The Volga Germans are a very misunderstood and little known ethnic group. When I tell people that my ethnic background can mostly be traced back to the Volga Germans, they are usually very confused. The Volga Germans, or Germans from Russia, were ethnic Germans who moved to Russia after Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia at the time, published manifestos in 1762 and 1763 welcoming Europeans to come to and settle in Russia. For my ancestors, things weren’t going so well in Germany. The Seven Years’ War had ended, but left much of Germanic Europe in poverty and ruin. A fresh start and new opportunities in Russia were just too good to pass up. They were able to become Russian citizens and gain farmland in Russia while maintaining their German language and culture and gaining more religious freedom. They were exempt from military service as well. Many settlers left their homes in Bavaria, Baden, Hesse, the Palatinate, and the Rhineland in order to seek out a better life for themselves and their families in Russia. Things were good for a while; the German settlers were able to construct homes, farms, communities, religious buildings, and cemeteries that reflected their German heritage.
So how did Volga Germans differ from their “main land German” counterparts? Let’s say you could time travel and visit a German colony along the Volga River in the late 1700s. Just by looking at an ethnic Russian and a Volga German side by side, you likely wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. As you may know, the climate in Russia is VERY different than the climate in Germany. The Volga Germans had to leave their traditional clothing styles behind in order to be adequately dressed for the Russian winters. Additionally, because these Germans were surrounded by Russians, their language started to change. They had their own unique accent and borrowed words from the Russian language.
Because my family is living in America, you might infer that things started to go south in Russia at some point and you’d be right!. When Tsar Alexander II came to power in 1855, many Volga Germans started to consider emigrating elsewhere. Under his reforms, many of the privileges and liberties that brought these Germans to Russia in the first place were being threatened. Russian officials became less sympathetic towards the German colonists and were sometimes xenophobic towards them. Communications with the Russian government became required to be in Russian, which was a nightmare for most of the Volga Germans who could now no longer communicate with their own government. They were also now under pressure to assimilate. At this point, many colonies had heard about America and started sending scouts to search for a new place of them to go. Eventually, many Volga Germans emigrated to Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, California, Washington and other states across the western United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These states had farm land that was an almost exact replica to the lands they had farmed for generations in Russia. Others emigrated to Canada and South America.
Unfortunately, not all Volga Germans could escape the emerging oppressive communist regime in Russia. In 1932, the Soviets started a forced starvation among the Volga Germans in order to make them more vulnerable. In the early 1920s, approximately 300,000 ethnic Germans died of starvation. When Nazi Germany invaded Russia, Stalin’s Soviet government took it as an opportunity to remove the remaining ethnic Germans they had problems with for so long. They did so by deporting Volga Germans to work camps in present day Siberia and Kazakhstan solely because of their German heritage; this started in 1941.
Those who moved to the US faced a different battle; fitting in. Obviously, many immigrants had trouble with this, but the Germans from Russia faced a unique issue. They were unable to relate to the German Americans because they had totally different hardships and experiences, and although they were Russian citizens, they could they couldn’t relate to the Russian Americans because of their culture and language. This created even more of an identity crisis for a people who already had to reinvent themselves in Russia.
Today, many Volga German families have assimilated into the American culture and traditions from the Volga are not part of their everyday lives. Those with grandparents or great grandparents from the Volga typically still grow up with traditional foods for holidays and even pick up a few German words. The Volga Germans are a people with a rich and complicated history, but it is a history that should be discussed.
Great article. I am of the Volga German heritage on both sides of my parents. I can’t imagine the struggles my ancestors went through. My dad was big on ancestry and passed that on to me and my sister also.
I am enlighten with this information, my grandparents as well as my mother were people who called themselves Germans from the Volga, never willing to explain what that meant…they have suffered a lot ergo never spoke about. Today desesperatly I look for information about my heritage. They are all gone.
My maternal great grandparents were Volga Germans from the Kratske Village. My maternal grandmother was first generation American born Her maiden name was Michaelis. She grew up on a farm in Russel County, Kansas. I can still hear my Grandmother popping off with German phrases that have stayed with me.