Friday, August 28, 2015
74 years since the deportation of the Volga Germans
Kazakhstan. On 28 August 1941, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued Ukaz 21-160 providing the legal basis for the decision to deport the ethnic Germans of the Volga German ASSR, Saratov Oblast, and Stalingrad Oblast made by the Council of People's Commissars and Central Committee of the Communist Party two days earlier. Nevertheless, the legal cover of the decree by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and other decrees pertaining to the deportation of the Volga Germans and the liquidation of the Volga German ASSR clearly violated the 1936 Soviet and 1937 RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) constitutions not to mention the constitution of the Volga German ASSR itself. This forcible dispersal of the Volga Germans across the eastern regions of the Soviet Union ended over 150 years of continuous settlement by ethnic Germans in the region. The Soviet government sought to permanently erase their former presence from the region. Lack of proper clothing, housing, food, and medical care led to mass mortality among the deportees. Subsequently the Soviet government mobilized most able bodied adults among the Russian-Germans for forced labor in the labor army. The Stalin regime placed the remaining deported Volga and other Russian-Germans under special settlement restrictions resembling the later apartheid laws of South Africa. These discriminatory restrictions on their mobility and residency were initially supposed to be permanent, but were finally repealed at the end of 1955. The deportees and their descendants, however, were never allowed to return in large numbers to their former places of residence in the Volga and elsewhere and the vast majority of the Russian-German population remained confined to Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and Siberia until they emigrated to Germany after 1987.