The breach of law (Benjamin Pinkus), which the Soviet government committed by dissolving the ASSRVG and the resultant deportations, was not only disastrous for the Russian Germans in the fields of politics, culture and economics, but it also lead to grave reductions to their civil rights.38 In contrast to their totalitarian opponents in Germany the Soviet Union had not anchored the discriminatory legal norms regarding ethnic communities in the law.39 Through this skilled move the Bolshevik leaders were able for decades to deny the huge suppression, initially of the Russian Germans, and later of other nationalities.
A complicated web of discriminatory regulations was soon in place resulting from the internal party decisions and the secret police briefings. A decisive role in this process was played by the department of special settlements (Otdel Spetspereselenii - OSP), which had been formed by 28 August 1941, was directly subordinate to the central apparatus of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and was solely concerned with the organization of the expulsions, followed by re-accommodation in Siberia and Kazakhstan.40 The state government must have recognized the growing gulf between, on the one hand the persecution of the former Kulaks because of a class principle, however vague, for which the Department for Work and Special Resettlement of the Main Camp Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei - GULag) was responsible, and on the other hand, the currently implemented repressions on an ethnic basis. The head (nachal’nik) of this authority, a major in the State Security, Ivan Ivanov, and his eight co-workers became very active in the period that followed in order to instruct their subordinates in the ‘correct’ way of dealing with the Germans who had by now been expelled from the brotherly Soviet peoples and were under the charge of the Interior Affairs Ministry. In numerous round robin letters to the district departments of the NKVD, Ivanov told them over and over again: seek and disclose the fascist agents among the resettled Germans; track down every expression of discontent; force the Germans, irrespective of their family status and professional or academic qualifications, to work in the kolkhozes and sovkhozes; and scrutinize their whereabouts within their designated areas.41
The party and government decision from 26 August 1941, along with other regulations, ensured that the resettlement of the Germans was only possible in small countryside villages or small district towns. Finding accommodation or moving to a regional town, an industrial area or even a major city was strictly forbidden. Added to this, the deportation soon also affected those Germans who lived in the eastern areas of the Soviet Union. Many had been there for generations; their mass deportation had never been intended. On 16 August 1941 the central committee of the communist party of Kazakhstan decided upon the deportation of Germans from the regional centres of the republic and henceforth they were banned from occupying any leading posts in the party, the soviet or in industry. A few days later the registration of Germans living in regional centres and industrial zones began. They were rounded up and banished to countryside settlements in the region of Molotov (Perm’), Cheliabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Chkalov (Orenburg) in the Urals. The forced resettlement from the large towns in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan followed in January 1942.42
For the national intelligentsia and professionals this was the beginning of a fatal development with devastating results which reached their low point when they were forced into the labour camps. Clearly all these measures were aimed at the destruction and humiliation of the political and cultural elite among the German Russians. What sort of professional future could be expected for the 212 doctors, teachers, actors and a further 452 state employees from Engels, the capital of the Volga German Republic, on the Siberian collective farms, specifically in the territory of Kansk, in the Region of Krasnoiarsk? As city dwellers they arrived with little food and could not even hope for a meagre compensation for their confiscated cattle or wheat. Very few were successful in finding employment in the district centre; most were defenceless against the hard physical farm labour and were already starving by December 1941.43 In the district of Oiashino, in the territory of Novosibirsk, 574 of the 1,300 Germans fit for work were professional experts, among whom were 66 professors, their assistants, librarians and teachers, 47 doctors, 22 engineers, and 120 accountants and chief accountants. Professor Werner, head of the chair for microbiology at Saratov University, was forced to do simple work in the Gorn Kolkhoz in Novosibirsk, and the gynaecologist (Dr) Wilhelm was sent to the Kolkhoz Voroshilov to do general work.44
The mass deportation from 1943 to1944 led to a drastic increase of the number of people with limited civil rights. In accordance with a decree of 9 January 1945, special military headquarters were created in areas where the deportees were sent in order to observe and control them. In the designated areas the Germans, along with other deportees, were required to register themselves and any change in the number of family members (through death, escape, birth, etc.) within three days; they were unable to leave their place of residence without permission from the commandant. The regime of special colonies was tightened with the adoption of the decree from the presidency of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 26 November 1948, which stated that the banishment of the ‘punished’ people was to be ‘permanent’ and envisaged the sentence for escaping from the special colonies as twenty years forced labour in a penal camp.45
World History
