German: since 1918, ‘Labour Commune of the Volga Germans’ or ‘(Autonomous) Region of the Volga Germans’; following its conversion into a republic in early 1924, the ‘Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans’, abbreviated to: ASSR of the Volga Germans, ASSR of the V.-G., also: ASSRWD, ASSR d. WD. or ASSRdWD. Until the early 1930s, the following designation was also in common use: Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans – ASRR of the Volga Germans (also: ASRRdWD).

Russian: from 1918, ‘(Trudovaya) Kommuna nemcev Povolzh’ya’ or ‘(Avtonomnaya) Oblast’ nemcev Povolzh’ya’; from 1924: ‘Avtonomnaja Socialističeskaja Sovetskaja Respublika Nemcev Povolž’ja (ASSR NP)’.

In 1917, there were more than 200 rural German settlements situated on both sides of the Volga (Russian: Volga), both upstream and downstream of the regional capital Saratov, in the districts (ujezdy) Nikolaevsk and Novouzensk in the Samara Governorate (Samarskaya guberniya), and in Atkarsk, as well as in Saratov and Kamyšin, i.e. in the Saratov Governorate (Saratovskaya guberniya). Together, they covered an area of approximately 20,000 km². Some remote settlements, such as Yagodnaya Polyana, remained outside the future autonomous region.

see Volga region

Whilst the bourgeois government was still in power, following the overthrow of the monarchy in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917, a mass national autonomy movement emerged amongst the Volga Germans (see Volga region), in which the right to self-determination promised in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia of 2 November 1917 met with broad support. The new Bolshevik leadership recognised the Volga Germans as a genuinely distinct Russian people and granted them the right to national linguistic and cultural development, as well as the establishment of their own territorial autonomy, albeit on the basis of the Bolshevik soviet organisations.

In early April 1918, a delegation of elected bourgeois representatives of the Volga Germans set off for Moscow to demand the autonomy rights that had been guaranteed. At the same time, a delegation of local socialists from Saratov arrived with the same request; they were received by Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Dzhugashvili, 1878–1953) in his capacity as Commissar for Nationalities.

To implement the Bolshevik-style nationalities policy in practice, the ‘Commissariat for German Affairs in the Volga Region’ was established at the end of April 1918, headed by Ernst Reuter (1889–1953), who later became Governing Mayor of Berlin. A few weeks later, the Congress of Councils of the German Colonies in the Volga Region – convened by the Commissariat in Saratov on 30 June – proclaimed a ‘Federation of Workers’ and Peasants’ Councils’, which declared itself responsible for the self-government of the German settlements and for all matters relating to culture and education. The Commissariat’s activities came to an end with the confirmation of this autonomy by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Ulyanov, 1870–1924) as head of government.

The New Economic Policy, introduced in March 1921 (NEP; Novaya ekonomicheskaya politika, NEP) introduced elements of a market economy and established stable delivery quotas for farmers, who were now, unlike under the previous system of requisitions, free to dispose of their surpluses as they saw fit. Local officials also hoped, above all, that the incorporation of settlements inhabited by people of other ethnicities and the centrally located Pokrovsk district into the Autonomous Region in June 1922 would lead to an improvement in the economic situation. Not least for reasons of foreign policy, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party approved the elevation of the region’s status (upgrading it to an Autonomous Republic) in December 1923.

The New Economic Policy led to a rapid economic recovery in the German autonomous region, where by 1927 the total area of cultivated land and total agricultural output had already reached 80 per cent of pre-war levels, whilst industrial output in the 1927/28 had already reached 88 per cent of pre-war output.

The course set in the late 1920s towards a mobilisation dictatorship under Stalin’s sole rule led to a departure from the previously more liberal policies, to the banishment and disenfranchisement of wealthy peasants, to the persecution of the churches and to criminal trials against bourgeois intellectuals, opponents of the kolkhozes and ‘pests’ of all kinds.^[5] As a result, unrest broke out in many places, particularly fiercely in the districts of Frank and Kamenka: Until armed units of the secret police, the GPU, intervened, a number of villages here were under the control of the enraged peasants for several weeks in December 1929 and January 1930; the peasants dissolved the collective farms, prevented the deportation of kulak families (= wealthy peasants) and reopened closed churches.

Nevertheless, by June 1931, the hastily formed kolkhozes resulting from forced collectivisation already accounted for 97 per cent of peasant holdings, which led to the famine of 1932–1933, which, particularly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus and, indeed, the Volga region, claimed the lives of at least 3.5 million people.

Cries for help from some distressed Soviet citizens of German origin to their relatives or fellow believers abroad triggered a massive propaganda campaign in which the existence of a famine was simply denied. In particular, the activities of the Reich Committee ‘Brothers in Need’ and the support provided by churches and private individuals from Nazi Germany were vilified as ‘Hitler aid’; its recipients were branded as ‘fascist agents’.^[6] From then on – unlike in the early 1920s – the Soviet leadership regarded such appeals as disloyalty to the ‘socialist homeland’. A wave of persecution and arrests was triggered by the telegram from the Central Committee of the Communist Party dated 5 November 1934, which called for a struggle ‘against the fascists and their accomplices’ amongst the German population. The intensity of the persecution of the Volga Germans in their republic during the years of the Great Terror, 1937–1938—with 6,698 people convicted, of whom 3,632 were shot, was one and a half times higher than the national average; however, due to their autonomous status, it was significantly lower than among Germans in Ukraine and other regions.^[7]

As early as the beginning of the 1930s, the role of local Party, state and government leadership was effectively limited to carrying out the directives issued by the Moscow headquarters. Nevertheless, the existence of national-territorial autonomy allowed for some consideration of the interests of the titular nationality in matters of personnel, in the cultural sphere (theatre, museums, visual arts, literature, the press, book printing), in higher education, and in mother-tongue schooling. The Marxist-Leninist worldview found sufficient supporters, particularly amongst young people and in urban circles, who were drawn to it not least by new ways of working and living, educational opportunities and prospects for advancement. Among the 9,741 members of the republican party organisation, the proportion of those of German titular nationality stood at 49.6 per cent as at 1 March 1940. At the same time, membership of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), which consisted mainly of Volga Germans, rose to 23,800.

The two famines, in particular, decimated the population considerably and forced many to emigrate. According to the first census of 28 August 1920, the Autonomous Region, within its borders at that time, had a population of 452,629, of whom more than 96 per cent were German. Exactly one year later, the population had fallen by 20.5 per cent to 359,460, and by 1 January 1922 it had fallen further to 338,560. In 1921 alone, 74,084 people officially left the labour commune and moved to Turkestan, the Caucasus, Central Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and also to Germany. Due to rampant epidemics and poor nutrition, by no means all the refugees reached their intended destinations. Added to this were 47,777 recorded deaths, the majority of whom were victims of starvation.^[8] The total population losses amongst the Volga Germans are estimated at up to 100,000 people. It was only the territorial expansion that managed to conceal these enormous human losses. In the second half of the 1920s, the natural growth rate of the German population in the ASSRdWD, at 38.1 per cent (1927), was among the highest in the entire USSR. This positive demographic trend was reflected in the results of the 1926 census: 379,600 Germans accounted for two-thirds of the republic’s population.

Ethnic composition of the Volga Germans in the ASSR according to the 1926 and 1939 Union censuses^[9]

However, the new collectivisation and industrialisation policies introduced from the late 1920s onwards once again led to demographic losses. In 1930 and 1931, 4,288 families of so-called kulaks, comprising 24,202 members – or 3.7 per cent of all peasant households – were forcibly resettled from the ASSRdWD, a figure significantly higher than the national average of approximately 1.5 per cent . During the famine of 1932–1933, some 45,300 people perished in the Volga Republic. According to statistical data, between 1930 and 1933 almost a third – or 203,000 – of the republic’s inhabitants left, relocating, amongst other places, to the major cities of Saratov, Stalingrad, Baku/Bakı, Moscow and Minsk.^[10] Some of them returned after a few years. Despite high birth rates, the absolute number of Germans in the ASSRdWD declined between the two censuses of 1926 and 1939.

The urbanisation rate among Germans (14.2 per cent, as of 1939) was lower than that of Russians or Ukrainians, but higher than that of other titular nationalities in their respective republics, such as the Mordvins (2.6 per cent), the Kalmyks (6.9 per cent) or the Volga Tatars (12.3 per cent). Whilst towns predominantly inhabited by Germans, such as Marxstadt or Balzer, recorded hardly any population growth, the population of the capital, Engels, doubled between 1926 and 1939, rising from 34,345 to 68,983.^[11]

Agriculture – and in particular arable farming, which accounted for up to 80 per cent of the area sown with various wheat varieties – dominated the economic structure of the autonomous region. Enormous fluctuations in crop yields were typical of this arid steppe region. With collectivisation and the expropriation of wealthy farmers, agriculture plunged into a deep crisis from which it did not recover until the late 1930s.

In addition, a significant cottage and craft industry had already existed prior to 1917, in which the production of sarpinka, a cotton fabric, is particularly noteworthy. As part of the hastily implemented industrialisation programme, work began, amongst other things, on the construction of the largest meat processing complex in the USSR in Engels. Existing factories were also significantly expanded and modernised. Above all, the ASSRdWD developed into one of the centres of the textile industry. Alongside the weaving and knitwear factories in Balzer and Kratzke/Podčinny, the spun-wool factory in Krasnyj Tekstilščik, with 1,904 employees, was one of the largest industrial enterprises.

The German-Soviet War, which broke out in June 1941, led to a radicalisation of the Soviet approach to ethnic issues. On 26 August 1941, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party decided to expel the Germans from the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and from the neighbouring regions of Saratov and Stalingrad. The decree issued two days later by the Presidential Board of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ‘On the resettlement of Germans living in the Volga districts’ legalised the Politburo’s decision. According to official figures, by 20 September 1941, 373,529 Germans had been deported from the Volga Republic, 46,706 from the Saratov region and 26,245 from the Stalingrad region. There were no public protests from the remaining population groups. On 22 September 1941, a few days after the deportation, the Saratov Regional Party Committee criticised the ‘unprecedented thefts and looting’ in the villages abandoned by the Germans during a meeting.^[15]

The deported Germans were housed exclusively in rural villages and small district towns in Kazakhstan and Siberia and were forced to perform manual labour regardless of their professional qualifications (see USSR). From January 1942 until the end of the war in 1945, almost all Germans aged between 15 and 55 were sent to labour camps.

Few events in the history of the Russian-German minority have been the subject of as much controversy to this day as the short-lived Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans. The following questions repeatedly come to the fore: Was the plight following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 the decisive factor in the proclamation of territorial autonomy, or was it the aspirations of the Volga Germans themselves and the new government’s policy on nationalities? What did the term ‘model republic of the Volga Germans’ stand for? Were there any sympathies or links on the part of German Soviet citizens towardsthe ‘Third Reich’? What were the actual reasons that led to the abolition of territorial autonomy in August 1941 and to the deportation? Why was the Volga Republic not restored in 1957, 1964 or later? What significance did territorial autonomy hold for the nationality in question within the Soviet state, and what significance does it still hold today in Russia?^[16]

• Arkadi German: *Istorija respubliki nemcev Povolž’ja v sobytijach, faktach, dokumentach* [History of the Republic of the Volga Germans in Events, Facts and Documents]. 2nd ed. Moscow 2000.
• Ibid.: German Autonomy on the Volga 1918–1941. 2nd, revised edition. Moscow 2007.
• Alfred Eisfeld (ed.): From the Establishment of Autonomy to Exile and the Denial of Rights. The Years 1918 and 1941 to 1948 in the History of the Germans in Russia. Stuttgart 2008 (Heimatbücher der Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland e. V.: Special volume).
• Viktor Krieger: Colonists, Soviet Germans, Resettlers. A History of the Russians of German Descent. Bonn 2015 (Publication Series / Federal Agency for Civic Education 1631).
• Manfred Langhans-Ratzeburg: The Volga Germans. Their Constitutional and Administrative Law in the Past and Present. Also a contribution to Bolshevik nationality law. Berlin 1929.
• Aleksandr Špak: Administrativno-territorial’nye preobrazovanija v Nempovolž’e. 1964−1944 [Administrative and territorial reorganisations in the German Volga region. 1764−1944]. Volgograd 2012.
• Gerd Stricker (ed.): Russia. Berlin 1997 (German History in Eastern Europe).

[1] Langhans-Ratzeburg: The Volga Germans, p. 80.

[2] Constitution of the Autonomous Socialist Council Republic of the Volga Germans. In: Resolutions of the 3rd Congress of the Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans. Pokrovsk. January–February 1926, pp. 37–59, here p. 59.

[3] Nachrichten (Engels), No. 100, 30 April 1937, p. 3.

[4] In the German Workers’ Commune alone, they were already able to feed around 80,000 children by the end of 1921, and by 1 April 1922 this figure had risen to 158,000. During the summer months, the ARA and the ‘Kinderhilfswerk’ temporarily took over the provision of food for 181,000 adults (cf. German: Nemeckaja avtonomija na Volge, pp. 124–127).

[5] See: Irina Ossipova: ‘Wenn die Welt euch hasst...’ (When the world hates you...). The persecution of the Catholic Church in the USSR. Based on court records and penal camp documents. Edited by Eugen Reinhardt. Annweiler 2000, esp. pp. 83–100; Viktor Krieger: ‘The First Secret Trial against Volga German Intellectuals’. In: Yearbook for International German Studies. Vol. XXXVIII (2006), No. 2, pp. 105–136.

[6] Nemcy-kolchozniki otvečajut na klevetu germanskich fašistov [German kolkhoz farmers respond to the slander of the German Reich’s fascists]. In: Pravda, No. 193, 15 July 1933; Hundreds of thousands of Soviet German peasants slap the lying mouths of the murderous fascists. In: Nachrichten, No. 168, 28 July 1933; Let the Working People of Germany Know [Report by the Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR, A. Kiselev, on his visit to the Republic of the Volga Germans]. In: Nachrichten, No. 264, 23 November 1933.

[7] Nikita Ochotin, Arseni Roginski: On the History of the NKVD’s ‘German Operation’ 1937–1938. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism 2000/2001. Berlin 2001, pp. 89–125.

[8] S. Kappes: The Impact of Crop Failures on Economic Life in the Region of the Volga Germans in the Years 1920–1921. In: Alexander Mattern (ed.): Our Economic Situation. A collection in 5 issues with 5 supplements. Marxstadt 1922, pp. 29–43, here pp. 31–32; The population of the Autonomous Region of the Volga Germans as at 1 January 1922 (according to data from the Regional Statistical Administration, in Russian): wolgadeutsche.net/diesendorf/1922.htm (accessed 25 June 2015).

[9] The figures from the last census in 1939 should be treated with caution: the Volga Republic, at 9.6 per cent, has the highest manipulated growth rate of all the territories of the RSFSR. The manipulation rates for the individual provinces are listed in: Valentina Žiromskaja: Demografičeskaja istorija Rossii v 1930-e gody. Vzgljad v neizvestnoe [Demographic History of Russia. A Glimpse into the Unknown]. Moscow 2001, pp. 53–60.

[10] German: Nemeckaja avtonomija na Volge, p. 272.

[11] Viktor Dizendorf (ed.): The Germans of Russia. Settlements and Areas of Settlement. Encyclopaedic Dictionary [Die Deutschen Russiens. Siedlungen und Siedlungsgebiete. Lexikon]. Moscow 2006, p. 323.

[12] German: *History of the Republic of the Volga Germans in Events, Facts and Documents*, p. 254.

[13] Johann Sinner: ‘The Volga German Museum on the 15th Anniversary of Autonomy’. In: Nachrichten, No. 232, 12 October 1933.

[14] See, for example, the continuation of the former ‘Mitteilungen’ of the Central Museum in the form of *Soobščenija Engel’skogo kraevedčeskogo museja* [Communications of the Engels Local History Museum]. Since 1997, a total of four issues have been published, focusing on Volga German culture and history.

[15] German: Nemeckaja avtonomija na Volge, p. 456.

[16] As the autonomy of the Volga Republic was a fiction, the Russian Germans today should focus less on their own traditions and more on their group’s resistance to Soviet policy, according to Detlef Brandes: ‘Die Wolgarepublik: Statehood or National Government, in: Hans Rothe (ed.): Germans in Russia. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 1996, pp. 103–130. In contrast, other researchers point to the fact that the existence of a national republic and the status of a titular nationality, despite all subordination in legal, political, economic or cultural matters, implied a certain degree of consideration for the interests of the local population in matters of cadre appointments, higher education or mother-tongue schooling; see, for example, Viktor Krieger: The Training of National Cadres in Kazakhstan and in the Republic of the Volga Germans (1920s–1930s): Commonalities and Distinctions. In: Anton Bosch (ed.): Russian-German Contemporary History. Volume 4, 2004/2005 issue. Under Monarchy and Dictatorship. Nuremberg 2005, pp. 339–370. Even in today’s Russian Federation, peoples and ethnic groups with an autonomous territory have significantly more opportunities to articulate, represent and ultimately finance their legitimate political, social and linguistic-cultural interests than ‘territory-less’ nationalities.

Viktor Krieger: Volga German ASSR. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32592 (accessed 24 January 2022).