Friday, August 26, 2016

Works Dealing with the Deportation of the Volga Germans on 28 August 1941.

This year is the 75th Anniversary of the deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The day of commemoration is the 28th of August. This blog post is basically an annotated series of links to articles and book chapters I have written dealing with various aspects of the deportation and the subsequent exile and forced labor of ethnic Germans in the USSR. "In our Hearts we Felt the Sentence of Death": Ethnic German Recollections of Mass Violence in the USSR, 1928-1948" coauthored with Eric Schmaltz and Ron Vossler deals with the 1941 deportations in the context of increasing Soviet violence against its ethnic German citizens after 1928. It looks at this violence from central and peripheral perspectives using both regime sources and letters from the German victims. "The Loss, Retention, and Reacquisition of Social Capital by Special Settlers in the USSR, 1941-1960" deals with the relative failure of the ethnic German deportees to recover from the damage done by their dispersal in comparison to other deported groups. Their lack of social capital was a key factor in this failure. "Ethnic Erasure: The Role of Border Changes in Soviet Ethnic Cleansing and Return Migration: compares the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars with regards to the importance of their autonomous territories in their respective national movements after their deportation. "A Caste of Helot Labourers: Special Settlers and the Cultivation of Cotton in Soviet Central Asia: 1944-1956" looks at the ethnic Germans sent to Tajikistan after 1944 to work on cotton kolkhozes as part of the larger use of national deportees in growing cotton in the USSR. "Suffering in a Province of Asia: The Russian-German Diaspora in Kazakhstan" deals with the deportation and subsequent life of ethnic Germans sent to Kazakhstan as special settlers in 1941. "Colonialism in One Country: The Deported Peoples of the USSR as an Example of Internal Colonialism"  views the deportation of the Volga Germans and other repressed peoples through the theoretical framework of internal colonialism. "Soviet Apartheid: Stalin's Ethnic Deportations, Special Settlement Restrictions, and the Labor Army: The Case of the Ethnic Germans in the USSR" compares the legal situation of the German special settlers deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia in 1941 to the apartheid laws enacted in South Africa in the late 1940s and early 1950s. "Volk auf dem Weg: Transnational Migration of the Russian-Germans from 1763 to the Present Day" is a history of the various migrations of ethnic Germans to the Russian Empire within the Russian Empire and USSR and out of the Russian Empire and USSR. It has a substantial section on the 1941 deportations and their aftermath. "Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water: The Russian-Germans in the Labour Army:" focuses on the mobilization of ethnic Germans in 1941-1943 into the labor army and their use by the Stalin regime as a slave labor force until 1957. Feel free to leave any comments on any of these works in the comments below.

1 comment:

derRach said...

Thank you for all that you do in remembrance of the dispossessed ethnic Germans!