History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union: Encyclopedia II - History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union - Germans in central Russia and Ukraine

History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union - Germans in central Russia and Ukraine

The earliest German settlement in Russia dates back to the reign of Vasili III in the 16th century. A handful of German and Dutch craftsmen and traders were allowed to establish themselves in Moscow's German Quarter (Немецкая слобода, or Nemetskaya sloboda), providing essential technical skills in the capital. Gradually, this policy extended to a few other major cities.

Peter the Great was greatly influenced by the international community located in the German Quarter, and his efforts to transform Russia into a more modern European state are believed to have derived in large part from his experiences among Russia's established Germans. By the late 17th century, foreigners were no longer so rare in Russian cities, and the German Quarter had lost its ethnic character by the end of that century.

Catherine II's proclamation of open immigration for foreigners wishing to live in the Russian Empire, dated July 22, 1763, marked the beginning of a much larger presence for Germans in the Empire. German colonies in the lower Volga river area were founded almost immediately afterwards. These early colonies were attacked during the Pugachev uprising, which was centred on the Volga area, but they survived the rebellion.

German immigration was motivated in part by religious intolerance and warfare in central Europe as well as by frequently difficult economic conditions. Catherine II's declaration freed German immigrants to Russia from military service (imposed on native Slavs) and from most taxes. It placed the new arrivals outside of Russia's feudal hierarchy and granted them considerable internal autonomy. Moving to Russia gave most of them political rights that they would not have possessed in their own lands, even though Russia as a whole was seen as a profoundly despotic state. Religious minorities found these terms very agreeable, particularly Mennonites from the Vistula river valley, which had fallen into Prussian hands during the first partition of Poland. Their unwillingness to participate in military service, and their long tradition of dissent from mainstream Lutheranism and Calvinism, made life under the Prussians very difficult for them. Nearly all of the Prussian Mennonites immigrated to Russia over the following century, leaving no more than a handful in Prussia.

Other German minority churches took advantage of Catherine II's offer as well, particularly Evangelical Christians like the Baptists. Although Catherine's declaration forbade them from proselytising among members of the Orthodox church, they were free to evangelise Russia's Muslim and other non-Christian minorities.

German colonisation was most intense in the lower Volga, but other areas were targeted as well. The area around the Black Sea received many German immigrants, and the lower Dniepr river area, around Ekaterinaslav (now Dnepropetrovsk) and Aleksandrovsk (now Zaporizhzhia), was favoured by the Mennonites.

In 1803, Catherine II's grandson Tsar Alexander I reissued her proclamation. In the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, the response from Germans was enormous. Ultimately, the Tsar imposed minimum financial requirements on new immigrants, requiring them to either have 300 gulden in cash or special skills in order to come to Russia.

The abolition of serfdom in 1863 created a shortage of labour in agriculture and motivated new German immigration, particularly from increasingly crowded central European states, where there was no longer enough fertile land for full employment in agriculture.

Furthermore, a sizable part of Russia's ethnic Germans migrated into Russia from its Polish possessions. The partitions of Poland in the late 18th century dismantled the Polish state, dividing it between Austria, Prussia and Russia. There were already many Germans living in the part of Poland transferred to Russia, dating back to mediaeval and later migrations. Many Germans in Russian Poland migrated further east into Russia between then and WWI, particularly in the aftermath of the Polish insurrection of 1830. The Polish insurrection in 1863 added a new wave of German immigration from Poland to those who had already moved east, and led to the founding of extensive German colonies in Volhynia. When Poland reclaimed its independence after WWI, it ceased to be a source of German immigration to Russia, but by then many hundreds of thousands of Germans had already settled in enclaves across the Russian Empire.

Germans settled in the Caucasus area from the beginning of the 19th century and in the 1850s expanded into Crimea. In the 1890s, new German colonies opened in Altai in Russian Asia. German colonial areas were still expanding in Ukraine as late as the beginning of WWI.

According to the first Census of the Russian Empire in 1897, there were about 1.8 million respondents who reported German as their mother tongue.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Germans in central Russia and Ukraine", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki