page_title: Caucasus Germans
section_title: Soviet era
hierarchical_section_title: Caucasus Germans / History / Soviet era
caption_attribution_description: English: View to Annanfeld (today - Shamkir, Azerbaijan)
context_page_description: Caucasus Germans are part of the German minority in Russia and the Soviet Union. They migrated to the Caucasus largely in the first half of the 19th century and settled in the North Caucasus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the region of Kars. In 1941, the majority of them were subject to deportation to Central Asia and Siberia during Joseph Stalin's population transfers in the Soviet Union. After Stalin's death in 1953 and the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw, the Caucasus Germans were allowed to return, though few did. Many assimilated and, after 1991, emigrated to Germany. Although the community today is a fraction of what it once was, many German buildings and churches are still extant, with some turned into museums.
context_section_description: Following the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and the Sovietization of the Caucasus, the new Soviet government initially demonstrated a favorable attitude toward multiculturalism in the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The cultural and linguistic rights of ethnic groups were promoted by Soviet authorities in accordance with the korenizatsiya (nativization) policy of Soviet nationalities. In 1926, there were seven public primary schools in Soviet Azerbaijan with German as the language of instruction. The First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union in 1926 showed that 93,915 Caucasus Germans lived in the North Caucasus region of the Russian SFSR. Within the Transcaucasian SFSR, 13,149 lived in the Azerbaijan SSR, 12,047 in the Georgian SSR and 104 in the Armenian SSR. The situation changed with the rise of Joseph Stalin. The Soviet government gradually ordered all German-sounding place-names to be changed by the mid-1930s. The forced collectivization of agriculture under the first five-year plan and the resulting famine of 1932-33 hit the North Caucasus and the local German community very hard.
  After the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in June 1941, the Caucasus Germans were internally deported by Soviet authorities to Central Asia and Siberia on the pretext that their loyalties were with Germany, even though this was not the case. According to scholar Pavel Polian, most of the Caucasus Germans (approximately 190,000 people) were deported from the North and South Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Siberia from September 1941 to June 1942.
  The deportees were allowed to take very little luggage, hardly any food and then had to undergo a voyage across the Caspian Sea to the camps of Central Asia. They were told the voyage would only be for several days but many ships went back and forth for months, resulting in mass death from starvation and the climate, especially among children, the elderly and the sick. On one ship carrying deportees, about 775 Germans froze to death. Evidently, maritime officials had no clear instructions to land the deportees at a particular destination and were prohibited from landing them anywhere else. They eventually arrived by rail in the Lake Balkhash area, in Kazakhstan. This torment can be ascribed, in part, to the confusion caused by the war, but also, more importantly, to the typical callous treatment of political prisoners by the Stalin regime, which did not care if prisoners lived or died. The following eye-witness report relates a harrowing story of evacuation by ship:
  For two months ethnic Germans from the Caucasus were pointlessly dragged back and forth on the Caspian Sea, and more people, especially children, were dying of starvation. They were just thrown overboard. My four-year-old son was thrown there as well. My other son, seven years of age, saw that. He grabbed my skirt and begged me with tears in his eyes: 'Mummy, don't let them throw me in the water. I beg you, leave me alive, and I will always be with you and take care of you when I grow up'... I always cry when I remember that he also died of starvation and was thrown overboard, which he feared so much.
  The only ones not subject to deportation were German women (and their descendants) who were married to non-Germans. Soon after Stalin's death in 1953 and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev to the Soviet leadership, the ban for the majority of the deported peoples to return to their homes was lifted. However, relatively few Germans returned to the Caucasus region. By 1979, there were only 46,979 Germans living in both North and South Caucasus.
caption: View on Annenfeld (within present-day Shamkir, Azerbaijan) ca. 1900
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