History of migration of Volga Germans Nikolai Steinle

Germans in Russia German minority in Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union was created from several sources and in several waves. The 1914 the number of Germans living in The Russian Empire at 2,416,290. In 1989, the German population of the Soviet Union was roughly 2 million.  Presently 597,212 Germans were enumerated, making Germans the fifth largest ethnic group in Russia. In 1999, there were 353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan and 21,472 in Kyrgyzstan. According to the 2001 census, 33,300 Germans lived in Ukraine.

Volga Germans Mother tongues of Volga Germans were High German or Low German dialects, despite their having lived in Russia for multiple generations. The Germans in Russia frequently lived in ethnic German communities, where they maintained German-language schools and German churches. The smaller villages were often settled by colonists of a common religion, who had come from the same area, so one town might be all Catholic, or all Lutheran, for instance; the people often settled together from the same region of Germany and thus spoke the same German dialect.

Volga Germans Tsarina Catherine II was German and she proclaimed open immigration for foreigners wishing to live in the Russian Empire on July 22, 1763, marking the beginning of a much larger presence for Germans in the Empire.

Volga Germans German immigration was motivated in part by religious intolerance and warfare in central Europe as well as by frequently difficult economic conditions. Catherine II's declaration freed German immigrants from military service (imposed on native Russians) and from most taxes. It placed the new arrivals outside of Russia's feudal hierarchy and granted them considerable internal autonomy. Moving to Russia gave German immigrants political rights that they would not have possessed in their own lands. In 1803 Catherine II’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I, reissued her proclamation. In the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, the response from Germans was enormous. Ultimately, the Tsar imposed minimum financial requirements on new immigrants, requiring them to either have 300 gulden in cash or special skills in order to come to Russia. According to the first census of the Russian Empire in 1897, about 1.8 million respondents reported German as their mother tongue.

Volga Germans After the 1917 Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, and particularly under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, conditions for the remaining Germans in Russia declined considerably. The rise of Nazi Germany, with its concern about ethnic Germans in other lands and proselytizing the German volk, led to suspicions of any German within Russia. In 1932-33, the Soviet authorities forced starvation among the Volga Germans, seized their food claiming famine in the rest of the Soviet Union and ordering the breakup of many German villages. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin ordered the deportation of Russian Germans to labor camps in Siberia, as he was suspicious of potential collaboration with the Germans.  In some areas, his forces attempted to bulldoze the German churches, and reused their tombstones for paving blocks. Many Germans in the Americas sent donations back to their communities, but others permanently lost contact with their relatives during the social disruption of the famine and Stalin's Great Purge, followed by World War II.

Aussiedler from Russia Article 116 of Germany's Basic Law, approved in 1949, provides individuals of German heritage with the right of return to Germany and the means to acquire German citizenship if they suffered persecution after the Second World War as a result of their German heritage. As a result, roughly 3.6 million ethnic Germans moved to West Germany between 1950 and 1996. These German descendents increasingly petitioned to return to Germany under First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev. According to historian John Glad, by 1957 the petitioners, commonly known as "Aussiedlers" or transferred settlers, filed over 100,000 applications a year to migrate to West Germany—several thousands returned in the 1970s. The flow of Aussiedlers increased with the breakup of the Soviet Union. For instance, between 1992 and 2007, a total of 1,797,084 ethnic Germans from the former USSR emigrated to Germany. Of this total number 923,902 were from Kazakhstan, 693,348 were from Russia, 73,460 were from Kyrgyzstan, 40,560 from Ukraine, 27,035 from Uzbekistan, and 14,578 from Tajikistan. Numbers peaked in 1994–213,214 Aussiedlers—and then gradually began to decline.

Soviet and post-Soviet emigration from Russia German population data from 2012 records 1,213,000 Russian migrants residing in Germany—this includes current and former citizens of the Russian Federation as well as former citizens of the Soviet Union. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports that about 3,500,000 speakers of Russian live in Germany, split largely into three ethnic groups: Ethnic Russians Russians descended from German migrants to the East (known as Aussiedler) Russian Jews Immigration to Germany surged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to Global Commission on International Migration research, "In the 1990s ethnic Germans comprised the largest components of emigration, and the most attractive destinations were Germany and the United States."  Between 1992 and 2000 Germany purportedly received 550,000 emigrants from Russia, 60% of the total amount emigrating to the three main destinations.

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