Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T22:43:19.325Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Due Process in Wartime? Secret Imperial Russian Police Files on the Forced Relocation of Russian Germans during World War I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Cynthia M. Vakareliyska
Cynthia M. Vakareliyska*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97405, USA. Email: vakarel@uoregon.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1762 and 1763, manifestos were issued by Catherine II, and later were extended further by her son Paul I, inviting foreign artisans and others to settle in far-flung rural areas of the Russian Empire in order to help strengthen the economy. Under a policy somewhat similar to the later US Homestead Act, under the manifestos German and other foreign-national settlers and their descendants were offered Russian citizenship, land ownership after three years, religious tolerance (including, in the case of Germans, German clergy and German-language churches), and exemption from the military draft—although by the end of the nineteenth century the last of these had been rescinded. The call was not restricted to Germans, but Germans comprised the largest group to take advantage of it, settling for the most part in Ukraine, Bessarabia, and the mid-Volga region. Those who participated in the migration, known as the Auswanderung, and their descendants are often referred to in English as “Russian Germans” or “Germans from Russia” (rossiiskie nemtsy). A second wave of German immigration occurred in 1894, when some Germans who had settled in Prussia moved across the border into Russia. By 1897, there were over 2 million German immigrants and descendants in the Russian Empire.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , September 2009 , pp. 589 - 611
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bartlett, Roger P. Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Cadiot, Juliette. “Le Recensement de 1897. Les Limites du contròle impérial et la représentation des nationalités.” Cahiers du monde russe 45, no. 3/4 (2004): 441–64.Google Scholar
Cadiot, Juliette. “Searching for Nationality: Statistics and National Categories at the End of the Russian Empire (1897–1917).” Russian Review 64, no. 3 (2005): 440–55.Google Scholar
Cadiot, Juliette. Le Laboratoire impérial. Russie—URSS 1860–1940. Paris: CNRS, 2007.Google Scholar
Diakin, V. S. “Pervaia mirovaia voina i meropriiatiia po likvidatsii tak nazyvaemogo nemetskogo zasiliia.” In Pervaia mirovaia voina, 1914–1918, edited by Sidorov, A.L. Moscow: Nauka, 1968.Google Scholar
Fischer, Fritz. Germany's Aims in the First World War. New York: Norton, 1967.Google Scholar
Fuller, William C. Jr. The Foe Within. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Gal'perina, B. D., Ribber, A., Sokolov, A.R., Xeimson, L., and Uortmen, R., eds. Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny: Bumagi A. N. Iakhontova: Zapisi zasedanii i perepiska. St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999.Google Scholar
Gatrell, Peter. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Geiss, Immanuel. Der Polnische Grenzstreifen 1914–1918: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Lübeck: Matthiesen, 1960.Google Scholar
Holquist, Peter. “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia.” In A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Grigor Suny, Ronald and Martin, Terry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Hull, Isabel V. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Kappeler, Andreas. “Die Deutschen im Rahmen des zaristischen und sowjetischen Vielvölker-reiches: Kontinuitäten unde Brüche.” In Die Deutschen im Russischen Reich und im Sowjetstaat. Nationalitäten- und Regionalprobleme in Osteuropa, edited by Kappeler, Andreas, Meissner, Boris and Simon, Gerhard. Vol. 1. Cologne: Markus, 1987.Google Scholar
Liulevicius, Vejas G. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Lohr, Eric. “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportations, Hostages, and Violence during World War I.” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (2001): 404–19.Google Scholar
Lohr, Eric. Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Lohr, Eric. “Russian Economic Nationalism during the First World War: Moscow Merchants and Commercial Diasporas.” Nationalities Papers 31, no. 4 (2003): 471–84.Google Scholar
Nelipovich, S. G. “‘Nemetskuiu pakost’ uvolit', i bez nezhnostei'. Deportatsii v Rossii 1914–1918 gg.” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1997): 42–52.Google Scholar
Nelipovich, S. G. “Naselenie okkupirovannykh territorii rassmatrivalos’ kak rezerv protivnika. Internirovanie chasti zhitelei Vostochnoi Prussii, Galitsii, i Bukoviny v 1914–1915 gg.” Voennoistoricheskii zhurnal, no. 2 (2000): 60–69.Google Scholar
Nolde, Boris E. Russia in the Economic War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928.Google Scholar
Rempel, David G. “The Expropriation of the German Colonists in South Russia during the Great War.” Journal of Modern History (March 1932), 49–67.Google Scholar
Sanborn, Joshua A. “Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I.” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (2005): 290–324.Google Scholar
Sobelev, G. “Krestianskii pozemel'nyi bank i bor'ba s ‘nemetskim zasil'em’ v agrarnoi sfere (1915–1917).” Vestnik Sankt Peterburgskogo Universiteta, no 16. Series 2, Issue 3, (1992): 24–29.Google Scholar
Steinwedel, Charles. “To Make a Difference: The Construction of a Category of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia, 1861–1917.” In Russian Modernity: Politics, Practices, Knowledge, edited by Kotsonis, Yanni and Hoffman, David. New York: Macmillan, 2000.Google Scholar
Steinwedel, Charles. “Making Social Groups, One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate, Religious Confession, and Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia.” In Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, edited by Caplan, Jane and Torpey, John. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald Grigor. “The Empire Strikes Out.” In A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Grigor Suny, Ronald and Martin, Terry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Vakareliyska, Cynthia M. “Multiple Language and Cultural Self-Identities of the German-Speaking Lutheran Minorities in ‘Russian Poland’ (Mazowsze and Suwałki provinces) in the 19th–20th centuries.” In American Contributions to the Thirteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, August 2003, edited by Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake. Vol. 1. Linguistics. Bloomington, IN: Slavica.Google Scholar
Vakareliyska, Cynthia M. Russian Germans in Russian Poland (tentative title, monograph, in progress).Google Scholar
Vol'ter, E. A. Spiski naselennykh mest suval'kskoi gubernii, kak material dlia istoriko-etnogra-ficheskoi geografii kraia. St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. akademii nauk, 1901.Google Scholar
Weeks, Theodore R. Nation and State in Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Wortman, Richard S. The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Wortman, Richard S. “Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law: New Considerations of the Court Reform of 1864.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (2005): 145–70.Google Scholar