From the Minot Daily News (printed 1995) history of the German-Russians via NDSU- What happened? The communists found the villages far too prosperous and too religious. They confiscated without payment the grain the farmers stored each year against the droughts. This triggered two famines that killed tens of thousands, one in the early 1920s, another about 10 years later. Communists dissolved the Catholic diocese, defaced the churches of whatever faith, and bullied the people into abandoning religion as the center of community life. They forced everyone to move from their villages to collective farms called kolkhozes. German descent alone made the villagers suspect, though from the very first they had exhibited strong loyalty to the Czars. Ethnic cleansing came in 1941. Robert Conquest, an English scholar with an interest in what happened to the rural people of Russia under communism, relates the story of the deportation of whole German villages to Siberia and eastern Asia. In his book The Soviet Deportation of the Nationalities, Conquest tells how NKVD (secret police) agents would enter a community several weeks before the deportation to get the feeling of the area. Then they would surround a village, read a decree, and give the people a brief time to gather food and clothing and appear at a place where lend-lease Studebaker trucks would take them to trains. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a historian of the Germans from Russia, believes about 379,000 were deported. Though the trains did not stop at death camps in the style of Adolf Hitler, thousands died in the deportation process. One was surely a blind man who had not been out of his home for 10 years. Families were separated. Men worked in mines or dug canals; women built houses if they were to have a place to live. Accounts tell of children stacked like cordwood during the winter in the Siberian villages. The Russian people who already lived in north and east Asia helped them in any way they could, but they had few resources themselves. There is a photograph of women hitched to plows; another of women taking a breather from cutting trees in a Siberian forest. For my family, the deportations are no abstraction. My grandmothers sister died in Siberia. The communists, of course, ruined the lives of other peoples too. The Ukrainians in the area, who were highly nationalistic, were treated almost worse, their leaders and intellectuals murdered, their language outlawed. If they were not subjected to mass deportation, it was only because there were so many of them. The Chechnians, attacked by the Russian military today, were among those deported, but they were allowed to return to their homes. In 1955, under Khruschev, the Soviet government admitted officially that it had been wrong to deport the Germans and others. The Germans were no longer considered prisoners, said a document, but were forbidden to return to their former villagers. However, the pull of home was so strong that some went back anyway and found what housing and work they could among the new inhabitants. Many today live and work on the farms and factories of the various Soviet states, and are concentrated in cities named Karaganda, Alma-Ata, and Duschambe. July 30, 1995 PART FOUR BACK TO THE BEGINNING Those who remained in Russia faced very difficult hill to climb library.ndsu.edu/grhc/articles/newspapers/news/boardman.html
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:19:01 +0000
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