Conclusion

Under the pretext of collaboration, the Stalinist leadership declared the Russian Germans state enemies and banished them to the eastern territories of the country. Without exception they were deprived of their rights, primarily to enable the patriotic mobilization of the Soviet society for the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Sent east and subject to the ‘special regimes’ of the NKVD, they had to work principally on construction sites, in pits or doing hard physical labour on the land, and were barred from all intellectual work or positions of responsibility. In contrast to other nationalities the state leadership ordered the forced admission of every German man, woman and youth into labour camps. Soldiers and officers of German descent were sifted out of the military and also sent to labour camps. Official Germanophobic propaganda stirred the flames of national hatred; personal insults and abuse relating to nationality remained unpunished.

Attentive observers quickly recognized the fatal connection between the unbridled hatred of the Germans and the evergrowing xenophobia. The well-known literary scholar Sergei Bondi had already said in July 1943: ‘I really regret the anti-democratic tendencies that one sees every day. Look at national chauvinism. From what is it evoked? Most of all through the mood of the army, which is anti-Semitic, anti-German and against all national minorities.’77

The fateful ideological developments of the post-war period, with its greater Russian chauvinism and its anti-Western slogans, the fight against the so-called ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and ‘grovellers to the West’, is hardly imaginable without the groundwork and cliches laid and ‘tested’ during the War. The fate of the Russian Germans clearly shows that the Soviet totalitarian regime was fully able to embrace racist measures of suppression, despite internationalist lip service and the rhetoric of class struggle.