Talk:History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union

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History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union is within the scope of the Russian History WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Russian History. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

I removed They are a dull people, of peasant stock; the only celebrity of note rising from them being Lawrence Welk for obvious reasons. BTW, in Russia they actually rose to great prominence, playing important roles in government and the arts. Danny

Wrong to remove true well established information from an article user:Fredbauder

Sorry Fred, but referring to an entire group of people as "dull" is questionable at best and certainly not well-established. Danny

I agree. Blanket statements, especially ethnically charged ones, have no place in an encyclopedia. --maveric149

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I've expanded the text quite a lot, but it has too much focus on the Russian German subculture I happen to know the best, and ought to cover more ground. There are probably some mistakes here, since I've said basically what I know from memory, supplimented by Google as a fact checker.

Also, pace Fred, there should maybe be a section on the importance of Russian Germans to Russian industrialisation and intellectual culture. Frederic Frommhold de Martens is a name that comes to mind, as does Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock in the sciences. The guy who designed Russia's first combine was one Peter Dyck, and the manufacturer of most of Tsarist Russia's farm machinery was the A. J. Koop company. There were a lot of German names in pre-revolutionary Russian industry. Unfortunately, I only know that names of the ones who were basically blood relatives, so I can't offer a more comprehensive picture.

--Diderot 14:30, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

A very impressive article. Now that the article went way beyond a mere ethnic scope, I would suggest to rename the article into someting like History of Germans in Russia and Soviet Union. Mikkalai 16:41, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Also, does it make sense to have the category:Russian Germans? Mikkalai 16:52, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Considering how spread out the pages on Russian Germans are, I think you may be onto something. Lemme see if I can set one up. --Diderot 18:33, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Volhynia Germans

An otherwise good brief description of the Germans in Russia fails to provide much information about the 200,000 Germans of Volhynia (c.1900) except for a passing reference in the Volga section. The link to the SGGEE website is appreciated. I have added a paragraph or two to make up for this.

Jerry Frank, Webmaster http://www.sggee.org - 205.206.215.65 21:48, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Volhynians in eastern Russia

On 27 Feb 2007, Vmenkov added some info about Volhynian Germans that migrated to eastern Russia. I find the info very interesting. The addition refers to the source material but I believe there may be some misunderstanding in that source which leads to some skewed information. The original Bug Hollender were indeed Germans who originally settled on the east side of the Bug River (in Volhynia) in the 1600s when the territory was still under Polish rule. They held to their German traditions, customs, and language.

In the 1850s to 1870s time period, a significant number of Mazovian Lutherans migrated to the Pripyat Marshes region of Volhynia, some distance east of the Bug River settlements (around Niwir and Gross Gluscha). Mazovian is a term applied to Polish ethnics but among these Lutherans were some Germans who had adopted the Polish language for their culture in their homelands of southeastern East Prussia and the Suwalki district of Russian Poland. These Mazovian and German Lutherans became associated with the Bug Hollender because the Lutheran pastor from that region served them as well. It would be these Lutherans with origins in Suwalki who carried with them the Polish texts and language in their church services, not the Bug Hollender. It is easy to understand how they became identified with the Bug Hollender in their migration to the east but ethnically there were differences.

Some of these Mazovian / German Lutherans from the Pripyat Marshes settlements also migrated to the region of Roblin, Manitoba, Canada prior to WW I where they held their church services in the Polish language until the early 1950s. Other Mazovian Lutherans, primarily with origins in East Prussia rather than Suwalki, also settled in the eastern States, Wisconsin, and near Minneapolis, MN.

This is probably more detail than is intended for this particular page so I am not sure how to handle the correction. Perhaps I will just leave it as this comment on the talk page.

Jerry Frank - Webmaster http://www.sggee.org 205.206.215.65 17:50, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

The above sounds like an entirely plausible explanation for the existence of a (formerly-) Polish-speaking Lutheran community with German-like names (e.g. Карл Григорьевич Людвиг, "Karl Grigoriewich Ludwig"). The aritcle ( http://www.strana-oz.ru/?numid=27&article=1189 ) that I summarized in that one sentence was from Otechestvennye Zapiski - a fairly decent Russian magazine, at least aspiring to be on the level of Atlantic Monthly or Utne Reader, if I am to come up with American comparison - but actually written by a high school student, with some guidance of, presumably, teachers or college instructors (one of the winners of a national competition of students' history papers). It is mostly based on the interviews with the Siberian "Lutherans" (or whatever you can call them), and does not have that much info about the life of their ancestors in what is now Belorus. They do claim that even before leaving the Bug lands in the 1910s, "no one in the community spoke German", and Polish was the language of prayer, which again is quite consistent with Jerry's theory.

I will be only glad if Jerry tries to re-word "my" paragraph and put it into a wider context. Vmenkov 20:24, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I have initiated contact with someone in Germany who has connections to descendants of Bug Hollender there. We will see how they remember the culture of their origins. This will help to prove my theory. I have been researching Germans from Volhynia for over 20 years and have only seen, to this time, the Polish influence on culture with the Germans in the Pripyat Marshes region. The other Germans always retained their German culture, especially with respect to their religion. I can also see the Belorus connection. The Germans of the Pripyat Marshes lived in Volhynia but very close to the Belorus border. In fact, their nearest large main town was probably Pinsk. I will consider what to write after I have done more research.

Jerry 205.206.215.65 21:12, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. When I said "Belarus" I actually meant "Pripyat marshes" (whcih are these days mostly north of the Uk-Bel border). I have no idea if the specific villages of origin for the folks in the O.Z. paper would be north of south of this border. I am too lazy to look at an appropriate map, but I suspect that what was understood as "Volhyania" in the 19th century could have spread a bit north of today's Uk-Bel border as well. Vmenkov 21:51, 16 March 2007 (UTC)