Журнал Фронтирных Исследований (Dec 2021)
The German Population of Siberia in the Conditions of Social Transformations of the 1900s-1920s
Abstract
At the turn of the 19th – 20th century Siberia became a “melting pot” once again, where the representatives of various ethnic groups found themselves. The reasons for the resettlement beyond the Urals were of predominant economic character. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of various social events of the first third of the 20th century on the life of Siberian Germans. Russian Germans engaged in agriculture were forced to seek the ways to survive inside Russia in the situation of the agrarian crisis. Modernization of the state migration policy at the beginning of the 20th century and development of the railway transport allowed for labor migration, as a result of which Siberia turned into one of the agrarian regions, being on the rise, by the mid-1910s. German immigrants, who created capitalist farm type households there and became a model for Russian old-timers and other immigrants, contributed greatly to his process. However, the events of 1914-1922 disrupted the customary pace of life in the German village. The economic policy of the Bolsheviks who came to power provoked famine in the first half of the 1920s.The German population suffered from hunger as well, which drove up emigration sentiments. However, NEP and restoration of cooperation allowed them to start rapid recovery of the small-scale economy. The All-Russian Mennonite Agricultural Union played a pivotal role in this process. The gradual curtailment of NEP and transition to a command-administrative economic model were connected with pressure on the German population among which the conservative-clerical sentiments prevailed. It was sure to provoke a new round of confrontation between the Russian Germans and the Soviet state in the late 1920s already. The article is intended for those interested in the history of ethnic minorities (Russian Germans) and national politics in the twentieth century.
Keywords
