Talk:History of Germans in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union

message: 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
Depends what the definition of dull is. If its law abiding, successful, wealthy farmers and ranchers then yes, they are very dull. Unfortunately Tom Daschle is an exception to this. He is a creepy lefty type politician. Actually there are more extensive lists of notable Germans from Russia than what's in this article. One of them is here http://www-personal.umich.edu/~steeles/gerrus/. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.196.90.139 (talk) 15:46, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Old talk

message: 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)
thread_title: More old talk

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Even more old talk

message: 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)
thread_title: Volhynia Germans

message: The current article states that:
"There were some 2 million ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union in 1989"
...
"By 1999 about 1.7 million former Soviet citizens of German origin had immigrated to Germany."
If this was true, then the current population of ethnic Germans in the former USSR should be around 300,000. However, one of the above numbers is wrong, because in Russia currently there are 597,212 (0.41% of the population) ethnic Germans according to the 2002 census. In Kazakhstan there are 214,200 (1.4% of the population) ethnic Germans according to the 2006 census. That is at least 811,412 ethnic Germans currently living in the former USSR. Cmrdm 05:11, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am removing the unreferenced population/emigration claims and replacing that with a statement of 2002 Russian census data. Cmrdm 23:37, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Current Population (confusion)

message: It would be really nice if we could put a single map together that shows all the areas of German groups in this region. For example if someone was trying to figure out which group a German village next to Kirovograd belongs to, they have to follow every link that references an area and look for a map (volga, black sea, Bessarabian, etc). Some have a map and some don't. I don't see any group that the Kirovograd area might belongs to. 
Not only would it be useful for someone trying to locate information on their village of interest, but it could help in the organization of the rest of this page. For example someone mentioned that their area of interest was lumped into Volga even though it was not near the Volga I think. Dneiper is listed under Volga also. Maybe these people didn't know what category to put information in.
I have experience with making maps with ESRI, so I would be willing to try to do it. but I don't have enough reference maps for all these different areas.
Maybe anyone who knows where a map is could post the address here, and after some time I (or someone) could try to put them together into a single map.  Broecher (talk) 23:27, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Map

message: Someone went to the trouble of changing all "Russian Poland" references to "Congress Poland".  It is important to understand that both terms are equally correct and there was therefore no real need to make this change.  In doing so, this reviser created a sentence that stated that Congress Poland was also commonly known as Congress Poland.  This person obviously never read the context of what had previously been written.  I corrected that phrase to show that Russian Poland was also commonly knows as Congress Poland.  I did not undo the rest of the changes.
Jerry Frank - 25 Feb 2010  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.206.215.65 (talk) 20:39, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russian Poland vs. Congress Poland 

message: *http://www.jstor.org/pss/130734 - interesting article on the Germans of St. Petersburg. Doblouto (talk) 02:28, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: More sources

message: The Volga Germans and Black Sea Germans sections should be modified.  1) The first section of Volga Germans sounds correct.  2) It would be better to place the section about Catherine II’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I, under the Black Sea Germans.  This is the area settled by Germans in the early 1800's.  3) It would be good to clarify the term "Black Sea Germans" ... they were also called "Odessa Germans". Cte67 (talk) 12:09, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Volga Germans / Black Sea Germans 

message: There are many books that compile the many letters written by Germans in the Soviet Union to their relatives that emigrated to the great plains of the US. Most letters detailing the genocide were written in the 1920s and 30s. "The Open Wound: The Genocide of German Ethnic Minorities in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1915-1949 and Beyond" by Samuel Sinner is probably the best single book on the subject. Perhaps a scholar could read some of these books and add a section on the genocide. 
Actually, there have been a lot of books written by Germans from Russia/Soviet Union detailing their lives in Russia/Soviet Union for sale on the North Dakota State University web site http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/order/general/genbooks.html. It would cost a lot of money to buy all of those books, but perhaps a scholar working for a university would be interested in reading all those books and greatly expand this wiki article, in addition to adding the proposed new section on the genocide. And no, I'm not connected to the NDSU pushing book sales. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not descended from Germans from Russia either, though I do live in ND and know a lot of people who are. I know what some of you are thinking. Why don't I do it? I guess I'm too busy with other things, too lazy, tight wad,  and am not interested enough in the subject to do it, an engineer, not a historian, and so on excuse after excuse. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.196.90.139 (talk) 16:26, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the genocide aspect needs to be much clearer in the article.  Stalin killed or deliberately starved millions of minorities in the USSR, and the Germans were high on that list.  Those that lived were forcibly scattered in Siberia and Uzbekistan, often splitting apart families and children over the age of 3 from their mothers (the fathers usually sent to hard labor).  As a result, the Germans left today know little of their heritage and many lost their language and family religion. Nerfer (talk) 15:48, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't agree with describing the late 1930s and early 1940s deportations to Siberia as "genocide." Half of my ancestors were Germans-from-Russia and I had distant relatives that were sent to Siberia during that time period. However, none of my distant relatives were actually executed. While there were many ethnic Germans that were executed for being accused of being 'Nazi sympathizers' or spies (usually unfairly accused, I might add), it's important to keep in mind that the entire period and war was a very bloody affair. Over 10% of the entire country's population died as a result of the Nazi invasion. That mass killing in itself could be called genocide against Russia. But "genocide" these days is a very politically charged term that is often thrown around whenever convenient to do so. That is why I'm in favor of leaving it out of this article. GfR-2016 (talk) 07:57, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Genocide of ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. 

message: While we appreciate that ethnicity is the way in which these are interpreted and understood in eastern europe. Most of this racist dialogue is singularly ill-founded and largely irrelevant to the matter in hand. Certain references to ethnic Germans may conceivably be appropriate, but in the majority of cases the people in question are not ethnic Germans, but Germans i.e. typically people who see themselves as German and choose where appropriate German as their language. Participation in a German church might also be evidence  of their German cultural leanings. In the vast majority of cases we have no idea of their ethnicity. They may be of slav decent or from some other combination of ethnic groups or races depending on how those are defined. To illustrate the point, there has been much talk recently in the English press and media about ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. Irrespective of usage in eastern europe that is nonsense. There is no basis for distinguishing Ukrainians and Russians on the basis of ethnicity. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who regard themselves as Russians and people who regard themselves as Ukrainians and people for whom the distinction is otiose. Those are cultural choices and inheritances with no physiological basis.
Why does this matter? It matters because similar nonsense in the Balkans in the late twentieth century gave us the infamous 'ethnic cleansing' under which certain cultural groups particularly Bosnians were persecuted and murdered on the basis of a wholly spurious ethnicity. There is no Bosnain ethnicity or Serbian or Croation. These people are simply slavs who don't like each other. Optymystic (talk) 08:25, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: It is not "racist" to say someone who speaks German, descended from German parents, went to a German-language school, attended a Catholic or Protestant church, lived in a segregated town, is ethnically different than the Russians or Cossacks or whoever that lived around them.  Nowadays, many of these people have lost their language and traditions because of the large-scale killing and dispersion that Stalin invoked.  Churches were razed or turned into barns, graveyard stones used for sidewalks, etc. So today many of them are no longer ethnically or culturally German, only German by DNA and perhaps family story. Nerfer (talk) 15:55, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: In addition to my post above, I will also add that I do not believe that the 'Russified' nature of ethnic Germans living in Russia today is purely a result of the Stalin-era deportations. In fact, as far back as the 1880s, the Russian Empire began requiring the Russian language to be taught in schools and for ethnic Germans to serve time in the military. And I do not see anything unreasonable about that. Here in the US, we also expect minorities to speak English and to participate in the military (by registering for the draft). I've never seen anything unfair about the Russian Empire having expected the same of my people. GfR-2016 (talk) 08:12, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Ethnic and Ethnicity

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 3 external links on History of Germans in Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070706003257/http://www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/nationality/ to http://www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/nationality/
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131012173257/http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/census_types.php?ct=6 to http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/census_types.php?ct=6
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070217070612/http://www.perepis2002.ru/ct/doc/English/4-2.xls to http://www.perepis2002.ru/ct/doc/English/4-2.xls
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 03:56, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on History of Germans in Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090808193844/http://lgi.osi.hu/ethnic/csdb/results.asp?idx=no&id=264 to http://lgi.osi.hu/ethnic/csdb/results.asp?idx=no&id=264
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080705164825/http://www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/grhc/order/german_language/stricker.html to http://www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/grhc/order/german_language/stricker.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 23:18, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified