People’s Commissar for Nationalities. Lenin had, admittedly, vociferously called for the formation of a ‘Constituent Assembly’. However, when the elections for this assembly in November 1917 dealt Lenin’s Bolsheviks a bitter defeat (they received only around 25 per cent of the vote), he had the Constituent Assembly dissolved on 19 January 1918 with the use of military force, even before it had been able to commence its work.

Following the humiliating setbacks and repression during the World War (e.g. through the Liquidation Laws of 2 February 1915; see also‘Russia/Russian Empire’), the majority of the Russian Germans – who had remained absolutely loyal to the throne right up until the war – welcomed the revolution. From April 1917 onwards, congresses were held in all Russian-German settlement areas, and associations and committees were founded, with the question of autonomy for the settlement areas also being discussed. ‘Councils’ of German farmers were also established in the Russian-German villages. Regiments of Russian-German volunteers, amongst others, fought in the Red Army.

The years following the October Revolution were marked by bloody clashes. This was due to the convergence of various intertwined phenomena:

The Bolsheviks termed the first phase of their rule ‘war communism’ (1918–1921), during which the tsarist leadership was largely replaced, by force, by Bolshevik ‘soviets’. This phase was characterised by a radical command economy: industry, large-scale landholdings and banks were nationalised, and the economy – the production and distribution of goods – was centralised; terror was the most common means of enforcing these objectives. Trotsky was entrusted with building up the Red Army, the formation of which had been decided by the ‘Council of People’s Commissars’ on 28 January 1918.

The newly formed Red Army had to prove itself in the civil war against the pro-tsarist ‘Whites’, who consisted of experienced generals, officers and sections of their troops, as well as volunteers and Cossacks, and were supported by foreign (including British, American and Japanese) interventionist forces. Nevertheless, Trotsky succeeded in driving out the ‘Whites’; in November 1920, the ‘White’ general Baron Peter/Pëtr von Wrangel (1878–1928) left Russia with his armies from the Crimea, whilst the civil war in the Far East dragged on until October 1922.

Following the revolution, resistance emerged amongst the peasants, who attempted to fight back against the Bolsheviks’ expropriation policy in numerous uprisings. These revolts were crushed by the Bolsheviks (including in German villages) in the course of the civil war. In the district of Marxstadt (Marksštadt, Katharinenstadt), for example, almost 300 people were sentenced to death by firing squad; during the recapture of Mariental by the ‘Reds’, 550 insurgents lost their lives.^[4] Requisitions and looting led, amongst other things, to the famine on the Volga in 1920–1921, which claimed five million lives; of these, 47,770 officially recorded fatalities were among the Volga Germans alone. Statistical data for the years 1921–1922 indicate a population decline in the Volga region of 114,000 people^[5] (see also‘Volga region’).

Despite a command economy and repressive measures to secure food supplies, the Soviet economy was on the verge of collapse; War Communism had failed, and millions of people had starved to death. Lenin therefore undertook a ‘tactical retreat’ by introducing the ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP; Novaja ėkonomičeskaja politika, NĖP) in 1921, which once again permitted private-sector activity in both the agricultural and commercial sectors. Compulsory requisitions were discontinued. This liberalisation spurred development in numerous economic sectors. However, economic liberalisation was not matched by political liberalisation; here, the unscrupulous use of terror remained the norm, including the murder of Tsar Nicholas and his family (16 July 1918).

‘National in form – socialist in content’ – it was in accordance with this directive that Lenin, and above all Stalin, shaped Soviet policy on nationalities. In the power struggle over Lenin’s succession, Stalin hoped to win the favour of non-Russian ethnic groups by making concessions on national issues.

The German-Russian Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) contained an additional clause whereby Germans wishing to leave the country could obtain a ‘protection certificate’ from the ‘German Commission for German Repatriates’ in Saratov, enabling them to travel to the German Empire. To prevent a wave of emigration among the Russian Germans, Stalin made concessions to them on the issue of autonomy. A Volga German conference in Warenburg on the Volga (24–26 February 1918), which brought together representatives from various German communities, sent a delegation to Moscow to explore the possibilities of autonomy. Shortly after the delegation’s return, the ‘Commissariat for Volga German Affairs’ was established in Saratov; its head was Ernst Reuter (1889–1953), who had arrived in Russia as a prisoner of war and who later became Governing Mayor of (West) Berlin (1947–1953), was entrusted with the planning and organisation of the ‘Labour Commune of the Volga Germans’. On 19 October 1918, Lenin himself signed the relevant decrees for the creation of the semi-autonomous ‘Labour Commune of the Volga Germans’, which was upgraded in 1924 tothe ‘Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans’(ASSRdWD). In addition, German ‘national raions’ were formed, each comprising several villages. In Russia there were (in addition to the Volga Republic) six German national raions, ten in Ukraine, and one each in Azerbaijan and Georgia. Admittedly, as with all national Soviet republics, these areas cannot be said to have enjoyed genuine autonomy due to the centralised command structures; nevertheless, even this relative autonomy was of the utmost importance, particularly for the German school and education system.

The German national raions were dissolved as early as the late 1930s, whilst the Volga Republic was abolished by the deportation decree of 28 August 1941.

(see also:‘Volga German ASSR’)

Lenin’s death in 1924 did not initially lead to any discernible political change. In his so-called ‘Testament’ (5 January 1923), Lenin had warned that Stalin was abusing his power as General Secretary of the ‘Communist Party of Russia’, and proposed Trotsky as his successor. Stalin concealed the ‘Testament’ and consolidated his position as Lenin’s ‘legitimate’ successor. He eliminated all comrades who might pose a threat to him. Between 1922 and 1924, he replaced 16,000 officials in the party and the administration with people he trusted.^[6] He became a key figure in political life in the Soviet Union, with the party serving as his instrument of rule.

By 1928, the Soviet Union’s economic situation had stabilised to some extent, leading Stalin to believe he could bring the NEP to an end and embark on forced industrialisation and collectivisation. The end of the NEP phase was marked by the first ‘Five-Year Plan’ for the development of the Soviet economy in 1928. The large-scale farmers had already been expropriated shortly after the revolution. But this did not come anywhere near to meeting the demand for land. Thus, in 1929, Stalin announced the new objective: the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’. What was meant was the expropriation of the ‘kulaks’, that is, individual farmers (medium and small-scale farmers). In the course of collectivisation, they were forced to hand over their land, livestock and equipment to the local kolkhoz or sovkhoz and to join as members themselves.

In the winter of 1929–1930 alone, 500,000 ‘kulaks’ were deported to Siberia, with a great many Russian Germans also perishing. The forced transition of agriculture to large-scale farms led to a further collapse of the agricultural sector, which was unable to function without the deported farmers. This resulted in a famine on an even greater scale than that on the Volga in 1921–1922. During the so-called Holodomor in Ukraine (1932–1933), at least 3.5 million people starved to death. For most Ukrainians, there is no doubt that this famine was deliberately brought about on Stalin’s orders in order to break the Ukrainians’ will to resist Soviet rule.^[7] However, recent Western research has concluded that the Holodomor was caused by a chain of various Stalinist measures; there was no specific directive from Stalin targeting Ukraine. The ‘Great Purges’ of 1936 to 1938 marked the grim culmination of Stalin’s path to a one-man dictatorship, during which real or supposed opponents were eliminated. Anyone could be arrested by the NKVD – long-serving party cadres, professors and teachers, artists and writers. It is estimated that between ten and eleven million Soviet citizens were tried in summary proceedings between 1936 and 1942: Some were shot on the spot, whilst others were sentenced to up to 25 years in the Gulag^[8]. Above all, Stalin distrusted his generals and the officer corps. In 1937, even the hero of the Civil War, Chief of the General Staff Marshal Nikolai Tukhachevsky (1893–1937), was executed. Of 6,000 staff officers, 1,500 ‘disappeared’. Of the seven full members of the Politburo elected in 1919, only Stalin was still alive by 1930 – all the others (apart from the late Lenin) had been executed as ‘unreliable’. The Party’s Central Committee, the executive body, consisted of 140 members in 1934, but by 1937 had been reduced to just 15 people. The heads of the secret police (NKVD) gained notoriety during the ‘purges’^[9] Nikolai Yezhov (Ežov, 1895–1940), who served between 1936 and 1938, and his successor Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953), who had organised the ‘purges’. Nazism drove numerous communists from all over the world to seek refuge in the Soviet Union, where Stalin made the Moscow ‘Hotel Lux’ available to hundreds of persecuted people, mostly Comintern officials. Among those who lived there were future senior officials of the GDR, such as Wilhelm Pieck (1876–1960), Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973) and Otto Grotewohl (1894–1964), as well as Herbert Wehner (1906–1990), Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) and many others. During the ‘purges’, the ‘Hotel Lux’ became a trap for many of its guests. They were ‘taken away’ at night and murdered – among them six German communists,^[10] – or deported.

The National Socialists ’ seizure of power in Germany triggered a fierce wave of anti-fascist propaganda in the Soviet Union. The Russian-Germans suffered particularly under the label of ‘fascist’, as they were accused of engaging in fascist espionage to the detriment of the Soviet Union. From 1937/1938 onwards, all German institutions in the Soviet Union were hindered in their activities and eventually dissolved, although the Volga Republic was not formally dissolved until after the German attack on the USSR in 1941.

The non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and the German Reich, known as the Hitler–Stalin Pact, shocked the world. Hitler recognised Soviet interests in eastern Poland, and Stalin declared his lack of interest in western and central Poland. Just one week later (1 September 1939), the Germans attacked Poland, and on 17 September 1939, the Red Army crossed the Polish-Soviet border. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, 93,000 Bessarabian Germans were forced to leave their homeland at the end of 1940 as part of the Nazi ‘Heim ins Reich’ campaign.

Only Finland put up fierce resistance to the Red Army during the ‘Winter War’ (1939–1940) and was able – albeit at the cost of territorial losses – to preserve its sovereignty.

On 22 June 1941, the German attack on the Soviet Union began. Stalin had been warned by his officers, but ignored these warnings. Within a few months, German troops had conquered Belarus and large parts of Ukraine, advancing as far as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad/Volgograd and the Caucasus. The Red Army’s retreat resembled a disorderly flight, not least due to the absence of the experienced generals and officers whom Stalin had purged. The Soviet government now withdrew to Kuybyshev (now Samara) on the Volga. War production (weapons, ammunition, aircraft) was relocated behind the Urals.

The German soldiers were generally welcomed by Belarusians and Ukrainians, as they hoped the Germans would liberate them from the Soviet regime. However, this hope quickly faded when it became apparent that German occupation policy showed little regard for the indigenous population, the ‘Slavic subhumans’.

The Wehrmacht failed to capture Moscow. Leningrad withstood the siege from September 1941 to January 1944, during which 1.1 million people starved to death. The annihilation of the German 6th Army in the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943) became a symbol of the turning point in the war. The final victory over the German armies, more than two years later, was the result of co-operation between the Allies (the Soviet Union, the USA, the United Kingdom and France). Members of the Allied governments held conferences in Moscow, Tehran and Yalta. At the conferences in Yalta and, after the war, in Potsdam, the future fate of Germany was decided: Stalin claimed for the Soviet Union Western Belarus, Western Ukraine and Western Volhynia, which had been part of the Russian Empire until 1918, as well as Carpathian Ukraine and Eastern Galicia, including Lviv. As compensation, Poland was awarded the German provinces east of the Oder–Neisse line.

Stalin’s crimes included the deportation of ‘unreliable’ ethnic groups (suspected of collaborating with the fascists) to Soviet Asia: 900,000 to 1 million Russian Germans, 470,000 Chechens, 202,000 Crimean Tatars, 131,300 Kalmyks, 92,000 Ingush, as well as other smaller ethnic groups.^[11] Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, a decree dated 28 August 1941 ordered the‘resettlement’of all Volga Germans (approx. 400,000).^[12] In reality, however, the decree was applied to all Germans in the Soviet Union. The compact settlement area of the Volga Germans prompted the institutions tasked with the deportation (primarily the NKVD) to begin at the Volga. It is estimated that at least 640,000 Germans were deported to Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Altai and the Central Asian Soviet republics in the few weeks from early September to early November 1941 alone.^[13] In addition to the Volga Germans, the 100,000 Ukrainian Germans who had been forced to remain on Soviet soil prior to the German-Romanian occupation of Ukraine were also ‘resettled’.^[14] Among the 640,000 deportees were also 45,000 Caucasus Germans, 35,000 Crimean Germans, 26,000 Germans from the Leningrad area, and more than 40,000 people from cities and other parts of the European USSR.^[15] There are occasional references to ‘thousands or even tens of thousands’ of Volga Germans having been shot shortly before their deportation.^[16]

Generally speaking, those affected were only informed of their‘resettlement’four hours before their deportation. During the journey, boys and men over the age of 16 were separated from their families and fellow villagers and sent to the ‘labour army’ (see below). The journey could take up to two months to reach very distant destinations and was characterised by appalling conditions: barred and sealed goods and livestock wagons, crushing overcrowding (45 to 120 people in a single wagon), bitter cold in the unheated carriages, a completely inadequate supply of food and drinking water – not to mention the catastrophic hygienic and sanitary conditions. Under these circumstances, tens of thousands or even more of those deported perished during the journey alone – primarily the elderly, the sick and young children.^[17]

The vast majority of the deported Volga Germans reached their designated destinations between late September and late October 1941. They were ‘dumped’ somewhere – often in the snow. Normally, the local authorities had made hardly any preparations for accommodating such a large number of new arrivals. With winter setting in, they often had to seek shelter in the collective farms’ cattle sheds; many dug huts into the ground (zemljanki), which some were only able to leave years later. According to eyewitness accounts, the desperate early years in the ‘special settlement’ (specnaselenie) claimed a particularly high number of victims: as a result of hunger and thirst, the cold, epidemic diseases and accidents at work.

Some of the deportees – between 120,000 and 130,000 people – were immediately conscripted into the ‘Labour Army’ (Trudovaja armija/Trudarmija), that is, into strictly guarded, barbed-wire-fenced labour camps operating under a military regime, where they were put to work felling timber, building railways and roads, mining coal, iron and nickel, and carrying out urban development. Whilst initially only men had been recruited for the ‘Labour Army’, following a tightening of the recruitment regime in 1942, women were also (aged between 16 and 45; exceptions: pregnant women and women with children under three years of age) were conscripted, and the recruitment of men was extended to include further age groups (15 to 55 years). Owing to the climatic conditions, malnutrition, disease, the unspeakable and accident-prone working conditions, and the ever-present terror, the mortality rate in the ‘Labour Army’ was considerable and, according to an analysis of eyewitness accounts and estimates, is thought to have stood at 20 per cent.^[18] Officially, the ‘Labour Army’ was disbanded after the end of the war, but it took until the end of 1946 for this process to be completed.

Those who were not conscripted into the ‘Labour Army’ were usually assigned to kolkhozes and sovkhozes. The ‘special settlers’ were subject to a special regime: the ‘Kommandantur’ (komendantura; ‘commandant’s office’, because the deportees initially had to report every 14 days, and later monthly, to the local commandant’s office of the NKVD or, subsequently, the KGB, to ensure that the special settlers had not left their assigned place of exile).

When the Red Army advanced against German- and Romanian-occupied Ukraine in 1943, the German authorities long failed to take any measures to protect the Ukrainian-German civilian population. It was not until mid-1943 that households were hastily broken up. In August 1943, a massive ‘treck’ comprising 95,000 Black Sea Germans (so-called ‘administrative resettlers’) set off westwards from the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU). In February 1944, the ‘Great Trek’ set off with 135,000 ‘Transnistrian Germans’. Both trecks took three months to reach the Warthegau, where they were to be ‘assigned for Germanisation’,^[19] or the ‘Altreich’ (i.e. eastern Germany). In addition, there were countless smaller treks^[20] that made their way westwards individually. From the end of 1944, between 200,000 and 250,000 of the 350,000 Ukrainian Germans who had fled – mainly in camps – in the Warthegau and in East Germany were overrun by the Red Army and ‘repatriated’—that is, deported to Soviet Asia—where the classes of the relevant age groups were also incorporated into the ‘Labour Army’, whilst the remainder, like the other ‘special settlers’ from the Volga region, were subjected to the control and terror regime of the ‘Kommandantur’. 150,000 Ukrainian Germans were initially able to evade ‘repatriation’,^[21] by going into hiding in the Western Zones of Germany. However, half of them were handed over to the Soviet occupying power by the American and British (but not the French) occupation authorities. Furthermore, special Soviet search parties were quite successful in tracking down Russian-Germans in hiding amongst the German civilian population.^[22] Only 70,000 to 80,000 of them were able, despite all Soviet counter-measures, to remain in the Western zones and assimilate into the West German population.

The question of the number of Russian-German fatalities resulting from the deportation can only be answered with the greatest of reservations. The British historian Robert Conquest nevertheless attempted to do so and arrived at a figure of 30 per cent (= 300,000) of the German ‘special settlers’ who perished under the deportation regime.^[23] Benjamin Pinkus, a Jewish historian who estimates the number of Russian-German ‘special settlers’ (1941–1955) at 970,000, also puts the figure at more than 30 per cent, i.e. 300,000 deaths.^[24] In 1955, following Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s (1876–1967) visit to Moscow from 8 to 14 September, the ‘Kommandantur’ was abolished. From then on, the deported ‘special settlers’ were allowed to move about relatively freely – but only within the Asian part of the Soviet Union. A decree issued in 1964, which cleared the Russian Germans of the accusation of having collaborated with the fascists, did nothing to change this. It was not until a decree of 1972 that the German ‘special settlers’ were permitted to move to the European part of the Soviet Union. However, only a few managed to return to their former settlement areas, because Russians and Ukrainians had been resettled there following the deportation of the Germans in 1941.

The Red Army had not only captured Berlin, but had also liberated Eastern Central and South-Eastern Europe from fascism. Cadres trained in Moscow ensured, by inciting uprisings, organising strikes and manipulating elections in these countries, that communist regimes were established in the future GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Under Tito’s leadership, Yugoslavia had been pursuing its own non-aligned path since 1948. The remaining satellite states of the Soviet Union joined together in 1955 to form the Warsaw Pact – as a counterweight to NATO. In 1968, Albania left the alliance; in the same year, Romania’s head of state, Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918–1989), broke away from Moscow.

Once the euphoria of victory had subsided, Stalin’s mistrust of everyone around him resurfaced in the late 1940s. Repression, persecution and deportations once again became part of everyday life in the Soviet Union. The same applied to Stalin’s anti-Semitism, which had already manifested itself during the ‘Great Purges’, when he had ‘made disappear’ all those Jews whom Lenin had appointed to leading positions (in 1930, for instance, eleven of the twenty-five members of the Party Presidium were Jewish), had ‘disappeared’. Cultural figures such as the poet Isaak Babel (1894–1940), the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (Vsevolod Mejerchol’d, 1874–1940) and his wife, Zinaida Reich (Zinaida Rajch, 1894–1939), had been ‘liquidated’; between 1936 and 1942, 49 Jewish writers and journalists had been murdered.^[25]

The ‘Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’ (JAFK), founded in 1942 by Jewish cultural figures, whose chairmen Solomon Michoel’s (1890–1948) and Icik Feffer (1900–1952) had been sent abroad to carry out propaganda for the Soviet Union and raise funds for the Red Army, was banned by Stalin in 1948. Michoel’s was murdered on Stalin’s express orders. Following the arrest of the 15 members of the JAFK Presidium in late 1948/early 1949, 13 of them were shot after a trial lasting almost three years. During the JAFK trial, Stalin, in his delusion, ‘exposed’ a ‘conspiracy of the Kremlin doctors’ – Jewish doctors who were allegedly plotting to kill him. From September 1952 onwards, large groups of them were arrested, with 37 arrested in February 1953 alone. Parallel to this wave of arrests, a vicious anti-Semitic press campaign was waged, resulting in mass anti-Jewish hysteria.^[26]

From the late 1940s onwards, the ideological conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the ‘Cold War’. The first major incident was Stalin’s attempt to annex West Berlin to the GDR by blocking all access roads to West Berlin from June 1948 to May 1949. The blockade failed because West Berlin was supplied by US aircraft via an ‘airlift’. This Berlin Crisis and the Korean War (1950–1953) nearly led to a new world war.

During the interregnum between Stalin’s death and Nikita Khrushchev’s (Khrushchev, 1894–1971) in 1953, an anti-communist popular uprising broke out in the GDR (17 June 1953), which was crushed by Soviet tanks.

In the power struggle following Stalin’s death, Khrushchev emerged victorious and became Party leader in 1953. In 1958, he also assumed the office of Head of Government. In his famous secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (February 1956), he exposed Stalin’s mistakes and crimes and initiated the process of de-Stalinisation. His aim was to pave the way for a cautious policy of reform. As a sign of his goodwill, he permitted certain liberalisation in the cultural sphere, ushering in the ‘Thaw’, during which authors such as Bella Akhmatova (1937–2010), Vladimir Dudincev (1918–1998), Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017), Andrei Voznesensky (1933–2010) and others were able to publish. The fact that Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) was not permitted to accept the Nobel Prize in 1958 for his novel *Doctor Zhivago* signalled, just as the suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet tanks had done previously (October 1956), the end of the so-called Thaw. The initial liberalisation measures were reversed, and repression once again became a tool of domestic policy. For example, the number of parishes and churches belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church (1953: 22,000, 1964: 11,000), monasteries (75, 17) and seminaries (12, 5) was significantly reduced as a result of state-imposed closures.^[27]

The construction of the Berlin Wall (13 August 1961), which was intended to halt the mass exodus from the GDR (1949–1961: up to 2.5 million GDR citizens), would not have been possible without the explicit consent of the Soviet leadership; the relevant decision by the Soviet leadership was taken in Moscow in early August 1961. The Cuban Missile Crisis (14–28 October 1962), provoked by Khrushchev and which could also have led to a Third World War, ended with Khrushchev suffering a massive loss of prestige (including on the domestic front).

Khrushchev’s reform plans for the state and the Party unsettled the old Party cadres; his failed measures in industry and agriculture were held against him as serious mistakes, such as his plans for land reclamation and the irrigation of Kazakhstan (with the drying up of the Aral Sea as a visible consequence since 1960). The apparatchiks also held it against him that he had yielded to the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Furthermore, his foreign policy had led to a cooling of Soviet relations with China. The combination of these factors led to Khrushchev’s downfall on 14 October 1964.

Leonid Brezhnev (Brežnev, 1906–1982) was among those who had ousted Khrushchev. In the same year, 1964, he was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His election as Chairman of the Presidential Board of the Supreme Soviet – and thus as Head of State – did not take place until 1977. The Brezhnev era was long characterised by the term ‘stagnation’. The question of whether, as was customary until recently, one can actually speak of a return by Brezhnev to the repressive forms of Stalinism (restriction of freedom of expression, reversal of reform initiatives from the Khrushchev era, tightening of laws on political offences, e.g. criticism of the regime), is increasingly becoming a focus of contemporary research.^[28] In any case, the writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1969, arrested in 1974 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1975. The Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989), a physicist and human rights activist, was arrested in 1980 and exiled to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod).

The attempt by Alexander Dubček (1921–1992), leader of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, to bring about liberalisation in the country through the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 – a ‘socialism with a human face’ – was thwarted by the military intervention of troops from the Warsaw Pact states (the Soviet Union, the GDR, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland). The political justification for this intervention in Prague/Praha was provided retrospectively on 12 November 1968: the so-called ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’. This granted the individual Warsaw Pact states limited sovereignty, which was, however, constrained by the interests of the socialist community.

From 1973, the ‘Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe’ (CSCE) met in Helsinki/Helsingfors, with participants from 35 countries representing both sides of the Cold War. The ‘Helsinki Final Act’ (1975) was intended to provide the states of both blocs with a set of instruments to facilitate orderly cooperation on humanitarian issues as well as on matters of security, human rights (freedom of expression and freedom of movement), the environment, etc. This ‘Final Act’ formed the basis for the wide-ranging activities of dissident and human rights groups in all the countries of Eastern Europe.

In 1979, at the urging of the Afghan Communist leadership, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The ‘Afghan adventure’, which claimed many thousands of lives on the Soviet side alone, was not brought to an end until 1989 by Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbačëv).

Brezhnev’s two successors, Yuri Andropov (Andropov, 1914–1984) from 1982 to 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko (Černenko, 1911–1985), were elected to their high offices despite their age and poor health; they died without having achieved anything of lasting significance.

When he was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was a generation younger than his three predecessors. He sought to create ‘socialism with a human face’ through a revolution from above in a country that had fallen behind economically and was ideologically stunted. The start of his tenure was overshadowed by the reactor disaster in Chernobyl (26 April 1986).

‘Glasnost’(openness),‘Perestroika’(restructuring) and‘Demokratizacija’(democratisation) were the concepts he used to initiate economic and ideological renewal in the Soviet Union. His efforts to reform the economy, not least with Western assistance, were projects that could not yield short-term successes. From an ideological perspective, the revelation of the Soviet Union’s profound crisis and the accompanying liberalisation had a profound impact on the people. Even anti-communist views, which until then could only be expressed underground, were now permitted to be voiced publicly (e.g. previously taboo subjects such as Stalin’s mass murders). Gorbachev also endeavoured to reduce, at least to some extent, the general lack of legal certainty, surveillance and mark. The Russian Orthodox Church serves as an example of this liberalisation. In 1987–1988, it was able to celebrate its 1,000th anniversary (‘Millennium’) in full public view, even in government buildings – something Gorbachev’s predecessors had forbidden. Hundreds of nationalised churches and monasteries were returned to the Church.^[29]

His open foreign policy (in collaboration with his Foreign Minister, the Georgian Eduard Shevardnadze [Ėduard Ševardnadze, 1928–2014]) was successful because the West trusted Gorbachev. Talks with the American Presidents Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) and George Bush Sr., and with their Secretaries of State, took place annually from 1985 onwards – sometimes more frequently – in Moscow, Washington, Geneva and Malta. These talks led to a significant improvement in relations between the West and the East, as did the CSCE follow-up negotiations (1989).

In October 1988, Gorbachev announced that, as far as he was concerned, the Brezhnev Doctrine was no longer valid and that the Warsaw Pact states would in future be free to choose their form of government according to their own preferences. This signalled the end of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the Cold War. In Eastern Central Europe, communist rule was subsequently abolished in most cases – partly as part of revolutionary processes. Gorbachev made German reunification in 1989–1990 possible through his personal commitment – in some cases in the face of Western resistance.

For the old party cadres, Gorbachev’s actions were sacrilege. His personnel policy (rejuvenating the top leadership bodies) earned him many enemies amongst the ultra-conservative officials. This is evidenced by the three-day coup in August 1991, when Gorbachev was abducted to the Crimea.^[30] The leading coup plotters – Gennady Yanayev (1937–2010), Vladimir Kryuchkov (1924–2007), Dmitry Yasov (1924–2020), Boris Pugo (1937–1991) and others, all held senior positions in the state and the party. The fact that the coup failed was due in no small part to Boris Yeltsin (El’cin, 1931–2007), who had the ‘White House’ (then the seat of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) defended by tanks. Gorbachev returned to the Kremlin a few days after the coup began – albeit with a sense of resignation following his experiences. The leading coup plotters were arrested.

Between March 1990 and December 1991, all the Soviet republics, with the exception of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, had seceded from the Soviet Union; in the end, the Russian Soviet Republic alone constituted the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was thus president of a state that, in effect, no longer existed. Boris Yeltsin – the democratically elected president of the still-powerful Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic – systematically stripped Gorbachev of his powers until the latter resigned on 25 December 1991 and handed over the reins of office to Yeltsin. That evening, the Soviet flag was taken down and the flag of the Russian Federation hoisted. On 26 December, the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution to dissolve the Soviet Union and to transfer all its obligations under international law to the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on 31 December 1991. The ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’ (CIS), founded in December 1991, never managed to gain any real international significance.

As early as the 1950s, the Soviet authorities had received around 100,000 applications from Russian Germans to leave the country. However, it was only in rare cases – and then mostly through family reunification – that people managed to leave the Soviet Union. Consequently, only 460 people were able to emigrate in 1985 and only 753 in 1986. Gorbachev, then still General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, created the conditions for the mass exodus of Russian Germans by introducing liberalised emigration regulations (25 August 1987). In that very same year, the number of Russian Germans leaving the country rose to 14,448. By 1989, the figure had already reached 98,134. In 1990 and 1991, the number stood at approximately 150,000. Between 1992 and 1995, around 200,000 Russian-Germans emigrated annually to their ‘historical homeland’. By 2005, the number of emigrants (including non-German spouses) had risen to 2.5 million.^[31]

German and Russian authorities jointly established German national districts: in 1991 in Halbstadt (Russian: Gal’bštadt) in the Altai region and in 1992 in Asovo (Russian: Azovo) near Omsk. However, the plan to thereby encourage the Russian Germans to remain in the country did not succeed. Today, even in these German raions, one hardly ever meets people who speak German.

The Lutheran, Catholic and Mennonite churches have become empty and are now only well attended on major holidays; some have been sold. Those who remain do so mostly because of their age, because they have a job they find fulfilling, or because they have failed the (simple) German language test. Despite the mass emigration, however, efforts are being made to preserve German history and culture in Russia; this work is carried out on the one hand by societies and associations such as the ‘International Association of German Culture’ and, on the other, by the churches (Lutherans, Catholics, Mennonites), which continue to offer services in German as well as in Russian.

• David Anin: The Russian Revolution of 1917 as recounted by its participants. Munich 1976 (Science and the Present series).
• Jörg Baberowski: The Red Terror. A History of Stalinism. Munich 2003.
• Thomas M. Bohn, Dietmar Neutatz (eds.): Study Guide to Eastern Europe. Vol. 2: History of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. 2nd, revised edition. Cologne 2009.
• Jean-François Bourret: The Germans of the Volga. A Cultural History of a Minority – 1763–1941. Lyon 1986.
• Dittmar Dahlmann, Ralph Tuchtenhagen (eds.): Between Reform and Revolution. The Germans on the Volga 1860–1917. 2nd, expanded and updated edition. Essen 1994 (Publications of the Institute for the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe 4).
• V[iktor] F. Dizendorf (ed.): German Settlements in the USSR up to 1941. Geography and Population. A Reference Work]. Moscow 2002.
• V[iktor] F. Dizendorf (ed.): German Settlements in the Russian Empire. Geography and Population. Reference Work [German Settlements in the Russian Empire. Geography and Population. A Reference Work]. Moscow 2006.
• Viktor Dönninghaus: Minorities in Distress. Soviet Policy towards Germans, Poles and Other Diaspora Nationalities 1917–1938. Munich 2009 (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 35).
• Konstantin Ehrlich: Living Heritage. Notes on the Settlement Geography and Cultural History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union. Alma-Ata 1988.
• Alfred Eisfeld (ed.): The Russians of German Descent. Munich 1992 (History of Expulsion and Expelled Germans. A series of study books on the interim assessment of resettlement, flight, deportation, expulsion and emigration 2).
• Alfred Eisfeld, Victor Herdt (eds.): Deportation. Special Settlements. Labour Army. Germans in the Soviet Union 1941–1956. Cologne 1996.
• Alfred Eisfeld, Victor Herdt, Boris Meissner † (eds.): Germans in Russia and in the Soviet Union 1914–1941. Berlin 2007 (History/Research and Science).
• Orlando Figes: The Tragedy of a People. The Era of the Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Berlin 2008.
• Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The Third Reich and the Germans in the Soviet Union. Stuttgart 1983 (Series of the Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46).
• Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Hugo H. Jedig (eds.): The Germans in the USSR. An International Contribution to German–Soviet Understanding. Baden-Baden 1990.
• Arkadij A. German: Nemeckaja avtonomija na Volge [German Autonomy on the Volga]. 2 vols. Saratov 1992/1994.
• Peter Hauptmann, Gerd Stricker (eds.): The Orthodox Church in Russia. Documents from its History (860–1980). Göttingen 1988.
• Michael Heller, Alexander Nekrich: History of the Soviet Union. 2 vols. Königstein/Ts. 1981/1982.
• Viktor Herdt (ed.): Between Revolution and Autonomy. Documents on the History of the Volga Germans from 1917–1918. Cologne 2000 (Göttingen Working Group: Publication 483).
• Manfred Hildermeier: History of the Soviet Union 1917–1991. The Rise and Fall of the First Socialist State. Munich 1998.
• Manfred Hildermeier: The Soviet Union 1917–1991. Munich 2007 (Oldenbourg Outline of History 31).
• Edgar Hösch: History of Russia. From the Kievan Rus’ to the Collapse of the Soviet Empire. Stuttgart 1996.
• Andreas Kappeler, Boris Meissner, Gerhard Simon: The Germans in the Russian Empire and the Soviet State. Cologne 1987 (Nationality and Regional Problems in Eastern Europe 1).
• Andreas Kappeler: Russia as a Multi-Ethnic Empire. Origins, History, Collapse. Munich 1992.
• Horst Günther Linke: History of Russia. From the Beginnings to the Present Day. Darmstadt 2006 (Outlines).
• Boris Meissner, Helmut Neubauer, Alfred Eisfeld (eds.): The Russian Germans. Yesterday and Today. Cologne 1992 (Nationality and Regional Problems in Eastern Europe 6).
• Dietmar Neutatz: Dreams and Nightmares. A History of Russia in the 20th Century. Munich 2013 (European History in the 20th Century).
• Hans-Heinrich Nolte: A Brief History of Russia. With numerous tables. Stuttgart 1998 (Reclam’s Universal Library 9696).
• Benjamin Pinkus, Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The Germans in the Soviet Union. History of a National Minority. Edited and published by Karl-Heinz Ruffman. Baden-Baden 1987 (Eastern Europe and International Communism 17).
• Roman Rössler: The Church and the Revolution in Russia. Patriarch Tikhon and the Soviet State. Cologne, Vienna 1969 (Contributions to the History of Eastern Europe 7).
• Gerhard Simon: Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union. From Total Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society. Baden-Baden 1986 (Eastern Europe and International Communism 16).
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Information on political education from the Federal Agency for Civic Education:

• www.bpb.de/izpb/189541/sowjetunion-i-1917-1953 (Soviet Union I 1917–1953)
• www.bpb.de/izpb/192770/sowjetunion-ii-1953-1991 (Soviet Union II 1953–1991)

[1] de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sowjetunion (accessed 17 March 2015); dtv Encyclopaedia. In 20 volumes. Vol. 17. Mannheim – Munich 1995: 1990 – 288.6 million inhabitants.

[2] There were always German members of parliament in the four Dumas (15 in 1906), but they belonged to various parties and did not represent the German minority, which was unable to reach a consensus. – The terms ‘sham democracy’ and ‘sham constitutionalism’ are attributed to Max Weber. See Max Weber: Russia’s Transition to Sham Constitutionalism. In: Archive for Social Science and Social Policy 23 (1906), Issue 1, Supplement, pp. 165–401. Reprinted in 1997.

[3] Since 1898: ‘Russian Social Democratic Party’, which split in 1903 into the more radical ‘Bolsheviks’ (majority) under Lenin and the more moderate ‘Mensheviks’ (minority) under Pavel Akselrod (1850–1928), Yuli Martov (1873–1923) and many others; from 1917 the party was known as the ‘Communist Party of Russia (B)’, and from 1952 as the ‘Communist Party of the Soviet Union’ (CPSU).

[4] Detlef Brandes: ‘From Persecution during the First World War to Deportation’. In: Stricker (ed.): Russia, pp. 131–213, here p. 141.

[5] Brandes: Persecutions (note 4), p. 145.

[6] Gerd Stricker: Russia 1914 to 1945. An Overview. In: Ibid. (ed.): Russia, pp. 112–130, here p. 122.

[7] The number of victims of the Holodomor is disputed. The figure of 3.5 million cited here was quoted by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 2008. Robert Conquest (The Harvest of Sorrow. Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine. Edmonton 1987) puts the death toll at 14.5 million, although he includes the victims of collectivisation and dekulakisation; see also Vsevolod W. Isayiv (ed.): Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, 1932–1933. Toronto 2003.

[8] GULag (‘Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej’[Main Administration of Camps]): labour camps often holding over 10,000 inmates, most of whom were forced to perform hard labour. See Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s (1918–2008) book *The Gulag Archipelago*, published in 1973.

[9] The name of the secret police was changed frequently: Cheka, (O)GPU, NKVD, KGB.

[10] Josef Erdmann, Wilhelm Marker, Hermann Ungar, Artur Golke, Leo Friedländer and Fritz Schimanski (see www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/politik/rezension-sachbuch-gesindel-in-unseren-reihen-11301698.html [accessed 20 August 2021]).

[11] The statistical data provided below are not always clear in the extensive literature, contain gaps (e.g. due to high mortality rates) and are sometimes contradictory. Nevertheless, to illustrate the scale of the situation, here are a few figures: the 1939 census in the USSR recorded a German minority of 1.42 million people (according to Simon: *Nationalism and Nationality Policy*, p. 423. – The same figure is cited by: Fleischhauer, Jedig: The Germans in the USSR, p. 199). An important indication of how many Russian Germans were deported between 1941 and 1946 is provided by a Soviet figure which put the number of deported Russian Germans (‘Germans resettled by government decree’) at 855,674 on 1 August 1950 (Eisfeld, Herdt [eds.]: *Deportation*, p. 351/Doc. 339). This is likely to have been the number of German deportees (= ‘special settlers’ – specnaselentsy) excluding the 266,000 Siberian Germans (Eisfeld, Herdt [eds.]: Deportation, p. 17), who had been living in the deportation area since the 1890s (the relevant regions are listed in Eisfeld, Herdt: Deportation, p. 45/Doc. 24). In October 1950, official Soviet statistics put the number of German ‘special settlers’ at 1,224,931; this figure evidently includes the 266,000 Siberian Germans.

[12] Peter Hilkes, Gerd Stricker: The Years after the Second World War. In: Stricker (ed.): Russia, pp. 221–238, here p. 222. Pinkus and Fleischhauer (Die Deutschen, p. 306) estimate that 375,000 Volga Germans were affected.
The text of the deportation decree in German, printed on 30 August 1941 in the Volga German newspaper *Nachrichten*, in Hilkes, Stricker: Years after the Second World War, p. 221ff.; facsimile of the decree in Eisfeld: The Russian Germans, p. 120.

[13] Pinkus, Fleischhauer: *The Germans*, p. 311.

[14] Pinkus, Fleischhauer: *The Germans*, p. 306.

[15] Pinkus, Fleischhauer: *The Germans*, pp. 310ff., 315.

[16] Eisfeld: The Russian Germans, p. 118.

[17] Pinkus, Fleischhauer: The Germans, p. 315.

[18] Hilkes, Stricker: Years after the Second World War (note 12), pp. 228ff.

[19] Eisfeld: The Russian Germans, p. 124.

[20] Eisfeld, The Russians of German Descent, pp. 123ff.; Hilkes, Stricker: Years after the Second World War (note 12), pp. 210ff.

[21] Eisfeld, The Russian Germans, pp. 124ff.

[22] They were searching for ‘traitors to the fatherland’, that is, renegade Soviet citizens who had fought alongside the Germans against the Red Army: primarily soldiers of the ‘Russian Liberation Army’ under the command of the Russian General Andrei Vlasov (Vlasov, 1901–1946), who, under German command from November 1944 until the end of the war, commanded between 50,000 and 125,000 Russian volunteers (mostly prisoners of war). In May 1945, parts of the so-called ‘Vlasov Army’ were taken prisoner by the Americans and handed over to the Soviet Union. The same happened in the British zone. Only the French military authorities refused to hand people over to the Soviets. – Vlasov and his officers were executed in Moscow in 1946.

[23] Robert Conquest: *Nation Killers. The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities*. London 1970, p. 162.

[24] Pinkus, Fleischhauer: The Germans, p. 315.

[25] In their attacks on the Jews, Stalin and his henchmen rarely spoke directly of ‘Jews’, but rather of ‘cosmopolitans’. ‘Cosmopolitans’ (citizens of the world) were denounced by Soviet ideologues as the antithesis of ‘Soviet citizens’ (patriots). Their global connections made it easy to accuse them of holding anti-communist, anti-Soviet views and thus to persecute them. In Soviet terminology, ‘cosmopolitanism’ was nothing more than a euphemism for anti-Semitism.

[26] Various recent studies have been devoted to the fate of the Jews in the Soviet Union, particularly during the Second World War. Frank Grüner: Jewish Communities in the Soviet State. On the Situation of the Jewish Religion in the Soviet Union during the War and Post-War Years. In: Faith in the Second World. Ecumenical Forum for Religion and Culture in East and West (G2W) 30 (2002), no. 4, pp. 13–19; Ibid.: Patriots and Cosmopolitans. Jews in the Soviet State 1941–1953. Cologne 2008 (Essays on the History of Eastern Europe 43); Arno Lustiger: The Red Book: Stalin and the Jews. The Tragic History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Soviet Jews. Berlin 1998; Alexander Solzhenitsyn: ‘Two Hundred Years Together’. Vol. 2: The Jews in the Soviet Union. Munich 2003.

[27] Stricker: Religion in Russia, pp. 98–108.

[28] At the ‘Centre for Eastern European Studies’ at the University of Bremen, Prof. Dr Susanne Schattenberg has published works on Brezhnev and is working on a biography of Brezhnev: www.forschungsstelle.uni-bremen.de/de/4/20110606112638/20110624151441/Bre%25C5%25BEnev_-_Eine_Biographie.html (accessed 26 January 2015).

[29] Gerd Stricker: The Resurgence of Russian Orthodoxy. Russian Orthodoxy since Perestroika. In: Beiträge pädagogischer Arbeit 48 (2005), No. 1, pp. 25–49, here: pp. 32–39.

[30] Ignaz Lozo: The Coup against Gorbachev and the End of the Soviet Union. Cologne 2014.

[31] Statistics cited in Hilkes, Stricker: Years after the Second World War (note 12), p. 259.

Gerd Stricker: USSR/Soviet Union. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32640 (as at 1 September 2020).