The measures taken by the state and party leadership according to the resolution on the deportation were clearly directed at the complete and total eradication of every trace of German life in the Soviet Union.25 Immediately after the publication of the decree on 28 August 1941, the dissolution of the national cultural institutes in the independent republic began. On 30 August the final edition of a German language newspaper was published with a hurried translation of the decree. Teaching in the German language was immediately forbidden; all German educational institutes in villages and even in towns such as Marxstadt and Balzer, where Germans were the absolute majority, were forced to close. The wave of disbanding also affected cultural institutions such as the German State Theatre in Engels and the theatres in Marxstadt and Balzer, the German state teacher training college, the teachers’ institute and the technical colleges, the state folk schools of the ASSRVG, the Philharmonie with its symphony orchestra and German state publishers. The writers’ and composers’ association, the organization for the fine arts and other cultural organizations were disbanded.26 Even writers of German origin were immediately rejected from the Soviet writers’ association.27
In order to fully eliminate the memory of the former inhabitants, the Supreme Soviet had at its disposal the decree from 19 May 1942 on the Russification of German place names. Some places already had both German and Russian names, so from then on only the Russian name was to be used. The others were given mainly patriotic Soviet names: the town of Balzer became Krasnoarmeisk, which means member of the Red Army; one of the oldest and biggest Volga German settlements, Mariental (founded in 1766), mutated into Sovetskoe; Jost was renamed Oktiabr’skoe. Where there were inhibitions due to abiding ideological reasons, the renaming was slightly more restrained: the former capital Engels was allowed to keep its name, which it had only been given in October 1931, while with Marxstadt, only the first half was to remain - the revealing German suffix of - stadt had to go.28
The systematic method of destroying national cultural institutions and the erasing of the memory of the over 175-year-long history of the Volga Germans is best illustrated in the example of the museums, archives and libraries. The central museum of the ASSRVG was founded in 1925 in Engels (at the time still called
Pokrovsk). Alongside numerous linguistic, ethnographic and folkloric expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s for the research and conservation of the intellectual and material culture of the Volga Germans, the collection also grew thanks to state purchases of contemporary art, as well as gifts. All in all, it owned 5,400 exhibition pieces in 1940.29 After the dissolution of the Volga German Republic, it did not take long before the museum was closed and other organizations moved into its rooms. The museum of local history in Engels was founded after the central museum was re-profiled, i. e. cleansed of everything that referred to its German inhabitants. After the War, the director of the museum, I. Struin, made an informative statement on the fate of the exhibition pieces, collections and magazine provisions:
Up to 1946 the exhibition pieces and treasures of the museum were laid chaotically in a shed, where many were damaged because of dampness. In this time [between 1941 and 1946] the museum changed its residence many times and three directors came and went [. . .] With the exception of 1936 no full inventory list remains, no description, no records. Because of these conditions many valuable exhibition pieces were damaged, rotted or fell into the hands of thieves.30
The central library of the ASSR of the Volga Germans was dissolved in a similar fashion. The library, founded in 1918, also housed alongside the scientific, educational and aesthetic literature in German, Russian, French and other European languages, testimonials of the history and culture of the Volga Germans and other geographical groups of Germans in Russia and the USSR. A considerable number of these books, which were collected over many years, were destroyed due to inappropriate storage; selected works were confiscated. About 3,500 valuable publications, mainly in Western European languages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries were selected in 1943 by a delegation from the University of Saratov to be taken to their academic library. A further part of the collection, which had no direction connection to the German Russians, was strewn across the country in different libraries in an attempt to top up their foreign language sections. Books with the stamp of the central republic library of the ASSRVG in Engels, can be found in the state libraries of Moscow and St Petersburg, in lending libraries in Volograd, Karaganda, Novosibirsk, Almaty and dozens of other towns.31
The fate of the collections of documents from the central state archives of the Volga German Republic was not as tragic as that of the documents from other national institutions. The 1,475 items and the 320,195 records which were registered on 1 January 1941, provide an invaluable source of the socio-cultural, religious, demographic, economic and political development of the German population on the Volga during the Tsarist Empire and after the October Revolution in 1917.32 In the process of only a few days, the archives comprising 10,000 bundles of paper from agricultural and industrial firms, authorities and institutions were confiscated. Numerous scripts were lost for ever in the ensuing chaos. As far as can be ascertained, the papers were not intentionally destroyed. Russians and Ukrainians comprised about a third of the total population in the territory of the ASSRVG, while in the capital, Engels, they formed an absolute majority, so in many cases it was impossible to cleanly separate the documents by nationality. A branch of the Saratov regional archives was created for the safe keeping of such documents. Despite the losses suffered, the archives managed to keep a considerable collection of documents on the history of the Volga Germans. However, the collection remained closed to the public and academia. Those who wanted to research in the archives were immediately thought to harbour anti-Soviet sentiments. Until the end of the 1980s it was forbidden to refer to Soviet publications in the library in Engels; even during the period of perestroika all mention of the archives and their catalogues were missing from reliable reference books.33
In addition to the cultural destruction, the Soviet state also economically ruined the citizens of German origin. The August ukase led to a wave of confiscations of private, collectivized and state wealth. Those who were deported were only allowed to take some food, bed linen and clothes with them. Their household contents, preserved food, tools, animals and their cultivated land fell into state hands. After the deportation alone in the eleven southern cantons the following wealth of the German kolkhoz lay fallow: 908,600 hectares of farmland, 333,102 houses with outbuildings, about 120,000 cattle, more than 120,000 sheep and goats, almost 20,000 horses and approximately 1,500 camels.34 In order to give this widespread dispossession the appearance of an ordered resettlement project, the government passed a bill on 30 August 1941 issuing ‘guidelines for the repossession of the wealth from the kolkhoz and the collective farmers, who were resettled as a result of a special decision’.35 These guidelines even foresaw compensation for the Germans, which - given the property they had forcibly abandoned - could have only been felt as mockery: once in the new settlements a percentage of the confiscated cattle were to be replaced in type or remunerated according to state prices; no member of the family was to receive more than 3 double hundredweight of corn. Further, the law foresaw cheap credit for the building of houses in the new colonies. City inhabitants were allowed to sell their households or contract others to do so on their behalf. Nonetheless the actual economic situation of the kolkhoz in Siberia and Kazakhstan, the complete concentration of the land’s resources on the war effort, and a rapid currency depreciation reduced these modest promises to waste paper.36
A large-scale ethnic redistribution was taking place - by 3 September 1941, as the deportation was in full swing, the government of the USSR decided to send 44,744 Russian and Ukrainian families from the Zaporozh’e, Kursk and other territories to the recently vacated homes and businesses. The repopulation continued slowly, although more orders soon came from the government to facilitate the acceleration of the repopulation of the evacuated areas. However, at the beginning of 1945 the population in the former German cantons was still only 20-35 per cent of the pre-war level. A considerable part of the deserted houses and business premises fell into disrepair; parts were scavenged during the War for heating or they served the new inhabitants as replacement stones for other buildings. Many countryside villages were never resettled after the deportation of the Germans.37
World History
