Once again the absolute shortest history possible of the ethnic Germans in the Russian Empire and USSR. The Russian Germans are the descendants of those German speakers from Central Europe who settled in the Russian Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries. It does not include the much older Baltic German population in Estland, Livland, and Kurland, present day Estonia and Latvia.  The German immigrants that founded the various Russian German settlements came to the Russian Empire to take advantage of privileges and opportunities not available in their home states. The very large number of German communities in the Russian Empire differed significantly from each other in geographical settlement, confession and dialect. Russian German colonies existed along the Volga and Black Sea regions and in Central Russia, and later the Caucasus, Volhynia, Bessarabia, the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia. Both the Tsarist Russian and Soviet governments classified all of these settlers as “Germans,” even those descended from immigrants originating from Holland, Switzerland, Austria and France on the basis that they spoke a German dialect. On 22 July 1763, Empress Catherine II issued a manifesto offering free transport to Russia, free land, freedom of religion, temporary exemption from taxes, local self government, interest free loans and permanent freedom from conscription to all Christian foreigners. The Russian government sent out agents and scouts to publicize this manifesto throughout Europe. Most of the foreigners taking up this offer came from the German speaking states of Central Europe. In particular, a large number of immigrants initially came to the Russian Empire from Hesse. The Seven Years War had meant high taxes, religious persecution and military conscription for them. The Volga region of the Russian Empire near the city of Saratov contained the earliest and largest concentration of German settlers and their descendants. Responding to the invitation by Catherine II, between 1764 and 1774, over 23,000 settlers established 66 Lutheran and 38 Catholic colonies along the Volga River. This initial population would eventually grow to more than 600,000 people by the late 19th century. The second large area of settlement for ethnic Germans in the Russian Empire appeared along the Black Sea region, in what is today southern Ukraine. The first settlements in Ukraine can be dated back to 1765 in the area near Kiev. Mennonites from West Prussia began settling the region in 1789. By 1810, nearly 18,000 Mennonites had settled in southern Ukraine. The devastation to the German speaking states of Central Europe caused by the Napoleonic Wars from 1804 to 1815 spurred a mass exodus eastward. The settlement of the Black Sea region by immigrants from Baden, Württemberg and Alsace continued to the late 1850s and involved over 100,000 people. Natural population growth increased the number of German colonists in the Black Sea region to over half a million people before the end of the Russian Empire. The final large waves of German immigrants from Central Europe into the Russian Empire settled in Volhynia in what is today northwestern Ukraine.  After the defeat of Napoleon, the Kingdom of Poland came under Russian rule. Known as Congress Poland, it had a large German population, many of whom later migrated to Volhynia. This region had earlier been annexed to the Russian Empire from Poland. The Volhynian Germans purchased land confiscated from Polish nobles by the Tsarist government following the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863. Between 1831 and 1880, over 170,000 German settlers from Poland and northern Germany arrived in Volhynia. After 1881, new German immigration into the Russian Empire remained very limited. The land tenure system of the various German colonists varied dramatically depending upon where they settled. The initial settlements in the Volga moved to communal farming similar to the Russian mir. Here the German village elders periodically redistributed strips of land among the families in the colony on the basis of how many agricultural laborers they had. In the Black Sea colonies,  individual families maintained ownership and farming of the land. These plots could not be subdivided and were usually inherited by the youngest son. The other sons had to purchase new lands to farm. In the Volga and Black Sea regions, the Russian Germans lived in closed settlements defined by confession.  Each village centered on a single church and had a school.  The Volhynian Germans in contrast purchased or more often leased individual households and farms mixed among the native population. Community ties among the Volhynian Germans thus tended to be much weaker than among most other German colonists. The various German colonies in the Russian Empire generally prospered for most of the 19th century. During the 1870s, the Russian government revoked many of the privileges of the Russian German colonists and reduced them to the legal status of freed serfs. Combined with economic difficulties, this motivated considerable emigration to the Western hemisphere. Between 1874 and 1915, over 185,000 Russian Germans immigrated to the US alone. Many others migrated from the Volga and Black Sea regions to Asian areas of the Russian Empire. Mennonites from the Black Sea and Volga regions established the first Russian German settlements in Central Asia in 1882. Russian German Lutherans and Catholics as well as Mennonites later established other colonies in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, the Urals and Siberia. This migration grew rapidly in the early 20th century. By 1914, there were over 75,000 Russian Germans in Siberia alone. The situation of the Russian Germans reached a nadir during World War One, when the Tsarist regime deported some 200,000 Germans from Volhynia, Poland, Bessarabia and other western areas of the Russian Empire to the Volga and Siberia. Only the overthrow of the Tsarist government in February 1917 prevented the total dispossession of the Russian Germans. During the 1920s, the Soviet government established a number of national administrative territories for the Russian Germans in order to support cultural institutions such as German language schools, media, publishing and arts. The largest and most important of these territories was the Volga German ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic). Originally founded as the Volga German Labor Commune on 19 October 1918, Moscow upgraded this administrative unit to an ASSR on 20 February 1924. This territory had a population of 366,685 Russian Germans by 1939. The Soviet government also created eleven smaller national districts in Ukraine, Crimea, the Kuban, Siberia and Azerbaijan for other Russian German communities. The mid and late 1920s were generally a period of cultural and economic growth for the Russian Germans. During the 1930s, Soviet policies became increasingly repressive toward the Russian Germans. In 1930 and 1931, Russian-Germans made up a disproportionately large number of kulaks deported to special settlements during collectivization. In 1935 and 1936, the Soviet government deported German communities on the borders of Poland to eastern Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Finally, during 1937 and 1938 the NKVD (Peoples Commissariat or Internal Affairs – political police) launched a “German Operation” as part of the Great Terror. The “German Operation” accounted for 38,000 out of around 75,000 Russian Germans arrested and 29,000 out of around 46,000 Russian Germans executed during these years. Simultaneously, the Soviet government eliminated all German national districts and their institutions outside of the Volga German ASSR. The Stalin regime came to view the Russian-Germans as an internal enemy nation during the 1930s. In the summer of 1941, following the Nazi attack on the USSR, the NKVD began the systematic deportation of the Russian German communities living in the European areas of the USSR to regions east of the Urals. In total, the Stalin regime forcibly relocated a recorded 799,459 Russian Germans from their homelands in the Volga, Ukraine, Caucasus, and other regions to Kazakhstan and Siberia by 1 January 1942. The NKVD classified the Russian German exiles as special settlers and confined them to restricted areas. They could not leave their assigned locality even for short periods of time without NKVD permission. The NKVD controlled their housing and work assignments and enforced a separate and unequal legal and administrative system upon them. The deported Russian Germans also suffered from severe material deprivation in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Large numbers perished from malnutrition, disease and exposure due to a lack of proper food, housing, clothing and medicine. The deportation ushered in a decade of misery for the Russian Germans. During 1942 and 1943, the Stalin regime subjected the Russian Germans to additional forced relocation and forced labor.  The NKVD transported over 50,000 Russian Germans from southern to northern Siberia to work in fishing camps. They also mobilized over 315,000 Russian German men and women into forced labor detachments to work in industrial construction, felling timber, coal mining and oil extraction in the Urals and other regions. Collectively known as the labor army (trudarmiia) these detachments employed the majority of the able bodied Russian German adult population. Over 182,000 of these individuals worked in Gulag camps and most of the rest in the commissariats of coal and oil under NKVD supervision. Hunger, unsanitary living conditions, and exhausting labor led to the death of around 60,000 to 70,000 Russian Germans conscripted into the labor army. The Soviet government began to dismantle the labor army in 1946. Those discharged from the labor army became reclassified as special settlers, but often remained attached to the same economic enterprises. In 1945 and 1946, two other categories of Russian Germans came under special settlement restrictions. The first group consisted of 203,796 Russian Germans repatriated to the USSR from what had been Nazi controlled territory. The second group represented 105,817 of the 209,581 Russian Germans living east of the Urals before 1941. The Soviet government placed almost all the Russian Germans in Kazakhstan and Central Asia under special settlement restrictions. Only a little over 100,000 Russian-Germans in Siberia and the Urals remained outside this system. The harsh conditions of deportation, exile and forced labor during the 1940s led to the premature death of around 245,000 Russian Germans.  They remained under special settlement restrictions until after Stalin’s death. Only on 13 December 1955, did the Soviet regime remove the last Russian Germans from the special settler rolls. They could not, however, return home or receive compensation for lost property or suffering. After World War II, the Soviet government refused to allow the Russian Germans to return to their previous areas of settlement. They continued to suffer from discrimination in education and employment due to their German ancestry. A lack of German schools and other institutions in a predominantly Russian language environment led to an increasing loss of the German language and culture among younger Russian Germans. From 1964 to 1967, a small movement composed of Russian German activists sought to lobby the Soviet government to recreate the Volga German ASSR. This movement, however, failed to achieve any substantial results. A more vigorous movement to address the problems of continued discrimination and acculturation arose in 1972. The proposed solution of this movement was emigration out of the USSR and settlement in West Germany. The movement of Russian Germans to leave the USSR and settle in Germany had limited success until 1987. Pressure by Russian-German activists and the West German government only managed to convince the Soviet regime to allow the emigration of 63,204 people between 1971 and 1980.  From 1981 to 1986, the Soviets only allowed 9,417 Russian Germans to emigrate. On 1 January 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev repealed all restrictions on emigrating out of the USSR. Since this time more than two million Russian Germans and their family members have left the USSR and its successor states and settled in Germany. New restrictions passed by the German government on 1 January 2005 later reduced Russian German migration from the former USSR to Germany to only a few thousand a year. Attrition of deaths of old people exceeding births have continued to reduce the ethnic German population in Russia. The 2010 Russian census listed nearly 400,000 ethnic Germans. The 2021 census recorded about half that many. In Kazakhstan in contrast the population grew from 178,000 in 2009 to 226,000 in 2021 due to both natural population growth and people of mixed heritage switching their identification from Russian to German. The Russian Germans have lived in the territory of the former Russian Empire now for nearly two and a half centuries. During this time they experienced both prosperity and extreme repression. This repression reached its height during World War Two with the mass deportation of the Russian Germans to Kazakhstan and Siberia. This experience greatly alienated the Russian-Germans from the Soviet regime. This alienation led to a massive emigration out of the Soviet Union to Germany when the opportunity presented itself in the late 1980s. Less than a quarter of the 1989 population remains in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. Bibliography Auman, V.A. and Chebotareva, V.G., eds. 1993. Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763-1992 gg.). Moscow: MIGP. Berdinskikh, V.A. 2005. Spetsposelentsy: Politcheskaia ssylka narodov Sovetskoi Rossii. Moscow. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Bugai, N.F., ed., 1992. Iosif Stalin – Lavrentiiu Berii: “Ikh nado deportirovat’” Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii. Moscow: Druzhba narodov. Bugai, N.F., ed. 1998.  “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny…I. Stalin”: Sbornik dokumentov (1940-40-e gody) Moscow: Gotika. Eisfeld, Alfred. 2003. 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