Russian-German Special Relations in the Twentieth Century: A Closed Chapter? (German Historical Perspectives)

Russian-German Special Relations in the Twentieth Century

German Historical Perspectives Series General Editors: Timothy Garton Ash and Gerhard A. Ritter ISSN 0953-363X Volume VI Escape into War: The Foreign Policy of Imperial Germany Edited by Gregor Schöllgen Volume VII German Unification: The Unexpected Challenge Edited by Dieter Grosser Volume VIII Germany’s New Position in Europe: Problems and Perspectives Edited by Arnulf Baring Volume IX Western Europe and Germany: The Beginnings of European Integration 1945–1960 Edited by Clemens Wurm Volume X The Military in Politics and Society in France and Germany in the Twentieth Century Edited by Klaus-Jürgen Müller Volume XI Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1995 Edited by Reiner Pommerin Volume XII The Problem of Revolution in Germany, 1789–1989 Edited by Reinhard Rürup Volume XIII Science in the Third Reich Edited by Margit Szöllösi-Janze Volume XIV The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality Edited by Hans Mommsen Volume XV The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war German History Edited by Christoph Kleßmann Volume XVI Towards an Urban Nation: Germany since 1780 Edited by Friedrich Lenger Volume XVII Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century Edited by Eduard Mühle Volume XVIII Britain and Germany in the Twentieth Century Edited by Manfred Görtemaker

German Historical Perspectives/XIX

Russian-German Special Relations in the Twentieth Century A Closed Chapter? Edited by

KARL SCHLÖGEL

Oxford • New York

First published in 2006 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Karl Schlögel 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Russian-German special relations in the twentieth century : a closed chapter? / edited by Karl Schlögel. p. cm. -- (German historical perspectives, ISSN 0953-363X ; 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-177-7 (hardback) ISBN-10: 1-84520-177-9 (hardback) 1. Germany--Foreign relations--Russia. 2. Russia--Foreign relations-Germany. 3. Germany--Foreign relations--Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union--Foreign relations--Germany. 5. Germany--Foreign relations--20th century. 6. Russia--Foreign relations--20th century. I. Schlögel, Karl. II. Series. DD120.R8R85 2006 327.4304709'04--dc22 2006012198

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13 978 1 84520 177 7 (Cloth) ISBN-10 1 84520 177 9 (Cloth) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

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Contents

Editorial Preface Timothy Garton Ash and Gerhard A. Ritter

vii

Contributors

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‘Special Relations’ between Russia and Germany in the Twentieth Century – A Closed Chapter? Karl Schlögel

1

Before the Great War: German Entrepreneurs in Russia – Russian Scholars in Germany. Two Types of Russian-German Relations in the Decades before the First World War Dittmar Dahlmann

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Thomas Mann and Others: Russophilism and Sovietophilia Among German Conservatives Gerd Koenen

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Berlin: ‘Stepmother’ Among Russian Cities Karl Schlögel

43

German Emigrants in Soviet Exile: A Drama in Five Acts Carola Tischler

77

The Strange Allies – Red Army and Reichswehr in the Inter-war Period Manfred Zeidler

99

Facing the Ostfront: The Other War in German Memory Peter Jahn

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Patriots or Traitors? – The Soviet Government and the ‘German Russians’ After the Attack on the USSR by National Socialist Germany Viktor Krieger

133

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‘Vot ona prokliataia Germaniia!’ Germany in Early 1945 Through the Eyes of Red Army Soldiers Elke Scherstjanoi

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Supervision and Abdication – East German Intellectual Life under Soviet Tutelage Jens Reich

191

German-Russian Relations in the Early Twenty-first Century. Some Reflections on Normalcy Klaus Segbers

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Index

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Editorial Preface

The purpose of this series of books is to present the results of research by German historians and social scientists to readers in English-speaking countries. Each of the volumes has a particular theme that will be handled from different points of view by specialists. The series is not limited to the problems of Germany but will also involve publications dealing with the history of other countries, with the general problems of political, economic, social and intellectual history as well as international relations and studies in comparative history. We hope the series will help to overcome the language barrier that experience has shown obstructs the rapid appreciation of German research in English-speaking countries. The publication of the series is closely associated with the German Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, which has existed since having been originally funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung, later by the British Leverhulme Trust, by the Ministry of Education and Science in the Federal Republic of Germany, and, starting in 1990, by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, with special funding since 2000 from the Marga and Kurt MöllgaardStiftung. Each volume is based on a series of seminars held in Oxford, which has been conceived and directed by the Visiting Fellow and organized in collaboration with the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College. The editors wish to thank the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft for meeting the expenses of the original lecture series and for generous assistance with the publication. They hope that this enterprise will help to overcome national introspection and to further international academic discourse and cooperation. Timothy Garton Ash

Gerhard A. Ritter

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Contributors

KARL SCHLÖGEL Historian and writer, professor of Eastern European Studies at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/ Oder. His main interests and fields of research are Russian cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, history of forced migrations in East and Central Europe, cities and urban culture. His many books include Moskau lesen (Berlin: Siedler, 1984) (English translation London: Reaction, 2005); Petersburg 1909–1921. Das Laboratorium der Moderne (Munich: Hanser, 2002); Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas (Berlin: Siedler, 1998) (Russian translation Moscow: NLO, 2005); Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschiche und Geopolitik (Munich: Hanser, 2003). Among his honours and awards are Sigmund-Freud-Preis der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung 2004; Lessing-Preis der Stadt Hamburg 2005. DITTMAR DAHLMANN Professor of East European History at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn. He has published several articles on German entrepreneurs in pre-revolutionary Russia and is the author of Die Provinz wählt. Russlands Konstitutionell-Demokratische Partei und die Dumawahlen 1906–1912 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996). His current research focuses on Siberia and the socio-cultural history of football in Russia. GERD KOENEN Writer and publicist in Frankfurt am Main. He has published a series of books, the most well known of which are Utopie der Säuberung. Was war der Kommunismus? (Berlin: Fest, 1998); and Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001). His most recent book is Der Russland-Komplex. Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1945 (Munich: Beck, 2005). CAROLA TISCHLER Teacher of history in Berlin. She has published a monograph Flucht in die Verfolgung: Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil, 1933–1945 (Münster: Lit, 1996), as well as several articles on Germans exile in the Soviet Union. Her current research ix

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focuses on film history; she is editing the film reviews of Wolfgang Duncker and works on Soviet film during the ‘Thaw’ era. MANFRED ZEIDLER Research associate at the Hannah-ArendtInstitute for Studies in Totalitarianism at the Technical University, Dresden. He is author of Reichswehr und Rote Armee (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993); Kriegsende im Osten (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996); and of numerous articles on military history, prisoners of war, and German-Russian relations in the twentieth century. PETER JAHN Director of the German-Russian Museum BerlinKarlshorst, which shows exhibits concerning Soviet-German relations in the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the Second World War. His most recent publication is Triumph und Trauma: Sowjetische und postsowjetische Erinnerung an den Krieg 1941–1945 (Berlin: Links, 2005). VIKTOR KRIEGER Research associate at the Research Centre for the History and Culture of Germans in Russia, and lecturer at the department for East European History at the University of Heidelberg. His publications include Deutsche Präsenz in Kasachstan zur Zarenzeit (Munich: Osteuropa-Institut, 1993), in addition to articles on the history of the Russian Germans and on Soviet nationality policy. ELKE SCHERSTJANOI Research associate at the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte), Munich-Berlin. Her research focus has for several years been the history of the political influence of the CPSU on the SED, i.e. the USSR’s influence on the GDR; and the mental developments in post-war relations between East Germans and their occupiers. JENS REICH Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Humboldt University, Berlin. He was co-founder of the grassroots movement ‘Neues Forum’ in 1989 and served as MP (East Germany) during German unification in 1990. He has published, in addition to his professional specialization, several articles and books on that transition period. KLAUS SEGBERS Professor for Political Sciences at the Institute for East European Research at the Free University, Berlin. He is

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author of The Globalization of Eastern Europe (Münster: Lit, 2000) and editor of the three-volume Explaining Post-Soviet Patchworks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). He has given lectures at departments of Columbia, George Washington, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford Universities; in Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai; and at numerous other institutes.

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KARL SCHLÖGEL

‘Special Relations’ between Russia and Germany in the Twentieth Century – A Closed Chapter?

Entire libraries have been written about German-Russian relations in the twentieth century.1 That these were dramatic – even catastrophic – relations is already clear in the titles of the books dedicated to this topic: ‘Community of Fate’, ‘Unholy Alliance’, ‘War and Peace’, ‘The European Civil War’, ‘The Devil’s Pact’.2 More rare is a neutral title such as that of Walter Laqueur’s classic study Russia and Germany, which was published over forty years ago.3 The semantics of these titles invokes fateful, extra-historical powers, hinting at ostensibly analogous and fatal networks of power in the nineteenth century, at intrigue and diabolical actors. A vital role is played by the souls of entire peoples, and again and again by war. This indicates the difficulty historiography has had in turning the events into the language of histoire raisonnée, but it also shows that violence and war, the excesses of total power, were clearly the dominant forces in German-Russian relations in the twentieth century.4 That century is now behind us. The whole scenery, the actors, the nexuses of power have been radically transformed. The division of the world and Europe into East and West is history; the Soviet empire no longer exists; Eastern Europe is free; Germany is reunited and sovereign. There are no border or territorial problems between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation. Today’s problems are the ordinary problems typically seen between two sovereign states. They have to deal with the problems of a world 1

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which not only evidently left the ‘era of extremes’ behind in 1989, but which also entered a new era on 11 September 2001: an era with new borders and frontiers, with new dangers and enemies in an entirely transformed network. But the questions arising from this are not specifically German, not specifically Russian. They affect Europe and the world as one entity. We could now define the current state of German-Russian relations as normal. Part of this is that we can now, post festum, once again delineate the history of our relations. We can do what was impossible in the preceding decades. We have relatively free access to archives and sources which had long been restricted. We can carry the – sometimes controversial – debates across borders without thought for the censor’s involvement. The ideological battles are over, and the past is allowed to be as complex and complicated in historical narratives as it actually was. Of course, we have all become sceptical of ‘grand narratives’ and of ‘master narrators’. We are satisfied when the ‘blanks’ are filled, and the overall image is reassembled piece by piece. This is also the idea of this volume. It is the product of a seminar held at the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College in Oxford in 2002, and was extended by three further contributions to complete the account. The most important staging posts of German-Russian relations are visited in chronological order. The aspects treated will not render our image of these relations in the twentieth century entirely redundant, but they will certainly elaborate and make more precise particular features. The most significant insight is perhaps that the networks which could lead to the appearance of a special relationship have been eroded. The capacity of total mobilization has exhausted itself in an incomparably destructive and self-destructive process. ‘Negative Poland policies’ (Klaus Zernack) can no longer function as the driving force in German-Russian co-operation after the end of the German Reich and the Soviet empire. The contributions in this volume take another look at the past from this post festum perspective. Dittmar Dahlmann is concerned with the contributions and impact of German merchants and entrepreneurs, as well as Russian students and scientists, in the period before the First World War. This includes prominent, even legendary, names: German industrial leaders and businessmen such as Knoop and Wogau in the Russian Empire; Russian students and poets such as Pasternak and Mandelstam at German universities. Dahlmann sketches the

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3

density of their relations by giving us a glimpse of their Lebenswelten (lifeworlds): in clubs, schools, church communities, sports clubs; participating in cultural life; their language skills and integration in the host societies. Reading this sketch of student and academic life in, for example, Heidelberg, or of the German merchant’s milieu in Moscow, makes Dahlmann’s theory that contacts were never again this closely intertwined seem entirely plausible.5 Gerd Koenen’s chapter takes us beyond the First World War. Contrary to popular opinion, which has it that before 1941 or 1933 the image of Russia was already clearly negative and in tune with the standard clichés of the Nazi period – anticipating Russians as ‘subhuman’ and Russia as ‘Lebensraum in the East’ – Koenen shows that the image of Russia was much more nuanced and inconsistent. For large swathes of the middle classes, and even some of the national-conservative rightists, the image of Russia was deeply influenced by the spirit of Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the works of Dostoevskii. Russia was in many respects the place which offered hope for the salvation and rejuvenation of an aging, decadent Western culture. Koenen shows this through the examples of Thomas Mann and Eduard Stadtler, and also Oswald Spengler. Koenen attempts to show their perception – or construction – of a shared understanding between German and Russian interests: the common ground in their antipathy towards all things Western. Hitler had to break through the knot of this positive German orientation towards Russia and the East to clear the way for his Operation Barbarossa.6 Karl Schlögel focuses his contribution on a ‘chronotop’ (Mikhail Bakhtin) of German-Russian relations: on Russkii Berlin as a place of intense encounters between Germans and Russians. For a short time – circa 1921 to 1924 – Russian Berlin was the centre of the anti-Bolshevik Russian emigration, yet at the same time it was the main base for revolutionary Soviet Russia in Central Western Europe. This differentiates Berlin from other cities of Russian emigration such as Paris, Harbin, Prague or New York. Russian Berlin seems like a microcosm of German-Russian relations; a place of the ‘mingling of clean and unclean’ (Ilia Ehrenburg), where anti-Bolshevik emigration, Comintern pro-Soviet agitation, the rightist terrorist underground, and scholars studying Russia met and fought one another. Schlögel aims to point out that the ‘Weimar culture’ would have been unimaginable without the direct and indirect impact of this ‘Russian Berlin’.7

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The Russian Berlin of the 1920s had its match in the ‘German Moscow’ of the 1930s. Carola Tischler’s contribution describes Soviet Russia as a refuge for German émigrés after 1933. The German community, particularly in Moscow, was comprised of doctors, engineers, scientists, communists and anti-fascist émigrés and their families. Taken collectively, they were a strong group, working in various structures of the Comintern and its front organizations, publishers and newspapers. Their fates in the 1930s shows in a markedly paradoxical manner the developments of German-Russian relations during Stalin’s terror. In 1938 over 70 per cent of German émigrés were victims of Stalin’s repression. On the other hand, they were also affected by the consequences of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939 and the resulting open collaboration between the two totalitarian regimes. Their destiny took yet another turn after Nazi Germany’s assault on the USSR. According to Carola Tischler, however, the often tragic experiences of these émigrés were not brought to light or reappraised in any way for decades after their return to Eastern Germany. In this case, as above, only 1989 brought radical change.8 The secret collaboration between the German Reichswehr and the Red Army was always one of the topics which demonstrated the ambivalence in German-Russian relations particularly dramatically. Manfred Zeidler picks up this case again in the light of new archival materials. He reconstructs the paradoxical situation that the joint training and military manoeuvres – intended to help fight the entente – actually aided armament and preparation for the German war on the Soviet Union. It is one of the cruellest ironies of GermanRussian relations that many of the commanders of Operation Barbarossa had experience of the terrain thanks to Soviet support, and that the commanders of the Red Army, as German spies, fell victim to the cleansing of the army leadership in 1937, which at the very least facilitated German aggression against the USSR.9 Peter Jahn deals with ‘the other war in the East’ and its traces in the memories of post-war Germany, where the dimensions of the genocide against Jews has now been widely acknowledged, unlike German crimes against Russians, Poles and other peoples of the East. Jahn assumes that the asymmetrical development of prejudices from as far back as the nineteenth century was among the ideational and mental prerequisites for the unprecedented dehumanization of the war in the East: Russia as not belonging to Europe, inferior, backwards, Asian; also the battle cry of ‘dictatorship of Jewish

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Bolshevism’, Russia as ‘Lebensraum’ and as ‘Germany’s India’. Feelings of superiority over Russia and the Russians had a high likelihood of acceptance by the majority in Nazi Germany. There is no other way, says Jahn, of explaining the systematic killing of commissars, the starvation of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and the treatment of workers from the East. Jahn also asks why it took so long in post-war Germany – basically until the ‘Crimes of the German Wehrmacht’ exhibition first opened (1995) and until the forced labour compensations had been settled – to start to fully address the crimes committed ‘in the East’. Certain clichés and attitudes could, according to Jahn, live on after 1945, when they were reactivated within the transformed cold war frame, and West Germany’s inclusion in the ‘struggle against communism’ and remilitarization. A result of this, Jahn notes, is that there continue to be gaps in current research pertaining to the war in the East.10 Viktor Krieger discusses a topic which could truly only be addressed with the aid of historical materials after the end of the Soviet Union. The Russlanddeutsche (Germans from Russia), especially along the Volga, were categorically, in one fell swoop, accused of collaboration and disenfranchised. This had wide-reaching consequences well into the post-war period. Krieger can demonstrate that the Soviet leadership quickly gave up their initial differentiation between Germans and Nazis and began the wholesale, collective deportation of the roughly 800,000 ‘collaborators’: the Russlanddeutschen. This was accompanied by the disintegration of the rich cultural infrastructure, the destruction of the economic base, and the total disenfranchisement and life-threatening discrimination.11 Elke Scherstjanoi studies what the soldiers of the Red Army, mainly young men, saw, felt and interpreted – for themselves and their relatives – on their advance into Germany. Against the background of available research on the perception of German soldiers in Russia, she inquires into the perceptions of the Red Army soldiers which are specific to the war. Her analysis is based on anecdotes, memoirs, letters, diaries – such things also exist in Russia. The chapter in this volume offers an interpretation of around 300 letters. The soldiers were particularly impressed by the prosperity in Germany, the good roads, the sewerage systems, the tiled roofs of the farmhouses, the furnishings; and also by the reports from those freed from Majdanek and other camps. But there are accounts too of soldiers satisfied by the victory, the

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retribution, signs of contempt for the ‘Fritzes’ pleading for mercy. Scherstjanoi also discusses why the mass rapes have always been such a central topic in the West.12 Jens Reich’s report reflects on his own life experiences as someone with ‘two lives’: a first life of about ‘forty years under the Yaltaumbrella’; and a second of over ten years in re-unified Germany. Reich explores the life experiences of his generation in Sovietdominated East Germany. His grandfather was deported to Siberia, for reasons still unexplained, and died there. Reich describes the double experience of ‘brutal enemies’ and ‘dear friends’; of the tanks in the uprising of 1953 and the departure of Soviet troops in 1992. These are experiences shared by many – as evidenced by the roughly one million Soviet soldiers stationed in the GDR over the forty years, and the tens of thousands of students and scientists who studied in the USSR. He is surprised that the decades of Russian tuition had no noticeable long-term positive effect. Reich calls the cultural affinity sometimes alleged to exist between the GDR and Russian culture a myth. It would be more appropriate to talk of disturbed communication between the cultural and intellectual avant-garde of both countries.13 And finally, Klaus Segbers systematically discusses the future of German-Russian relations as a dependent variable in the context of global development. A new geopolitical landscape has emerged in the post-Westphalian era, in the era following the cold war and after 11 September 2001. The binary system of the cold war has been invalidated; transnational flows of capital are more important than political decisions in old capital cities. Movements on the capital markets carry more weight than traditional diplomacy. We have to somehow come to terms with this increasingly insecure world, which is not a new world order, and is also not defined in a unilateral or neo-imperial manner. The consequences for Germany and Russia are serious. For Germany, with its political culture oriented towards consensus, with its dependency on energy imports and the burden of its history, much is changing, but always within the framework of European institutions. The primary concern for Russia is the continued transformation of the system. The integration of Russia into the world market via the energy sector, i.e. oil and gas, is advancing at great speed; an isolated development of Russia is barely conceivable. The new elite want their achievements to be safeguarded: in other words, stability and continuity. What consequences will this ultimately have for

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German-Russian relations? For all intents and purposes, the outlook is ‘basically cloudless’. All the issues which could be controversial are of low-ranking significance: the Russlanddeutsche question and the repayment of debts have been dealt with; the looted art has been stripped of its inflated and symbolic significance. According to Segbers, specialists on Eastern Europe do still have work to do, despite these more or less harmonious relations; but it is no longer work on the ‘special relations’.14 One would be glad to concur with this analysis, despite the perturbation created by the talk of a ‘Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis’ in connection with the Iraq war. But even this changes nothing in the fundamental finding that the nexus in which the drama of GermanRussian relations unfolded over the last century has disintegrated. There are no ‘special relations’ any more. Nevertheless, this does not imply a lack of specific experiences and traditions which have left their marks on the cultural memory of the peoples and their elites. That there are roughly two to three million people living in the Federal Republic of Germany whose first language is Russian; that there are once again Jewish communities, whose re-establishment is largely thanks to the immigration of former Soviet citizens; that there is a more lively interest in all things Russian in Germany than elsewhere – all this is linked to the past special relationship between Germany and Russia. It would be strange to deny this. Even if the generation of veterans from the Second World War will soon no longer be with us and the horrors of the war in the East will remain an enduring chapter in the memory of both peoples – with many aspects still to be addressed. The experiences of those involved in the war – the labourers from the East, the prisoners of war from both sides – belong to the ‘negative cultural capital’ which is sometimes as important as the positive. It is similar for the post-war period, already on its way to becoming history. The experiences of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who were stationed on German territory; of tens of thousands of GDR citizens who studied and worked in the Soviet Union – it would be strange if these experiences disappeared without trace. But perhaps less remains than we think; less than, say, from the short ‘Sturm und Drang’ period of the avant-garde in the 1920s. Perhaps the devaluation of cultural capital in East Germany is a tragic part of the collateral damage resulting from Germany’s reunification.

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In all likelihood, we will have to return afresh to the First World War in the history of German-Russian relations. The First World War is perceived quite differently, even asymmetrically. In Russia, the ‘ultimate catastrophe’ of the war fell entirely by the wayside in the midst of revolution and civil war and was largely forgotten. It has no place in collective memory, whereas in Germany the war and the disastrous peace treaty of Versailles became the source of great resentment and a desire for revenge. And one thing is certain. The happiest and most rewarding time, never again matched in its productivity and density, was the ‘fin de siècle’. It has nothing to do with nostalgia or with an apology for the Hohenzollern or Romanov empires – and their rule over Poland – if we recall the density of economic cooperation, cultural exchange and understanding of that period. The twentieth century has done nothing other than destroy that massive block of intense and natural cooperation – to the very great detriment of not only Russians and Germans, but also all Europeans. The standard of relations established between Russia and Germany around 1900 has not yet been surpassed. Memories of that time survived even the horrors of two world wars, and are only now being superseded by something quite different – the victory march of a culture with its centre in America, bringing in its wake changes much more fundamental than all the revolutions which have rocked Russia and Germany. Translated from the German by Felicitas Macgilchrist

Notes 1. References in Karin Bock (ed.), Sowjetische Forschungen (1917 bis 1991) zur Geschichte der deutsch-russischen Beziehungen von den Anfängen bis 1949 (Berlin: Akademie, 1993). The most detailed reference list is found in Gerd Koenen’s West-östliche Spiegelungen. Gerd Koenen and Lew Kopelew (eds), Deutschland und die Russische Revolution 1917–1924 (Munich, 1998), pp. 827–934. 2. Gerald Freund, Unholy Alliance. Russian-German Relations from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the Treaty of Berlin (London, 1957); Sebastian Haffner,

A Closed Chapter?

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

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Der Teufelspakt. Die deutsch-russischen Beziehungen vom Ersten zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Zurich: Manesse, 1988); F.A. Krummacher and Helmut Lange, Krieg und Frieden. Geschichte der deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen. Von Brest-Litowsk zum Unternehmen Barbarossa (Munich and Esslingen: Bechtle, 1970); Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945, Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus, (Frankfurt/Main and Berlin: Propyläen, 1987); Günter Rosenfeld, Sowjetrußland und Deutschland 1917–1922 (Berlin: Akademie, 1960); Günter Rosenfeld, Sowjetunion und Deutschland: 1922–1933 (Berlin: Akademie, 1984); Gerd Voigt, Rußland in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung (Berlin: Akademie, 1994). Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1965). The exhibition Berlin-Moskau attempted to give a comprehensive overview. Exhibition catalogue, Irina Antonova and Jörn Merkert (eds) (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1995). The most exhaustive project to document German-Russian relations over centuries is the ‘Wuppertaler Project’: Gerd Koenen and Lew Kopelew (eds), West-östliche Spiegelungen. Russen und Rußland aus deutscher Sicht und Deutsche und Deutschland aus russischer Sicht von den Anfängen bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Wuppertaler Projekt zur Erforschung der Geschichte deutschrussischer Fremdenbilder. Reihe A: Russen und Rußland aus deutscher Sicht, 4 vols, Reihe B: Deutsche und Deutschland aus russischer Sicht, 2 vols, (Munich: Fink, 1985 ff). Most recently: Gerd Koenen, Der RusslandKomplex. Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1950 (Munich: Beck, 2005). In the German ‘Historikerstreit’ the interrelationship between the two totalitarianisms still played a central role, cf. Rudolf Augstein (ed.), Der Historikerstreit. Die Dokumentation der Kontoverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1987). Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit. Ein polemischer Essay zum ‘Historikerstreit’ (Munich: Beck, 1988); Helmut Fleischer, ‘Zu einer Historik für die Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Präliminarien, Perspektiven, Paradigmen’, in Helmut Fleischer and Perluca Azzaro (eds), Das 20. Jahrhundert. Zeitalter der tragischen Verkehrungen. Forum zum 80. Geburtstag von Ernst Nolte (Munich: Herbig, 2003), pp. 506–58. See also Dittmar Dahlmann and Carmen Scheide (eds), ‘. . . das einzige Land in Europa, das eine grosse Zukunft vor sich hat’. Deutsche Unternehmen und Unternehmer im Russischen Reich im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Essen, 1998). Gerd Koenen attempts a comprehensive overview in, Der Russlandkomplex. Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1950 (Munich: Beck, 2005). For more on the Russian Berlin cf. Karl Schlögel, Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas. Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler, 1998)

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8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

Karl Schlögel (in Russian: Moscow, 2005); Karl Schlögel (ed.), Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918–1941. Leben im europäischen Bürgerkrieg (Berlin: Akademie, 1995); Karl Schlögel, Katharina Kucher, Bernhard Suchy and Gregor Thum, Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland 1918–1941 (Berlin: Akademie, 1999). Carola Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil 1933 bis 1945 (Münster: Lit, 1996). Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee. 1920–1933. Wege und Stationen einer ungewöhnlichen Zusammenarbeit (Munich: Oldenburg, 1993). Idem, ‘Das Bild der Wehrmacht von Rußland und der Roten Armee zwischen 1933 und 1939’, in Hans-Erich Volkmann, Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich (Cologne, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 1994), pp. 105–24; Olaf Groehler, Selbstmörderische Allianz. Deutsch-russische Militärbeziehungen 1920–1941 (Berlin, 1992). Peter Jahn and Reinhard Rürup (eds), Erobern und Vernichten. Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941–1945 (Berlin, 1991). For more on the image of Russia in the Third Reich, cf. Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.), Das Rußlandbild im Dritten Reich. Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette (eds), Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion. ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’ 1941, (Frankfurt/Main, 1991); Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). Alfred Eisfeld and Victor Herdt (eds), Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956 (Cologne, 1996). Elke Scherstjanoi (ed.), Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland. Briefe von der Front (1945) und historische Analysen (Munich, 2004). See the autobiographical sketch by Jens Reich, ‘Wenn der Staat bestimmt’, in Kursbuch 148 (June 2002). For more on post-Soviet contexts, cf. Klaus Segbers and Stephan de Spiegeleire (eds), Post-Soviet Puzzles. Mapping the Political Economy of the Former Soviet Union, vols 1-4 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1995).

DITTMAR DAHLMANN

Before the Great War: German Entrepreneurs in Russia – Russian Scholars in Germany. Two Types of Russian-German Relations in the Decades before the First World War

This chapter presents two aspects of the relationship between Russia and Germany at the turn of the century: business history and intellectual history. At first glance both fields do not have very much in common, but as I will present business history – at least to a certain degree – as cultural history, these two fields could well be seen and dealt with together. Culture will be understood in two ways: firstly as a way of life and the world one lives in (Lebenswelt und Lebensweise), and secondly in the normal sense with science or scholarship seen as a part of it.1 A good number of German merchants and entrepreneurs as well as German scholars went to Russia at around the same time: in the beginning of the eighteenth century under Peter I.2 Not all of them stayed, and not all were successful or had an extraordinary career. But a lot of them made it to the top, and became rich and famous. Some were even the founding fathers of academic or merchant dynasties, whose families lived in the Russian Empire for three and more generations.3 In May 1877 the textile company of Ludwig Knoop & Co. celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in Moscow. The founder and director of the enterprise, Ludwig Knoop, at this time fifty-six years old, wrote about this event to his brother Julius: 11

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The first toast was on the Emperor. The second one was on me. Then, after a break, T. Morozov was called out, came back with a dispatch from the minister of finance, who notified him that at noon of this same day the emperor had raised me to a hereditary baron. The applause was endless, I am unable to describe my feelings to you, but I am sure, that we are one and you feel like me. – After this Baranov made a speech which was beautiful and hilarious, at the end of it I was exhausted, because my nerves could not endure any more and my whole body was trembling.4

Knoop, born in Bremen in 1821, was made a nobleman because of his contribution to the Russian national industry. Though Knoop remained a citizen of his home town all his life, he received this honour for the development of the Russian textile industry. Like many of his German-speaking fellow-countrymen,5 he had come to the Russian Empire in his younger years to make a fortune in this country. The most famous example of course is Heinrich Schliemann,6 who also owned a commercial house in Moscow. The two men must have known each other, as the circle of German entrepreneurs in Moscow was not particularly extensive, but unfortunately there is no evidence for this assertion. Knoop stuck to his business, as did most of the other German merchants and industrialists, so his name was long forgotten and known only to a few specialists in Russian and Bremen history until the end of the 1980s. Since that time of perestroika, when historians in the declining Soviet Union discovered new fields of history, business history has been a flourishing field in Russia, as have so many other fields: cultural and intellectual history, the history of exile and so on.7 Among the influential, rich and successful merchant or industrialist families in the Russian Empire at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century we find quite a number of German origin. Besides Knoop we have in Moscow the following ‘big names’: von Wogau, Zenker, Marc, Bansa, von Einem and Spies; and in St Petersburg: Amburger, again the Spies family, Stieglitz, König and Hammerschmidt. However, German merchants and entrepreneurs were not restricted to the two capitals, for we can also find them in Lodz, Kazan, Saratov, Samara, Odessa and many other Russian cities. Those who were at the top at the turn of the century mainly had come to Russia at the beginning or the first half of the nineteenth

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century: Knoop, von Wogau, Marc, Spies and many others. For the Germans the Russian Empire offered many opportunities for it was a big country with just a few internal customs barriers – in contrast to Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century – and after the end of the Napoleonic Wars it was a developing market. In dealing with the German merchants and industrialists I will focus on two examples: the Knoops and the von Wogaus in Moscow. Their success was unique, but many others were also very successful. Ludwig Knoop came to Moscow in 1840 when he was not yet twenty, as the representative of an English company in Manchester which belonged partly to one of his uncles, having lived in Manchester for over two years before coming to Russia. After a couple of years he married the daughter of a Baltic-German merchant and founded his first company in 1852.8 From the moment of his arrival he was a part of the German colony in Moscow. According to the only general census of the Russian Empire in 1897, 17,358 Germans of both sexes lived in Moscow.9 Although this was only 1.7 per cent of the city’s total population, it was the biggest colony of non-Russians, with more Germans than Ukrainians, Poles or Jews. Most of them were Russian citizens, but over 6,000 were not. More than two-thirds belonged to a Protestant church – over 14,000 – with just 3,000 Catholics. Roughly 2,000 were economically self-sufficient as craftsmen, merchants, bankers or industrialists.10 The Moscow Germans formed an important social group in the second capital city of the Russian Empire. They inhabited a small world of their own with newspapers, journals, churches, schools, hospitals, clubs, restaurants with German food and beer, hotels, book stores, all kinds of shops – in particular – doctors and so on. At one time there was also a German theatre in the city.11 The famous Baedeker described German life in Moscow and wrote: ‘There’s no need to worry about finding a German or German-speaking doctor in Moscow, and in all of the pharmacies German is spoken.’12 Besides the family the centre of German life in Moscow, or any other Russian city, was the church parish and, closely connected to it, the school. The other important social institution was the club, i.e. the German club, Deutscher Klub in Moskau, which as a matter of fact was not as German as its name indicated.13 There were four Lutheran and Reformed Church parishes in Moscow, the oldest being Petri-Pauli and Michaelis. Both had high

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schools (Gymnasia) which were founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for boys and girls. The Gymnasia followed the Prussian system and were open to everybody who could pay for it. There were therefore many Russian and Jewish children at these schools, in particular girls, since only a few Russian schools for the higher education of the female sex existed at the time. Nearly all German entrepreneurs sent their children to these schools, where the language of instruction was mainly German, but Russian was also taught, and nearly all Germans of this social strata were at least trilingual: German, Russian and English, some even managing four or five.14 Nearly all German merchants and industrialists in Moscow were active members of their church parishes as chairmen or members of various boards and in various other functions. The same was true for the schools, which also had their various boards. And it was also true for the many charity organisations that existed either in the churches or as separate institutions.15 Here again most German industrialists were members and chairmen of these organisations. Some hold these functions for ten or even twenty years. Church, school and charity were closely related, with church and school being particularly important for the life of the Moscow Germans, or indeed for most Germans in the Russian Empire before and after 1914. Many German industrialists donated a lot of money to churches, schools and especially charities.16 This they had in common with their Russian counterparts, mainly with those Russian entrepreneurs who were Old Believers.17 But it was not church and school alone that bound the strata of German industrialists together. Of equal importance was marriage. As a general rule, until the third generation the Germans married among themselves. The most famous example in Moscow was the von Wogau clan. The families of Wogau, Marc, Ruperti, Bansa, Hermann and Schumacher were woven into a net of relationships by marriage. Moritz Marc, for example, was at the same time the nephew and the brother-in-law of Karl von Wogau. Marriage of course was not only a matter of love, but of economic and financial importance.18 Nearly all German enterprises were primarily family owned, either as a limited company or as a limited partnership, in some cases as a limited partnership by shares. For this reason the newly married husbands became partners in the business, and the wives increased the family’s prestige and influence in business circles.19

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But the German industrialists and entrepreneurs in Russia by no means lived exclusively among the Germans. On the contrary, adaptation or acculturation to the Russian way of life was widespread. Though the language spoken at home was always German, the children learnt Russian from their nianias, the Russian maid who normally stayed with a family not only for the first child, but for all the family’s children. Even afterwards, when the last born no longer needed a maid, she would often continue to live with the family or had even become part of the family. This led to the use of the Russian form of first names, using diminutives and pet names. It was also common to use the Russian form of address with first name and surname. Beginning with the third generation it was also common to give children Russian first names.20 Common in nearly all German families were certain Russian customs and habits, as well as the celebration of religious and other holidays. In the east corner of the living room or dining room there would be an icon, and on New Year’s Day the orthodox priest came to bless the house and the family. During the ‘butterweek’, the week before the six weeks of fasting before Easter, meals were prepared and Easter was celebrated in the Russian, and not in the German, way.21 Most families tended to own or rent summer houses in the countryside. Generally from late spring or early summer, until early autumn, the whole family with all the servants moved to these summer houses. The head of the family, who had his business in the city, only went out for the weekends, but by the turn of the century, and in the years before 1914 when the traffic conditions became better and some families had even bought a car, he would come to the summer house every afternoon. As with Russian families it was not only the immediate family who spent the time there, but also the extended family, and sometimes close friends stayed for shorter or longer periods.22 Some of the richer families organized their summer houses to make up little colonies in the countryside, where they could visit one another, stay overnight and have parties. The importance of these summer houses or residences is shown by the fact that many German entrepreneurs spent more money on these buildings, gardens, etc. than on their houses or apartments in the cities. Alfred Ruperti, for example, a member of the Wogau clan, spent at least a million roubles on his summer villa, but only rented an apartment, albeit large and comfortable, for the winter months in the city.23

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The two worlds – Russian and German industrialists – met outside the business world, mostly in the clubs. The two most famous and most prestigious in Moscow were the English club (angliiskii klub) and the merchants’ club (kupecheskii klub). The English club was the most distinguished, noble and elegant one on Moscow’s main street, the Tverskaia; the merchants’ club was close to the club of the nobility in Bol’shaia Dmitrovka. Club life was the realm of men: dining, playing cards, reading and of course discussing business were the main activities in the clubs. Women were only admitted for social events: balls and social gatherings.24 Shortly before the turn of the twentieth-century sports clubs became fashionable among Russian and German entrepreneurs: first horse-riding and lawn tennis, and later car racing. Hunting was another activity that both worlds shared, fox-hunting in particular.25 The growing integration of the second and third generation of Germans in Russia was manifested in the interest they had for Russian theatre, music and literature. The younger generations were more familiar with Russian authors – Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Gor’kii – than with German ones. They admired the productions of Konstantin Stanislavskii at the Moscow Artist theatre, together with Russian ballet, music and painting.26 This world of culture is closely related to another field that German and Russian entrepreneurs shared – the patronage of art in general. Though more common among the Russian industrial elite, their German counterparts also financed literature, theatre, music and painting.27 In the next part of this chapter I will describe the career of a German entrepreneur in Moscow, namely Ludwig Baron Knoop, one of the most successful German industrialists in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, mentioned already at the beginning of the chapter. His personal success story may seem extraordinary, but there are at least another fifty German entrepreneurs who were similarly crowned with success. Ludwig Knoop began his career in Manchester in the 1830s in the de Jersey Company, which was partly owned by two of his uncles, before going to Moscow in 1840 as a representative of the firm. In 1843 he married the daughter of a Baltic-German merchant in Moscow and four years later Ludwig managed to complete his first big deal when in 1847 he sold a fully equipped textile factory to Savva Morozov, one of the richest and most influential entrepreneurs in

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Moscow and a member of the Old Believers. Knoop did not only sell the newest and best English machines, he also hired British employees and foremen. This form of business became the basis of Knoop’s overwhelming success. He was so convinced of the success of this new factory that he refused any direct payment, instead taking a 10 per cent share of the annual profits of Morozov’s factory. Over the next fifteen years Knoop build another 153 factories and in all of them held a share in the annual profits of between 5 and 15 per cent. Furthermore he provided the machinery for another thirty factories, not only delivering the machinery and technical know-how in the shape of British employees and foremen, but also becoming the main importer of the cotton that these factories needed.28 In 1852 Ludwig Knoop founded his own company in Russia, with the head office in Moscow and branches in St Petersburg and Reval. Another five years later, in 1857, together with Russian and German partners, he founded the textile factory ‘Krähnholm’, situated directly on the border of the province of Estonia, on the banks of the River Narova, close to the city of Narva. The company still exists – it is now the biggest company in the whole of Estonia, belongs to a Swedish company and is Estonia’s biggest exporter.29 But let us turn back to Ludwig Knoop in 1857. His four partners in the founding of Krähnholm were three Russians, members of the Moscow Old Believer community, and two Germans. The Russians were Aleksei and Gerasim Khludov and Koz’ma Soldatenkov. Together with them Knoop also held shares in the Emil Zündel company, another textile company in Moscow, and together with members of the Shchukin family, again an Old Believer family, held shares in the Danilovskaia factory. So Knoop had very good relations with his fellow German nationals and with Russian Old Believers in Moscow, and was well established in Moscow business circles.30 The capital of the Krähnholm factory was initially two million gold roubles, later being raised to six million. It was, de jure, what would be call in German a Kommanditgesellschaft auf Aktien, a partnership limited by shares. All the shares were either in the hands of the founding members and could not be sold without the consent of the others, or the shares were in the hands of members of the Knoop family. Some sources indicate that two uncles of Ludwig Knoop, the two who co-owned the de Jersey company in Manchester, and Ludwig’s two brothers Julius and Daniel, held shares in the Krähnholm company.31

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The rise of the Knoop company continued in the years that followed. Ludwig Knoop and his wife, together with their three daughters, returned to Bremen in 1861, while the three sons remained in Moscow. The two oldest sons, Theodor and Andreas, married two sisters in the Zenker family, daughters of a rich MoscowGerman banker; Johann, the third son, married in Bremen. The three daughters married into Bremen’s entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, the families of Wolde, Albrecht and Kulenkampff. The Woldes owned a private bank; George Albrecht was the owner of Joh. Lange’s Witwe & Söhne, a well-established merchant and shipowner family; and the Kulenkampff family is still an institution in today’s Bremen.32 Back in his home town, Bremen, Knoop built a luxurious family seat on the banks of the River Lesum. Mühlenthal no longer exists, but the surrounding park, known in Bremen as Knoop’s Park, still gives an impression of the Knoops’ huge premises. Knoop had his own telegraph station and an extra stop for the railway line. He frequently travelled between Bremen, Moscow and Krähnholm by train for as long as he was able to do so. His wife used to say, ‘Father thinks and dreams of cotton only!’33 Let us now turn to the network of the Knoop family that was more or less entirely based on family relations. Members of the family were owners of the British company de Jersey which had branches in Liverpool and Manchester. In addition to Ludwig Knoop, his two uncles (his mother’s brothers), later Ludwig’s brother Julius, and finally Julius’ two sons, Andreas and Ludwig Karl, were all partners with their father in ownership of this company. Another son of Ludwig, Johann Knoop, controlled the London trading house Wm. Berkefeld & Co., from at least 1871, the de Jersey company holding shares in it and in the London Banking House H.S. Lefevre & Co. Knoop’s next English partner was Platt Bros. in Manchester, where he bought most of the machinery. One of the directors was E.W. Gromme, his nephew and the son of one of Ludwig Knoop’s sisters; later Ludwig Knoop held shares in this company. Besides this, Ludwig worked together with many English companies in which members of his family or he himself had shares. These were in particular: Mather, Platt & Co. in Salford, a textile plant; John Musgraves & Sons in Bolton, a steam engine factory; Hick Hargreaves & Co., another steam-engine factory, also in Bolton; and seven other companies. At Musgrave’s the above-mentioned E.W. Gromme was one of the directors and later Ludwig Knoop’s

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grandson Johann Ludwig Knoop also worked for this company. For the supply of laboratory equipment, valves and pumps Ludwig Knoop relied on two German companies: Keller-Dorian and A. Buttner, although there is no evidence that he or members of his family held any shares in these firms.34 In America the Knoop family founded the general commission agency Knoop, Hanemann & Co. in 1863, with branches in New York, Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans and Mobile. The company was founded by another relative of Ludwig, Gottfried Knoop, together with another German, Hanemann. Ludwig and another brother, Julius, held shares in this company; later on Julius’ son Andreas and another relative from the side of Ludwig’s mother were also engaged by this firm. After Hanemann’s retirement in 1875 the company changed its name to Knoop, Frerich & Co. Once again the English de Jersey company was one of the main partners. The primary function of Knoop, Frerich & Co. was to supply the Russian House with raw cotton.35 In 1864, during the American Civil War, Ludwig Knoop founded another company in Bombay to trade with cotton. For the same reason, de Jersey & Co. and Knoop were again partners in the company of the St Petersburg German Julius Amburger, in Alexandria. After Amburger’s death in 1881, Ludwig Knoop invested £50,000 in the successor firm, Ernest Malleson & Co., and remained a sleeping partner in it until 1891.36 The leading figures of the Knoop family enterprise were the two brothers Ludwig and Julius, one in Russia and the other in England. It is also apparent that those with capital among the members of the extended family, former partners and even employees left it invested in L. Knoop and Co. The companies of the two brothers operated worldwide and supported one another. In 1877 Ludwig was made a Russian baron, but the family was more international and cosmopolitan both in its business affairs and in its private life. Knoop’s sons received their commercial training outside Russia, but this was also increasingly the case in genuinely Russian entrepreneurial families from the middle of the nineteenth century. Marriages, as we have seen, were an important means to establish business relations, though in the first two generations of the Knoop family’s Russian branch, religion and national origin were the dominating factors. It was only in the third generation that marriage links with the Russian bourgeoisie were forged: two grandsons of

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Ludwig Knoop married into important Moscow entrepreneurial families: the Medved’evs and the Mamontovs. The family remained the central – but not the only – base for Ludwig Knoop’s business in Russia. As we have seen, he also had very good connections to Russian entrepreneurs, in particular Russian Old Believers. It can generally be said that Knoop was well established within Moscow business circles and had many friends among his Russian colleagues. The German economist Gerhart von Schulze-Gävernitz, who visited Russia and Knoop’s factory Krähnholm in the 1890s wrote that to a certain extent Knoop owed his success to his stomach – he frequently visited those places where even in the second half of the nineteenth century a lot of contracts were settled, the Russian traktir.37 For many years Knoop was the chairman of the Moscow stock exchange and held various other posts within entrepreneurial organizations, while his two sons in Moscow followed in their father’s footsteps.38 Within a time span of twenty-five years Ludwig Knoop built up an entrepreneurial empire based mainly, but in no way exclusively, on family relations. The network of companies which he owned, or in which he held shares, was worldwide and truly intercontinental: Europe, America, Africa and Asia. The production was based in Russia; the supply of the machinery came from England and partly from Germany; raw materials, mainly cotton, came from the USA, Egypt and India, and during and after the American Civil War from Russian Central Asia.39 The family empire continued to exist after Ludwig Knoop’s death in 1894, until the Russian Revolution of 1917. Krähnholm, after 1918/19 in Estonia, belonged to the Knoop family until 1939, but the factory as such, as previously mentioned, still exists today. Schulze-Gävernitz called him ‘Russia’s greatest industrialist’, and a mixture of John D. Rockefeller and Sir Richard Arkwright.40 In any case, he was one of the big European industrialists of the second half of the nineteenth century, and although forgotten in the Soviet Union for obvious reasons, Russian historiography nowadays deals extensively with him and other great industrialists in Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.41 Knoop and his family empire constituted just one outstanding example of a German entrepreneur in Russia who built up an international enterprise that had its centre in the Russian Empire. Yet there were many other cases to show that not only was the economic relationship between Germany and Russia developing rapidly,

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but also that Russia was an integral part of the world economy and that the process of what we now call globalization was well under way in the decades leading up to the First World War, before being interrupted by the great catastrophes of two world wars and the division of Europe and the world, until the late 1980s and early 1990s.42 In the second part of this chapter I would like to show the intensity and density of the relations between Germany and Russia in terms of scholarly or scientific relationships at the turn of the twentieth century. From the second half of the nineteenth century, when Russia’s need for an intellectual elite was steadily growing, but could not be satisfied by the country’s own universities, more and more Russian students went abroad, partly with the support of the Russian government and partly at their own expense.43 Their main interest was not what some famous, but unusual, sources seem to indicate – philosophy and revolution, or vice versa – but sciences, medicine and architecture. Apart from Berlin, in particular after the 1870s, and some universities close to the German-Russian border, most students from Russia went to the technical universities: Karlsruhe, Darmstadt, Munich and the Bergakademie Freiberg, famous in Russia ever since Mikhail Lomonosov had been a student there in the first half of the eighteenth century.44 For obvious reasons Russian students founded clubs and unions, but had one speciality: the Russische Lesehallen (reading-rooms), where members could read newspapers, magazines and books, have tea, and where from time to time balls and other social gatherings were arranged. As censorship was not as harsh in Germany as in Russia and differed from state to state, they could also read the illegal literature of Russian Social Democracy, the SocialistRevolutionaries or of the liberal opposition. One of the oldest reading-rooms was founded in Heidelberg in 1862, named after the famous Russian physician Nikolai Pirogov. Before the outbreak of the First World War, there were Russian reading-rooms or clubs in 20 German university towns, including 6 in Munich, 5 in Dresden, 3 each in Berlin, Freiburg and Freiberg, and 2 in Heidelberg.45 Historical research has mainly focused on the revolutionary aspects of Russian students in Germany, Bolsheviks being the prime object of research. Not only in the East, but also in the West the focus was on Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Germany, not on the scholarly relations which developed at the turn of the century. Those who came from Russia to study at a German university did

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so for different reasons and with different motives, which were so closely related to one another that it would be difficult to separate them. Learning and scholarship, scholarship and revolution, and revolution and learning were an inextricable tangle.46 And it was in these clubs, unions and reading-rooms where all these people with all their ideas and ideals met, despite their different world-views or ideologies, their different thoughts and aims. For the intellectual elite from Russia it was mainly Heidelberg University which they chose for their studies. The oldest university in Germany was one of the academic and intellectual centres of German philosophy, economics and law. Neo-Kantianism, political economy and constitutional law were the main subjects of interest.47 One of the leading experts of constitutional law at the RupertoCarola in Heidelberg was Georg Jellinek, professor of constitutional law, whose works were widely known in Russia and had been translated into Russian. Many Russian law students attended his lectures and seminars. Here they had a chance to discuss Russian law freely, or the concept of a liberal constitutional state, which they wanted to achieve in Russia. Among the students of Jellinek were Fedor Kokoshkin, Bogdan Kistiakovskii, Sergei Svatikov and Mikhail Kalantarov. The first two were founding and leading members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party in Russia in 1905.48 Kistiakovskii in particular had a very close relationship with Max Weber and was his main source of information for the two famous articles that Weber wrote in 1906 on the Russian revolution of 1905-6 ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Rußland’ and ‘Rußlands Übergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus’.49 These two Russian law professors who returned to Russia after their studies remained in close contact with the German academic world. Kistiakovskii either translated Weber’s first article into Russian or was the organizer of this translation, at least this is my assumption.50 But he was certainly engaged in the translation of Jellinek’s work into Russian. When his teacher died in 1911, Kistiakovskii wrote a lengthy obituary in the journal Russkaia Mysl’ entitled ‘Georg Jellinek as a thinker and man’ (‘Ellinek kak myslitel’ i chelovek’).51 The close relationship between the German and Russian academic world can also be seen in the history of the Heidelberger Russische Lesehalle. Most of the material that Weber used for his two articles on the Russian Revolution he found there and it was also the place where he met his informants, scholars like Bogdan

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Kistiakovskii and Sergei Zhivago. And when the Lesehalle celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in December 1912, three professors from the university were invited to give public lectures on the relationship between the German and Russian academic world: the Weber brothers, Max and Alfred, and Gustav Radbruch, the famous legal philosopher, later Minister of Justice for a couple of years in the Weimar Republic. One of the leading liberal dailies in Russia, Russkie Vedomosti, even published an article on Max Weber’s speech at this event. It was actually planned to publish all three speeches in one volume in Russian under the title ‘Geidel’bergskii sbornik’. All three lectures were delivered, as one eyewitness wrote, ‘in the typical way of the Russian students, Max Weber could begin his talk only at around midnight.’52 Weber then spoke for at least seventy-five minutes. There are no accounts about the length of the discussion afterwards.53 Max Weber and Gustav Radbruch spoke about German-Russian cultural relations. From all the three speeches only the manuscript of Radbruch’s lecture survived. He spoke about the different perceptions of law in both countries. The Russians were, according to him ‘Juristen aus Freiheitssinn’ (lawyers due to a sense of freedom), in contrast to the Germans who were ‘Juristen aus Ordnungssinn’ (lawyers due to a sense of orderliness). I think that this is a good observation. The task of the Russian, Radbruch believed, should be to develop this sense of freedom among the German too, and to strengthen the pathos of the law.54 One of the most ambitious undertakings of cooperation between Russian and German scholars was the journal Logos, founded in 1909 by the German philosophers Richard Kroner, Georg Mehlis and Arnold Ruge, and their Russian friends Sergei Gessen (Hessen), Nikolai Bubnov and Fedor Stepun. All of them had studied at either Heidelberg or Freiburg university, or at both universities. In the background of the journal, not mentioned as editors, operated some of most famous German scholars: Max Weber, Heinrich Rickert, Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Windelband.55 The journal was published in Russian and German editions, which were not identical. While the German edition was published in Tübingen at the famous Mohr/Siebeck publishing house, the Russian edition first appeared at Musaget in Moscow, a publishing house owned by Hedwig Friedrich, another German entrepreneur in Russia, at that time one of the most famous booksellers and publishers, then at M.O. Vol’f (Wolf) in Moscow.56

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Logos was one of the most ambitious undertakings of German and Russian scholars and devoted to the ‘mutual understanding of nations’, as was written in the draft by the aforementioned editors in 1909.57 They held the view that each national culture had its own values. This supranationalism, as they called it, should be distinguished from a cosmopolitanism which annihilates the individual peculiarities of historical development and also from a narrow nationalism, which does not acknowledge the value of a homogeneous mankind, bound together by culture – in the German sense of the word. The term used is Kulturmenschheit.58 Philosophy and culture were supranational, and although national cultures should be overcome by philosophical aspirations, by no means should the different traditions of culture or civilization be neglected. This was a different way to a united Europe, a philosophically united Europe, bound together by ideas,59 not an economically united Europe bound together by the Euro. But this of course is another story. We know that this programme of transnationalism or supranationalism, this attempt to look for reason in civilization or culture and the attempts to let philosophy become practical, failed just a few years later, when the irrational triumphed in Europa. Many more aspects of this relationship between German and Russian scholars, and German and Russian writers and artists, could be mentioned here: Boris Pasternak as a student in Marburg in 1912 or Osip Mandel’shtam who studied in Heidelberg two years earlier. Also worth mentioning is the interest that the German intellectual elite took in the writings and philosophy of Lev Tolstoi.60 Economic and cultural relations between Germany and Russia in the decades before the First World War were very close, closer then they are even nowadays. Many of these entrepreneurs and scholars lived in two worlds, or in two civilizations, and acted as intermediaries between the two countries and their cultures. They were at home in Berlin and Heidelberg as well as in Moscow or St Petersburg. After a war caused by ultra-nationalism and the Bolshevik revolution, many German entrepreneurs in Russia and many Russian scholars who had once spent the years of their study in Germany had to leave revolutionary Russia and ‘return’ home. But exile is another story that should be told at another time.

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Notes 1. I will not deal with the long discussion about the concept of culture and cultural history (Kulturgeschichte). It is different in the Germanand English-speaking world. In Germany the latest book is Ute Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). 2. Klaus Heller, ‘Ausländische Kaufleute und Unternehmer im Russischen Reich bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Dittmar Dahlmann and Carmen Scheide (eds), ‘. . . das einzige Land in Europa, das eine große Zukunft vor sich hat’. Deutsche Unternehmen und Unternehmer im Russischen Reich im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Essen: Klartext, 1998), pp. 27– 48; Viktor N. Sacharow, ‘Von Nowgorod nach Petersburg. Deutsche Kaufleute in Russland von den Zeiten der Hanse bis zum Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Dittmar Dahlmann (ed.), ‘Eine grosse Zukunft’. Deutsche in Russlands Wirtschaft (Berlin: Reschke & Steffens, 2000), pp. 12–21; also published in a Russian version (Moscow, 2000); Dittmar Dahlmann, ‘Unternehmer als Migranten im Russischen Reich’, in Mathias Beer and Dittmar Dahlmann (eds), Migration nach Ost- und Südosteuropa vom 18. Bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 1999), pp. 235–44. 3. The most famous example is the Amburger Family. Erik Amburger, Deutsche in Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Russlands. Die Familie Amburger in St. Petersburg 1770–1920 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986). 4. Adele Wolde, Ludwig Knoop. Erinnerungsbilder aus seinem Leben. Gesammelt und für seine Nachkommen niedergeschrieben von Adele Wolde (Bremen: Schünemann, 1928; repr. Bremen: Hauschild, 1998), p. 44; cf. Dittmar Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop: ein Unternehmerleben, in Dahlmann and Scheide (eds), ‘. . . das einzige Land’, pp. 361–78; Stuart Thompstone, ‘Ludwig Knoop. The Arkwright of Russia’, in Textile History 15 (1984) no. 1, pp. 45–73; Stuart Thompstone, The Organisation and Financing of Russian Foreign Trade before 1914, Ph.D. dissertation, London University (1991), chap. 5. 5. I use the terms ‘German’ and ‘German-speaking’ in more or less the same sense: persons born in the German Empire (Deutsches Reich) before 1806 or after this date in those states which were part of the Deutscher Bund and had German as their mother tongue. 6. Joachim Mai, ‘Heinrich Schliemann als Unternehmer in Russland 1846–1864’, in Dahlmann and Scheide (eds), ‘. . . das einzige Land’, pp. 349–60; Joachim Mai, ‘“Ich gelte hier als der schlaueste, durchtriebenste und fähigste Kaufmann”. Heinrich Schliemann in Russland’, in Dahlmann et al. (eds), ‘Eine grosse Zukunft’, pp. 202–5; Igor’ A. Bogdanov, Dolgaia doroga v Troiu. Genrikh Shliman v Peterburge (St Petersburg: Glagol’, 1995).

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7.

Karl Eimermacher (ed.), Das historische Gedächtnis Russlands. Archive Bibliotheken, Geschichtswissenschaft (Bochum: Lotman-Institut für russische und sowjetische Kultur, 1999). Dahlmann, Knoop, pp. 370–1. Victor Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen in der Moskauer Gesellschaft. Symbiose und Konflikte (1494–1941) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), p. 65. Ibid., chap. 1.2 and 1.4. Dittmar Dahlmann, ‘Lebenswelt und Lebensweise deutscher Unternehmer in Moskau vom Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in Nordost-Archiv N.F. 3 (1994), pp. 139–40. Baedeker, Russland, 4th edn (Essen, 1897), pp. 260–1, and 7th edn, (Essen, 1912), pp. 258–62. Andreas Keller, ‘Bildung und Wohlfahrt, Gesellschaften und Vereine. Deutsches Leben in Moskau im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert’, in Nordost-Archiv N.F. 3 (1994), pp. 89–111; idem, ‘Der Deutsche Klub in Moskau 1819–1914’, in Forschungen zur Geschichte und Kultur der Russlanddeutschen 7 (1997), pp. 151–64. Dönninghaus, Deutsche in der Moskauer Gesellschaft, chap. 2. Dahlmann, Lebenswelt und Lebensweise, pp. 158–60; Dönninghaus, Deutsche in der Moskauer Gesellschaft, chap. 2. Ibid. On the Old Believers in the Russian economy, in particular in Moscow cf. Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Jo Ann Ruckman, The Moscow Business Elite: A Social and Cultural Portrait of Two Generations, 1840–1905 (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois UP, 1984); Thomas C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia. A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); Galina N. Ulianova, ‘Old Believers and New Entrepreneurs: Religious Belief and Ritual in Merchant Moscow’, in James L. West and Jurii A. Petrov (eds), Merchant Moscow. Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), pp. 61–71; Manfred Hildermeier, ‘Alter Glaube und Neue Welt: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Raskol im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas N.F. 38 (1990), pp. 504–25; V.V. Kerov, ‘Konfessional’no-etnicheskie faktory staroobriadcheskogo predprinimatel’stva’, in Ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii XIX–XX vv.: sovremennyi vzgliad (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), pp. 254–64. In exile after 1917, one younger Moscow merchant wrote a collective portrait of this world of the Moscow entrepreneurs: Pavel A. Buryshkin, Moskva kupecheskaia (New York, 1954; reprinted Moscow: Sovremennik, 1991). Jurij A. Petrov, ‘Deutsche Unternehmer in Moskau: Das Handelshaus “Wogau & Co.”’, in Dahlmann et al. (eds), ‘. . . das einzige Land’, pp. 379–409; Dahlmann, Lebenswelt und Lebensweise, pp. 147–50.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Before the Great War 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

27

Dahlmann, Lebenswelt und Lebensweise, p. 146; Thompstone, Organisation, pp. 416–18. Dahlmann, Lebenswelt und Lebensweise, p. 144. Ibid., pp. 144–5. Ibid., pp. 145–6. Andreas Ruperti, Erlebtes in Russland (unpublished), pp. 7–9; Walter Marc, Lebenserinnerungen (unpublished), p. 59. Dahlmann, Lebenswelt und Lebensweise, pp. 155–6; Ruperti, Erlebtes, pp. 18–21; cf. Joseph E. Bradley, ‘Voluntary Associations, Civic Culture and Obshchestvennost’ in Moscow’, in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West (eds), Between Tsar and People. Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), pp. 131–48. Marc, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 13-15; Ruperti, Erlebtes, pp. 27. Georg Spies, Erinnerungen eines Ausland-Deutschen (St Petersburg: Olearius, 2002), pp. 129–30. The first edition of the memoirs of one of the leading figures among the German industrialists in Russia in the interwar-period, mainly active in Rumania, was published in Spiess’sche Familienzeitung, Beilageband II (Marburg, 1926–1930). Petrov, ‘Deutsche Unternehmer in Moskau’, in Dahlmann et al. (eds), ‘. . . das einzige Land’; cf. Waltraud Bayer, Die Moskauer Medici. Der russische Bürger als Mäzen 1850–1917 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996); Mikhail Gavlin, Rossiiskie Medichi (Moscow: Terra, 1996). Gerhart von Schulze-Gävernitz, Volkswirtschaftliche Studien aus Russland (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1899), p. 96; Manfred Hildermeier, Bürgertum und Stadt in Russland 1760–1870. Rechtliche Lage und soziale Struktur (Cologne: Böhlau, 1986) p. 528. 75 Jahre: 1857–1932. Gesellschaft der Krähnholm-Manufaktur für Baumwollfabrikate (Narva, 1933), p. 13; Krengol’mskaia manufaktura 1857-1907. Istoricheskoe opisanie (St Petersburg, 1907); Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop, pp. 371–2. Ibid., pp. 372-73; Jo Ann Ruckman, The Moscow Business Elite, p. 54; Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia, p. 210. 75 Jahre: 1857–1932: Gesellschaft der Krähnholm-Manufaktur, pp. 27– 8; Ustav tovarishchestva krengol’mskoi manufaktury bumazhnykh izdelii (St Petersburg, 1885); Erik Amburger, ‘Das neuzeitliche Narva als Wirtschaftsfaktor zwischen Russland und Estland’, in idem, Fremde und Einheimische im Wirtschafts- und Kulturleben des neuzeitlichen Russland. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. by Klaus Zernack (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), p. 114. Wolde, Knoop, p. 57; Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop, pp. 376–7. Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop, p. 376; Wolde, Knoop, p. 57; Ulla Tesch, Jutta Langer, Knoops Park. Eine historische Parkanlage in Bremen-Nord (Bremen: Hauschild, 1999).

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34.

Thompstone, Organisation, pp. 416–18; Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop, pp. 54–5. Dokladnaia zapiska russkikh fabrikantov Ego Vysokoprevoskhoditel’stvu Gospodinu Ministru finansov (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii Arkhiv, St Petersburg, fond 560, opis’ 16, delo 509, p. 30 (reverse side) no date [30 March 1877]; Amburger, Deutsche in Staat, pp. 142– 3, 247; Thompstone, Organisation, pp. 417–18; Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop, pp. 55–6. Amburger, Deutsche in Staat, pp. 142–3; Thompstone, Organisation, p. 417; Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop, p. 55. Schulze-Gävernitz, Volkswirtschaftliche Studien, p. 91. Jurii Petrov, ‘Russian-German Economic Relations in the Nineteenth – Early Twentieth Centuries. The Problem of Export of “Human Capital”’, in Hans Pohl (ed.), Competition and Cooperation of Enterprises on National and International Markets (Nineteenth–Twentieth Century) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), pp. 65–71; Russian version in Ekonomicheskaia istoriia. Predprinimatel’stvo i predprinimateli (Moscow, 1999), pp. 63–79. Thompstone, Organisation, pp. 416–18. Schulze-Gävernitz, Volkswirtschaftliche Studien, p. 90; cf. Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop, p. 378 for other judgements on Knoop. Klaus Heller, ‘Neue russische Literatur zur Geschichte des privaten Unternehmertums in Russland’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas N.F. 48 (2000), pp. 264–72; Istoriia predprinimatel’stva v Rossii, 2 vols (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000). Cf. the volumes on German entrepreneurs in Russia in footnotes 1 & 3 above. Dittmar Dahlmann, ‘Bildung, Wissenschaft und Revolution. Die russische Intelligencija im Deutschen Reich um die Jahrhundertwende’, in Gangolf Hübinger and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (eds), Intellektuelle im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), pp. 145– 6. Cf. Aleksandr A. Morozov, M.V. Lomonosov. Put’ k zrelosti 1711–1741 (Moscow and Leningrad: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962); Claudie Weill, ‘Convivialité et sociabilité des étudiants russes en Allemagne 1900–1914’, in Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 32 (1991), 3, pp. 349–68; eadem, ‘La “question des étrangers”: les étudiants russes en Allemagne, 1900–1914’, in Le Mouvement Social, 120 (1982) pp. 77–94; Weill, ‘Les étudiants russes en Allemagne 1900–1914’, in Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 20 (1979), 2, pp. 203–25, cf. Robert C. Williams, Culture in Exile. Russian Emigrés in Germany, 1881–1941 (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1972), chap. 1; Botho Brachmann, Russische Sozialdemokraten in Berlin 1895–1914 mit Berücksichtigung der Studentenbewegung in Preußen und Sachsen (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962).

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

Before the Great War 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

29

Dahlmann, Bildung, p. 146. Ibid., p. 147. Cf. Hubert Treiber and Karól Sauerland (eds), Heidelberg im Schnittpunkt intellektueller Kreise. Zur Topographie der ‘geistigen Geselligkeit’ eines ‘Weltdorfes’ 1850–1950 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995); Willy Birkenmaier (ed.), ‘Heidelberg am Schnittpunkt russischer Lebensläufe’, in Russica Palatina 33 (Heidelberg 1999); ibid., ‘Biographisches Lexikon des russischen Heidelberg’, in Russica Palatina 27, 2nd edn (Heidelberg 1998); Gesa Bock, ‘Studenten des Russischen Reiches an der Universität Heidelberg (1862/63–1914)’, unpublished M.A. thesis (University of Heidelberg, 1991). Dittmar Dahlmann, Die Provinz wählt. Russlands KonstitutionellDemokratische Partei und die Dumawahlen 1906–1912 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 78, 359; Biographisches Lexikon des russischen Heidelberg, pp. 60, 64, 67, 133. Kalantarov and Svatikov finished their studies in Heidelberg with a Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Georg Jellinek, ibid., pp. 156, 161. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Dittmar Dahlmann (eds), Max Weber. Zur Russischen Revolution von 1905. Schriften und Reden 1905–1912 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988) (= Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, vol. 10: hereafter MWG 10), pp. 71–4, 284; Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions, transl. and ed. by Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 32, note 1; Susan Heuman, Kistiakovsky. The Struggle for National and Constitutional Rights in the Last Years of Tsarism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1998), pp. 27-29; ‘B. Kistiakovskii in Heidelberg (18.4.1901–12.4.1911)’, in Russica Palatina 33 (1999), pp. 80–102. Weber’s article ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland’ was published in a Russian translation ‘Istoricheskii ocherk osvoboditel’nogo dvizheniia v Rossii i polozhenie burzhuaznoi demokratii’ in Kiev by the publishing company I.I. Chokolov. Kistiakovskii was born in Kiev and had lived there as a political activist for the liberal movement together with his wife in 1904 and 1905 before he came to Heidelberg and became acquainted with Max Weber, MWG 10, p. 78; Heuman, Kistiakovsky, p. 27. Bogdan Kistiakovskii, ‘Georg Ellinek kak myslitel’ i chelovek’, in Russkaia Mysl’ 32, 1911, pp.77–86. Paul Honigsheim, ‘Max Weber in Heidelberg’, in René König and Johannes Winckelmann (eds), Max Weber zum Gedächtnis. Materialien und Dokumente zur Bewertung von Werk und Persönlichkeit (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963, 2nd edn 1985), pp. 161–271, here p. 169. MWG 10, p. 701–5; Willy Birkenmaier, ‘Max Webers Rede zum Jubiläum der russischen Lesehalle’, in Russica Palatina 21 (1992), pp. 70–8.

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54.

Gustav Radbruch Papers, Handschriftenabteilung University of Heidelberg, Heid. HS.3716. Cf. Gustav Radbruch, Briefe, ed. by Erich Wolf (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), p. 31: letter from Radbruch to Karl Jaspers, 29 December 1912. Dahlmann, Bildung, pp. 154–5 and pp. 234–5; Rüdiger Kramme, ‘Philosophische Kultur als Programm. Die Konstituierungsphase des “Logos”’, in Treiber and Sauerland (eds), Heidelberg im Schnittpunkt, pp. 119–49; Michail V. Bezrodnyi, ‘Zur Geschichte des russischen Neukantianismus. Die Zeitschrift “Logos” und ihre Redakteure’, in Zeitschrift für Slawistik 37 (1992), pp. 489–511. Dahlmann, Bildung, p. 234, note 64. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., pp. 154–5. Ibid., p. 155. Edith Hanke, Prophet des Unmodernen. Leo N. Tolstoi als Kulturkritiker in der deutschen Diskussion der Jahrhundertwende (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); eadem, ‘Das “spezifisch intellektualistische Erlösungsbedürfnis” Oder Warum Intellektuelle Tolstoi lasen’, in Hübinger and Mommsen (eds), Intellektuelle im Kaiserreich, pp. 158–71.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

GERD KOENEN

Thomas Mann and Others: Russophilism and Sovietophilia Among German Conservatives

On the evening of 21 June 1941 John Colville, private secretary to Winston Churchill, noted that Churchill again and again repeated what a pleasure it was to see Germany and Russia finally fighting one another; and that this was perhaps the happiest evening of his life. That pleasure was of course perfectly understandable because at that time Britain stood with her back against the wall. But it is interesting that Churchill did not speak about Hitler and Stalin, or Nazism and Bolshevism, but about ‘Germany and Russia’. So it was not just an acute danger but a longstanding nightmare from which he was released. What were the main motives which resulted in ‘Barbarossa’? In German history after the Second World War, it has become quite commonplace to regard Hitler’s Ostraumpolitik and its racist practices of enslavement and extermination of the so-called ‘Slavic subhumans’ (Untermenschen) as a culminating point in a longestablished tradition of Russophobia and Slavophobia, which after the 1917/18 revolution appeared to merge with the new tendencies of anti-Bolshevism, sharpened by a virulent anti-Semitism directed mainly against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. Thus Russophobia, antiBolshevism and anti-Semitism are widely regarded as a natural or logical triad. In this respect liberal- or left-minded German historians generally share the same perspective, as for example Ernst Nolte, who constructed his notorious ‘causal nexus’ between the rise of Nazism to power in Germany 1933 and the acute moods of antiBolshevism, Russophobia and anti-Semitism after 1917. 31

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In my view, having dealt for many years with German reactions to the revolution in Russia after 1917, these are retrospective interpretations to which I would strongly object. The special subject of this chapter – conservative Russophilism and Sovietophilia – is right at the centre of this discussion. To come back to my initial anecdote about Churchill, I am fully aware that the British view, in which ‘Russia and Prussia’ have always been under suspicion of a potentially fatal collusion, runs much in the direction of my argument. But as I would also like to demonstrate, this view is a little too harsh and too brittle. There was an old affinity between Russia and Prussia, although in terms of personal and cultural relations on the level of the two ruling bureaucracies it was easy to find rather strained relations. Even Bismarck is said to have had a very sceptical view of Russia after the social reforms of Alexander II in the 1860s. He sometimes spoke about his nightmares of a ‘red bureaucracy’ in power in St Petersburg. But this did not essentially change his view of Russia as a power that could never be domesticated or defeated by Germany. It was therefore his raison d’état to never allow the newly formed German Empire to engage in any serious conflict with Russia. The downside of such dominating Prussian policies of Rückversicherung from Russia was a violent Russophobia among the liberal and democratic forces, for whom the Russian Tsar was still the ‘head of the Holy Alliance’, and stood behind all reactionary powers and repressions in Europe, thus creating violent hatred which was later transferred to the emerging Social Democratic Party. As is well known, some of the fiercest Russophobes in Germany (and later in London) were Karl Marx and his inhibited ‘General’, Frederick Engels, who longed for war with Russia as the signal for a European revolution. But that is another story. Around the turn of the century there was the first major ‘change of the signposts’, which of course was related to the change of German imperial policies after Bismarck under Wilhelm II, towards international politics (Weltpolitik). For one thing there was a growing mood of dissonance among the Prussian gentry against Russia, not only because of the economic quarrels about the export of grain and other agrarian goods, but also through general disappointment and mistrust towards their fast-developing and industrializing eastern neighbour. Added to that were Prussia’s military alliance

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with France, growing social instability (long before 1905) and again the continual mounting German phobic and pan-Slavic tendencies among the Russian public. This mistrust and bad feeling were now systematically nurtured by a whole class of Baltic émigré intellectuals and ideologues, who for more than a decade were the leading commentators within the conservative press. Under the guidance of the first ordinary professor for Russian history at Berlin University, Theodor Schieman believed that these tendencies of Russophobia had been systematically worked out. The central argument of Schiemann was that Russia, because of its inner heterogeneity, would always be an expansionist colossus, whose position would become more and more hostile to Germany as her only serious rival on the Continent, and also because of her massive inferiority complex. Schiemann’s strongest arguments were long quotations he took from the Russian press, in which the final battle between ‘Germans (Teutons) and Slavs’ was again and again evoked. But Schiemann – who in fact was never able to form a school – found after 1908 a potent rival in his former scholar Otto Hoetzsch, who as a historian argued on a much more sound and scientific basis, and revived the old admiration and aspiration of German conservatives for a state-induced and state-controlled way of industrialization, which he saw in full development in Russia. It was specifically the reforms of Stolypin after the Russian defeat against Japan, and the Revolution of 1905, which Hoetzsch saw as a demonstration that Russia was neither invincible as a potential foe nor incapable of a dynamic development on her own. For him it was clear that Germany and Russia were natural allies in a world of rising imperialist tensions. In fact it was much more Otto Hoetzsch who became the real founder of German Eastern European Studies, rather than Theodor Schiemann, so much so that in autumn 1914, months after the outbreak of the First World War, Schiemann was replaced by his rival Otto Hoetzsch as the chief commentator of Russian affairs in the semi-official conservative newspaper Kreuz-Zeitung. The point of conflict was very clear: Schiemann as a fervent Russophobe had to argue in favour of peace, and even of a future alliance with Great Britain. Otto Hoetzsch naturally argued against a bold peace agreement with Russia, even at the cost of Austria, which could have made Germany the hegemonistic power of central and western Europe, and against the combination of forces of both

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modernized monarchies which could warrant a bright future for Germany among the elite world powers. This became more and more the mainstream opinion in the face of the protracting world war. But we have advanced a little bit too quickly in following the major tendencies of these times. When I write of the ‘change of signposts’ around 1900, this did not only refer to the conservatives, but also and perhaps more importantly to the national-liberal middle spectrum of the bourgeois parties and to the leading representatives of German industry. Take for example, Walther Rathenau the young heir of the mighty electro-technical company AEG, who later became an eminent writer, the organizer of German wartime industry, and for a short yet decisive period in the early 1920s the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, who signed the treaty of Rapallo in 1922 but was murdered soon afterwards. Rathenau wrote in an early article in 1898 on the ‘Trans-Atlantic Warning Signals’ of a new entente on the seas between Great Britain and the emerging United States of America: ‘what is left open at the table of this partie carrée – are the corners’, which could only be occupied by the Germans and the Slavs, who had already inherited the onetime position of the Romans, i.e. France. More astonishing than this rather sober strategic thought was the tone, in which Rathenau spoke of Russia as a ‘young giant, whose feet covers half of Europe and half of Asia and whose breast and head are shielded by the invincible palladium of his orthodox faith’. The great spectacle of current and future times, Rathenau continued, would still be ‘the battle between Russia and Britain about world hegemony’. He said, ‘For us Germans, all signs point to the East and to its ascendancy’. This view was of course not representative in all respects; but it marked a characteristic change of traditional views within the German bourgeoisie and middle class. That change was not only induced by political considerations, but also by the astonishing rise of Russia in the same period as a ‘cultural nation’ (Kulturnation). Besides the emergence of the world-famous, often avant-gardistic Russian painters, musicians, dancers and actors, there was also Russian literature, which appeared, as Thomas Mann put it later, as ‘a miracle of world culture’, and which early in his short novel Tonio Kröger in 1904, he labelled ‘the holy Russian literature’.

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This special note of devotion leads us into the heart of our subject. The interest for Russian literature in Germany at this time was not so much based on the mere artistic substance, but on the philosophical and religious content of the social prophecies, which were supposedly to be found here. Behind the Homeric figure of the legendary preacher Tolstoi appeared the more modern, gloomy and ambiguous figure of Dostoevskii who found his posthumous position at the side of Nietzsche. Meanwhile a third figure appeared, the juvenile proletarian autodidact Maksim Gor’kii, whose stories of barefooted heroes and naturalist-existentialist pieces like Night Asylum caused a furore in German theatres. This was an international phenomenon, but one which made an especially deep impression on Germany in the pre-war, war and post-war periods. To be more precise, it became an inherent part of German ideology itself during these years. You can hardly find one important author or artist in Germany for whom in the words of Alfred Döblin ‘the meeting with Dostoevskii’ was not an ‘epoch-making event’. More so, Russia became for many of them an artistic dreamland, where a naïve, believing, natural and gifted people, cruelly treated and suppressed by their rulers, vacillating between upheaval and faithfulness, formed together with its great artists and poets the essential and ‘true Russia’, which had her future still ahead of her. If this was a form of romanticism, and it was, then it was already quite a modern one. The people in this picture no longer bore the shape of the old muzhik, but of the ‘barefoot’ proletarian and especially after the events of 1905 of the worker and the soldier. Even the Social Democrats in Germany, who had been rather mistrustful of the terrorist and anarchist movements in Russia in the 1880s and 1890s, were now compelled to acknowledge that the social uprising of 1905, in the words of Kautsky, had up to then been ‘the most explicit proletarian character of all revolutions’. It was Walther Rathenau, who in his pre-war writings in the spirit of ‘cultural pessimism’ (as in The Mechanization of the Mind, 1913) developed the metaphor of ‘a migration of nations from underneath’, which was in his view also a migration from east to west, a silent ‘Slavization’ of Prussia and Germany. So you find at this time, the years before the War, a complete picture of the great split between the ‘old’ bourgeois West on one hand and the ‘young’ proletarian East on the other hand, the latter becoming dominant after the War.

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Even though in August 1914 the First World War began with a declaration of war against Russia, it had very little to do with any specific Russophobia in Germany, and not even with direct conflicts between the two countries, but was thanks to the constellation of powers in general. The first round of war propaganda against the ‘barbaric’ or ‘despotic’ tsarist regime, the ‘Russian abomination’ (Russengreuel) in Eastern Prussia etc., was rather utilitarian and necessary to engage the wavering Austrians, to force the Social Democrats into the War, and to denounce the Western powers as helpers of the reactionary Tsardom. But the real hate propaganda was reserved for the ‘treacherous’ Brits, when they entered the War. This war brought an incredible and spontaneous outburst of verse and prose, endless literature, in which nearly every eminent mind in the country took part. To speak about ‘propaganda’ is an understatement. It was an authentic intellectual production, in which Germany as a nation reinvented herself in a substantialist way as ‘the country of the midst’ (das Land der Mitte) – the midst of Europe, the midst of the world, the midst of mankind. But if you look closer into these so-called ‘Ideas of 1914’, they were nearly exclusively developed in contrast to the ‘Ideas of 1789’ or to ‘British utilitarianism’. The War developed mentally and intellectually into a conflict between Germany and the West. Every constituent notion of Western social and political thinking was surpassed or overreached by a complementary German notion. ‘Civilization’ stood against ‘culture’, the ‘individual’ against the ‘personality’, the ‘bourgeois’ against the Bürger, formal ‘citizen rights’ against ‘moral law’, and so on. And very early on it was commonplace, even among people of conservative or liberal orientation, to speak about ‘German socialism’ as the antithesis to Western ‘capitalism’, not only as an exceptional measure in wartime, but as a factual and higher mode of production and social life in the future. In this German ‘war ideology’, as we might call it, the official tsarist Russia was not a worthwhile antagonist, because it represented no universal ideal. On the other hand there was an internal opponent of this regime, namely the suppressed Russian people, who from the mouth of its great poets and prophets represented a ‘Russian ideal’ of ‘all-human’ importance. This distinction between the people and the rulers could not be plausibly made in the face of the Western democracies. Here in the West the battle lines were

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fixed and established – in the field of political will and ideology as well as on the battlefield. In the East, by contrast, everything seemed possible. Germany could assign herself a liberating mission, with her ideology of the ‘individuality of the people’ which had to be defended against the counterbalancing forces of the tsarist autocracy or of Western democracy. Moreover pieces of Russian thinking became an integral part of the newly formed ‘German ideology’ or ‘German ideal’, because they (especially the writings of Dostoevskii) seemed to formulate the sharpest antithesis to Western ideas. The classical text in this regard was certainly Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Apolitical, which centred on the problem of the ‘German loneliness’, and the ‘world-offensiveness of Germany’ (Weltanstößigkeit Deutschlands). The answer may be found in Dostoevskii’s description of Germany as the ‘protesting Reich’ in its universal antagonism against ‘Rome’, which was a metaphor for the Western world. Thomas Mann worked for three full years on his text, finally finishing in December 1917, just weeks after the Bolshevist takeover. He referred emphatically to German-Russian ‘congeniality’, whose real importance would be shown only after the War: ‘What an affinity these two national souls share in their relation to “Europe”, to the “West”, to “Civilization”, to politics, to democracy!’ And he continued: ‘No! Whenever soul and mind should form the basis and the legitimation of power politics and alliances, then Russia and Germany belong together: their understanding . . . is a necessity of world politics, if the union of the Anglo-Saxons will prove permanent.’ The text, finished on the day of the armistice between the German and Bolshevik governments in Brest in December 1917, closed with the exclamation: ‘Peace with Russia! Peace first with her! And the war, if it is to continue, should go on alone against the West, against the trois pays libres, against “civilization”, against “literature”, politics and the rethoric bourgeois!’ We have no method to objectively evaluate the reprentativeness of certain opinions – a representativeness, which Thomas Mann has always claimed for himself because of his ‘sensitivity’ for the Zeitgeist, as he would put it. But one thing we can say for sure, referring to the passages I have cited, it would have been absolutely inadmissible to speak in such terms about any other enemy country. ‘Is not the Russian the most humane among human beings? Is his literature not the most humane of all – holy of humaneness.’

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Like Thomas Mann’s attitude to the Russians after 1917, his brother Heinrich couldn’t and wouldn’t ever speak about the French. Heinrich Mann’s famous essay about Zola (1915) was a metaphorical invocation of the value of an open and critical mind, not a proclamation of spiritual affinity of two peoples. Thomas Mann’s anger at the writings of his brother Heinrich was not directed so much against the verbal text, but against the sub-text, which appeared to him an act of literary subversion, opening the doors to a spiritual invasion from the West. The work of Thomas Mann was in any case quite characteristic of the German reaction to the revolution in Russia in 1917. The February Revolution, with the establishment of the provisional government, had been quickly labelled as a ‘British revolution on Russian soil’, whereas the radical opposition movements around the Soviets and Lenin’s party were generally regarded with satisfaction, as an expression of the real will of the Russian people for peace and land. The Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 seemed moreover to be a victory of German weapons and peace propaganda. And even the Bolshevik program of ‘war communism’ was taken by most German observers as an outbreak of a natural or naïve Russian egalitarianism and communitarianism. Even if it was bound to fail, it could be regarded as a desperate attempt to gain a hold on the disrupted economy, or even as a touching experiment which later on could be pragmatically modified. In the summer of 1918, after serious defeats on the Western Front, strikes and mutinies, the fear of revolution and Bolshevism suddenly gripped the ruling elites of the Reich, including the military high command under Ludendorff himself, in the clearest and even hysterical way, there was of course an acute change of mood. But even in this period I cannot detect this ‘triad’ of antiBolshevism, anti-Semitism and Russophobia at work. The strongest opponents of the Bolshevik-Spartakist upheavals in January and March 1919 were in fact the majority Social Democrats, who saw Bolshevism as a kind of ‘Asian Socialism’, or merely ‘despotism’. Their fears about the possible total disintegration of the German state and society, which now lay open to the East, were so strong that they, together with parts of the catholic Zentrum party and the Liberal Democrats, were finally ready to subscribe the harsh peace conditions in Versailles.

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This led to a split with those active forces, who were organized in early 1919 as an ‘anti-Bolshevist League’ and fought in the front line against the Spartakist uprisings. The central figure was a Catholic activist named Eduard Stadtler, who had followed the revolutionary developments in Russia as a prisoner of war. He returned to Germany with the fixed idea that in the event of a political-military collapse it was absolutely necessary to defend Germany against the wave of anarchist dissolution and moral depravation coming from the East, with the spectre of hungry, bare-footed, desperate soldiers – Germans as well as Russians, Latvians, Hungarians and Jews – guided by fanatical agitators. He also thought that an effective defence would only be possible if the new German parties and authorities took up the spiritual and intellectual contents and motivations of Bolshevism in a ‘positive’ way – that of a ‘German socialism’ – which would be more organized, civilized and constructive. It could be said that Stadtler (without even knowing anything about Mussolini and his policies in 1919) held a corporatist view of a ‘social dictatorship’, and in this respect may be regarded as the figure of a German Mussolini manqué. This type of activist and ‘positive’ anti-Bolshevism was never successful and in 1919–20 became part of the so-called ‘young conservativism’, which was not then intended as an activist movement but as a strictly elitist grouping. It merged the ‘Ideas of 1914’ with those of the so-called Jugendbewegung (youth movement). The real spiritual leader was Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who since 1905 had been the German editor for Dostoevskii – together with the Russian religious philosopher Dmitrii Merezhkovskii – and as such was in the forefront of the efforts to formulate the doctrines of an ‘integral nationalism’. Sentences like ‘Every nation is battling for its own way of development, its place in the world, as a way to God’, or ‘Every nation has its own socialism’ were the teachings which Moeller allegedly took from Dostoevskii. Moeller transferred the vague spiritual inclinations to the ‘East’, which were predominant in the first years of the Weimar Republic, into a perspective of a German political and military breakout, out of the ‘system of Versailles’ and towards the ‘young nations’. This was not only incompatible with the perspectives of a leading part of the German military, the Reichswehr, but also of a large intellectual current with many prominent figures such as Thomas Mann, who in the first years of the Weimar Republic was quite attached to these ‘young conservative’ groupings, until he revealed himself as a

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republican at the end of 1922 after the murder of Rathenau. Then there was Oswald Spengler with his ideas of a ‘Prussian socialism’, which under the conditions of a new Russian ‘pseudo-morphosis’ – the Bolsheviks were in fact the heirs of the Petrinian reforms – could lead to a new combination of ‘Prussia and Russia’ as the focus of a new world civilization, an antagonist of the ‘Declining West’. Add to this picture the ideologues of the Jugendbewegung like Eugen Diederichs, who was the editor of the Collected Works of Tolstoi in Germany before and during the War, and developed his own ideas about the future fusion of the Germanic and Slavic peoples, whose characters he described in terms of male and female. Or Carl Schmitt . . . Or Ernst Jünger . . . Were these ‘young conservatives’ or, as they were also described, ‘revolutionary conservatives’, predecessors of the Nazis? Yes and no. Yes, because some of them were founding members of the Nazi movement or became active participants. But many others were ousted, like Otto Hoetzsch and his Osteuropa-Gesellschaft, which in the 1920s and early 1930s had done a lot of serious scientific research, often in partnership with Soviet institutions; or like Eduard Stadtler, the former anti-Bolshevist activist, who was now treated as a sectarian ‘fascist’. The Nazis themselves drew a clear line between the so-called Ostorientierung (eastern orientation) of the 1920s and their own Ostpolitik, which called for Lebensraum im Osten (living space in the East) and for a definite change of perspectives for German imperialism. And rightly so, since some of the ‘revolutionary conservatives’ of the 1920s were later to be found among the military conspirators of 1944 who attempted to assassinate Hitler, or even as members of the ‘Red Chapel’, the Soviet-orientated spy organization, e.g. Arvid Harnack. There were also strong Russophile leanings and inclinations among the nationalist and anti-Semitic movements after 1918. Very often, the chief ideologues were Baltic emigrants who stood in close contact with the milieus of White-Russian emigrés. This was true for Alfred Rosenberg as one of the leading ideologues of the Nazi movement, as well as for Ludwig Müller von Hausen, who was the German editor of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In these writings, Russia and Germany shared the common destiny of having fallen under Jewish occupation, whose origins

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can be traced back to Wall Street or the City of London. ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, especially in the figure of Trotskii, who was presented as the true ruler of Russia, appeared as a kind of foreign domination by Jewish revolutionaries who had mostly come from America, with the clear mission to extradite the country to the Western financial capital. So the main strategic idea in these circles, and also in the early Nazi party, was the common liberation of Russia and Germany, as the two most anti-Semitic nations, from Jewish domination, with the perspective of forming a continental bloc with strong, dictatorial, national regimes against the victors of the First World War, the powers of Versailles. The same perspective was also to be found, in an even more romantic and Russophile version, among the left, socialist wing of the Nazi movement, represented by the Strasser brothers, or Joseph Goebbels. As a student of German literature the latter had grown up in an intellectual mood shaped completely by Nietzsche and Dostoevskii. His early novel Michael, written in the fashion of expressionism, is the story of a German and a Russian revolutionary. And as late as 1925 Goebbels spoke and wrote about the common battle of a seemingly more national-minded Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany, which were both seen primarily as a front of the ‘young’ proletarian peoples of a mythically enlarged ‘East’ against the ‘old’ bourgeois countries of the ‘West’. It was Hitler, who after his return from prison, reversed all these visions in his book Mein Kampf and proclaimed the change of the thousand-year-old migration of Germanic peoples to the south and west – i.e. towards Rome – back to the East. Germany should no longer try to conquer world markets or faraway colonies, but should acquire agrarian soil for the Reich and its human potential. And here ‘the fate itself’ shows us a huge empire to the East under Jewish domination, which is bound to fall apart, since all Aryan elites have been exterminated. This manifesto in Mein Kampf never became a political reality, not even in 1941, since the precondition of this battle for living space was an alliance, or at least an arrangement, with Great Britain, and the idea of a ‘breakdown’ of the Soviet Union, caused by ‘Jewish domination’ under Stalin’s rule, had become thoroughly unconvincing. Hitler had undone the tie of the former conservative or nationalist ‘eastern orientations’ in Germany, which could never be spelled through in terms of real politics.

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The question remains: what has been the real impact of these different, half leftist, half conservative ‘eastern orientations’ in Germany before and after the First World War, and the Russian Revolution? In the fields of fine arts, literature, music, film or architecture, they were part of the astonishing fertility and diversity of the German culture in the precarious times of the Weimar Republic. And as Karl Schlögel and others have shown, there was still a strong element of personal relationship, be it in the sense of an old, renewed familiarity or of a fertile new differentiation. Berlin was in particular the meeting point of all the migrations and influences, the collisions and collusions between Germany and the ‘new Russia’. This was in a way a last salute to a whole era of rather dense cultural relations, a desperate attempt to ignore or to overcome the cultural and political drift or split which began to run through the Continent. But the virtual possibility of an ‘eastern orientation’ enflamed the fantasies and was, in sober retrospective judgement, an element of the non-capacity and non-preparedness of the new Weimar Republic to arrange with the changed world situation, which was not so unfavourable and even potentially promising. Germany could not decide between the factual socio-economical and cultural integration to the West, and the seemingly ‘deeper’ and more promising prospects of an Eastern orientation. So this became part of the revisionist complex of the Weimar years, a moment of German irredentism of the time, or as the Hungarian social philosopher Istvan Bibó put it, of ‘German hysteria’.

KARL SCHLÖGEL

Berlin: ‘Stepmother’ Among Russian Cities1

There is a valid reason why there is hardly a visible trace of the hundred thousand refugees from the former Russian Empire who fled to Germany during the years between the wars, as Berlin became the ‘capital city beyond the borders of Russia’. Nowhere was the situation of the Russian Diaspora so paradoxical, nowhere was the dilemma of Russian emigrants shown as dramatically as it was in Germany, where they sought asylum. The Russian emigrants came into what had been the ‘enemy country’ between 1914 and 1918; with the help of the Germans, Russian revolutionaries were conveyed in a ‘sealed train’ to Petrograd; with the peace of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, Germany forced Soviet Russia into signing a humiliating peace treaty. The Russian refugees came into a country that had surprised the world on l6 April 1922 by opening formal diplomatic relations with Russia in the Treaty of Rapallo, thereby pulling the rug from under every claim of emigration based on the representation of Russian interests. They came into a country that from 1918 to 1933 was devastated by crises, civil warlike conditions and separatist movements that differed little from those from which the Russian refugees had just escaped. They were émigrés in a country that in 1931 itself became the source of a great refugee movement, that started the Second World War in 1939, and in 1941 launched its attack on the Soviet Union, in which Russians were liable to be eliminated as ‘sub-humans’. There was no point during the Russian Diaspora of the inter-war years when it was not abundantly clear that emigration did not mean salvation, but just one of the various forms of existence in the European Thirty Years’ War; at no point in time during the Russian Diaspora was 43

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there such intense contact between ‘Red’ and ‘White Russia’ as in Berlin, which at times represented a caravanserei both of émigrés and of the vanguards of Soviet Russia in the heart of Europe. The splendour and misery of Russian emigration in Germany in those years is characterized by this constellation. There is hardly anything left of the once strong Russian community of the inter-war period following the rule of the National Socialists, the Second World War and the subsequent partition of Germany. There are generally few personal connections and little continuity in life histories between the earlier émigrés and the ‘second wave’ of those who did not return home, which took place in the 1940s. This is even truer of those Soviet émigrés of the ‘third wave’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Today there is a steadily decreasing number of witness to those times.2 Documentary sources have been damaged severely by war and the division of Germany. We should be all the more grateful, therefore, for the few works available that do deal with emigration.3 Of special value are those documentary collections and anthologies which bear witness to the intensity and fruitfulness of ‘Russian Berlin’ as a nodal point of selfunderstanding and of cultural exchange between Russians on both sides of the borders, as well as between Russians and their German surroundings.4 In the last decade a plethora of individual studies of important aspects of life in German exile have been produced, dealing with schools, the lives of church congregations, book and newspaper publishing, the activities of scientific institutions, as well as Russian theatre activity in Berlin.5 ‘The Berlin Years’ play an important role for almost all the Russian emigrants who were temporarily in Berlin, and they represent an important source for the reconstruction of Russian life in Germany.6 Naturally enough, research concentrates almost exclusively on Berlin, so much so that we have only scant knowledge of Russian life in the German ‘Russian provinces’, above all in Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Hamburg and Wiesbaden. As might be expected, there is a difference between the work of East and West German historians. Even though important source materials on the ‘white emigrants’ lay in East German archives, historians concentrated almost exclusively on GermanSoviet cultural relationships, and treated the role of the emigrants only as an aside.7 Those writing earlier works had at their disposal the archives available in the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States.8 A quantitatively new situation has arisen with the opening up of

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the archives in the former Soviet Union and the amalgamation of the East and West German archives. Thus collections are accessible to us today that were handed over by émigré organizations to the Historical Foreign Archive in Prague and then taken in 1946 to the Soviet Union, where they are for the most part stored in the State Archive of the October Revolution.9 Another important source awaiting examination are the so-called ‘plundered records’ which were spirited away into the Soviet Union after the War, of which only a minuscule portion has been returned to Germany. These records offer insight into life within the Russian émigré organizations, such as those of Ukrainians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Jews, Turks, White Russians and others, as well as into their politics in the 1920s, the 1930s and during the Second World War.10 The estimates of the number of Russian emigrants living in Germany during the inter-war period are very divided. Exact statistics are hard to obtain for several reasons: firstly, not all refugees registered themselves; secondly, official data from various organizations and authorities are incomplete; and thirdly, the classification of the refugees is frequently problematic. At the end of 1918 there were approximately 1.2 million Russian soldiers and officers in German prisoner-of-war camps. These captives were supposed to return home after negotiations with the German-Soviet repatriation commission, yet they were free to stay in Germany if they so wished. The camps were seen by the different sides as a recruiting base: the Soviet Government hoped to increase the ranks of the Red Army through repatriation, just as the White Russians hoped to add the POWs to Vrangel’s army in southern Russia, and that of Iudenich and Avalov-Bermondt in the eastern Baltic. The German government was interested in quick repatriation, fearing dangerous sources of domestic political unrest in the prison camps, while the representatives of the Entente for a time blocked the process in the hope of strengthening the White Armies. Some Russian prisoners of war indeed found their way back to the front lines in the Russian civil war – either on the side of the Red Army and the German communists, or on the side of the White Russians and the Germans Freikorps. And, as long as the Russian war was undecided, Berlin was an outpost of that conflict. The negotiations that were opened in 1919 between Moritz Schlesinger and the Soviet representative of the repatriation committee, Viktor Kopp, which aimed at opening the way home for German POWs in Russia, and which presupposed a de facto diplomatic recognition of

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Soviet Russia, were completed in July 1921. Some 15,000 to 20,000 Russian soldiers, who did not want to return home or had escaped the attention of the authorities, stayed behind in Germany.11 Aside from the Russian prisoners of war, Germany harboured refugees who had finished up in the territory of the German Occupation Army in the East, and who streamed into Germany proper after the collapse of the eastern front. Another wave of asylum seekers reached Germany after the defeat of Vrangel’s army in November 1920, then in spring 1921, with another wave arriving via France throughout 1922. The refugees in Germany were citizens of the former Russian Empire that had now been broken up into many different sovereign states, such as Finland, the Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and the Caucasian republics. Inasmuch as these people had not become citizens of the newly-formed countries, they possessed only the citizenship of a non-existent state. The overwhelming majority of the emigrants thought of themselves merely as temporary refugees – until ‘the downfall of the Bolsheviks’ – from Russia. Scarcely anyone thought that this provisional situation would acquire permanent status. They saw themselves accordingly not as ‘emigrants’, but rather as bezhentsy, i.e. temporary refugees. For years they remained unwilling emigrants. All estimates have to be seen against this background. For all the imprecision of the total estimate, the course of Russian immigration and emigration is quite clear. In May 1919 the ‘German-Russian Association for the Support and Encouragement of Reciprocal Trade Relations’ estimated there were between 60,000 and 80,000 Russians in Germany. According to the calculations of the ‘Russian Delegation for Prisoners-of-War and Returning Migrants in Germany’ there were around 100,000 refugees in 1919. In 1920 the American Red Cross in Germany declared the number of Russians it supported to be 560,000. The influx of Russian refugees reached its high point between 1922 and 1923. According to figures provided by the League of Nations and the German Foreign Office there were approximately 600,000 Russian refugees in Germany in these two years, of whom some 300,000 had sought asylum in Berlin alone in 1923.12 In Geneva the ‘Refugee Inspectorate of the International Labour Office’ put the number of refugees from Russia for 1925 at 150,000, while the émigré organizations’ own estimate was approximately 500,000. For 1928 the numbers from the Refugee Inspectorate continued to indicate around 150,000

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Russians in Germany, which by 1933 had decreased to 100,000. The estimate of 150,000 Russians in Berlin in 1935 possibly reflects the self-interest of the ‘Russian Trust’ in Berlin in boosting its importance with inflated numbers, yet it may be taken as a fact that a considerable Russian community existed in Germany even after 1933.13 The later sharp increase of Russians in Germany after the war against the Soviet Union was not, of course, attributable to the influx of Russian émigrés from other European countries, although there were some, but rather to the circa 5.7 million members of the Soviet armed forces captured by the Wehrmacht by the end of the War, together with the two million slave labourers from the Soviet Union. Out of these ranks were recruited General Andrei Vlasov’s ‘volunteer units’ that fought alongside the Wehrmacht against the Red Army.14 Definite caesuras are discernible in the migration pattern: there are influxes in 1919 and, above all, in 1922–3, and reverse movements after 1923 and 1933. The greatest concentration of emigrants was in Berlin, but communities of several thousand Russians were to be found in Danzig, Hamburg, Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, and even in the traditional sites of Russian settlement in Germany: Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. Upon closer inspection the ‘Russian emigration’ is actually a ‘migration of the people of Greater Russia’, in other words a multi-ethnic one involving a great number of competing associations and organizations. After the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Russian-Germans and the Russian Jews had the largest communities.15 In Germany the interests of the emigrants vis-à-vis the German authorities were represented up to the resumption of diplomatic relations in 1922 by the ‘Russian Delegation in Berlin’, housed at Unter den Zelten 16. After Rapallo this was transformed into an ‘Intermediary Office for Russian Refugees in Germany’. The ‘Russian Delegation’, headed from August 1919 by Sergei von Botkin, the former Russian ambassador to Rome, although it had never been recognized formally by the German government, was the accepted de facto representative of Russian interests. As such, it had the right to issue passports, personal identification cards, notarizations, certifications and the like. Needless to say, this all changed after Rapallo. Soviet Russia had already decreed on 15 December 1921 that all emigrants would lose their citizenship if they remained outside their home country for more than five years, did not report to a Soviet consulate, made no use of their right to vote,

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or were active in ‘White Russian’ activities. After Rapallo émigrés lost their diplomatic protection altogether and the overwhelming mass of them became stateless. They fell under the constraints of the laws for foreigners with regard to such crucial activities for everyday life as procuring a job, opening a practice, acquiring real estate property, applying for welfare and social security, and, above all, being granted freedom of movement. Although Germany only joined the League of Nations in 1926, and despite fears of mass immigration, in 1922 it adopted the plan developed by the High Commisssioner for Foreign Affairs, Fridtjof Nansen, and supported by forty nations, by which stateless Russian émigrés were granted the so-called ‘Nansen Passport’, with which they could cross borders and, above all, get a job more easily.16 When Germany left the League of Nations in 1934 the Russian emigrants lost their protection from its Refugee Board, but in 1936 they found both representation and compulsory organization in the reorganized and Nazified ‘Intermediary Office for Russian Refugees’ (there were similar offices for Ukrainians, Caucasians and Turkestanis). However, the ‘Intermediary Office’ (also known as the Political Delegation) provided very vague and formal protection. Only state programmes or the émigré self-help organizations could be at all effective against the poverty that had hit the emigrants especially hard in the beleaguered Weimar Republic. On top of this is the fact that the Russian refugees constituted only one part of the refugee and migration movement that sought asylum in post-First World War Germany. Thousands of Baltic and Russian-Germans, above all from famine-riven regions on the Volga, refugees from the border areas lost to Poland under the Versailles Treaties, as well as from Alsace-Lorraine and the former German colonies, along with tens of thousands of Eastern Jewish emigrants who wanted to travel overseas – all of these competed for the limited means of the Republic available for relief.17 Under these circumstances, simply finding food was extremely difficult. As far as we know, the general observation also held true for the Russian community in Germany: it may be described as an ‘inverted social pyramid’. An astute observer wrote at the time: ‘Being a Russian emigrant in Berlin was to be a part of a pyramid, of which only the tip remained. The lower and middle classes, made up of workers and farmers, craftsmen and small businessmen, were missing. In their places there were officers, civil servants, artists, financiers, politicians and members of the old courtly society.’18

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This was especially noticeable by comparison with the average cross-section of the population around the émigrés. Vladimir Nabokov wrote of the two main cities for foreign exile: ‘In Berlin and Paris the Russians built compact colonies with a cultural coefficient that exceeded by far the cultural average of other groups of foreigners in whose midst they found themselves, groups that were of necessity less well represented.’19 Although emigration was a mass phenomenon, the proportion of members that belonged to the educated and propertied classes was disproportionally high: members of the professions, such as lawyers, doctors, journalists, entrepreneurs and bankers, white-collar workers and civil servants of the old state apparatus, members of the upper echelons of the aristocracy and, after the evacuation of the White Army in 1920, members of the officer corps in particular. The Russian emigrants stemmed from the most diverse circles, but they all found themselves in pitiful conditions, with no money, no clothing, and most of them without any knowledge of the language of the country in which they now found themselves, without the skills to pursue a trade, and completely unsuited for the life of settlers in a foreign country. In the face of this mass misery, it was first and foremost a question of satisfying the most urgent needs of these unhappy people, of supplying them with food, clothing and shelter.20

There is a variety of reasons as to why Germany acted as a haven for the Russian Diaspora, in spite of the instability, the civil war-like conditions and the economic crisis. Many Russians were familiar with Germany from before the War: quite a number of Russian aristocratic families had familial ties to German noble families; the pretender to the throne, Grand Prince Kirill Vladimirovich, for example, temporarily made Coburg his seat. Numerous members of the intelligentsia had studied in Germany and were familiar with its academic world. This also holds true for the scholars and scientists who arrived in Berlin in late 1922 after their forced exile from Russia. Germany possessed a workable Russian typographical base from before the War and was the obvious home for press and publishing houses. More importantly, Germany was a cheap place to live for foreigners during the period of high inflation, especially if they possessed hard currency. It was also a place where the different factions of the political emigrants found their political home: the anti-Bolshevist Left found that in the strongest party of

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European Socialism, the SPD; the Russian Right found kindred souls in German monarchists and right-wing extremists. But above all, Germany was regarded as the power with the most pressing interest in the revision of the consequences of Versailles and in the destruction of the resurrected Polish state. This seemed to accord with the ambitions of the White Russian movement for a ‘united and indivisible Russian Empire’. The split amongst the emigrants into a German-friendly and an Entente-friendly camp is just as significant as the split between the Left and the Right. Life in a foreign country could only be managed if the emigrants helped themselves, individually and communally. For the individual that often meant starting from scratch. With this in mind, specific qualifications – such as the level of education, knowledge of foreign languages or artistic experience – could be of great importance. The classified ads of any Russian newspaper in Berlin in the early 1920s testify to the initiative of the emigrants in keeping their heads above water with restaurants, cafés, new and antiquarian bookshops, translation bureaux, ballet schools, jewelry stores and fur shops, as well as by working as secretaries, milliners, porters, taxi drivers or casual labourers. For the other emigrants who came from well-todo families, the new situation meant a plunge into the abyss, unless they had some hidden jewels sewn into their clothing to help them over the initial penury. Even as successful an author as Vladimir Nabokov had to take temporary jobs as a tennis teacher, private tutor and a movie extra with Ufa in order to make ends meet. The Russian guide book for Berlin that appeared at the high point of emigration in 1922 enumerates the hundreds of essentially short-lived organizations, large and small, that together constituted the microcosm of ‘Russian Berlin’.21 Almost all of them were represented in the ‘Committee of Russian Public Organizations and Institutions in Germany’, which worked hand in hand with the Intermediary Office. The committee members included Sergei von Botkin as director of the Intermediary Office, Theodore von Schlippe and Baron A. Vrangel on behalf of the Russian Red Cross and the Rural and Urban Federation, as well as S. Smirnov, E. Kogan, I. Gessen and Baron A. Krüdener-Struve, representing about another thirty organizations.22 A simple listing of these gives a clear impression as to how diverse the professional interests and activities were. The former members of the Russian Army were represented through the ‘Association of Mutual Support for the Former Officers of the Russian Army and Navy’ or through the

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‘Central Union for Russian War Casualties in Germany’, the ‘Union of Former Prisoners of War and Internees’, the ‘Federation of the Former General Staff Officers’ or the ‘Federation of the Former Officers in the Preobrazhensky-Regiment’ and the ‘Union of Russian Airmen’. Officials of the Russian Empire organized themselves in the ‘Berlin Federation for the Former Officials and Employees of the Foreign Office’ or in the ‘Federation of Former Russian Judges and Court Officials’. Members of the professions joined together in the ‘Berlin Federation of Russian Doctors (MD)’, the ‘Federation of Russian Journalists and Authors’, the ‘Confederation of Russsian Lawyers in Germany’, the ‘Union of Russian Actors’, ‘The Union of Russian Cinematographers Abroad’, or the ‘Union of Russian Engineers in Germany’. Scholars, scientists and students had their own societies, such as the ‘Russian Academic Group in Berlin’ and the ‘Federation of Russian Students in Germany’. The economically powerful emigrants formed the ‘Union of Russian Merchants, Industrialists and Financiers in Germany’ and the ‘Union of Russian Land Owners’. The general welfare organizations – such as the ‘Russian Aid’ of the German Red Cross, the Papal Welfare Organization and the YMCA – deserve especial mention.23 The most important institutions for people in the Russian Diaspora were the ones that could get them passports and residence permits, such as the ‘Russian Intermediary Office’, as well as the charity institutions that could help ease immediate distress through financial support, securing of accommodation in camps, out-patient clinics, sending children into the country, or collecting money. They could also provide assistance in the founding of small businesses or workshops, and not least with the founding of educational or training institutions that facilitated the transmission and encouragement of knowledge, science and Russian culture. Ensuring the education of the younger generation in Berlin became increasingly more urgent as the chances of a speedy return to Russia decreased, and the large number of Russian student societies in Berlin reflect this. St George’s School was founded in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in December 1920 as a result of the decisive initiative of Johannes Masing, a preacher from St Petersburg, and taking as its model the German church schools in St Petersburg and Moscow. This school will in the first place provide refugee children from Russia – among whom there are, as is well known, many Russian-Germans – the guarantee of a sound German education. Secondly, it will offer

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German children whose parents have close ties to Russia and might possibly emigrate there, the chance of a thorough education in Russian language skills.24

The costs of the school were borne partly through donations and partly through the Foreign Office. The other Russian school in Berlin was the Higher Russian Private School of the Russian Academic Society, founded on 10 February 1921 with the aim of ‘educating children of Russian emigrants according to the curriculum of the old Russian high schools and in a nationalistic Russian spirit’. Initially it was housed in a private home and later moved into public school buildings. The school was financed through donations, but the bulk of the costs were covered by subsidies from the Foreign Office. As a result of the shortage of funds, the two schools planned to amalgamate and this ultimately took place in 1931, the explicit reasoning being that ‘this school will bring forth the type of personality which, as a well-trained pioneer for political, military, economic and cultural purposes, will be well-suited to serve Germany in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.’ Despite the protestations of the leading educationalists, the former emigrant school became a ‘German secondary school’ after 1933, which as an ‘Eastern’ school was given the task of imparting a ‘solid knowledge of the eastern countries’.25 Beyond this, two Russian elementary schools were set up in 1923, one in the Scheunen refugee camp near Celle, the other in the Alexanderheim in Berlin-Tegel. The YMCA started a technical school in 1923 in the former POW camp in Wünsdorf/Zossen, in which the residents were taught practical occupational skills. The most significant academic institution, however, was the ‘Russian Scientific Institute’. This school owed its foundation to the initiatives of a number of people and bodies, including the east European historian, Professor Otto Hoetzsch, the Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, Moritz Schlesinger, the Foreign Office and the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Public Education; but its foundation was due above all to the active role played by important scholars and scientists who had been expelled from Soviet Russia in the autumn of 1922, and most of whom were founding members of the ‘Russian Academic Society’.26 The institute could count on approximately 500 Russians studying at Berlin colleges, along with another 1,500 Russians planning to continue their education there. Moreover, the Institute acted as a vigorous

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sponsor of public lectures, which initially took place in Schinkel’s Academy of Architecture, and to which Russian scholars from other centres of the Diaspora were invited. The result was an impressive spectrum of talks from the fields of philosophy, history, law, art history and the history of literature, with such prominent speakers as Nikolai Berdiaev, Aleksandr Kizevetter, Vsevolod Iasinskii, Avgust Kaminka, Petr Struve, Ivan Il’in, Iulii Aicheval’d, Sergei Gogel’ and Boris Brutskus. The Institute possessed a superb library, especially in its periodicals section. The work of the Institute was in constant danger from shortage of funds, which were principally covered by the Foreign Office, the request of which that the Institute should refrain from political comment also sounded threatening. When the National Socialists seized power the Institute was initially purged of any ‘non-Aryans’ and later cleansed of all employees from the emigrant scene, until it was in all probability incorporated into the organization of the ‘Anti-Comintern’.27 Berlin never succeeded, unlike Prague and Paris, in establishing a real centre for Russian intellectual life and scholarship. One of the major accomplishments of the Russian Diaspora in Berlin was the establishment of a publications centre. ‘Russian Berlin’ even exported books to Soviet Russia, while supplying the rest of the worldwide Diaspora with newspapers and magazines, and between 1918 and 1924 produced more books than Moscow or Petrograd; eighty-six publishing companies published approximately 2,100 to 2,200 titles.28 The most important of these companies were the Kniga publishing house that had been founded before 1914, together with Grzebin, Efron, Neva, Epokha, Petropolis, Gelikon and Slovo. The lion’s share of their publications consisted, though, of reprinted editions of Russian classics and textbooks for children and teachers, but they did also publish some contemporary works by modern Russian authors, both émigrés and Soviet Russians, including Andrei Belyi, Vladislav Khodasevich, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin, Boris Zaitsev, Maksim Gor’kii and Isaak Babel’. As publishing concerns, they financed the bulk of the editions, magazines and newspapers published in Berlin. Quite a few of them succeeded in making newspaper and emigration history, too, including the 22-volume Archive of the Russian Revolution (1921–1937), started by Iosif V. Gessen, the opulently decorated Feuervogel, edited by A.E. Kogan, or the Russian Book and The New Russian Book, published by Ladyzhnikov and edited by Aleksandr Iashchenko. The Russian publishers’ bookshops, such as Kniga

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at Kurfürstenstraße 79, Ol’ga Diakova at Bayreuthstraße 45, and Moskva on the Wilhelmstraße, formed communication centres for Russian Berlin. The vast number of Russian newspapers and magazines reflected the intellectual and cultural potential of ‘St Petersburg on the Wittenbergplatz’, to quote the title of a 1931 work (in German) of popular literature about emigration. This book also showed the extent of the hectic search for identity of a ‘community of despair’ (R.C. Williams), its fractional and ethnic bickerings and the overwhelming sense of helplessness. The need for critical analysis of the past was as great as that for justification. Berlin became – and that in enormous temporal and spacial proximity – the site of a Russian process of remembrance, producing an extensive outpouring of memoirs, research into, and analytical concern with, the immediate past, but also the literary mythologization and demonization of the Russian Revolution. There appeared (usually simultaneously in German translation) the memoirs of the former members of the ancien régime such as the former ministers Sergei Sazonov and Vladimir Sukhomlinov, then Nikolai Sukhanov’s unique Sketches of the Revolution and Sergei Mel’gunov’s Red Terror in Russia 1918–1923, along with the memoirs of numerous chamberlains and ladies in waiting of the Tsar’s family. The first attempts at historical analysis and documentation outside the Soviet Union were undertaken at the ‘Russian Scientific Institute’ or at the ‘Institute for Pogrom Research’. It was above all the newspapers that created the cohesion of an extraterritorial community that had to survive without a national infrastructure. They did this through analysis of the situation ‘at home’ and ‘beyond the borders’, through a chronicle of emigrant life, a calender of events, classified ads, emigrant gossip, caricatures and debates that were carried out world wide – from Paris to Harbin. All of the intellectual and political émigré factions created their own mouthpiece: the Monarchists in the collections The Double Eagle and the journal the Russia of the Future; the early Fascists in The Summons and later in The Jew Eater; the Social Revolutionaries in Days; those friendly to the Soviets and those that wanted to return home in On the Eve; the Liberals in The Helm; the Mensheviks in Socialist Messenger. There was also a high number of one-time newspapers.29 The outstanding Russian paper in Berlin that most closely lived up to its claim of impartiality and objectivity was a Russian daily called Rul’, edited by the St Petersburg publicist Iosif V. Gessen, which appeared from 1920 to 1931 in the Slovo

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Press that was supported by the Ullstein group. It is comparable only to Segodnia in Riga and Poslednie Novosti in Paris. The translator Arthur Luther summed up what a reader at the time might feel: If you pick up one of the Russian newspapers published in Berlin and look at the classified ads, you’re tempted to believe that it was a Moscow or Petersburg newspaper from the ‘good old days’: there are adverts for theatre performances, concerts and cabarets; countless restaurants recommend their international cuisine to the gentle reader: blini, kulebiaka and the inevitable vodka with sakuska so go with it; Russian doctors and lawyers announce when and where their practices are open [..]. It’s only when you look more closely at the addresses of these people that you realize that you’re in Berlin, and not in Petersburg.30

Long after ‘Russian Berlin’ had passed its zenith, churches reminded people that the Orthodox Church had also been a pillar of Russian emigrant life in Berlin. The first is the St Nikolas and St Helena Church in Berlin-Tegel that was built before 1914; Mikhail Glinka, Vladimir D. Nabokov and Iulii Aikhenval’d are buried in its cemetery, near to which the Alexanderheim used to stand. The other is the Cathedral of Christ Risen on the Hohenzollerndamm, which was dedicated in 1938. The building of a new church in the central area of the city, which had hitherto been served by churches in temporary premises, became pressing after the Embassy Church on Unter den Linden was handed over to the Soviet Russians under the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo. In the 1920s the orthodox Russians belonged to the overseas church, coming under the jurisdiction of both Evlogii, Bishop of Paris, and the Church of the Patriarchs back in Russia. The overseas church under Bishop Tikhon won most of the battles with the supporters of Evlogii, though. Tikhon, who pronounced the day of the Nazi assumption of power to be ‘also a day of celebration for the Russians in Germany’, succeeded from 1936 to 1938 in securing for his church sole jurisdiction overseas, and after the invasions of Poland and, later, the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht it extended its activities into the occupied territories.31 While the success of the humanitarian and intermediary organizations for the emigrants lay in their ability to make life in exile tolerable, the political organizations had a different agenda: the justification of their existence consisted in their ability both programmatically and practically to keep alive the hope of a return

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home. As long as the civil war lasted and its outcome remained uncertain, a political line aimed at the armed overthrow of the Bolsheviks seemed justifiable. The isolation of Soviet Russia and the promises of the intervening powers distracted attention from the defeat of the White Russians. A crisis of the political parties of emigration became unavoidable when Soviet Russia began to be recognized by more and more members of the international community. If we bear in mind that even in pre-revolutionary Russia parties were inherently weak, and were then swept aside by the Revolution at the very time when they had begun to play a historic role, if we add to that the fact that those parties in exile had inevitably lost their class-based and socio-cultural roots, then we see how difficult indeed it is to talk of established parties in emigration. It was much more a matter of varyingly loose organizations and groups of individuals brought together by the common experience of failure and personal endangerment in the struggle against Bolshevism, little different from the revolutionary émigré circles in Europe before the War and the Revolution. A good number of the party political leaders forced into exile after 1917 had had previous experience of the bitter experience of exile. The anti-Bolshevik consensus that seemed to form the common ground between all parties in emigration was to prove itself under the pressure of concrete decision-making as superficial and short lived. The failure of the diverse attempts at unification by the parties of the Diaspora in 1920, 1921, 1926 and 1930 is clear proof of this. What could Miliukov and Kerenski possibly have in common with the generals of the White Russian movement, or the exiled Mensheviks Iulii Martov and Fedor Dan with the Petersburg Black Hundreds, other than opposition to the new regime in Moscow? The spectrum of political parties in exile appears to be a copy or continuation of that of pre-revolutionary times, but it was really nothing but a shadow of its former self, being more of an intellectual or cultural phenomenon than one with real political clout. Its function and its importance in emigration lay, or so it would seem, not in their nature as political parties, but rather in the specific force of the views and images of the Russian Revolution and of Soviet Russia put over by the political groups in their individual countries of exile. The real contribution that could be expected of the politicians of emigration was not so much as to what extent they succeeded in building up a party, but consisted in the analysis and self-analysis they could offer, something which is possible for those excluded

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from the political struggle indefinitely and condemned to stand and watch day-to-day political skirmishes from afar. The chance of any real political impact was granted only to those who discovered a strong interest in Russian affairs in their new country of residence. This meant that in Germany, in the medium term, the only Russian emigrants who could play any real political role were members of the dwindling minority that was willing to take part in a German campaign against the Soviet Union, with all that that meant. Whenever leading émigré politicians came to Germany, they did so because they could be sure of finding support for their goals, as could those who had settled in Paris and London, the capital cities of their former allies. The split in the Diaspora into proGerman and pro-Entente inevitably became far less prominant as the sense of alliance faded, with the socio-political affinity of the political groups becoming far more important. That was true of the Mensheviks who, as the largest party, took on the chairmanship of the II. International, and was no less true of the monarchists and the extreme Right, who found a lot of common ground with, and strong support from, the reactionary völkisch scene in the Weimar Republic. In the years when Berlin was the centre of Russian emigration, more or less all pre-revolutionary Russian party groupings were represented, alongside newer ones, such as the ‘Smena Vekh Movement’, the ‘Young Russians’ and the Eurasians. The Mensheviks in Berlin joined forces with a cadre, some of whose members had been expelled from Russia against their will. They included Iulii Martov, Eva Broido, David Dallin, Rafail Abamovich, Fedor Dan and Boris Nikolaevskii. Their ‘Overseas Office of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Russia (Berlin)’, together with the party HQ in Moscow, made up the central committee. They could immediately reactivate the strong ties to the German Social Democrats that had been made before 1914, and up to 1933 constituted a sort of brains trust guiding the clearly anti-Bolshevik Russian policies of the SPD. From 1921 to 1933 the Mensheviks published a weekly newspaper in Russian, with a German edition, the Organ of Russian Social Democracy, appearing simultaneously. The activities of the Mensheviks seem to have been focussed on Germany, as in their advising the SPD. After their second exile in 1933 many of them became pioneers of American research on the Soviet Union and Communism.32 The other great party of the Russian Revolution, the Social Revolutionaries, also found a home in Berlin for a while. From 1919 to 1922 their Golos Rossii

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appeared there, to be followed from 1922 to 1925 by Dni, the most important newspaper of the Social Revolutionaries in exile. Their leaders Aleksandr Kerenskii, Viktor Chernov, Sergei Pokopovich and Elena Kuskova all came from Paris or Prague to spend some time in Berlin. The newspaper offers a good impression of Russian life in Berlin at the time, and benefitted from the collaboration of some eminent Russian writers.33 This is even more true of Rul’, the daily published in Berlin from 1920 to 1931 by leading members of the Constitutional Democratic Party. Vladimir D. Nabokov, Avgust Kaminka and Iosif V. Gessen made newspaper and cultural, rather than party, history during these years. Nabokov’s project of uniting in exile the divided party of the ‘Cadets’, and his success in winning over Pavel Miliukov, the left-wing leader of the cadets, ultimately failed not only because of the assassination of Nabokov in the Berlin Philharmonic on 28 March 1922 by terrorists from the extreme Right, but undoubtedly also because a liberal agenda for Soviet Russia seemed to be anything but practicable for the forseeable future. The enduring, essentially indirect influence of the newspaper and its editor-inchief is ultimately greater than its party political activities.34 A new feature of the mainly traditional party landscape from pre-revolutionary days was the emergence of those factions and groupings that supported the establishment and consolidation of Soviet authority and demanded that politicians in emigration should proceed from the realities, instead of chasing old dreams and hopes for the future. One such group was Smena Vekh, which, roughly translated, means ‘change of road signs’. Its spokesmen called for an acceptance by the Russian intelligentsia at home and abroad of the new political order. They wanted to mobilize the full potential of Russian emigrants for the benefit of the motherland and the building up of Soviet Russia, even calling on them to return home. With Soviet financial support the daily Nakanune was published in Berlin from 1922 to 1924 by some of its leading theorists, such as Iurii Kliuchnikov, Grigorii Kirdetsov, Sergei Luk’ianov, Iurii Potekhin and Aleksei Tolstoi. Even though the call for a return essentially fell on deaf ears, Smena Vekh is symptomatic of the process of intellectual maturation that took place in postrevolutionary Russia and in emigration, when a central issue was the working out of a new modus vivendi – what became known as National Bolshevism – between the new revolutionary power and the remnants of the old, even imperial elites. Much the same is

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true of the Eurasians, whose main bases were in Prague and Sofia, but who also provoked interest and irritation in Berlin with the publications and lectures of Petr Savitskii and Lev Karsavin. They too read the Russian Revolution as a creative occurrence that had pushed the unique quality of Russia, its being beyond Occident and Orient, to a new synthesis.35 This tendency to view Bolshevism as a genuinely national Russian phenomen was put forward as part of the platform of the ‘Young Russians’, a movement founded in 1923 in Munich by Aleksandr Kazem-Bek, which, with the Italian Fascists and the German National Socialists very much in mind, put forward the notion of a modernized – i.e. Soviet – monarchy to be radically different from the dreams of the representatives of the ancien régime. The Gestapo appositely summed up this movement in the following way: ‘Unlike all other anti-Bolshevist emigrant organizations, the Young Russian movement does not view the Soviet Union as the work of the proponents of the Bolshevik World Revolution, but rather as nothing more than the continuation of the Russian Empire under the leadership of a government that does not meet with their approval.’36 Many of the elements developed by the Young Russians – corporativeness, the ‘third way’ between liberalism and Bolshevism, and nationalism – were reflected by political parties in the 1930s.37 It should also be mentioned, in order to complete the picture, that there were short-lived contacts between Russian and German anarchists in Berlin.38 The chapter on Russian emigration in Germany with the most significant consequences was, however, not written by the revolutionary Social Democrats or Russian liberals, but by the Right, from the conservative to the extreme right wing. Even before Berlin had become one of the major civies of emigration – which happened after Vrangel’s defeat in November 1920 – it had become an ‘outpost’ of the Russian civil war, just like other European capital cities. Attempts were made from Germany to rescue the imperilled Russian royal family by playing on the family connections of the Hohenzollerns. Protected by Oberost, counter-revolutionary forces had joined together in an attempt to reactivate the alliance of the German and Russian Empires that existed before the War against the liberal West. After the ceasefire and the collapse of the Eastern Front in November 1918 they moved west under the protection of German troops. In the eastern Baltic German Freikorps and Russian civil war troops joined forces. Berlin brought them together, and it

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was there that their cameraderie was effectively forged during the Kapp Putsch of 20 March 1920. After the insurrection was quelled, the centre of anti-Bolshevist and anti-republican activities moved to Munich, where fringe groups of Russian monarchists became involved in the initial phases of the National Socialist movement. As with the political parties in emigration, this part of GermanRussian history also essentially consists of the activities of individual groupings and the collaboration of central figures of the Russian counter-revolution, such as General Vasilii Biskupskii, Pavel AvalovBermondt, Fedor von Vinberg, Petr Shabel’skii-Bork, Sergei Taboritskii, Nikolai Markov II and Grigorii Shvarts-Bostunich on the Russian side, and Alfred Rosenberg, Max Scheubner-Richter and Arno Schickedanz on the German, or, to be more accurate, on the German Baltic side. Quite apart from its political defeat in the civil war, the monarchist movement was devastated by the execution of the Tsar and his family. Any possible resolution of the question of succession was legally shaky and was, in any case, attacked by rival groupings. All efforts to unify the monarchist movement, or to present it as the legitimate voice of emigration, failed. The monarchist congress that took place from May to June 1921 in Bad Reichenhall (Bavaria) under the title ‘Congress for the Economic Reconstruction of Russia’, in which more than a hundred representatives of many countries took part – but without the House of the Romanovs being represented – was as unsuccessful in bringing unity about as a later congress that took place in Paris in 1926. There was not a single convincing and new answer to any of the questions that had played a part in the downfall of the Russian monarchy. And the major obstacle throughout was that the monarchist camp itself, which had kept on hoping that the news from Ekaterinburg would turn out to be wrong and that the Tsar would turn out to have been saved by a miracle, was itself divided. One pretender to the throne, Kirill Vladimirovich, a cousin of Nicholas II, had, after emigrating via Finland, France and Switzerland, taken up residence in Coburg, the seat of his wife’s family. In 1922 he declared himself to be Regent until such time as the death of the Tsar and the Tsarevich could be confirmed, and in 1924 he styled himself Emperor of all Russia. From the very beginning this ‘legitimist’ self-proclamation was attacked by the supporters of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich who, as former Commander-in-Chief of the Russian troops, enjoyed a certain popularity, among émigré military circles in particular. But even

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the death in 1928 of Nikolai Nikolaevich, who was seen in certain emigrant circles as the ‘Russian Duce’, did little to change the hopelessness of the monarchist movement.39 Even through the strategic alliances between German and Russian counter-revolutionaries, all striving for the restoration of the old monarchies and of the status quo ante in Central Europe, were entirely unsuccessful, some alliances were formed, the aims of which seemed to go beyond mere restoration of the two monarchies. They were united by: the experience of defeat; the loss of their homeland; social deracination; the terror and chaos they had witnessed and the search for the ‘guilty ones’. The German-Russian war, the decree of the Entente with regard to the Provisional government, the Russian October Revolution and the German November Revolution, the collapse of the old order, the ‘stab in the back’ of the armies and the Treaties of Versailles: all this was, in their eyes, the result of a massive conspiracy, primarily by Jews, freemasons and their accomplices. The fact that prominent revolutionaries in Russia and Germany were Jewish – Trotskii, Zinov’ev, Luxemburg, Liebknecht – was viewed as confirmation of this and brought about an alliance, within which radical antisemitism, anti-Bolshevism, and the struggle against the Republic became more or less synonymous. The belief in the grand conspiracy that was behind everything was never expressed so forcefully as in the forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the text of which appeared in Fedor von Vinberg’s periodical Luch Sveta (Ray of Light) from 1919 onwards, and which appeared as early as 1920 in Berlin in Gottfried zur Beek’s (pen name for Ludwig Müller von Hausen) German translation.40 The working out of an anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik and anti-bourgeois common denominator, under which the Right of pre-war Russia and that in post-war Germany could unite, now led to their direct cooperation in terrorist activities: in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and that of Hitler in 1923, and in the murders of Walter Rathenau and Vladimir D. Nabokov in 1922. Their paths crossed again when the National Socialists came to power. Many Russian emigrants left Germany in 1933, or soon after; among them were Simon Dubnov, Grigorii Landau, Semen Frank, Leonid Pasternak, Roman Gul’ and Vladimir Nabokov. Many others put their faith in the anti-Bolshevism of the new regime and did not reject it until much later, as was the case with the philosophers Ivan Il’in and Boris Vysheslavtsev. A good number offered their

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services as Russian National Socialists to various organizations of the new order – not always to their satisfaction, as the Third Reich viewed the emigrants as moaners and schemers, an egoistical bunch who needed watching and bringing into line. But a good many of them collaborated with the Nazi authorities up to the bitter end, while dozens of those who had once sought refuge in Berlin were later hunted down and killed all over Europe – this was the fate of Mikhail Gorlin and Raisa Bloch in Paris, and of Simon Dubnov in Riga, to name but three. For the majority of the emigrants the onset of Nazi rule merely meant that life went on, with community activities, functions, balls, anniversaries, job-hunting and the like. Even Russian Jews in Berlin were long unaware of the seriousness of their situation. In 1936 the ‘Russian Intermediary Office’ was reconstituted under the direction of General Biskupskii, above all, in order to sort out the rival emigrant organizations. It also meant that it had to accept a number of language directives, such as those issued after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 and the invasion of Poland, under which they had to agree that the pact was entirely in the interest of the Russian people.41 The decisive turning point did not, of course, come until the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Now many emigrants saw themselves presented with the opportunity to return home and to turn the slogan of the ‘anti-Bolshevik struggle’ into deeds – alongside the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Special Units. A good number of emigrants collaborated with the Germans in order to work towards this goal. Russian emigrants in countries occupied by the Wehrmacht reported to the Russian Intermediary Offices in Paris, Warsaw and Brussels, took the oath of loyalty to the Third Reich (as Generals Golovin, Kusonskii and von Lampe did) and then reported to their units, while suspicious or uncooperative members of the emigrant community were harassed and sometimes even imprisoned. The attitude of the German authorities to the emigrants was, though, inconsistent and ambivalent: on the one hand the emigrants were needed, on the other hand they were regarded as unreliable – after all, it was Hitler’s watchword that ‘none but Germans should be allowed to bear arms.’42 The deployment of Russian emigrants was therefore subject to various limitations: emigrants of the first generation and former members of the Red Army found it difficult to agree on things, some German

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organizations had great suspicion of the ‘Russians’ as such, while the competing plans of the Germans lacked uniformity. The idea of forming a Russian Liberation Army under General Andrei Vlasov, who had been captured in July 1942, was postponed time and again because of German anxiety about arming foreigners, and it was not deployed until spring 1945. Emigrants from the inter-war years joined the Vlasov army and the Wehrmacht as translators, specialists and commanders of Russian voluntary units; about 1,500 Russian emigrants from France joined the Wehrmacht, while ca. 1,200 from Germany were assigned to it as translators. As a precautionary measure lists were put together of emigrant experts who would be able to take part in the administration and reconstruction of the occupied territories. Hundreds of Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other emigrants worked as translators in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Organizations Todt and Speer, in German counter-intelligence and the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Senior officers from the White Russian emigration (Generals Arkhangel’skii, von Lampe, Dragomirov, Golovin, Kreiter, Cossack atamans Abramov, Balabin and Shkuro) joined the Vlasov movement, as did representatives of new organizations that had only been formed in exile, but this too was not without its problems, as the suspicious Gestapo followed the emigrants’ every step.43 Some of the leading representatives of emigration who collaborated with the Wehrmacht were captured after the victory of the Red Army in the East, deported and tried in Moscow or Kharkov, and subsequently executed.44 Those who could flee to the Western zones of Germany after the War disappeared in the second wave of refugees. The ‘double liquidation’ of Russian life in Germany could very easily lead one to think that there is not a trace of it left, apart from the remarkable survival of the odd individual like Fedor Stepun. But, in fact, both the fatal and the inspirational influences of Russian Berlin were of a mediating nature. To understand them, we again have to look at certain special features of the ‘transit camp’, as Russian Berlin was called. Berlin was an outpost in the European theatre of crisis, but also a refuge and a safe haven in the civil war. Here, as in no other place in Europe, ‘Red’ and ‘White’ faced each other on foreign soil. ‘Sovdepien’, as the emigrants contemptuously referred to Soviet Russia, had a massive population in Berlin, with around 3,000

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people being employed by the embassy and the trade mission alone, and there was about the same number of ‘White Guards’, as they dubbed the refugees. In Berlin there was, though, a considerable amount of overlap of the various social circles formed from within the Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden and ‘Charlottengrad’, as the area of the west occupied by the Russian emigrants was termed. Around both of these poles groups of politically highly active people were formed, which did come into contact at a distance with each other, but which generally distrusted and opposed each other. The recognition of Soviet Russia by Germany turned Berlin into the ‘gate to the West’ for those ‘travellers with the red passport’, and in the 1920s a never-ending stream of Soviet citizens poured into the capital, sometimes enjoying the option of being able to stay indefinitely, or for ever. Berlin became the great centre of communications between Russians at home and abroad. In their newspapers and clubs the two camps crossed – on the cultural level over the demarcation lines that separated them politically. Scarcely one of the great names of Soviet and Russian literature was missing from the writers for Russian newspapers and periodicals in Berlin: Mark Aldanov, Arkadii Averchenko, Andrei Belyi, Sasha Chernyi, Vladislav Khodasevich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Don Aminado, Il’ia Erenburg, Sergei Esenin, Maksim Gor’kii, Georgii Ivanov, Aleksandr Kusikov, Lev Lunts, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Nikolai Otsup, Mikhail Osorgin, Boris Pasternak, Boris Pil’niak, Larisa Reisner, Aleksei Remizov, Igor Severianin, Ivan Shmelev, Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, Aleksei Tolstoi, Boris Zaitsev, and many others. Russian Berlin offered the two entrenched camps a social space in which the ‘pure and the impure’, White and Red, could meet again. The series of productions in the ‘House of the Arts’ and the list of authors writing for New Russian Books bring out the uniqueness of this social world.45 Berlin was a transit station in which old acquaintances could see each other again, even see each other for the very last time, as was the case with Lev Shestov and Mikhail Gershenzon, and with Boris Pasternak and his parents. Berlin became the cramped site for the struggle to have the Russian culture of emigration and the culture of Soviet Russia internationally recognized. Both Soviet and emigration artists took part in the 1st Russian Art Exhibition in the Van Diemen Gallery, and for many of them Berlin marked the starting point of their international careers; these included Natan Al’tman, Aleksandr Arkhipenko, Aleksandr Arnshtam, Ksenia

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Boguslavskaia, Pavel Chelishchev, Naum Gabo, Boris Grigor’ev, Vasilii Kandinskii, Anton Pevsner, Ivan Puni, Marc Chagall, Serge Charchoune and David Shterenberg.46 Berlin offered a Russianspeaking cultural world that could support not only numerous Russian theatres and cabarets, but also offer an appropriate reception for the visiting performances of the Moscow theatres of Tairov, Meierkhol’d and Stanislavskii; it even managed to fascinate the cultural elite of the capital, as so notably happened with Iakov Iuzhnii’s cabaret ‘The Blue Bird’.47 The appearances of Russian stars of world-wide renown, such as Sergei Diagilev, Igor’ Stravinskii and Vladimir Horowitz, were major cultural events. How, then, did the presence of a large Russian community and growing interest in the Soviet Union manifest itself in Berlin? The entire Russian world remained a sort of superstructure on an unchangingly autochtonic base. Berliners had been a little surprised by things, and initially had by no means been unfriendly, at times even downright helpful, but they essentially took little notice of the invasion from the East, and just got on with their lives. They were fully occupied with their own problems, the economic collapse and the galloping inflation. The contact between the two worlds was limited to the visits that Berliners made to the theatres, concerts, cabarets and speciality resaurants, on the one hand, and to those, on the other hand, of the Russians to the daunting brick building that housed the main police station, where they had to queue up to extend their visas and renew their ID cards. There were probable contacts of a commercial, and certainly of a political nature. Entry into the Russian and German artistic worlds by the other side was, in any case, very haphazard, and the two worlds just got on with their own lives.48 But intellectuals such as Alfred Polgar and Carl Einstein saw the Volga flowing through Berlin and were fascinated by the magic and colour of the Russian theatre in the midst of Berlin. Thomas Mann gave a lecture in the House of the Arts. Generally the Russians seemed to look down on their Berlin surroundings, often sensing – as Belyi did – that something was going to happen in Berlin akin to what they had already experienced in Petrograd and Moscow. Many Soviet intellectuals found themselves confirmed in their opinion that they were witnesses to, and actors in, a superior social experiment, while the representatives of aristocratic Russia looked down with irritation, if not contempt, on the petty-bourgeois and plebeian Berlin of officers’ widows and backyards. The endangered,

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multi-facetted Berlin of the 1920s and 1930s finds its most subtle literary treatment in the novels and short stories of Vladimir Nabokov.49 And how did the Germans react to the Russians? With anecdotes about ‘Charlottengrad’, as Charlottenburg was called, and about the ‘Nepsky Prospect’, which was the ironic name (by analogy with the Nevskii Prospect in St Petersburg) given to the Kurfürstendamm, which seemed to be overrun with Russians. Soviet Russia was first and foremost a topic of debate for the extreme Left, which saw the emigrants merely as a bunch of failures and reactionaries, and treated them accordingly – by keeping them under observation and by the use of bands of thugs. One group of those of a Russophile disposition, mainly conservatives, came to view emigrants as sources of information on, and representatives of, the ‘good old Russia’, while another conservative Russophile group engaged in top-secret military cooperation with the Soviet government. Thus in Berlin in the 1920s we meet in this confined space not only Georgii Chicherin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs (and former student of the Friedrich Wilhelm University, now Humboldt University), but also Karl Radek being greatly in demand in his Moabit cell, as well as the White generals. But we also meet – incognito – generals of the Red Army such as Mikhail Tukhachevskii, who are visiting the Republic to engage in secret negotiations with the Wehrmacht, or to take part in training exercises.50 Berlin becomes a place of astonishing alliances and meetings. At the receptions of Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Krestinskii we find not only Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, but also the representatives of Weimar’s ‘Cultural Bolshevism’. In the Café Leon on the Nollendorfplatz Maiakovskii and Esenin, poets of the new Russia, encounter the poets of the lost ‘silver age’. More or less simultaneously Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Gustav Landauer’s Twilight in Europe and Nikolai Berdiaev’s The New Middle-Ages are published here.51 ‘Friends of the New Russia’ gain new members from the middle classes, such as Albert Einstein, Paul Löbe, Bernhard Kellermann, Leopold Jessner and the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, while Moeller van den Bruck sees in Dostoevskii and Merezhkovskii the key to the riddles of modernity. The simultaneity of the historical experiences of collapse and revolution that people had made in their individual rooms, as it were, causes those who get to know each other in Berlin to see each other as contemporaries, as fellow tenants of a ‘home in time’ (Il’ia Erenburg).

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Where this sort of things happens the interchange of roles is inevitable and a firm sense of identity is threatened with dissolution. Who is who? In Russian Berlin you could reach out and touch the efforts by each side to infiltrate the other, to learn all about it, to find out what was going on and, if possible, to make use of that information oneself. Part of the emigrant discourse was the suspicion that whoever was of the contrary opinion had to be an ‘agent of the Cheka’, while those who did not side unambiguously with the German arch-conservatives had to be working for the Entente or ‘World Jewry’. The grey area between yesterday’s world and that in which people are looking for somewhere to settle down is full of speculators, those who deal in forged papers and documents, con men, and real and imaginary agents. Only in a world in which things have become so uncertain can the claim of a woman with the name Anastasia to be the Tsar’s daughter be taken seriously, causing the overheated imagination of the crowd to run wild for years.52 Russian Berlin of the inter-war years becomes the barometer that keeps us informed about the state of subterranean currents, and becomes the probe by which we can read what will happen when it emerges from its dormancy.

Notes 1. First published in German in Karl Schlögel (ed.), Der große Exodus: Die russische Emigration und ihre Zentren 1917 bis 1941 (Munich: Beck, 1994), pp. 234–59, 407–11 (notes). English version see Yearbook of European Studies, 13 (1999), pp. 235–65; translated by Keith Bullivant and Geoffrey Giles. 2. The St Petersburg female writers Vera Lur’e and Tat’iana Gzovskaia come to mind, as does the late Nina Berberova. 3. Written entirely from eyewitness accounts: Hans von Rimscha, Der russische Bürgerkrieg und die russische Emigration 1917–1921 (Jena: Frommann, 1924) and von Rimscha, Rußland jenseits der Grenzen. 1921– 1926. Ein Beitrag zur russischen Nachkriegsgeschichte (Jena: Frommann, 1927). From a historical point of view: Hans-Erich Volkmann, Die russische Emigration in Deutschland. 1919–1929 (Würzburg: Holzner, 1966). Still unmatched in breadth and wealth of material: Robert C. Williams, Culture in Exile. Russian Emigrés in Germany, 1881–1941 (Ithaca,

68

4.

5.

6.

7.

Karl Schlögel New York, London: Cornell University Press, 1972). Fundamental for certain aspects: Walter Laqueur, Deutschland und Rußland (Berlin: Propyläen, 1965). Recent, with important source material: Bettina Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”: Russische Emigranten in Deutschland von 1918 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern: Lang, 1993). Lazar Fleishman (ed.), Russkii Berlin 1921–1923. Po materialam archiva B. I. Nikoaevskogo v Guverovskom institute (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983); Fritz Mierau (ed.), Russen in Berlin 1918–1933. Eine kulturelle Begegnung (Weinheim, Berlin: Quadriga, 1988). Franz Basler, Die deutsch-russische Schule in Berlin. 1931–1945. Geschichte und Auftrag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983); Klaus Wiese, Von der Emigrantenschule zur nationalsozialistischen deutschen Ostschule (Berlin, 1986); Michaela Böhmig, Das russische Theater in Berlin 1919–1931 (Munich: Sagner, 1990); Thomas R. Beyer jr., Gottfried Kratz and Xenia Werner, Russische Autoren und Verlage in Berlin nach dem ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag Spitz, 1987); Claudia Scandura, ‘Das “Russische Berlin” 1921–1924: Die Verlage’, in Zeitschrift für Slawistik 32 (1987), 5, pp. 754–62, and eadem, ‘Das “russische Berlin” 1921– 1923: Die Zeitschriften’, in Zeitschrift für Slawistik 33 (1988), 4, pp. 515–22; Alexander Schwarz, ‘Russische Emigranten im deutschen Film: Fallstudien zu Josif Ermol’ev und Ivan Mozžuchin’, in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 30 (1992), pp. 153–95; on the Russian Scientific Institute cf. Gabriele Camphausen, Die wissenschaftliche historische Rußlandforschung in Deutschland 1893–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Lang, 1990); Gerd Voigt, Otto Hoetzsch 1876–1946. Wissenschaft und Politik im Leben eines deutschen Historikers (Berlin: Akademie, 1978); on the church Käte Gaede, Russische Orthodoxe Kirche in Deutschland in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Stenone, 1985); Gernot Seide, Die Geschichte der Russischen Orthodoxen Kirche im Ausland von der Gründung bis in die Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983). Particularly informative are: Roman Gul’, Ia unes Rossiiu, vol. 1: Rossiia v Germanii (New York: Most, 1981); Vladimir Nabokov, Sprich Erinnerung, sprich. Wiedersehen mit einer Autobiographie (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984); Iosif V. Gessen, Gody izgnaniia: Zhiznennyi otchet (Paris: YMCA Press, 1979); Ilja Ehrenburg, Menschen, Jahre, Leben, Autobiographie, vols 1-2 (Munich: Kindler, 1962–5); Simon M. Dubnov, Kniga zhizni (New York, 1957). A summary is provided by Deutschland-Sowjetunion Aus fünf Jahrzehnten kultureller Zusammenarbeit. Zum 50. Jahrestag der großen sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution (Berlin: Humboldt Universität, 1966). Exceptions to the rule are Botho Brachmann: Russische Sozialdemokraten in Berlin (Berlin: Akademie, 1962) and Günter Gorski, Die antisowjetische Emigration (Ph.D. dissertation, Halle, 1987).

Berlin: ‘Stepmother’ Among Russian Cities 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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Cf. Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, pp. 310–22; Williams, Culture in Exile, pp. 386–9. For newspapers damaged in the war, cf. Walter Andreesen, ‘Berlin und die russische Literatur der 20er Jahre’, in Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Mitteilungen 15 (1983), pp. 13–14. For exile newspapers etc., cf. Russian National Library and INION in Moscow. The collection in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF, ex-CGAOR) is particularly good. Cf. in especially ff. 6007, 5815, 5859, 5774, 5908, 6006 and 5853. For information on the ‘trophy archive’, cf. George Clark Browder, ‘Captured German and Other Nations. Documents in the Osoby (Special) Archive in Moscow’, in Central European History 24 (1991), 4, pp. 424–43; Jan Foitzig, ‘Zur Situation in Moskauer Archiven’, in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 1993, pp. 299–308; Wolfgang Form and Pavel Poljan, ‘Das Zentrum für die Aufbewahrung historisch-dokumentarischer Sammlungen in Moskau – ein Erfahrungsbericht’, in Bundesinstitut für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien, Information aus der Forschung 7, 1992. Cf. Wilhelm Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Völker. Bearb. in Verbindung mit Theodor Kappstein und hrsg. im amtlichen Auftrage des Reichswehrministeriums von Wilhelm Doegen, 6th edn, vol. 1: Der Kriegsgefangenen Haltung und Schicksal in Deutschland (Berlin: Politik und Wirtschaft, 1921); Moritz Schlesinger, Erinnerungen eines Außenseiters im diplomatischen Dienst, ed. and intr. by Hubert Schneider (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1977). Volkmann’s calculations have not yet been superseded. He based his figures on statistics from the German Interior Ministry, and on information from von Rimscha, the German consul in Copenhagen, and the Papal Welfare Organization for Russians in Germany (Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, pp. 5–7). Cf. also Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, pp. 8–10. Williams estimates there to have been 60,000 Jews in the Jewish Diaspora (Culture in Exile, p. 113). The statistics for the 1930s come from the Bureau for Refugee Affairs in the Reich, Osoby Archive, f. 7, op. 1, d. 386, 1.43. Dodenhoeft figures (1932: 60,000; 1933: 50,000) are based on reports for the FO, Nansen’s office and the League of Nations, and are way below these. Nash Vek of 19 March 1933 claimed there were 8,320 Russian emigrants and 3,000 members of the Soviet Russian colony. On the Vlasov Movement, cf. Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Emigré Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Joachim Hoffmann, Die Geschichte der Wlassow-Armee (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1984). On the Soviet workers and POWs in Germany: Reinhard Rürup (ed.), Der

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15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Karl Schlögel Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941–1945. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Argon, 1991), pp. 140, 108 ff. The figure of 50,000 Ukrainians in Berlin alone is probably too high, cf. Frank Golczewski (ed.), Geschichte der Ukraine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), pp. 237 and 329. Schmidt estimates there to have been 120,000 Russian and Baltic Germans, of which half remained permanently in Germany. See M. Schmidt, Wolgadeutsche Emigranten im Deutschen Reich zwischen 1917 und 1933 (MA thesis, Freiburg University), p. 42. On the legal question: J.M. Rabinowitsch, ‘Die Rechtslage der staatenlosen russischen Emigranten in Deutschland’, in Osteuropa 3 (1927/28), pp. 617–25; Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, pp. 29–45; Alexis Doldenweiser, ‘Über die Rechtslage russischer Flüchtlinge in Deutschland’, in Columbia Collection, box 12, folder 2. Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, p. 8. On Germany as a transit stop for Jewish emigrants, cf. Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918– 1933 (Hamburg: Christians, 1986). Wipert v. Blücher, Deutschlands Weg nach Rapallo. Erinnerungen eines Mannes aus dem zweiten Gliede (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1951). Nabokov, Sprich Erinnerung, p. 281. Internationale Rundschau der Arbeit, 1928, quoted in Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, pp. 12–13. Spravochnik-Al’manakh pod. red. G.V. Franka (Berlin: Argonavty, 1922). Cf. Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, p. 15 and Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, pp. 36 ff. The internal papers of many of these associations were deposited in the Prague Historical Foreign Archive. The archives of the Red Cross were lost in the Second World War. On the activities of the YMCA, cf. Kenneth Scott Latourette, World Service: A History of the Foreign Work and World Service of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of the United States and Canada (New York: Association Press, 1957). Quoted in Wiese, Von der Emigrantenschule, p. 44. Ibid., pp. 73, 96. On the Russian Scientific Institute, cf. Camphausen, Die wissenschaftliche historische Russlandforschung, pp. 56–60; Voigt, Otto Hoetzsch, pp. 178 ff.; Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, pp. 89–114. Cf. Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, p. 110. Cf. here Williams, Culture in Exile, p. 137 and Gottfried Kratz, ‘Russische Verlage in Berlin nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Beyer et al., Russische Autoren und Verlage, pp. 39–150. A less than complete overview of newspapers and magazines that appeared in Germany is contained in Postnikov’s bibliography and

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30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

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catalogue; see Sergei P. Postnikov, Politika, ideologiia, byt i uchenie trudy russkoi emigratsii 1918–1945: bibliografiia iz kataloga i biblioteki R.Z.I. Arkhiva, pod red. G. Blinova, vols 1-2 (New York: Ross, 1993). Cf. also the memoirs of Gul’ and Gessen. Arthur Luther, ‘Russen in Deutschland’, in Illustrierte Zeitung, No. 4080, 1922, p. 111. The evaluation of the overseas church after 1933 and up to 1941, in particular, in the work of Gernot Seide, Käte Gaede and Werner Günter, Aus der Geschichte der Russisch-Orthodoxen Gemeinde Baden-Baden (Baden-Baden, 1982) is highly controversial. On the Mensheviks, cf. Williams, Culture in Exile, pp. 185 ff; Leopold Haimson (ed.), The Mensheviks from the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974); Sozialistische Revolution in einem unterentwickelten Land? Texte der Menschewiki zur russischen Revolution und zum Sowjetstaat 1903–1937 (Hamburg, 1981); Georg Decker, Erinnerungen und Aufsätze eines Menschewiken und Sozialdemokraten, ed. by Werner Plum (Bonn: Friedrich-EbertStiftung, 1980); André Liebich, Les Mensheviks en exile face à l’Union soviétique (Québec: CIEE, 1982). Cf. here Marc Jansen (ed.), The Socialist-Revolutionary Party after October 1917. Documents from the P.S.-R. Archives (Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG, 1989), pp. 641–757. On the cadets: William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). Cf. also Williams, Culture in Exile, pp. 181–7. On Rul’ cf. the memoirs of Gessen and Gul’. On National Bolshevism and Smena Vekh: Mikhail Agursky, Ideologiia natsional-bol’shevizma (Paris: YMCA Press, 1980); Amory Burchard, Die Literaturbeilage der Berliner russischen Tageszeitung ‘Nakanune’ (1922– 1924) als Spiegel der Zeit (MA thesis, Berlin 1993); Hilde Hardeman, Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime: The ‘Changing Signposts’ Movement among Russian Emigrés in the Early 1920s (De Kalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1994). On the Eurasians: Otto Böss, Die Lehre der Eurasier. Ein Beitrag zur russischen Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1961); Leonid Luks, ‘Die Ideologie der Eurasier im zeitgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas N.F. 34 (1986), pp. 374–95. Cf. Nicholas Hayes, ‘Kazem-Bek and the Young Russians’ Revolution’, in Slavic Review 39 (1980), pp. 255–68; John J. Stephan, The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925–1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, p. 231. On the Russian National Freedom Movement (ROND) and the Russian National and Social Movement (RSND). Cf. Williams, Culture in Exile, p. 238.

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39.

For differences in the monarchist camp, cf. ibid., pp. 160–80, 202–21; Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, pp. 168–70; Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, pp. 61–3. On the Russo-German connection in Munich in particular, cf. Laqueur, Deutschland und Russland, pp. 99 ff.; Williams, Culture in Exile, pp. 85 ff.; Henri Rollin, L’apocalypse de notre temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1939); Rafail Sh. Ganelin (ed.), Natsional’naia pravaia prezhde i teper’: istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki, chast’ I (St Petersburg: Institut sotsiologii Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, Sankt-Peterburgskii filial, 1992), pp. 124–9, 130–50. Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, p. 261, quoting Novoe Slovo of 27 August 1939. The lack of awareness of the emigrants emerges very clearly in the comments on the events of 1933 in Nash Vek. Cf. Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, pp. 270, 282 on declarations of loyalty and collaboration. On contacts between the first-generation emigrants and the Vlasov movement: Sergej Fröhlich, General Wlassow: Russen und Deutsche zwischen Hitler und Stalin, ed. by von Edel von Freier (Cologne: Markus, 1987), p. 240; Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Gegen Stalin und Hitler. General Wlassow und die russische Freiheitsbewegung (Mainz: von Hase & Koehler, 1970), pp. 165 ff.; Hoffmann: Die Geschichte der Wlassow-Armee, pp. 39 ff.; Dodenhoeft, “Laßt mich nach Rußland heim”, pp. 276–95. On the trials of collaborating emigrants, cf. Vladimir Komin, Belaia emigratsiia i vtoraia mirovaia voina. Uchebnoe posobie (Kalinin: KGU, 1979). On the House of the Arts, cf. Thomas R. Beyer jr., ‘The House of Arts and the Writer’s Club, Berlin 1921–1923’, in Beyer et al., Russische Autoren und Verlage, pp. 9–38, as well as the memoirs of Ehrenburg and Gul’ and the collection by Mierau. On this first exhibition, cf. the catalogue of Stationen der Moderne. Die bedeutendsten Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, ed. by Michael Boll (Berlin: Nicolai, 1988), pp. 184–215; Jörn Merkert (ed.), Naum Gabo: Ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 1922–1932. Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architektenentwürfe, Dokumente und Archive aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie (Berlin: Nishen, 1989); Eberhard Steneberg, Russische Kunst in Berlin 1919–1932 (Berlin: Mann, 1969). Cf.. Böhmig, Das russische Theater. Nicholas Nabokov, quoted in ibid., p. 261. Cf. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, vol. 1: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and Andrew Field, Vladimir Nabokov: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986). On Chicherin and Litvinov as students in Berlin, cf. Brachmann, Russische Sozialdemokraten. On the collaboration between the German

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

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51.

52.

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Army and the Red Army, cf. Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920–1933. Wege und Stationen einer ungewöhnlichen Zusammenarbeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993). On Schmitt and Jünger as guests at Krestinskii’s receptions even after 30 January 1933, cf. Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch, 3rd edn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), p. 50. Serious research into this grey area stands in inverse ratio to the enormous popular interest of the day, which was met by an outpouring of trashy and detective stories, such as Essad Bey, Das weiße Rußland. Menschen ohne Heimat (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1932); Wladimir Orloff, Mörder, Fälscher, Provokateure. Lebenskämpfe im unterirdischen Russland (Berlin: Brückenverlag, 1929); Grigorij Bessedowskii, Den Klauen der Tscheka entronnen (Leipzig, Zürich: Grethlein, 1930); Tamara Solonewitsch, Drei Jahre bei der Berliner Sowjethandelsvertretung (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1939). And there were, of course, the host of lives of the ‘Tsar’s daughter’ Anastasia, that went on into the postSecond World War period.

Bibliographical note Since this research on Russian Berlin has been done, a lot of new works – research guides, bibliographies, anthologies, monographs, memoirs – have been published. The results of my own research project of the 1990s are materialized in a series of books: Karl Schlögel (ed.), Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918–1941 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995); Karl Schlögel, Katharina Kucher, Bernhard Suchy and Gregor Thum (eds), Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland 1918–1941 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999). There are two studies dedicated to prominent sites and personalities of the Russian émigré community in Germany: Johannes Baur, Die russische Kolonie in München 1900–1945. Deutsch-russische Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1998), and Christian Hufen, Fedor Stepun. Ein politicher Intellektueller aus Rußland in Europa. Die Jahre 1884–1945 (Berlin: Lukas, 2001). I tried to bring together white and red Russian Berlin in the monograph Karl Schlögel, Berlin Ostbahnhof. Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler, 1998), in Russian: Berlin. Vostochnyi vokzal. Russkaia emigratsiia v Germanii mezhdu dvumia voinami, 1918–1945 (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005).

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The most important change in émigré research concerns the opening of the Russian archives. The publishing of research guides and aids, and the publications of edited primary sources, brought particularly impressive new insights. This new access to archival material – still fairly inaccessible for many other fields – had a clear impact on the research on émigré affairs. The most important files are in GARF, where the bulk of the Russian Foreign Historic Archives, originally based in Prague, have been preserved since 1945. See the series of Gosudarstevnnyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii. Putevoditel’, starting with vol. 1: Fondy gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Rossiiskoi federatsii po istorii Rossii XIX – nachala XX vv., red. S. V. Mironeko, Gregori L. Friz (Moscow: Blagovest, 1994); Problemy zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi Rossiki. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Russkii mir, 1997); also Russkoe zarubezh’e 1917–1991. Katalog izdanii iz fonda biblioteki-archiva (Moscow, 1992). Particularly helpful are: S.P. Postnikov (ed.) and S.G. Blinov (red.), Politika, ideologiia, byt i uchenye trudy russkoi emigratsii 1918–1945. Bibliografiia iz katalog biblioteki R.Z.I.A., vols I-II (New York: Norman Ross, 1993). Very impressive is the progress made in publishing encyclopaedias dedicated to general issues regarding the history and culture of the Russian émigré community: Russkoe zarubezh’e. Zolotaia kniga emigratsii. Pervaia tret’ XX veka. Entsiklopedicheskii biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997); Literaturnaia entsiklopediia russkogo zarubezh’ia, 2 vols (Moscow, 1997); Valentin Bulgakov, Slovar’ russkikh zarubezhnykh pisatelei, red. Galina Vanchkova (New York: Norman Ross, 1993). Pisateli russkogo zarubezh’ia. Literaturnaia entsiklopediia russkogo zarubezh’ia 1918–1940 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997); Zarubezhnaia Rossiia 1917–1939, vol. 2 (Sankt-Peterburg: Liki Rossii, 2003); Wojciech Zalewski, Evgeni Gollerbach, Rasprostranenie russkoi pechati v mire. 1918–1939 gg., Spravochnik (Sankt-Peterburg: Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, 1998). On New Russian Berlin see the valuable guide Das neue Russische Berlin, ed. by Partner für Berlin – Gesellschaft für Hauptstadt-Marketing (Berlin, 2001). Russia abroad, as remembered and reflected in memoirs and diaries is one of the most relevant sources for any research. Scholars find indispensable aid in Rossiia i rossiiskaia emigratsiia v vospominaniiakh i dnevnikakh. Annotirovannyi ukazatel’ knig, zhurnal’nykh i gazetnykh publikatsii, izdannykh za rubezhom v 1917– 1991 gg., 4 vols (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003–2005); Svodnyi katalog

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periodicheskikh i prodolzhaiushchikhsia izdanii russkogo zarubez’ia v bibliotekakh Moskvy, 1917–1996 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999); I.L. Polotovskaia, Materialy dlia bibliografii informatsionnykh resursov russkogo zarubez’ia (Sankt-Peterburg: Nestor, 2002); David Arans, Russkie knigi za rubezhom 1980–1995 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia Publichnaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka Rossii, 2002); Literatura russkogo zarubezh’ia vozvrashchaetsia na rodinu. Vyborochnyi ukazatel’ publikatsii 1886–1990, fasc. I, part 1 (Moscow: Rudomino, 1993). The cultural heritage of Russian emigration has been the subject of many exhibitions in Russia as well as abroad, for instance Nikita Struve, Soixante-dix ans d’émigration russe, 1919–1989 (Paris: Fayard, 1996); Russkii Berlin. Das russische Berlin 1918–1941. Izdanie k vystavke “Russkii Berlin 1918-1941” v Gosudarstvennom muzee 13–27 maia 2003. Representative documents are published in Russkaia voennaia emigratsiia 20-kh–40-kh godov. Dokumenty i materialy, vols I–II (Moscow: Geia, 1998); Politicheskaia istoriia russkoi emigratsii 1920–1940gg. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Vladox, 1999); Iu. N. Sukharev, Materialy k istorii russkogo nauchnogo zarubezh’ia, vols I–II (Moscow: Studiia “TRITE” Nikity Mikhalkova, 2002). Many conferences in recent years have dealt with various aspects of émigré life: Russkie bez otechestva. Ocherki antibol’shevistkoi emigratsii 20–40-kh godov (Moscow: Izdatel’skii tsentr RGGU, 2000). The outstanding contribution of Russian Jews is analyzed in many articles in the multi-volume series Michail Parkhomovsky (ed.), Evrei v kul’ture russkogo zarubezh’ia. Sbornik statei, publikatsii, memuarov i esse, 9 vols (Jerusalem, 1992–2004). New light is shed on the spectacular exile actions of the Bolshevik government in 19921/22: Vysylka vmesto rasstrela. Deportatsiia intelligentsii v dokumentakh VChK-GPU (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2005); M.E. Glavatskii, “Filofoskij parokhod”: god 1922-i. Istoriograficheskiie etjudy (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo universiteta, 2002). Specific groups of émigrés – academic, ethnic, artistic, etc. – are the subject of special studies: Hauke Janssen, Russische Ökonomen in Deutschland, 1910–1933 (Marburg: Metropolis, 2004); on literary circles: Amory Burchard, Klubs der russischen Dichter in Berlin 1920–1941. Institutionen des literarischen Lebens im Exil (München: Otto Sagner, 2001); Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Thomas Urban, Nabokov in Berlin (Berlin: Proyläen, 1999); Dieter E. Zimmer, Nabokovs Berlin (Berlin:

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Nicolai, 2001); Daniela Rippl (ed.), Vladimir Nabokov – Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (Berlin: Alexander Fest, 1998). Kul’tura russkoi diaspory: Vladimir Nabokov – 100. Materialy nauchoi konferentsii TallinnTartu, 14–17 ianvaria 1999 (Tallinn, 2000). In addition to the wellknown studies of R.C. Williams and Erich Volkmann, based on new archival materials: Leonid Pasternak v Rossii i Germanii. Iz muzeinykh i chastnich sobranii Moskvy, Vejmara, Marbakha i Oksforda (Moscow: Pinakoteka, 2001); Claudia Weiss, Das Russland zwischen den Zeilen. Die russische Emigrantenpresse im Frankreich der 1920er Jahre und ihre Bedeutung für die Genese der “Zarubezhnaia Rossiia” (Hamburg and Munich: Döllig und Galitz, 2000). On the political scene: André Liebich, From the Other Shore. Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambride, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Claudie Weill, Étudiants russes en Allemagne 1900–1914. Quand la Russie frappait aux portes de l’Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996); Istorichskaia nauka rossiiskoi emigratsii 20–30-kh gg. XX veka. Khronika (Moscow: AiroXX, 1998); G.S. Starodubtsev, Mezhdunarodno-pravovaia nauka rossiiskoi emigratsii, 1918–1939 (Moscow: Kniga i biznes, 2000); on the problem of raising children in the new environment abroad: Deti russkoi emigratsii. Kniga, kotoruiu mechtali i ne smogli izdat’ izgnanniki (Moscow: Terra, 1997). Lazar Fleishman, V tiskakh provokatsii. Operatsija “Trest” i russkaia zarubezhnaia pechat’ (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003); Oleg Zinger, Moskau – Berlin – Paris. Das Leben eines Malers (Leipzig: Reclam, 1995). For new evidence on the relationship and cooperation between Russian émigrés and some German milieus, especially the right wing: A.V. Okorokov, Fashizm i russkaia emigratsiia, 1920–1945 gg. (Moscow: Rusaki, 2002); Artem Lysenko, Golos izgnaniia. Stanovlenie gazet russkogo Berlina i ikh evoliutsiia v 1919–1922 gg. (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2000); Iurii Tsurganov, Neudavshiisia revansh. Belaia emigratsiia vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine (Moscow: Intrada, 2001); and especially Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).

CAROLA TISCHLER

German Emigrants in Soviet Exile: A Drama in Five Acts

Act 1: Exposition – the Route to the Soviet Union The principle of granting political asylum was firmly anchored in the Bolshevik consciousness. Many had themselves flown from the persecution of the tsarist empire and found refuge in other countries of Europe. As early as March 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee had ordered by decree that persons who were persecuted for political reasons in their home countries would be granted asylum. This decision was codified in Article 21 of the Soviet Constitution of July 1918. For the Bolsheviks, naturally, ‘political reasons’ meant revolutionary activity, as a constitutional amendment of 1929 made clear. The punishment threatened, however, had to be unusually high in order for the right of asylum to go into effect. The new Soviet constitution of 1936 recapitulated the requirement regarding the asylum law.1 The guarantees in this law had already gained significance in 1919 with the defeat of revolutionary uprisings in Hungary and Bavaria, when a number of the participants fled to Soviet Russia to escape persecution in their homelands. In the course of the twentieth century, more than 10,000 ‘revolutionary fighters’ were welcomed in the USSR as political emigrants by the International Red Aid of the USSR (MOPR SSSR) founded in 1922. 2 Most of these emigrants came from Poland, Bulgaria, Latvia, Germany and Rumania.3 Although some of the refugees stayed quite some time in the Soviet Union, the goal was not to grant permanent residence, but rather to take the persecuted away from the action for a period of time. They were often sent to recuperate and were armed with new 77

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revolutionary enthusiasm, and in some cases with new documents, in order to take up the fight again in their former countries. Some also completed classes at the Lenin School in Moscow, founded in 1926. The school focused particularly on the German section, since the Bolshevik revolutionaries still set their hopes on the German proletariat as Marx had – in spite of the defeat of the 1923 Hamburg Uprising. With the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933 the Soviet position of only granting asylum to those facing a long prison sentence or even the death penalty did not initially change. Since the Soviet leaders, like those of the German Communist Party (KPD), succumbed to the erroneous view that the National Socialists would only be in power for a short time, a mass emigration of those communists at risk was not regarded as desirable. Quite the contrary, both the Russian and German communist parties expected the revolutionary fervour to escalate in Germany, i.e. the cadres were needed in the country. Not long thereafter, however, the KPD leadership changed its mind. As the annihilation of the Communist Party progressed and the leaders themselves left the country, it was recognized that the emigration of Communist Party members should be supported.4 Acquiring entry permission to the Soviet Union was difficult, due to the visa requirement and the slow bureaucratic wheels of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat – but not hopeless. In the end, the asylum policy of the Soviet Union – at least as it pertained to the emigration of Communist Party members – was not as restrictive as was suggested by contemporary opinion and, consequently, also for a time in academic literature.5 The propaganda of the Soviet Union itself helped propagate this image since the fear that events in Germany could lead to mass migration to the Soviet Union did not only worry the officials of the foreign ministry. Economically speaking, the Soviet Union was not in a position to offer accommodation and subsistence to a large number of German refugees. The great movement of foreign skilled labourers – mainly from Germany, but also from America – who were recruited in the industrialization period following 1929, had shown that it was not sufficient to merely offer a job; it was also necessary to offer living conditions and wages at a level that would meet the expectations of workers from the West. The cost of the negative message from disappointed workers returning to the West was higher, from the Soviet Union’s perspective, than the benefits gained from the

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foreign labour. But a housing shortage as well as a hard currency shortage continued to dominate the Soviet economy. In addition, the economic and social isolation of the Soviet Union from the early 1930s had an effect on opinions. This development, taken together with immigration pressure from Germany and the overly burdensome Soviet bureaucracy, led to the perception that Soviet policy was restrictive. This was indeed what the largest group by far of immigrants from Germany, the Jews, experienced. And although the Soviet Union as a country was not of much interest to German Jews who wanted to leave their home, the scant employment opportunities in Germany and other Western countries to which they could emigrate kept the USSR as an option. As they had generally not fought for revolutionary change, they were denied the status of political emigrants in the USSR. Apart from the special case of a group of about sixty doctors and their family members, who were granted admission through the intermediation of the Commissioner for Health, Kaminskii, no Jewish organization succeeded in persuading the USSR to receive a large number of refugees.6 In contrast, a number of individuals – Jews and non-Jews alike – succeeded in seeking asylum in the Soviet Union by other means than through the party. In most cases they already had professional connections with Soviet institutions or advocates who had contacts to prominent or influential Soviet figures. Thanks to the earnings from their activity, especially in the areas of science and culture which they promised to the USSR, they obtained entry visas and were assigned occupations corresponding to their education. On this basis, mathematicians, physicists, medical practitioners, musicians, architects and others made their livelihoods in the Soviet Union. The exact number of such people is not known, but it may have been around a hundred. By far the largest group of emigrants was made up of KPD members and their families. The requirement that only those threatened with a death or prison sentence could have the status of political emigrants was soon abandoned. In addition the rule that one could emigrate only with the permission of the Central Committee lost its validity with the break-up of the party structure. KPD members took various routes to the Soviet Union: writers, for example, stayed in the country after participating in the Writers’ Congress of 1934; those involved with theatre stayed after the Theatre-Olympiad; tourists looked for a job at their own expense and requested emigration

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permission ex post; children of illegal workers in Germany were sent alone to the Soviet Union; and Party functionaries participated in conferences or congresses and were assigned new tasks. Entreaties to the Red Cross by simple Party members and their families were approved and visas were prepared through the diplomatic offices of other countries. For Party functionaries, the Comintern regulated the formalities. The numerous people who had worked in the most diverse institutions before 1933 and became emigrants against their will also deserve mention. These included many German technical experts, who had been attracted to the expanding Soviet market during the world-wide Great Depression and no longer wanted to return to Nazi Germany. All in all, the biggest German communist exile colony arose in the Soviet Union in the first three years after 1933. Based on estimates, the KPD representation at the Comintern suggested there were about 4,600 emigrants in mid-1936. In contrast, the estimated number of exiled communists in the remaining European countries at this time amounted to only 2,000 people.7 Act II: Plot Development – the Years of Settling in, 1933 to 1936 Although the instructions to the MOPR called for the new emigrants to be housed in the provinces as much as possible, the majority ultimately remained in Moscow. The housing situation was very tense here, but the capital offered the most employment possibilities for the Germans. Germans working in the provinces in the 1930s were primarily those who had come as skilled labourers and had no desire to return to Germany after 1933.8 Some of the Germans living in the USSR in the 1930s had already seen the country through participation in congresses, tourist trips or work assignments in the 1920s and had thus developed some insight into the lifestyle. For most, however, this was their first contact and thus it entailed some adjustment difficulties. The positive image of the workers’ and farmers’ state, created by the KPD and the supportive press, had to be reconciled with the realities the emigrants met: poor living conditions, rationed food supplies and long queues at the food shops, stray children and old beggars, a different culture leading to different behaviour, unbelievable bureaucratic difficulties and, last but not least, a

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totally foreign language. Naturally, adjusting to all of this required enormous effort. The writer Hedda Zinner, who had come to Moscow together with her husband, Fritz Erpenbeck, from their exile in Prague early in 1935, wrote the following in one of her first reports about the mood on the 1 May holiday: ‘It is lovely to wander through the streets and look at the shops. They are also all dressed up and decorated. The colourful displays of goods are not advertisements in our sense. What for anyway? If someone wants to buy something, they do it anyway . . .’ In her account of her time in exile, which was written in the German Democratic Republic before 1975, but could only be published after 1989, she added this passage: I wrote these lines back then simply in the intensity of the moment. Today I ask myself if anyone believes, can believe, the accuracy of these observations. Those windows covered in red paper, with the production targets of the plan, photos of the best workers, adorned with portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Marx and Engels, were ugly, hiding the scarcity. But I didn’t think of them this way. It would be wrong to accuse me of immediately justifying to myself the deplorable state of affairs I encountered. If one presumes such an attitude, it would be responsible for everything. But such simplifications are not correct. I came from capitalist countries and had often enough stood in front of beautiful, extravagant displays, intended to lure in shoppers. But I often couldn’t buy anything in these countries, although I was hungry. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t much, but what there was, you could buy in plenty. That’s why the shop windows, which had nothing to do with shop windows in the usual sense, seemed pleasant to me.9

There was hardly anyone who wanted to leave the country at that time. The persecution in Germany made a return home impossible and the restricted employment options in most other émigré countries made them untenable alternatives. Moreover, in spite of all the difficulties mentioned, the Soviet Union’s trump card was, on the one hand, the manifold employment possibilities which were offered to Germans and, on the other hand, the tremendous enthusiasm in the 1930s for building socialism that had infected most of them. All the problems that had to be overcome could, in many cases, be rightly blamed on the backwardness of the tsarist times. The housing question was resolved for the different emigrants in various ways. The Comintern owned an out-of-service hotel in

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the centre of Moscow, the legendary Hotel Lux, which was used as housing quarters for its leading functionaries.10 Other colleagues could live in another hotel on Gorkii Street which was also owned by the Comintern. In addition the MOPR, which maintained its own emigrants’ house for approximately 200 people, also rented rooms in many Moscow hotels in which emigrants lived on a shortor even long-term basis. In general, various places of work also owned the houses adjacent to their business. It was very difficult to find accommodation on the normal housing market due to the overcrowding of the city. Finding a permanent room in a communal apartment – even a very small one – was a great stroke of luck. In the worst cases, people could live in rooms which became available for short periods, and hence had to adjust to a year-long nomadic existence. To relieve the situation dachas (summer houses) in the area surrounding Moscow were used, which were unoccupied in the summer months, but which, to some extent, became permanent living quarters. The majority of Soviet citizens fared no better, which eased the emigrants’ acceptance of the situation. The international focus of the communist movement did indeed open up opportunities for the emigrants, which would not have been available in other countries of emigration. Alone the Communist International, including its affiliated sub-organizations, offered a diverse field of activities, not only for its leading functionaries. The enormous amount of paper that the Comintern produced required the maintenance of an extensive editorial, writing and translation apparatus. The same structures existed in the Communist Youth International, the International Revolutionary Theatre Alliance, the International Red Cross, the International Workers Assistance Organization, the International Agricultural Institute and the Red Union International, all of which had their headquarters in Moscow. Whereas at the Lenin School, cadres were educated for illegal activities, the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West prepared the communist emigrants for activities in the lower and middle party echelons.11 The emigrants could also utilize their education and experience at the State Radio Committee, which since 1929 had been producing, among other programs, a German-language program, or at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, which dealt with the international research and publication of works of the classical Marxist writers. The German section of the ‘Publishing Association of Foreign Workers (VEGAAR)’ offered the group of German-speaking

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writers publication and employment opportunities, as did the two exile periodicals published in Moscow: Das Wort and Internationale Literatur. In addition, the existence of a German-speaking national minority in the Soviet multi-ethnic state meant that several Germanlanguage newspapers were published in the USSR (in Moscow: Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung; in Leningrad: Rote Zeitung), and that the émigré plan to develop a German-language National Theatre in the capital of the German Volga republic could be pursued.12 For those who had already worked in this system of communist organizations in Germany, nothing much changed apart from the location. The foreignness of the country was at first more difficult for the family members who had also emigrated, although they were the ones who adjusted more quickly to daily life. The existence of the German minority mitigated many problems. German publications were part of this, but the German Karl-Liebknecht-School in Moscow, for example, also played a role: in the 1930s almost a third of the school was composed of emigrant children (and teachers). Furthermore, German was one of the most widely taught foreign languages at that time. The ‘Ernst Thälmann’ club for foreign workers had also already existed since the beginning of the 1920s as an emigrant social club. Frequented for a time mainly by skilled labourers, in the 1930s it became the meeting place of the German emigrant community in Moscow. Integration into Soviet life took different forms, depending on personality, acquaintances and working environment. In addition, the level of political involvement differed drastically. The usual procedure in the communist movement of transferring to the party of the respective country of residence did not apply initially to KPD emigrants because of a halt on new members by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in force since 1933. Hitherto, foreigners had always managed to join the CPSU, but in 1935, when several of these foreign party members were stigmatized as ‘spies’, ‘saboteurs’ or ‘class enemies’ in the spree of arrests after the Kirov murder, disquiet arose more than anywhere within the Comintern. Those accused had, after all, been recommended to join the CPSU and now those who had proposed them fell under suspicion. This led to the inspection of all party members in the echelons of the Comintern in all foreign communist parties. A commission decided for each country whether to support a transfer to the CPSU after the lifting of the ban on new members. At the same time, in March 1936, the secretariat of the Comintern

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announced a resolution on political emigration, stating that a great number of emigrants should leave the Soviet Union: namely those who had travelled into the country without permission from the Central Committee or those who faced no particularly severe persecution in their home country; but above all those who had made themselves suspicious to the Party in one way or another, whether through complications with their daily lives, which was seen as a lack of loyalty to the country, or through membership of earlier factional groups.13 The inspection of the KPD, which was carried out by a commission chaired by Walter Dittbender, took several months during 1936. In the autumn, Dittbender produced a list of people who should be sent back to Germany. They included in part the three groups mentioned above, but also trustworthy members of the German Communist Party. In this way the KPD hoped to strengthen the shattered KPD in Germany. The vigour of the Great Terror, however, meant that these plans were derailed by subsequent events. Act 3: Climax – the Terrible Years of 1937 and 1938 Although individual German emigrants had already been arrested in the years prior to 1936, the German émigrés first became aware of the Stalinist Terror with the first show trial in August 1936. Initially it was primarily the party leadership which panicked as a result of its connections to the accused in these show trials, of whom five were members of the KPD.14 It was the period in which meetings were taking place across the whole country pursuing excessive vigilance of the ‘enemies’.15 At this time, most people – including the German KPD exiles – were convinced by the official communiqués. And if someone else was arrested, the recriminations of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) were legitimized. If someone – or indeed a loved one – was arrested, this was explained as an error due to the threatening or complicated situation which would soon be cleared up. Little by little, as the situation deteriorated, the truth came out, among emigrants as well, that the Terror was unjustified. The huge operation, which was carried out at the same time as the show trials, targeted quite specific groups of citizens, such as specific nationalities or ‘former people’ (byvshie liudi) who were potentially ill-disposed to the Soviet regime. The latter included

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former landowners or wealthy farmers, tsarist officials, White officers, social revolutionaries and mensheviki, as well as clergy. The reach and the means of its implementation had the effect, however, that more or less every group of citizens felt threatened by the Terror. The outwardly observed arbitrariness of the arrests, seemingly to fulfil quotas, also induced fear among German emigrants and in consequence social fragmentation and denunciation. Party life was disrupted; the emigrant community which had functioned as a selfsufficient group was fractured and ultimately almost annihilated by the Terror. With the decrease in arrests in the summer of 1938, over 70 per cent of the German emigrants had been directly affected by the Terror.16 It was – as far as we can tell today – primarily two letters from the central administration of state security of the NKVD, and one directive, which led to the arrests of the Germans. The first directive, dated 14 February 1937, was targeted against the suspected or real Trotskyites.17 An outline of the foreign organizations of the German Trotskyites is attached. The second directive, dated 2 April 1937, concerns the February-March assembly of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and predicts fascist activity on USSR soil.18 It also refers to the imminence of the so-called German operation. NKVD directive number 00439, of 25 July 1937, required that lists be compiled of those Germans who were currently working, or had previously worked, in armaments factories, factories with armaments divisions or in railroad industries; they were then to be arrested within five days. This included emigrants who still held German citizenship. Political emigrants with Soviet citizenship – and this would have been the majority at this point – were explicitly excluded. Three aspects of the directive, however, pointed to particular dangers for the emigrants. For each German emigrant with Soviet citizenship a memorandum ‘regarding clarification of the issue of arrest’ was to be prepared by August after evaluation of the incriminating evidence. Moreover, at the same time, a record was to be prepared of all Germans working in other industrial areas, in the agricultural sector or for the Soviet authorities. And finally a passage of the directive refers to the danger of becoming involved that involved everyone: ‘In the course of the investigation newly uncovered German agents – spies, saboteurs, and terrorists of Soviet or foreign citizenship – are to be arrested immediately, irrespective of their professional position.’19 Directed at first at Germans who possessed German citizenship, this decree increasingly targeted the Soviet

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Germans and their associates as well, so that in time more than 70,000 people were caught and imprisoned by this operation. For the German anti-fascists who fell under the wheels of the Soviet Terror, the situation was incomprehensible for they felt a strong empathy with this socialist country. But the inability of the anti-fascist exiles to reflect on these events later is also inexplicable. Most emigrants, whether affected by the Terror or not, later found a home in the GDR. A return to Germany during the Terror years was contemplated by very few emigrants – as far as we can ascertain today. On the contrary, a conspicuous number attempted to participate in the Spanish Civil War. This seemed to be the perfect escape from the Soviet Terror for the communists who could not abandon their ideals. For the family members left behind – mainly women and children – imprisonment also meant harrowing separation. Jäkel, who as the successor of the imprisoned Dittbender acted as KPD spokesman for the political emigrants, formulated the sentiment in a report to the party leadership as follows: The mood of a part of the comrades has been unusually aroused. They have been shocked and depressed by the many arrests. If one meets another, he says, ‘You’re still alive?’ If the comrades in our office come and count their contributions, they say: ‘Ah, your membership list is shrinking too! How many left? Still a dozen?’ and ‘Now you’re open just two days a week? We’re amazed that you haven’t already closed entirely!20

If accommodation was linked to the husband’s job, wives often had to look for another place to live. Many also lost their jobs or had to accept less desirable and badly paid work. Support payments from the Red Cross were discontinued, and the affected could hope for little help from the KPD. Many had to sell the few belongings they had brought with them from Germany or had acquired over the years. Wives of those arrested could count on the solidarity of other prisoners’ wives – as well as, in some cases, the wives of the non-arrested. Only a few separated from their imprisoned partners. New partnerships, which were sometimes embarked upon, were primarily for the security which this offered both the children and themselves. The queues in front of the Moscow prisons in which the relatives waited hours or days for, initially, information about their loved ones and, later, in order to make payments, are well documented. German political emigrants were also in the queues,

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just as some endeavoured to visit their husbands in the camps. Many also wrote despairing letters to the German diplomatic office, or more often to the Soviet authorities, in an effort to prove the innocence of their relatives.21 Although petitions were usually unsuccessful, they at least had the effect of confronting despondency with action. For some the situation was so difficult to bear that they went mad or committed suicide.

Act 4: Turning Point – the Years of German-Soviet Friendship, 1939 to 1941 With the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939 and the subsequent division of Poland after the invasion of German, and somewhat later Soviet troops, Germany and the Soviet Union became neighbours. At the same time the new ‘friends’ agreed not to become involved in the domestic politics of the other country – in Germany the communist persecution continued, and the USSR carried on determining for itself its treatment of German emigrants. There was no special cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of the interior ministries of both countries, aiming, for instance, for the extradition of German anti-fascists from the USSR. On the contrary, in Germany there was no desire for the return of active communists or Jewish emigrants; politics was entirely aimed at expelling such groups of people from Germany or isolating them from society. Nevertheless, the pact caused the German Ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner Count von der Schulenburg, to concern himself anew with the release of citizens of the German Reich. In addition to the roughly 3,500 ‘returnees from Russia’, who were registered in Germany after arriving from the USSR from 1934 until the autumn of 1939, several hundred Germans were also sent back to Germany from Soviet prisons after February 1937.22 The forced expulsion of foreigners who had had their visas revoked took place from early 1937, predominantly in the border regions or areas with particular registration systems. The second directive of April 1937 contained instructions on this topic. The local NKVD administration were told by the central administration: to carry out, over the course of half a year, operative and preventative measures, in order to remove from the USSR all German and other

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foreign citizens, who are suspected of whatever scale of espionage or counterrevolutionary activity. The German citizens who are to be removed from the USSR and, if necessary, to be forcefully imprisoned and deported, include all German citizens registered with the militia except political émigrés, whose cases will be dealt with separately.23

After the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact there were still almost 500 German citizens on the list of prisoners which the German representation in Moscow had compiled. Schulenburg hoped the new circumstances would bring about an accelerated release of these people. An increasing number of Germans were deported in the first months of the pact period, who were now – since Poland no longer existed – delivered directly to the German authorities; among them were, as in previous years, anti-fascist emigrants, who were immediately taken into ‘protective custody’ in Germany. The German diplomatic service, although it had received instructions not to issue such people entry visas into Germany, did not want to hamper the overall process. Also, for some people, the embassy had no precise data and could not therefore produce an assessment in line with the Gestapo’s directives. From 1939 to 1941, besides approximately a thousand free returnees, about 350 people were deported from Soviet prisons to Germany. In foreign affairs both countries also adapted themselves to the new circumstances, which for the USSR meant an end to its anti-fascist propaganda. The KPD leadership was involved in the decision-making processes as little as the Comintern – they were merely to execute what the Soviet party leadership demanded. It is clear that the new line, which led many doubtful leftists in Western Europe to break with the Soviet Union for good, threw the KPD into confusion over it legitimacy. It worked hard at its communiqués, in order to save at least part of its anti-fascism, but it had to give in to the pressure passed on through the Comintern leadership. After month-long discussions the KPD managed to force itself to find a political platform which was to guide further political orientation.24 The objective of this document was to exploit the official friendship between both countries, in order to anchor the KPD in Germany. It shows the completely incorrect assessment of the situation in Germany by the exiled leadership of the KPD, which since the arrest of leading KPD functionaries in France in September 1939, and the start of the Second World War, had been controlled from Moscow. The KPD also hoped to re-strengthen its position within

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the Comintern, which had been declining continuously since 1933. Both objectives failed. The only success the KPD had during this pact period was in carrying out political training sessions. Since the beginning of the Terror, an independent German party life could no longer exist. The fear was too great that the people one met would be arrested a short time later, or that gatherings could be interpreted as fascist espionage networks. Now, in 1940, the party leadership once again called together its emigrants living in Moscow and the surrounding area. These training courses were aimed at reinstating those Party members who had been dispersed and made insecure through the Terror. They were to be prepared for later tasks in Germany, even if the KPD thought a return to Germany was impossible at this point. Additionally, it appeared necessary to explain the Soviet policies of the period to the emigrants. Naturally there was also great confusion among the simple KPD emigrants about the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Some thought it was a tactical manoeuvre of the Soviet Union in order to keep itself – at least at first – out of the world war. In this case, the pact seemed justified to them, in that it served to protect and strengthen the USSR. Others believed in an actual convergence of the two political systems. Those who were active as anti-fascists, be it as writers or as editors for newspapers, magazines or radio, had to tone down their comments – anti-fascist opinions were no longer popular. Instead, they wrote primarily about internal Soviet themes or produced translations. Some could adjust themselves well to the new situation; others fell into a creative crisis. But the demand for German teachers increased, since the contacts between both countries was quickly re-intensified after years of disagreement in all areas – economics, science and culture. The new relationship had the effect that a few emigrants took up their connections to their families in Germany again, whether by means of the normal postal service or by transmitting a message via those travelling between the countries. In addition, contact to the German embassy in Moscow was no longer forbidden. The KPD did want to restrict such relationships, but it had no way of controlling them, let alone eliminating them. A few wives of arrested KPD members tried to return to Germany. But it was not only the GermanSoviet relationship that played a role in this. A decree from late 1939 which was provoked by the Soviet-Finnish winter war was the key trigger. The Soviet Union had so far been able to stay out of the

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Second World War, but the refusal of Finland to comply with Soviet demands after signing an assistance and trade agreement with the USSR, provoked the Red Army assault on Finland in November 1939, and as a result the war. In this context all those who did not possess Soviet citizenship were evacuated from Moscow (and other large cities). The Soviet authorities even presented some German emigrants with the decision either to participate in the evacuations or to return to Germany. Since the people had lived in the Soviet Union long enough to recognize that life in the province would be much more difficult for them than in Moscow, several opted for the second alternative. The changes resulting from the new foreign policy situation certainly had significant effects on the life of the German emigrants, but even more so did the internal political situation, marked by an abatement of the Terror. Some historians speak of this time as the first ‘thaw’. In December 1938 Ezhov was relieved of his function as Commissar for Internal Affairs by Beriia. Shortly afterward it was conceded that mistakes had been discovered in the arrests. Among the thousands set free at this time were many Germans. The NKVD released imprisoned German emigrants mostly in the months from December 1938 to April 1939 and November 1939 to March 1940.25 Although individual people were still arrested during this time, the release of prisoners contributed to the feeling that the Terror was over, in spite of the fact that these people were required to remain silent regarding their imprisonment. Nevertheless, a whole set of details about the prison conditions and the unjustified recriminations began to emerge. Most of them applied directly to the KPD for renewed Party membership. After initial delays and insecurities, the KPD leadership re-established Party membership in most cases. Those who still had imprisoned relatives could continue to believe in an apparent mistake that would soon be cleared up. How could they return to Germany in this situation?

Act 5: Catastrophe – the Years of German-Soviet War, 1941 to 1945 For German emigrants the German Wehrmacht attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 was double-edged. On the one hand, it re-established the old positions of the anti-fascists. On the other hand, the emigrants were the same nationality as the country

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that once again was being bitterly fought by the Soviet Union. The emigrants were confronted with this dichotomy again in the War’s aftermath. Along with the external threat, the internal Terror escalated again, although this time it was more focused than in the 1930s and was above all concentrated against potential opponents of the system. Across the board Soviet citizens of German nationality were suspected of collaboration with the Germans, which led finally to the break-up of the German Volga Republic and to the deportation of the German minority to Siberia and Central Asia.26 Those German emigrants who were still in Moscow and were not suitable for warrelated work were also caught up in the wave of deportations. Many emigrants – above all children, women and the elderly – had, however, already left Moscow for the east in the huge evacuation that was initiated soon after the War began. Approximately 14 to 19 million Soviet citizens were on the move in the initial months, up to 10 million were officially evacuated and up to 9 million left their homes on their own initiative.27 Also affected by arrests, especially in the early months of the War, were persons of German nationality. While the emigrants distinguished themselves from the Soviet Germans, the Soviet authorities saw no reason for a difference in treatment, and a number of emigrants were arrested, primarily in the days immediately after the beginning of the War and in the middle of September. The KPD had been informed about forty-two cases by the end of December 1941, of which a large number were women.28 Information on this subject that has come to light indicates that it was mainly relatives of prisoners or those who had once been imprisoned themselves who were affected by the new repression. They were classified as ‘socially-dangerous elements’. The treatment of these prisoners in the prison camps in which many of the German emigrants were held also deteriorated. Germans were no longer allowed to perform special work, which could have made their difficult lives easier; and they were not set free throughout the duration of the War – even if their prison sentence was over. Sometimes they were separated within the prison camps. There was also a danger that for trifling reasons they would be sent to the detention room or, in extreme cases, even be subjected to a new trial. All of these measures persisted while the course of the War was uncertain. After the situation on the war front had become less tense, the special treatment of the imprisoned Germans was relaxed once again.

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In addition to the arrests early in the War and the intensification of the prison regime, there was a third threat aimed at Soviet Germans, but which affected individual emigrants –being drafted into the Trudarmiia, the labour army. In February 1942, the State Defence Committee, the highest governing body during the War, ordered the mobilization of all German males between seventeen and fifty years of age, who had resettled in the Soviet Union – they were too be labourers for the duration of the War. They built new railway lines and factories, worked in the forests or in the mines; they were housed in camps and received the same food as prisoners; refusing to work meant the death penalty. In the autumn of the same year a decree widened the pool of people to include women between sixteen and forty-five years of age, and men between fifteen and fifty-five. Other nationalities with links to Germany, such as Romanians, Hungarians, Italians and Finns, as well as Chinese, Koreans, Greeks, Calmucks or Crimean Tatars, were included in the mobilization. The number in the labour army amounted to about 400,000.29 For those affected, there was barely any difference between these workers and the prisoners. They were sometimes located in the same camp complex. However, for the German antifascists, a significant difference did exist, since workers could be freed from their situation with the help of the Comintern, whereas prisoners could not. It was primarily young emigrants who had resettled who were now called to the labour army. Registering with the KPD meant the KPD could organize a release via the Comintern. The prerequisite was that the emigrants were classified as cadre reservists. It is not known how many emigrants were affected by the call to the labour army. Not all – recalling the experience of the Terror years – would have appealed to the German Party for help. Life in Siberia and Central Asia during the evacuation or the deportation was hard for all – Soviet citizen or German alike. The only advantage was that they were at least far from the combat zone. But climate, food, life and working conditions were so unusual and the feeling of being isolated so widespread, that many tried to return to Moscow. For part of the Comintern, who were likewise evacuated in the first winter to Kuibyshev (today’s Samara) and Ufa, this endeavour succeeded by early 1942. Bit by bit all those needed to work were ordered back to Moscow. The Germans had been eager to participate in the anti-fascist movement since the beginning of the War. After early reservations among the Soviets

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they were also integrated into the propaganda system. Above all, the German emigrants’ radio stations made a significant impact. Foreign service was expanded significantly and the Comintern established its own broadcast stations.30 Emigrants wrote articles for pamphlets, worked as translators for prisoner-of-war problems or as anti-fascist teachers in camps for prisoners of war. They were even trained as parachutists in order to work underground in Germany. They wrote and spoke to German soldiers and to the German public over the radio, over loudspeakers in the trenches and through books or prisoner-of-war newspapers – with the aim of ending the War. They were decisively involved in the activity of the National Committee of a Free Germany, which was founded in mid-1943 at the instigation of the Soviet Union.31 And they turned their ‘face to Germany’,32 by training their own comrades who had survived and been dispersed by the Terror, as well as new cadres from the masses of German prisoners of war, for tasks in Germany. Epilogue The Stalinist Terror would be replaced for the German emigrants by the Nazi Terror which was committed during the War on Soviet soil. The neglect of the Terror years, however, is among the congenital defects of the GDR. The members of the three initiative groups which arrived in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SOZ) at the end of April 1945 from Moscow, were not the only ones who determined the politics of the early SOZ/GDR. But they found themselves in a disproportionately strong starting position and attained decisive positions little by little during the tumultuous times when power in the Party was decided. They knew the Soviet mentality and ruling techniques and had better contacts. They required those returnees who came to the GDR from camps and exile, especially after Stalin’s death, to keep their experiences secret. And they themselves were unable to learn from the mistakes of Stalinism. This suppression did not fracture the GDR. But the failure to reappraise the damage – whether the reappraisal was marked by coming to terms with the Terror or by the survivors’ silence and sense of guilt – at a time when the immediate threat was over, was a symbol for the system’s lack of credibility. Translated by Megan Harris and Felicitas Macgilchrist

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1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

Cf. Iurii Fel’shtinskii, K istorii nashei zakrytosti. Zakonodatel’nye osnovy sovetskoi immigratsionnoi i emigratsionnoi politiki (Moscow: Terra, 1991), pp. 15–16. The MOPR (Mezdunarodnaia organizatsiia pomoshchi bortsam revoliutsii) or International Red Aid was a solidarity organization affiliated with the communist movement, which above all provided material and moral support to political prisoners and their families in capitalist countries. Cf. James Martin Ryle, International Red Aid 1922– 1928: The Founding of a Comintern Front Organisation (Atlanta, 1967); for the German Red Aid (Rote Hilfe), see the detailed dissertation by Nikolaus Brauns, Schafft Rote Hilfe! Geschichte und Aktivitäten der proletarischen Hilfsorganisation in Deutschland (1919–1938) (Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein, 2003). Cf. Galina M. Isaeva et al., Moskva internatsional’naia (Moscow, 1977), pp. 98–9. This and the following details are based to a large extent on the research for my 1996 Ph.D. dissertation, Carola Tischer, Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil 1933 bis 1945 (Münster: Lit, 1996); for new literature on exile in the USSR see the bibliography in Simone Barck (ed.), Jahrhundertschicksale. Frauen im sowjetischen Exil (Berlin: Lukas, 2003), pp. 248–57. Cf. Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung, p. 20. Cf. Carola Tischler, ‘The Emigration of German-Jewish Physicians to the Soviet Union after 1933’, in Susan Gross Solomon (ed.), SovietGerman Medical Relations between the Wars (Toronto, in print). Cf. Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung, p. 97. On this topic see in particular the regional study by Wilhelm Mensing, Von der Ruhr in den GULag: Opfer des Stalinschen Massenterrors aus dem Ruhrgebiet (Essen, 2001). As an example of technical workers in Moscow, see Sergei Zhuravlev, ‘Malenkie liudi’ i ‘bol’shaia istoriia’. Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-ch – 1930-ch gg (Moscow, 2000). (German translation under the title ‘Ich bitte um Arbeit in der Sowjetunion.’ Das Schicksal deutscher Facharbeiter im Moskau der 30er Jahre, Berlin, 2003). Hedda Zinner, Selbstbefragung (Berlin: Der Morgen, 1989), p. 12. On the ‘difficulties with the truth’ of German writers who lived in Soviet exile, cf. Anne Hartmann, Traum und Trauma Sowjetunion: Deutsche Autoren über ihr Leben im sowjetischen Exil, in Dagmar Herrmann and Astrid Volpert (eds), Traum und Trauma. Russen und Deutsche im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2003), pp. 143–200. Cf. Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (Munich: Piper, 1978); Arkadi Vaksberg, Hôtel Lux: Les parties frères au service de l’Internationale

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11.

12.

13. 14.

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communiste (Paris: Fayard, 1993). Nowadays the Lux is a synonym for Soviet exile, although as a temporary residence for leading functionaries of all communist parties (‘pied-à-terre of the world revolution’), it only played a minimal role in the German exile of the 1930s. Research on the Comintern has produced an abundance of new knowledge since the opening of the Comintern archives in 1991, which is reflected in numerous Russian publications (of materials), and also in the publications of the corresponding countries. It would be presumptuous to name a selection. Representative writings on this topic can be found in the contributions and suggestions in the Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (1993 ff.) which since 2000/2001 also contains the International Newsletter of Communist Studies. A long-term research project for the digitalization of the Comintern’s inventory has recently been completed: www.cominternonline.com A good overview of the numerous artistic and political activities is still offered in the – in other respects outdated – volume: Kunst und Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil, vol. 1 (I/II): Exil in der UdSSR (Leipzig: Reclam, 1989). New research above all on the MarxEngels-Lenin Institute Stalinismus und das Ende der ersten MarxEngels-Gesamtausgabe (1931–1941). Contributions to Marx-Engels research, N.F., Special vol. 3 (Berlin, 2001); on theatre: Peter Diezel, “Hier brauchen sie uns nicht”: Maxim Vallentin und das deutschsprachige Exiltheater in der Sowjetunion 1935–1937. Briefe und Dokumente (Berlin, 2000); on film: Günter Agde, Kämpfer: Geschichte eines Films und seiner Macher (Berlin, 2001) as well as the journal Filmexil: Filmexil Moskau (Berlin, 2004); and on radio: Carola Tischler, ‘Funk in Fesseln: Der deutschsprachige Rundfunk aus Moskau zwischen revolutionärem Anspruch und staatlicher Reglementierung (1929–1941)’ in Karl Eimermacher (ed.), West-östliche Spiegelungen. Neue Folge. Deutsche und Russen im 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, in print). The text of the resolution is printed in Peter Huber, Stalins Schatten in die Schweiz. Schweizer Kommunisten in Moskau: Verteidiger und Gefangene der Komintern (Zurich: Chronos, 1994), p. 407. These five people were Fritz David, Alexander Emel, Hans Stauer, Valentin Olberg und Nathan Lurje. None came from Germany, but all had been active in Germany in the 1920s and had consequently been transferred in part into positions of much responsibility in the KPD. The party chairmanship of the KPD was held provisionally by Wilhelm Pieck after the arrest of the chairman Ernst Thälmann. After the power struggles of the years 1933–5 a new Central Committee was elected at the Brussels Party conference of the KPD in 1935. They consisted of Ernst Thälmann (nominally), Fritz Heckert, Wilhelm

96

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Carola Tischler Pieck, Wilhelm Florin, Walter Ulbricht, Franz Dahlem, Paul Merker as well as the candidates Herbert Wehner and Anton Ackermann. An example of German exile is the protocol of a party meeting of German-language writers. See Reinhard Müller (ed.), Die Säuberung. Moskau 1936: Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991). Report by Paul Jäkel ‘Material zur Information’, 29 April 1938, in Luitwin Bies, ‘Deutsche Emigranten in der UdSSR. Two Documents’, in Marxistische Blätter 5, 1992, p. 53. ‘On the terrorist, saboteur and espionage activities of the German Trotskyites, being carried out on the orders of the Gestapo on the territory of the Union of SSR.’ The wording is printed in: Reinhard Müller, Herbert Wehner – Moskau 1937 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004); cf. also idem, Menschenfalle Moskau. Exil und stalinistische Verfolgung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001). ‘On the increasing activity of German spy organizations and special arrangements of the fascist party (the foreign and foreign policy section of the Anti-Comintern, on the intelligence service of the Schutzstaffeln, etc.) on the territory of the USSR’; cf. Nikita Okhotin and Arseni Roginski, on the history of the ‘“German operation” of the NKVD 1937–1938,’ in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2000/2001, pp. 89–125, here p. 95; in Russian: Nakazannyi narod. Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev, ed. by Memorial and Goethe Institute Moscow, Moscow 1999, pp. 35–75. The command appears in Reinhard Müller (with assistance from Nataliia Mussienko), ‘“Wir kommen alle dran”. Säuberungen unter den deutschen Politemigranten in der Sowjetunion (1934–1938)’, in Hermann Weber and Ulrich Mählert (eds), Terror. Stalinistische Parteisäuberungen 1936–1953 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), pp. 165–6. Bies, ‘Deutsche Emigranten’, p. 53. See also Reinhard Müller, ‘“Menschenopfer unerhört” – Eingaben und Briefe deutscher Emigrantinnen an Stalin, Molotow und andere’, in Barck et al. (eds), Jahrhundertschicksale, pp. 26–53. Cf. Hans Schafranek, Zwischen NKWD und Gestapo: Die Auslieferung deutscher und österreichischer Antifaschisten aus der Sowjetunion an Nazideutschland, 1937–1941 (Frankfurt am Main: ISP, 1990). Okhotin and Roginski, To History, p. 100. See Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung, pp. 145–7. Ibid., p. 157. Cf. the chaper by Viktor Krieger. Cf. Manfred Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion 1917–1991 (Munich: Beck, 1998), p. 634. ‘Namensliste über den Verbleib deutscher Parteimitglieder’, 30 December 1941; SAMPO-BArch: NL 4036/517, p. 8.

German Emigrants in Soviet Exile 29. 30.

31. 32.

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Cf. Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung, pp. 186–7. For the extensive literature on the labour army, see the chapter by Viktor Krieger. Cf. Carola Tischler, ‘Von Geister- und anderen Stimmen. Der Rundfunk als Waffe im Kampf gegen die Deutschen im Großen Vaterländischen Krieg’, in Karl Eimermacher (ed.), West-östliche Spiegelungen. Neue Folge. Deutsche und Russen im 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Fink, 2004). Cf. Jörg Morré, Hinter den Kulissen des Nationalkomitees. Das Institut 99 in Moskau und die Deutschlandpolitik der UdSSR 1943–1946 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001). A decree from the Secretariat of the EKKI of 15 December 1942 obligated the leading party functionaries ‘to fully turn their face to Germany in their work; to primarily concentrate their energy on multi-faceted practical help for the reconstruction and strengthening of the party at home, the party organization and the party leadership’. SAPMO BArch, NL 4036/542, p. 70.

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MANFRED ZEIDLER

The Strange Allies – Red Army and Reichswehr in the Inter-war Period

Introduction As the subject of this chapter is very diverse, only the most important aspects could be singled out, giving preference to an accentuating and more thesis-like presentation of the theme as opposed to a very differentiating one. Despite the wish to do justice to the German and the Russian side, the German perspective will after all prevail. Not least this has to do with the way one looks at the subject and sees the historic importance of the issue largely in its function as part of the secret German rearmament before 1933. Admittedly, this may run the risk of reducing the subject too much to a piece of German history and particularly of German military history within this epoch. First a few general remarks about the historical context of the subject. Looking at the rather eventful German-Russian relations, the period in question here, i.e. the time between the wars, belongs to the cooperative side of those relations. The other side, the confrontational one and uppermost in our general conscience, will be dealt with in other chapters. If we look at German-Russian relations between the creation of the German nation state in 1871 and its re-establishment in 1990, we see a constant sequence of confrontational and cooperative phases, of cold or hot war, even war of extermination, and strong, even intensive economic-technical cooperation, down to militarystrategic collaboration. We have therefore rarely known anything like non-dramatic inter-state ‘normality’, perhaps with the 99

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exception of a period during the Empire, but a constant series of extremes in one or other direction. Both countries are unable to feel or behave indifferently towards each other but always take a firm stand, and the changes in their relations are usually caused by external circumstances. Since German unification in 1990, the relationship is clearly moving in the direction of cooperation again – political, economic and, to a lesser extent, military. The emphasis in this contribution is on the relations, in particular the military ones, during the years of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933. Before, however, we should consider the situation before and after the historic dates which define our period. What were things like before and after? Let’s have a brief look at the military, and only the military, relations between both countries before 1918 and after 1933.

German-Russian Military Relations during the Empire and the Third Reich During the epoch of the Empire, i.e. between 1871 and 1918, there were two distinct periods, starting with the long period of peace prior to 1914. During this time, we see militarydiplomatic attaché relations as were common in the European world of states before 1914, i.e. relations with a good number of personal contacts, with regular reciprocal officers’ exchanges, even after the deterioration of political relations in the 1890s. The same applies to the other great German power, the AustroHungarian Empire. Young officers frequently travelled within their own armies before starting their general staff duties in order to improve their knowledge of languages. A prominent example was Erich Ludendorff, who travelled to Russia in 1894 immediately before taking up his duties at the Great General Staff (Großer Generalstab) and reported on this three month’s stay in his later military memoirs.1 The Russian side also had a number of wellknown military staff of the First World War, who had spent time in Germany or other European countries before 1914.2 According to the old military and dynastic bonds in both armies, sister units existed, as the legendary Alexander-Regiment in Berlin (named after Tsar Alexander I of Russia) and its Russian counterpart, the King Friedrich-Wilhelm von Preußen Regiment.

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During the decade before the First World War Russia’s military structure showed some conspicuous similarities to the German system, especially in respect of the central military apparatus. After losing the war against Japan in 1905 the general staff was released from its subordination to the Ministry of War and, following the Prussian-German example, became an independent institution immediately placed under the Emperor.3 The right of direct report was introduced for a considerable number of inspectors for each branch of the services, and for the heads of military districts, who were similar to the German Generalkommandos and were simultaneously governor-generals over their respective regions. To sum up it can be said that, as in Germany, the Russian system suffered from a multiplicity of officers with access to the throne and a lack of communication and coordination among them.4 Under the Chief of Staff, General F. F. Palitsyn, a protegé of the Tsar’s uncle Grand Duke Nicholas, from 1906 on German military thinking, especially in the operational field, exerted considerable influence on the younger Russian staff officers who were graduating from the imperial general staff academy at this time.5 The years 1914 to 1917 represented a phase of military conflict in the overall context of the First World War, whilst maintaining a sufficiently active diplomacy to achieve an armistice in December 1917 and a peace agreement in March 1918, the Treaty of BrestLitovsk, with Russia’s new Bolshevist regime. Moving on to the Third Reich after 1933. Nazi Germany saw three very different phases: the years 1933 to 1938 were a time of very fast-moving political alienation which, with the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, turned into a kind of cold war, i.e. a state of political tension and a growing propaganda war on both sides. There was no longer sufficient trust to sustain national securityrelevant military cooperation, and military relations reverted to routine or restricted attaché liaison meetings.6 The years 1939 to 1941 were a period of intense economic relations of strategic significance and a considerable transfer of military technology from Germany to Russia.7 These were not so much due to the neutrality and non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939, but began with the ‘Frontier and Friendship Agreement’ (Grenzund Freundschaftsvertrag), dated 28 September of the same year, following the joint occupation and separation of Poland. Never before or after did Germany and Russia have such close economic relations as during this short period between 1939 and 1941.8

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Finally, the years 1941 to 1945, as is well known, were marked by an uncompromising and total war of extermination lasting nearly four years, during which there was a complete inability to even begin to apply politics and diplomacy as was done during the First World War. The Weimar Republic Period 1919–1933: Outline and Evaluation We are now coming to our actual core subject – the period of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933. As mentioned at the outset, this subject, German-Russian military relations at this time, can, like most issues, be looked at from different angles. Two particular perspectives offer themselves which should be outlined briefly. One can look at it in the traditional sense of political and diplomatic history as part of German-Soviet relations. This was the older research perspective of the 1950s and 1960s with its main interest in aspects of foreign and revision policies, particularly in view of the common opponent, Poland. Its emphasis was placed on the actual peak period of the Rapallo policy during the first half of the 1920s and the main players on the German side were General von Seeckt and ambassador von Brockdorff-Rantzau.9 It concentrated therefore on a period during which the exclusive German-Russian revision policy was at its climax, but military relations were poor and of relatively little use. And – that’s the other view – one can look at this cooperation as part of the secret German rearmament before 1933 and therefore see it in a more military and arms-historical context. This tends to be the perspective of later research, not least due to the availability of source material as – at least to German researchers – diplomatic files of the foreign office were at our disposal earlier than military records from the Reichswehrministerium (German armed forces ministry). This perspective, which is also the author’s one, puts the main emphasis on the productive phase of secret German armament in the late 1920s and early 1930s when Stresemann’s Locarno policy was prevalent and the actual peak time of the Rapallo diplomacy was long gone.10 The revision policy played a much lesser role in this later phase of German-Soviet relations than it did during the height of Rapallo. In fact, both powers rather moved away from

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each other politically, whereas military relations only now reached their climax and their greatest intensity. It can indeed be said that only Locarno and its political and economic effects on Germany brought military relations with Russia to full fruition. Later in the chapter I will further discuss this quasi ‘dialectic’ connection between the Locarno policy and the German-Russian relations in the economic as well as the military field. The question of the viewing perspective is interlinked with a look at the historical verdicts of later times. This particular example of German-Russian military cooperation before 1933 demonstrates how greatly the historical evaluation is influenced by day-to-day politics and the political orientation of the time – in this case the verdict over the significance of cooperation by both parties. Let us now consider the few official voices from the National Socialist era, which are clearly depreciatory. The Nazis maintained the official historical myth that the Weimar Republic was pacifist through and through, pacifist ‘to the very bone’ and had Germany disarmed in accordance with the dictates of the Entente. National Socialism then took the sole credit for bringing Germany back to political and military power after 1933, almost from nothing. The secret rearmament efforts of the Republic were therefore officially tabooed or simply denied. Cooperation with the Soviet state in this field was regarded, as Göring’s permanent secretary Milch expressed it internally, as a ‘toy of no great use’ which had ‘more political than of military significance’.11 The two German sciences of history after 1945 also show that both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic passed largely minimizing judgements about the value and the significance of this cooperation.12 The identical verdicts, however, were guided by very different interests. Whereas the GDR’s main interest was to exonerate the Soviet state – its own political and ideological model – by denying any Soviet connection with German militarism, the West German post-war historiography above all tried to refute the ‘Rapallo myth’ forced by Britain, France and the USA after 1945 – a legend which aimed at bringing Rapallo, with its implications of revision policy, into a continuous line with German expansion endeavours between 1914 and 1939, and very much stressed the military component of German-Russian relations at the time. The young Federal Republic, with its wish to become integrated in the West, saw Locarno, i.e. Stresemann’s

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policy of peace and détente vis-à-vis the West, as the far more important and desirable historical point of reference than Rapallo. The GDR, however, celebrated Rapallo as the first successful example of the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence, but almost completely tabooed its military aspect.13 The Anglo-American science of history was the first after 1945 to have access to German documents and without doubt laid the groundwork in this field. At the same time, however, it mystified German-Russian military contacts by, for example, painting a highly exaggerated picture of secret German arms production in Russia.14 Not included in this are the excellent landmark studies of Hans W. Gatzke, John Erickson and Francis L. Carsten.15 Not until the years of perestroika, with a new assessment of their own national history, did Russian historians begin to touch on this highly delicate and long tabooed topic.16 Military Relations 1920–1933. Underlying Foreign and Military Policies. As it is a well-known subject, only a brief summary of the foreign policy basis for military relations of the time is necessary. Both powers came off badly from the 1919 Versailles peace treaty. Their joint anti-Versailles revisionism brought them together and gave rise to the slightly romantic idea of a German-Russian ‘companionship of misfortune’ (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), a term coined by Karl Radek, the Germany expert of the Comintern and one of Moscow’s secret emissaries during his early contacts with Berlin. The world and with it the Entente will unquestioningly see the growing of a German-Russian community of interests. Whatever the future has in store, either along revolutionary or counterrevolutionary lines.

Karl Radek wrote this in the autumn of 1920 for a brochure published in Germany.17 At that time Moscow was still hoping for a revolutionary variant of the German-Russian unification in the shape of a proletarian class alliance resulting in a Soviet-Germany. At the same time, the German bourgeois-conservative elite was still holding the reverse hope that, by conjuring up the general threat to Europe through Russian Bolshevism, the Entente would

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make military concessions to Germany. However, the Spa conference in the summer of 1920 confirmed the prohibitory provisions of Versailles, thereby crushing these hopes and leading to a complete U-turn in favour of cooperation with Soviet Russia. Two statements of General von Seeckt from the first half of 1920 clearly illustrate this. The first dates from January 1920 and declares: ‘We are prepared to be the bulwark against Bolshevism, in our own interest which is also that of the Entente. For this it should allow us the necessary arms.’18 The second, only shortly after, reads: ‘Only a firm union with Great Russia will allow Germany to regain its world hegemony. Even if the powers of the Entente fight this with all available means, our mutual interests will eventually bring about German-Russian unification by natural force.’19 Further development took the path of, in Radek’s terminology, the ‘counterrevolutionary’ variant of the German-Russian alliance, i.e. it was based on opposite political doctrines. For Moscow this meant stressing very highly vis-à-vis its imperialist competitors from the Entente the political differences of Germany as a bourgeoiscapitalist and therefore potentially imperialist state in order to avoid an anti-Soviet alliance of the European powers. The military vacuum Germany represented in the centre of Europe due to its disarmament in accordance with Versailles was seen as highly dangerous by Moscow and it did not hesitate to demand openly and plainly from Germany a resolute rearmament programme in contravention of the terms of the peace treaty. Neither ‘serving the allies to win points’, nor hope for help from the League of Nations, this ‘tool for the systematic humiliation of Germany’ would regain the country’s national greatness – although only ‘factors of power: dollars, dreadnoughts and aeroplanes’ could achieve this. This was written in Pravda in the autumn of 1926,20 in the style of the German-national opposition, was addressed to Berlin and therefore opposed Stresemann’s détente policy vis-à-vis the Entente powers. In other words: Germany must rearm so that Moscow could reap a twofold advantage: 1. 2.

To keep tensions up as high as possible on the imperialist side. To participate in the German rearmament efforts and use them for its own military gain.

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In this connection it’s only necessary to touch briefly on military policy basis for such cooperation. In the military sector, the main reasons (for an alliance) were the rigid arms limitations as laid down in Part V of the Treaty of Versailles, which only permitted Germany a poorly equipped regular army of 100,000 men. This meant almost inevitably losing contact with the international development of military technology. The point is that both countries were basically complementary. Germany was defeated in military terms and politically humiliated, but remained a great power as far as industry, science and technology were concerned. The Soviet system was victorious and successful in maintaining its self-esteem vis-à-vis the others but was greatly weakened economically and underdeveloped in science and technology. The German potential was there but remained unexploited because of political handcuffs. Russia had the political freedom of action but lacked the potential to make use of this freedom. Both countries faced the need for a new military start under difficult structural conditions, as well as changed political circumstances. We therefore see that there are sufficient structural reasons, independent of governments of varying party-political colours or individuals on both sides, to sustain the cooperation in the military field as well and thereby achieve stability and constancy.21 Military Relations 1920–1933: Methods of Cooperation We now come to the practicalities of military cooperation between 1920 and 1933, and its development during this time span. As mentioned earlier, two time phases can be clearly distinguished. First, the early ‘Rapallo phase’ of military cooperation from the first secret contacts in 1920 to about 1925/26: this phase includes the year 1923, the year of major crisis for the Weimar Republic which began with the occupation of the Ruhr area by French and Belgian troops. Germany, unable to defend itself with its small 100,000strong army, and without allies, finds itself in a desperate political and security situation. In February a military delegation under the chief of the clandestine general staff of the Reichsheer, the so-called Truppenamt, General Mayor Otto Hasse, went to Moscow for talks with his Soviet counterpart, Army Commander Pavel

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Lebedev, and his deputy Boris Shaposhnikov, in order to examine the possibility immediate military aid for Germany. A second delegation headed by the chief of staffs of the Army Ordnance Office (Heereswaffenamt) followed three months later and inspected the Russian armaments industry. In the summer of that year, the German attempt to win Moscow over for a security alliance in case of a Polish attack on the Reich failed. Moscow’s intermediary, the chief of the Soviet air combat forces, Arkadii Rozengol’ts, advised German chancellor Cuno, during a top secret meeting in a private Berlin flat, that Germany was far too weak in military terms at present to be considered by Moscow as an alliance partner. Both countries together would have to become strong again before an open confrontation with the Entente could be risked.22 This phase is characterized by the lack of success in most economic-military undertakings to produce arms under concession – mostly for two reasons: 1. 2.

Lack of financial resources. Serious problems with private sector partners called in by the German side because they followed their own commercial interests. Just one example was the aircraft manufacturer Junkers with a branch near Moscow which never really went into production because of economic problems, and went bankrupt as early as 1925.23

The second phase is the ‘Locarno phase’ of military cooperation after 1926: this phase is typified by a fairly successful cooperation in the areas of arms development and testing as well as training of military cadres. Arms trials at the German test sites – aircraft in Lipetsk, tanks in Kazan’, chemical weapons in Sikhanii near Vol’sk on the Volga – reached their peak in 1930 and 1931.24 The same applied to the extensive exchange of officers from both armies. One reason for this success was probably because any cooperation was purely between government bodies, mostly military, to the exclusion of all private sector partners, which created a structural symmetry between all parties involved. Another reason was the closer connection sought by German political and military bodies after 1926, and in particular the end of the long-lasting rivalry between the Foreign Ministry and the Army Command (Heeresleitung), which put German arms policies on a much broader footing than before.25

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How did this new quality of military cooperation become possible? The answer, as already mentioned, can be found in the keyword ‘Locarno’, quite the opposite to ‘Rapallo’ which stood for political alienation of the two countries. Locarno furthered military relations by loosening the Versailles terms and thereby considerably improved the German chances of rearmament. In practice this meant: 1. 2. 3.

4.

By clearing the Ruhr area in the summer of 1925, Germany regained its old arms industry centres in the west of the country. The liberating terms of the Paris aviation agreement in the spring of 1926 enabled Germany to at least develop military aircraft even if production was not yet possible. At the beginning of 1927, the ‘Inter-allied Military Control Commission’ withdrew from Germany where it had meticulously supervised the various stages of German disarmament since 1920. A fourth vital point is the economic consequences of Locarno for the Reich.

The Dawes Plan of 1924 led to a big inflow of capital into the country and therefore a brief but stormy period of prosperity in the late 1920s. This also widened the financial operating possibilities of government institutions which showed not least in the increase in public budgets. The arms budget alone, which nearly doubled between 1924 and 1928, demonstrated the increased room for manoeuvre for the armed services ministry in the field of material arms projects. Expenditure of the Army Ordnance Office for military research and development orders grew even more than the overall arms budget, with an increase of over 10 per cent of the reported budget total up to 1932.26 This enabled the placing of large development orders for new arms within the framework of the so-called ‘1st armament programme’, projected since 1927,27 and intensive technical and tactical trials at test centres in Russia following. A similar development can be seen in trade relations between the two countries. Here it is the great ‘legal and economic agreement’ (Rechts- und Wirtschaftsabkommen) of October 1925 that opened

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up opportunities for economic exchange which would have been unthinkable during the height of Rapallo, because of Germany’s inability to accommodate loans for any Russian trade.28 Regardless of the anti-Locarno rhetoric of its official foreign policy, Moscow’s leadership understood at last that this development brought its country more advantages than disadvantages, e.g. access to international money and capital markets via Germany. With Berlin acting as the ‘eastern agent of Wall Street’, as Werner Link put it,29 a bit of ‘prosperity’ found its way to Moscow in the shape of government-secured German loans, and notably increased its ability to buy civil and military know-how abroad. Locarno had considerably widened the range of action for economic and military cooperation for both sides, though mostly on the German side, without a relaxation of the Versailles limitations to an extent that Germany would have been no longer forced to realize its rearmament projects in an exclusive partnership with Moscow. Results of Cooperation and Military Benefits for Both Sides If one has to answer the question about results and benefits for both partners it can must be said that Germany clearly had the bigger advantages. For years Germany was able to test prototypes of combat aircraft and tanks, developed since 1926 on the basis of secret contracts with industry, in concealed test areas in Russia and to further develop them to mass-production standard. This alone is an invaluable advantage, but the same applies to personnel in that a small but solid and highly qualified core of experts was formed. Of the nearly 200 officers who were trained to be pilots or aircraft observers at the Lipetsk flight centre near Voronezh, more than thirty became generals in the air force or other branches of the armed forces during the Second World War. The much smaller training and test centre for the tank force at Kazan’ also produced at least fourteen future generals.30 Of those who undertook one or more visits to the Red Army before 1933, almost all the leading figures of Adolf Hitler’s army can be found, including: Blomberg, Brauchitsch, Fromm, Harpe, Keitel, Krebs, List, Manstein, Model, Olbricht, Speidel, Sperrle and Student.31 Even the two German post-war armies, the Bundeswehr and NVA, the East German Army, had high-ranking officers with personal experience of cooperation

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between the Reichswehr and the Red Army, such as the first air force inspector of the Bundeswehr, General Josef Kammhuber, and his deputy, Major General Hermann Plocher, both of whom received their flight training as young Reichswehr officers at Lipetsk.32 One point must be emphasized again: the arms objectives of the Weimar Republic could not be of a quantitative nature. Production of arms in appreciable numbers was impossible because before 1933 the Republic was lacking in the wherewithal – political will, freedom of action and finance. So the main aim was to do what was possible at the time and create the capability for Germany to arm itself and thereby give future governments with the right preconditions the chance to set up modern armed forces in a short time; in other words, to open up an option for the future. Not pilots but teaching staff, not stockpiles of arms but prototypes was the ‘order of the day’. To have over a hundred qualified flying instructors available became of vital importance when setting up the air force after 1933; more or less the same applied to the tank force. In addition, there was the priceless tactical and organizational experience gained on Russian ground. A German aviation expert said in a review after the War: ‘When Hitler came to power he just needed to press a button. The designs, the tests and the models were ready. Hitler only had to order the series.’33 This may be slightly overstated but one thing is correct: when the first German fighter planes and tanks started being mass-produced as early as 1934, and the first air force wings and tank divisions were equipped a year later, this was the result of the arms development and military personnel planning which began with the first armament programme of 1927/28, and could never have reached its goal so quickly without the Russian test and training centres. Far less successful was the cooperation between the navies of both countries because the German naval command, the so-called Marineleitung, which was independent of the army command, the so-called Heeresleitung, had chosen different foreign partners to achieve its own secret armament objectives.34 Another reason was the political and psychological reservation of the Germans because of the ongoing political trauma within the German Navy following the Revolution in November 1918. In the author’s opinion, the long-term benefits for the Russians were more modest. Unlike the Germans, the Russians pursued quantitative armament objectives and tried, among other things,

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to channel as many of their own officers through the joint training courses which occasionally led to tension between the partners. The Red Army, of course, participated in the German technical and tactical experience gained and had liaison officers in all the German Army establishments on Russian soil, but the technical benefit for their own arms development was rather limited. A few technical components were borrowed for tank construction but, on the whole, Soviet tank development of the most successful types was based on American models. The famous T34 was a further development of the American Christie tank, whereas the Soviet model T28, which was based on the German so-called ‘big tractor’ and was tested in Kazan’, had already proved to be a technical deadlock during the Finland war and was no longer produced from as early as 1940.35 Coincidentally, the German successor model, the Neubaufahrzeug, suffered the same fate. It should be remembered that Germany, after years of prohibition, first had to catch up on international development, particularly where tanks were concerned, but also with other arms, before being able to offer anything noteworthy to others. One area from which the Russians had especially hoped to profit was the study of the German general staff service and the training system for highly qualified military personal.36 The large majority of the about 100 officers involved in these activities, however, fell victim to the bloody army purge in the late 1930s, which meant that most of the experience gained was lost. Only a few, such as the later marshals Shaposhnikov, Timoshenko and Meretskov, lived to see the Second World War. The Political Minimum Conditions for Cooperation and its Decline after the National Socialist Seizure of Power in 1933 This last section deals with a central political question: what were the political minimum conditions for an alliance of this kind where both partners gained a great deal of knowledge about their respective army structures and therefore presented a national security risk? Why did these conditions exist up to 1933 and why no longer afterwards? As mentioned earlier, the German Locarno policy moved the two countries apart politically. Even then, in 1926/27, a few voices could

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be heard in Moscow, for example Nikolai Bukharin, cautioning against the German partner which had, by joining the Ententedominated League of Nations, openly moved into the imperialist camp and was now beginning to follow an active imperialist policy. Military relations nevertheless survived this German swerve to the West and became even more intense due to the aforementioned after-effects of Locarno. What were the political conditions for this continuation? First of all the fact that the Locarno pact of October 1925 was extended towards the East by the so-called Berlin agreement of 24 April 1926, in which both countries affirmed their reciprocal neutrality in case of controversy with a third party and, in addition, agreed never, even in peacetime, to join a boycott coalition against the other party. Even more important was the fact that only a year later, in 1927, a serious – in Moscow’s view – even war-threatening, conflict between Soviet Russia and England and France broke out and the contract passed the crucial test. Contrary to fears on the part of the Soviet government, the German government resisted the temptation to exchange its neutrality in this conflict for concessions of the Western powers in vacating the Rhineland. In particular Stresemann’s engaged vote against any ideology of crusade towards Soviet Russia during the League of Nations June session in 1927, and his subsequent speech in the German Reichstag (‘Gallia quo vadis?’), in which he pleaded for the idea of peaceful coexistence, impressed the Soviet leaders.37 These events had shown that the neutrality of Germany, the new member of the League of Nations, had been maintained in a real conflict with the two leading powers of the League which in turn secured the minimum basis for the German-Russian relationship in terms of foreign and security policy.38 The change of power in Germany in 1933 was certainly not a reason per se to regard this basis as no longer existing. Hitler’s anti-communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric was interpreted in Moscow as mainly internal- and election campaign-motivated – a view that seemed to be confirmed by the new chancellor in his policy declaration of 23 March 1933 when he said before the Reichstag that the fight against communism in Germany was a purely internal matter which ‘does not affect political relations with other powers to which we are bound by mutual interests’.39 This statement of the new government seemed to confirm the basis for the relationship

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which had been underlined only in December 1932 by Hitler’s predecessor, General Schleicher – Moscow’s great white hope at the end of the Weimar Republic, like Seeckt had been during its early years – and the Soviet foreign minister, Maksim Litvinov.40 In addition, Moscow was hoping for the positive influence of President Hindenburg and of the new defence minister General Blomberg, who were both seen as guarantors for unchanged good relations between the two countries. Training and tests were therefore still carried out at the German establishments in Russia during the summer of 1933. Only in August 1933 did Moscow request the immediate dissolution of all German test centres, having called back its course participants at the general staff in Berlin a month previously.41 Russia had obviously granted the new regime in Germany sufficient time to affirm in no uncertain terms the basis of their mutual partnership regarding security policy. Moscow had expected something like a binding statement from Hitler that the anti-Soviet and expansionist aims of the National Socialist movement, as could be read in Mein Kampf or in the official party pamphlets of NS chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, were of no significance for German-Russian relations.42 As such a signal was not forthcoming from Berlin and, on the contrary, antiSoviet propaganda and violent attacks on Russian establishments in Germany were on the increase, the Soviet leadership revised its initial assessment of Hitler’s anti-communism and began to recognize its fundamental character. Only now did Moscow’s leadership seem certain that the continuation of a relationship of such security and political relevance could no longer be justified with this German government. Germany now continued alone on the path of military rearmament, made possible not least by the general equality of armament rights which had been achieved by the Schleicher government at the Geneva disarmament conference in December 1932.43 Consequently, the Soviet government changed its foreign policy in the autumn of 1933 and sought reconciliation with the powers of the League of Nations which Germany had left in October 1933. Moscow’s propaganda also took a U-turn and noisily condemned the German revisionism as dangerous and peace destroying, having encouraged it enthusiastically for the past decade.44 Nevertheless, the Soviet leadership continued to use the personal contacts between the militaries of both countries for a political re-approach. Moscow’s deputy defence commissary, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, tried as late as October 1935, when his

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country had officially long taken the line of the Litvinov policy of ‘collective security’ of the anti-Fascist alliance with the Western powers, to ‘explore the ground’ at an informal meeting at the Moscow residence of ambassador von der Schulenburg. ‘If Germany and the Soviet Union still had the same friendly relations as they used to, we could now dictate peace to the world’, Tukhachevskii is said to have uttered, according to notes made by a German diplomat, and then expressed his great hope that ‘Germany and the Soviet Union will find each other again’.45 This was the same Tukhachevskii who, only six months before in a sensational Pravda article, had painted German rearmament in the most alarming colours and branded it as a danger to world peace.46 Moscow’s leadership now started a dual-track, half-open, halfsecret probing and lobbying policy between Germany and the Western powers which ultimately culminated in the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939, followed by the frontier and friendship agreement of September that year, with its many subsequent contracts up to 1941. Unlike before 1933, however, there was no longer any feeling of trust between the two partners. The only political basis was Germany’s position of power on the European continent after military victories over Poland and France which made the German Reich and the Soviet Union immediate territorial neighbours and demanded contractual clarification of their relationship. What happened now was what politicians and the military could only dream of during the Weimar Republic era: the joint revision of the last territorial Versailles relics by way of military force. This phase, lasting a good twenty months, changed abruptly into a German war of aggression and extermination on 22 June 1941 – a war which is still unique in history. Adolf Hitler pointed his military tool, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, against the one power which, by its willingness to cooperate with the political and military revisionism of the Weimar Republic, had helped create the basis for this tool. Not the first time, but never before in such a dramatic and spectacular way, did history demonstrate that mutual state relations only based on revisionist aims of power politics sooner or later become a menace to peace – an experience that may be a warning not only for Germany and Russia but for the whole community of nations.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

General Ludendorff, Mein militärischer Werdegang. Blätter der Erinnerung an unser großes Heer (München: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1937), pp. 30–2. Another example for the Austro-Hungarian Army was Alfred Redl, who spent a year in Kazan’ on the Volga in 1899/1900, before taking up his duties at the well-known Evidenzbüro of the Imperial and Royal (k.u.k.) general staff in Vienna, where he became the most famous of all Russian spies. See Georg Markus, Der Fall Redl (Vienna and Munich: Amalthea, 1984), pp. 49–52. See Wladimir A. Suchomlinow, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1924), p. 34–5; Aleksej A. Brussilow, Meine Erinnerungen (Berlin: Militärverlag der DDR, 1988), p. 41. A.G. Kavtaradze, ‘Iz istorii russkogo general’nogo shtaba’, in Voennoistoricheskii zhurnal, 1972, 7, pp. 87–92. See also Suchomlinow, Erinnerungen, pp. 205–6. Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), pp. 65–6. It must be mentioned that by Sukhomlinov’s politics of reunifying military leadership under the War Ministry after 1909 some of this institutional privileges were abolished. See B.M. Schaposchnikow, Das Hirn der Armee (Berlin: Militärverlag der DDR, 1987), pp. 119–20. Also S.N. Kozlov, V.M. Smirnov, I.S. Baz’ and P.A. Siderov, O sovetskoi voennoi nauke (Moscow, 1964), p. 170. At the same time a pro-French orientated school of military thinking existed within the Army. Dean S. MacMurry, Deutschland und die Sowjetunion 1933–1936. Ideologie, Machtpolitik und Wirtschaftsbeziehungen (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1979). Heinrich Schwendemann, Die wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Deutschen Reich und der Sowjetunion von 1939 bis 1941. Alternative zu Hitlers Ostprogramm? (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993). See Manfred Zeidler, ‘German-Soviet Economic Relations during the Hitler-Stalin Pact’, in From Peace to War. Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939–1941, ed. by Bernd Wegner (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), pp. 95–111. Cf. Herbert Helbig, Die Träger der Rapallo-Politik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958). For this new approach see Gaines Post, The Civil-Military Fabric of Weimar Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); also Michael Geyer, Aufrüstung oder Sicherheit. Die Reichswehr in der Krise der Machtpolitik 1924–1936 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1980). Quoted in Herbert Molloy Mason, Die Luftwaffe. Aufbau, Aufstieg und Scheitern im Sieg (Vienna and Berlin: Paul Neff, 1976), p. 125. See

116

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Manfred Zeidler also David Irving, Die Tragödie der Deutschen Luftwaffe. Aus den Akten und Erinnerungen von Feldmarschall Erhard Milch (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1975), p. 62. See Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920–1933. Wege und Stationen einer ungewöhnlichen Zusammenarbeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), p. 22. Ibid., pp. 22–3. The first scholar from the GDR who dealt with the topic in more detail was Günter Rosenfeld, Sowjetunion und Deutschland 1922–1933 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984), pp. 267–78. One of the leading East German specialists on military history focused on the theme, but not until the end of the GDR in 1989, see Olaf Groehler, Selbstmörderische Allianz. Deutsch-russische Militärbeziehungen 1920–1941 (Berlin: Vision-Verlag, 1992). Gerald Freund, Unholy Alliance. Russian-German Relations from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the Treaty of Berlin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957); Arthur L. Smith, ‘The German General Staff and Russia, 1919–1926’, in Soviet Studies 8 (1956/57), pp. 125–33. Hans W. Gatzke, ‘Russo-German Military Collaboration During the Weimar Republic’, in American Historical Review 63 (1958), pp. 565– 97; John Erickson, The Soviet High Command. A Military-Political History 1918–1941 (London: Macmillan & Co, 1962); Francis L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918 to 1933 (London: Oxford UP, 1966). See also G.H. Stein, ‘Russo-German Military Collaboration: The Last Phase, 1933’, in Political Science Quarterly 72 (1962), pp. 54–71. The following are a collection of Russian works, articles and documents on the topic from the last decade: B.M. Orlov, ‘V poiskakh soiuznikov: Komandovanie Krasnoi Armii i problemy vneshnei politiki SSSR v 30-ch godakh’, in Voprosy istorii, 1990, 4, pp. 40–53; A.A. Akhtamzian, ‘Voennoe sotrudnichestvo SSSR i Germanii 1920–1933 gg.’, in Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1990, 5, pp. 3–24; S.A. Gorlov, ‘Sovetsko-germanskoe voennoe sotrudnichestvo v 1920–1933 godakh (vpervye publikuemye dokumenty)’, in Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn’, 1990, 6, pp. 107–24; idem, Moskva-Berlin, 1920–1933 gg. Voennopoliticheskie otnosheniia mezhdu SSSR i Germaniei i stanovlenie sovetskoi voennoi derzhavy v period Rapallo. Dissertatsiia na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata istoricheskikh nauk (Moscow: MGIMO MID RF, 1993); S.A. Gorlov and S.V. Ermachenkov, ‘Voenno-uchebnye tsentry Reikhsvera v Sovetskom Soiuze’, in Voenno-istorichskii zhurnal, 1993, 6, pp. 39–44, 7, pp. 41–4, 8, pp. 36–42; S.A. Misanov and V.V. Zacharov, Voennoe sotrudnichestvo SSSR i Germanii v 1921–1933 gg. (Moscow: Voenno-politicheskaia Akademiia, 1991); V.V. Zacharov, Voennye aspekty vzaimootnoshenii SSSR i Germanii 1921–iiun’ 1941 gg. (Moscow: Gumanitarnaia Akademiia Vooruzhennykh Sil, 1992); Iu.L. D’iakov and T.S. Busueva, Fashitskii mech kovalsia v SSSR: Krasnaia Armiia i Reikhsver. Tainoe sotrudnichestvo 1922–1933. Neizvestnye dokumenty

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

117

(Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1972), British edition: The Red Army and the Wehrmacht. How the Soviets Militarized Germany, 1922–33, and Paved the Way for Fascism (Loughton: Prometheus Books, 1995); Reichswehr und Rote Armee. Dokumente aus den Militärarchiven Deutschlands und Rußlands 1925–1931, ed. by F.P. Kahlenberg, R.G. Pikhoia and L.V. Dvoinykh (Koblenz: Bundesarchiv, 1995); N.E. Eliseeva, ‘“Nemtsy veli i budut vesti dvoinuiu politiku”. Reikhsver glazami komandirov Krasnoi Armii’, in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1997, 2, pp. 30–8. Karl Radek, Die Auswärtige Politik Sowjet-Rußlands (Hamburg: Carl Hoym Nachf., 1921), p. 73. Quoted in Friedrich v. Rabenau, Seeckt. Aus seinem Leben 1918–1936 (Leipzig: v. Hase & Koehler, 1941), p. 252. Hans Meier-Welcker, Seeckt (Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe, 1967), pp. 294–5. Quoted in Helmut Grieser, Die Sowjetpresse über Deutschland in Europa 1922–1932. Revision von Versailles und Rapallo-Politik in sowjetischer Sicht (Stuttgart: Klett, 1970), p. 167. Zeidler, Reichswehr, p. 46. Ibid., pp. 70–8. See also Rolf-Dieter Müller, Das Tor zur Weltmacht. Die Bedeutung der Sowjetunion für die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Rüstungspolitik zwischen den Weltkriegen (Boppard: Boldt, 1984), pp. 110–36. Ibid., pp. 89–97; Olaf Groehler and Helmut Erfurth, Hugo Junkers. Ein politisches Essay (Berlin: Militärverlag der DDR, 1989), pp. 28– 42. Almost the same happened with the other prominent partner of the German military, the specialist for chemical warfare and disciple of Fritz Haber, Hugo Stoltzenberg; see Rolf-Dieter Müller, ‘Die deutschen Gaskriegsvorbereitungen 1919–1945. Mit Giftgas zur Weltmacht?’, in Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 27 (1980), pp. 26–9. Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 171–207. Geyer, Aufrüstung, pp. 193–5; see also idem, Deutsche Rüstungspolitik 1860–1980 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 131–7. Manfred Lachmann, Zu Problemen der Bewaffnung des imperialistischen deutschen Heeres (1919–1939) (Leipzig: Ph.D. dissertation, 1965), pp. 80–1. See Geyer, Aufrüstung, pp. 199–200; H. Sperling, ‘Rolle und Funktion des Heereswaffenamts beim ersten Rüstungsprogramm der Reichswehr’, in Militärgeschichte 23 (1984), pp. 305–12; Michael Geyer, ‘Das Zweite Rüstungsprogramm (1930–1934)’, in Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 17 (1975), pp. 125–72. Werner Beitel and Jürgen Nötzold, Deutsch-sowjetische Wirtschaftsbeziehungen in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1979), pp. 65–73. W. Link, ‘Amerika, die Weimarer Republik und Sowjetrußland’, in Der Westen und die Sowjetunion, Gottfried Niedhart (ed.) (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 1983), pp. 79–104 (quotation, p. 94).

118 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Manfred Zeidler Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 302–3. Ibid., pp. 208–17. Ibid., p. 303. Gerhard Hubrich, Zwischen den Meilensteinen der Luftfahrt (Steinebach: Zuerl, 1969), p. 78. Werner Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung 1919–1928. Konzeption und Führung der Marine in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Bernard & Graefe, 1976), pp. 171–85. Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 197–8. D’iakov and Busueva, Fashistkii mech, p. 103. Gustav Stresemann. Vermächtnis. Der Nachlaß in drei Bänden, ed. by H. Bernhard, vol. 3 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1933), pp. 151, 166–7; also Grieser, Die Sowjetpresse, p. 182. Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 152–3. Quoted in Max Domarus, Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. I, 1 (1932–1934) (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1965), p. 236. See Akten zur deutschen Auswärtigen Politik (ADAP), Series B, vol. XXI, Doc. no. 229. Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 287–91. ADAP, B, vol. II, 1, Doc. no. 176. Hans-Jürgen Rautenberg, Deutsche Rüstungspolitik vom Beginn der Genfer Abrüstungskonferenz bis zur Wiedereinführung der allgemeinen Wehrpflicht 1932–1935, (Bonn: Ph.D. dissertation, 1973). As an example see Karl Radeks Pravda article from 10 May 1933, in Dietrich Möller, Karl Radek in Deutschland (Köln: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1976), pp. 269–72. ADAP, C, vol. IV, 2, Doc. no. 383, annex. See M. Buchsweiler and J.L. Wallach, ‘Menetekel. Der sowjetrussische Marschall M. Tuchatschewski warnt im März 1935 vor deutschen Agressionsplänen (ein mißachtetes und vergessenes Dokument)’, in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 13 (1984), pp. 351–65.

PETER JAHN

Facing the Ostfront: The Other War in German Memory

Before discussing the German recollections of the war in the East, two preliminary comments should be made: only the development of West Germany will be considered; that of East Germany will not. The way the War was seen in East Germany is an interesting subject in itself, but its strong identification with the Soviet Union would require an analysis of the Soviet official history too. German will therefore imply West German in this chapter. Secondly, there has been quite a development on the subject of the war in the East and the way it is remembered in the last five to ten years. The generation of those who lived and fought in the War are nearing the end of their lives now, so last chances to ask questions sometimes meet with these men’s wishes to free themselves from long silence and taboos. At the same time professional historiography is increasingly discovering that war and the German occupation of the Soviet Union as a subject. Things may be seen differently in five years’ time. In order to understand the discourse about the War in postwar Germany, and the public consensus on what should and what should not be discussed, it will be useful to summarize some central facts of the war in the East, all the more so as the West European and American focus on the Second World War is different from that in Central and Eastern Europe. But before doing so, I will go back yet another step: the Germans – and it is their perspective we are interested in – did not invade a terra incognita in June 1941 for the Nazi leadership, as well as most of the people, had a distinct and detailed idea of Russia and the Russians. And it is these traditional and common ideas 119

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which determined – alongside the incisive experience of the War itself shared by millions – the content and forms of the collective memory after 1945. Popular images of the Russian national character were widespread in Germany before 1933. Looking back to the nineteenth century these images were predominantly Russophobic, even if certain groups in German society had a positive attitude towards Russians. Three main aspects can be identified. Russia and the Russians were seen: 1. 2. 3.

As foreign, not belonging to the progressive European culture. As backward, inferior; this idea was commonly associated with a stagnating ‘Asiatic’ society. As potentially threatening, and naturally expansive.

Bolshevist rule and its ideology of global revolution by the proletariat had been added to traditional Russian expansionism in this view. Under Nazi rule these images were made more aggressive, were combined with anti-Semitism to ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and with the Lebensraum ideology, to justify an imperialism directed towards Eastern Europe culminating in the idea of the Ukraine as a German India. In the biological, racist concept, inferior people, among them all Slavic people and especially the ‘Asiatic’ Russian Slavs – in addition, infected by Bolshevism – were denied any right to exist. This concept developed by Hitler and Rosenberg was in its strict form only held by a minority, but parts of it and the idea of a competition of ethnically strong and weak nations was shared by the majority. Even Christians, for whom a racist biological concept of society was unacceptable, saw no right for an atheist state to exist. When in 1940, after Poland and France had been defeated and the war with Great Britain had ground to a stalemate, the political and military leadership in Germany began to plan the war against the Soviet Union, these ideas were transformed into military orders, forming the basis of a warfare that ignored existing international law. Soviet political officers, ‘Kommissars’, were to be shot, atrocities against the civilian population were to be punished only exceptionally, the murder of political and economic representatives of the Soviet Union and of the Jewish population by SS and police forces in the occupied territories was planned on a large scale. With

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these actions close cooperation with the Wehrmacht was assumed and later realized. Eventually a scheme was designed that would lead to the planned starvation of around 30 million people, mainly in the industrial areas of the Soviet Union. The attack devised as a blitzkrieg lasting no more than four months turned out to become a horrendous war lasting four years, resulting in the unconditional surrender and provisional end of Germany as a nation. The Soviet Union lost 25 to 30 million people, more than half of them civilians. Of the total 6 to 7 million German dead, at least 70 per cent were killed as soldiers on the Eastern Front or died as refugees in the East at the end of the War. It does not fit into the standard British or American view of the War, but even after the Normandy landings the Third Reich gave priority – and they had to give it in their military and political logic – to the fighting in the East, where the Wehrmacht was finally defeated by the Red Army. But this war in the East was characterized not only by tank and infantry battles on a massive scale. Particularly in the first year, 1941, when victory seemed close, military operations included a policy of exterminating prisoners of war and civilians – against political officers of whom thousands were murdered; against hundreds of thousands who were murdered as alleged partisans; indirectly against huge numbers of the population as they were denied food (in Leningrad alone 800,000 people starved, and were meant to); against Soviet prisoners of war, of whom 2 out of 3 million starved up to May 1942, as they were regarded as unnecessary mouths to feed. Later POWs were needed as labourers as victory had not been won in a few months, but – as Russians were still regarded as animallike Untermenschen – a further million died in German camps. Up to the end of 1941 – even before such genocide was officially ordered – 500,000 Jews were murdered on Soviet territory, and a further one and a half million by 1944. Considering the scale of these crimes and the suffering of the victims, it seems only natural to regard the Germans as the culprits. Direct and indirect responsibility for Nazi crimes, particularly the relationship between individual guilt and collective responsibility, are well documented and will be discussed further in this chapter. In my view it is distorting the facts to simply characterize such enormous crimes as committed ‘in the German name’. Beside the responsibility which can only be assessed individually (and can rarely be fully reconstructed), beside the individual extent to

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which soldiers carried out the policy of occupation, submission and annihilation on behalf of the Nazi regime, we have to look at the specific experiences of the majority who fought there – that is of around 10 million German and Austrian males – if we want to explain the various ways to grapple with this past in the decades after 1945. Apart from the question of responsibility we have to acknowledge that these men were collectively traumatized, too. For years they were exposed to extreme physical and emotional stress that is difficult for us to comprehend. Their war biography was characterised by exhaustion, hunger, filth and vermin, illness, fear of death and mutilation, the experience of their fellow soldiers´ deaths on a huge scale, by the necessity to conform to their group in order to survive, humiliations by their superiors and later, after defeat by the enemy, finally by being made prisoners of war. It sounds a paradox, but the intensity of the trauma – in addition to the fact that it was the common experience of practically a whole generation raised under the inescapable norms of male toughness – prevented people from being aware of it. To feel sympathy with your fellow soldiers or with yourself was an idea that seemed inappropriate – you felt sympathy with a crying child or with a dog that had been run over, but not with yourself. For the immediate post-war period, the years 1945–9, up to about the time of the establishment of two the German states, it is impossible to assess the way Germans came to terms with the War. Besides the fact that most people simply had to fight for their survival, that for 2.5 to 3 million prisoners of war in the Soviet Union and their families at home the War was not yet over, that many people’s minds were still heavily influenced by Nazi ideology, there were just no public announcements that were not filtered by the censorship of the Allied occupational forces, so that witness statements cannot be taken to reveal the true German view. War was a subject of public discussion but it often had a strong moralizing undertone. The Nuremberg trials and the subsequent edition of forty-two volumes of evidence – an excellent compilation of sources on Nazi crimes not least about those committed in the Soviet Union – offered a chance to grapple with the most serious of war crimes. These books could be found in almost any public library in Germany, but they were not read. Nobody wanted to be confronted with the facts. The Nuremberg trials set an example in a quite different sense, as a central element in the defence of the accused members of the

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Wehrmacht was the assertion that they had known little or nothing of the criminal plans and actions, let alone taken part in them. A deep gap between the Nazi leadership and the Wehrmacht was built up, an idea which was seemingly proved by the bitter struggle between Hitler and the generals about operational and later even tactical questions. This view was supported by an impressive number of purely military accounts of the war in the East written by former generals under the direction of Franz Halder and commissioned by the Historical Division of the US Forces. At that stage, cold war military expertise was more important than military ethos. But even among the weak West German left there were strong tendencies to deny the part ordinary people had played in the Nazi regime. In an intellectual magazine called Der Ruf Alfred Andersch was outspoken about the generals’ role as war criminals, but cleared the soldiers of all charges, as they had to obey. So we find memoirs written by former generals, and purely military accounts, as the first uncensored publications on the War in early 1950s Germany. Ten years later popular historiography of the war in the East reached a peak with Paul Schmidt’s (a former press officer in Ribbentrop’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) book Unternehmen Babarossa published under the pen name Carell. This book, of which several hundred thousand copies had been sold by the 1990s, has strongly influended the popular image of the war in the East. In the course of the 1950s more and more autobiographical accounts of that war, and of the time as prisoners of war, appeared. It is remarkable how many doctors and clergymen were among the authors. This does not tell us anything about the quality of these books, but it does tell us something about the emotional needs of the reading public. In retrospect, people preferred to be reminded of the sensitive doctor or clergyman, able to help body and soul, rather than of the armed soldier entering a foreign country as an enemy. Taking into account that around 10 million German and Austrian soldiers fought in the East, of whom at the most 3 million were taken prisoner, the fact that 50 per cent of all publications deal with captivity is in need of an explanation. The Second World War played an important role in fiction, especially in the popular mass literature of the 1950s, and it is the war in the East that is the central subject. Individual authors – Bauer, Kirst and Konsalik, for example – achieved print runs of up to a million. Interestingly enough the genres of autobiographical and fictional

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literature are integrated: fictional texts claim to be based on facts, while in non-fictional texts there are fictional passages. Even more readers were reached when accounts of this type were published in special magazines after about 1954 – covering roughly thirty pages, these magazines were undemanding with respect to time and intellect. Indeed, they are still on sale in large numbers at newsagents and department stores even today. In German film productions of the 1950s, the war in the East played an important role, too, whereas with television starting its development in the mid-1950s, it more or less stayed away from the subject. With the exception of one enormously successful serial about a German prisoner of war escaping from Siberia, there are rather serious documentaries instead. It is not easy to sum up these many early publications which have dominated the collective memory until now. Of course, with no censorship to manipulate the public, there is a wide range of views: the memoirs of Helmut Gollwitzer – a clergyman and an active opponent of the Nazi regime – covering five years as prisoner of war, show a very different attitude to the war in the East and the Russians, from those held by the novelists Josef Martin Bauer and Heinz Konsalik, who also wrote about prisoners of war, but who had both been authors of Nazi propaganda publications about the Soviet enemy before 1945. In spite of all the differences there is a main theme, a preference of subjects and even conclusions. The predominant point of view is that of soldiers and prisoners of war, not of civilians, least of all of women who were confronted with the violence of out-of-control Soviet soldiers. The German soldiers and prisoners of war see themselves as defenders of their country, as people who are critical of the Nazis and merely defending their homes against an attack from the East. The fact that this ‘defence’ took place on Soviet territory most of the time is not questioned; politics in most cases are not touched on. There are practically no Nazis among the soldiers at the front, if at all, merely naive youngsters soon to be set right by hard facts. Mass murder committed by Germans is only rarely mentioned, and in the few short accounts it is depicted as an abhorred crime of the ‘others’, the Nazis. Accordingly, the typical German soldier is the best soldier of the Second World War, who hates war but at the same time does his duty for his country, for his family and for his mates. Whereas the communist regime is rejected without exception as inhuman, the characterization and judgement of Russians is far

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more varied. Mostly however we find a perspective which shows the population as the communist regime’s victims in order to justify the Germans’ actions. Often the Russian national character, a term that is used uncritically, is regarded as suitable to the political regime or the regime is even seen as just an ideological variation of a strong government suitable to historically deep-rooted Russian mentality. The stereotypes of the Russian character, handed down from one generation to the next and sharpened by National Socialism, were in most cases kept in the post-war period. According to them typical Russians are represented as intellecually simple, but physically and emotionally strong people. As an ambivalent characteristic they are said to be childlike – as long as they obey, they are not dangerous. But their vigorous emotional outbursts can be destructive, especially when they occur en masse. This is exemplified by the Soviet soldiers who are described time and again as Asiatic (with the connotation of being primitive – belonging to nature rather than to civilisation). So Konsalik writes: ‘and then they attacked . . . like ants, earth-coloured, crawled out of their holes, their dugouts . . . Tatars, Mongolians, Kirghiz and Kalmucks . . . they stormed towards us.’ With another author, Thorwald, the killing of German civilians is mostly attributed to ‘Kalmucks, Tatars, Caucasians, Siberians’ stirred up by propaganda and ‘primitive, simple-minded people who in their poverty and backwardness do not esteem human life as much as people in highly civilised countries do’. As far as intelligent Russians are presented, they may appear as positive characters: as elderly, powerless people of the times of the Tsar or as educated women, above all doctors, or as negative characters, that is as fanatic and dangerous communists. As a recurrent positive character you will find the old woman, the babushka, often as offering help to an exhausted German soldier or prisoner of war. Here a real experience has been taken up, whereas most of the aforesaid characters are heavily influenced by old clichés. All this reveals a strong resemblance to publications of the National Socialist period as well as to private material (letters from the front or diaries). To put it drastically, the image of Russia and the Russians in the years 1941 to 1945 was maintained with only slight modifications for many years after the War, the only aspect left out being the anti-Semitic component. In Nazi publications the vicious commissar seen in the centre of all Bolshevist crimes had

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always been a Jew. Now the term ‘Asiatic’ served a similar purpose, thereby of course again taking up Nazi stereotypes. For a majority of Germans the negative stereotype of Bolshevist-Asiatic hordes threatening Europe was seemingly confirmed by the painful experience of excesses of violence committed by uncontrolled Red Army soldiers in the last months of the War, by contact with Stalinist repression and by hunger suffered in Soviet prisoner-ofwar camps. To what extent these images made public in texts and films reflected the images people had in their minds cannot of course be assessed exactly, as we have to acknowledge huge differences in the indiviual attitudes. The few public opinion polls though – that of Sodhi and Bergius of 1953 and those of Wolf in 1959 and 1964 – show basically the same results. Sodhi and Bergius list as the seven Russian qualities named most often: brutal when drunk, unpredictable, primitive, loving their home country, modest, cruel and kind to children. The list continues – again named by more than 50 per cent – with stubborn, lacking individuality, instinctive, dirty. At least later polls show that the very emotional, very hostile classifications figure less prominently. The view of the war in the East as outlined here, a view formed in the 1950s that saw the war as a defence of the German population, that saw atrocities almost exclusively on the Soviet side, that saw German soldiers as well as civilians only as victims, a view that, with only minor modifications, kept using the old, deadly image of the enemy, of the primitive, barbaric Russians – this view could lead to the assumption that Germans at the time generally still adhered to Nazi ideology, since the conquest of Lebensraum and the annihilation of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ were central elements of this ideology. Although a lot of what had happened between 1933 and 1945 was played down and whitewashed, the criminal character of the Nazi dictatorship and the fact that it had ruined the German state were widely accepted, above all in the political sphere, but by and large with most of the people, too. But of the regime that had to be criticized, the war in the East was cut off and so the things people had done in this war could be regarded as justified. The majority realized that the Nazi leaders had been criminals, but in the East Germany had been defended, so the war should have been won. A substantial majority of Germans therefore saw themselves as victims of both – the Nazis and the Soviets, the latter being worse.

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This character of the war memory was conforming to the political needs of the early Federal Republic seeking acceptance, and was therefore reinforced by its politicians. At this time, when there was no affluence as yet and democratic participation was not really attractive for most Germans, the image this society had of itself was largely based on rejecting the communist threat from the East. And this collective warding off of the ‘red flood’ helped the conservatives to stay in power, because the Social Democrats – who at that time had not yet abandoned all Marxist ideas – could thus be denounced as untrustworthy. This invocation of the ‘red threat’ offered another justification for the war in the past, which was now seen as a legitimate defence of Western civilization. The establishment of a new German Army, explained exclusively by the possibility of Soviet attack, could also profit from this new positive interpretation of the war in the East. This became obvious and practical when former officers and veterans’ organizations were lobbying, demanding the release of any officers sentenced to imprisonment as war criminals by the Western Allies, and the restoration of honour for the Wehrmacht and their actions in the Second World War, as a prerequisite to their cooperation in forming the Bundeswehr. They were granted both, the restoration of honour being given by President Eisenhower himself, although he knew better – it was nothing but a political tactic. It would be misleading though to explain the justification of the war in the East as being mainly in the interests of the government and conservative groups; it was instrumental for them and they reinforced it, but at the same time it answered the emotional needs of a majority of the population, as 10 million soldiers of the Wehrmacht had experienced the war as a decisive part of their lives and as a time of enormous suffering. Whereas the genocide of the European Jews had been committed by a limited number of people, the war of annihilation in the East was fought by the mass-organization Wehrmacht. Not every single soldier, let alone a majority, took an active part in atrocities, but the identification with the Wehrmacht, normally accepted as part of people’s own lives, forced them to whitewash the past. After the trauma of defeat, with Germany being split into occupational zones, and the founding of a new state, there was a strong demand for continuity, for something one could identify with across the changing political scene. So in this situation, justifying the war in the East that had taken up old images of the Russian enemy served this purpose. When the war

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could be legitimized by both the recent political confrontation and the old image of the enemy, what the Wehrmacht did and what the individual did – most people did not differentiate between the two – could be dissociated from the Nazi regime. If there had been any sense in the Wehrmacht’s struggle against the Soviet Union beyond National Socialist ideology and interests, the suicidal continuation of the war until May 1945 could be justified. The dominant view on the war at the Eastern front of the 1950s and 1960s has been described in detail here, because not only had there been a broad consensus in the German public on this subject, but also some features of it are still relevant today. The tendency to justify the war has become less relevant in the ensuing decades, but the discussion about an exhibition of crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, which has played a major role with the German public in the last seven years, has proved just how many people are still influenced by this view. At the same time the very existence of this exhibition, as well as the acrimonious discussion, reveal that the image of the war in society has undergone important changes, with the memory focusing on different aspects. This has been brought about by various factors. The setting was provided by the change in East-West relations, or levelling-out: since the second half of the 1960s the Soviet Union was no longer seen exclusively as the threat. The decisive phase was the years 1985 to 1989, characterized by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy, by serious proposals for disarmament, perestroika and glasnost. In 1989 and 1990 when the confrontation ended, relief was mixed with gratitude for the definite acceptance of German unification. With the fear gone, it was easier to view the Soviets not only as the enemy, even in retrospect. Then the results of critical research on the subject were at last noticed by people outside the inner circle of specialized historians. Non-apologetic, critical resarch on the war in the East had developed slowly, beginning in the 1960s. This might partly be explained by the fact that German military documents were in American hands up to the second half of the 1950s. But this is not a far- reaching explanation as even material that could be studied, such as the published Nuremberg documents, were not used. It is remarkable that in the 1950s only two projects on the war years were initiated with public support: an extensive publication of documents on the expulsion of the German population from Eastern Europe; and a series of detailed investigations on the situation with German

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prisoners of war. Both works are in themselves results of serious historical analysis, but the political implication is quite obvious. Germans were the victims and the victims of German aggression were not a subject of German historiography. (The choice of the subjects shows some opportunism towards the Western Allies, too: there was no comparable investigation on the 500,000 Germans who died in air raids.) Interestingly enough the initiative for research on the close connection of Hitler’s intentions and the Wehrmacht’s aims in the East was not taken by historians of a liberal or leftish university background. They would identify the subject with the mass of apologetic literature published so far and turn their backs on it. The first important studies were written by Andreas Hillgruber, who had worked on German warfare and its connection with National Socialist ideology. A programmatic title of one of his articles is ‘The final solution and the German empire in the East as the core of the racist programme of National Socialism.’ An essential part of dismantling the myth of a politically neutral, at all times honourable Wehrmacht, was achieved by an institution that was far from the universities and was not expected to have done anything quite like it. The Institute for Military History of the Bundeswehr, for many years under the direction of two liberal historians, Messerschmidt and Deist, analyzed the close relation between the Nazi leadership and that of the Wehrmacht before 1939, and the racist war of annihilation against the Soviet Union in many detailed works. The main study of the planning and execution of the attack on the Soviet Union was published in 1984. In the 1980s, thirty years after the end of the War, some more studies on specific aspects were published: on the planned death of more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war in German camps; on the activities of the operational groups of the SS and the police behind the lines and their close cooperation with the military; and on forced labour, especially the Soviet Ostarbeiter in German factories. Until now the public has received these results piecemeal; in the 1980s they were known only to a few specialists and some committed teachers. Independent of professional historiography local initiatives developed in many places in the 1970s. People started to ask questions about their own relatives during the years 1933 to 1945 and often came upon the fact that they had been prisoners of war and forced labourers. They often got support from the Protestant Church

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and the unions. The change in the attitude to the War became very obvious with President von Weizsäcker’s speech on the 40th anniversary of the German capitulation. Conservative Weizsäcker carefully considered Germany’s military and political defeat and then characterized it – in spite of all the losses and pain – as liberation, as the only chance for a new beginning that could not have been achieved alone. The vigorous protest of conservative circles also showed that his position was not a common one. In 1991 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German assault on the Soviet Union, a documentary exhibition was shown in Berlin that for the first time presented the findings of professional historiography on the War and on the various complexes of crimes in the East to a wider public. The positive reactions even in the conservative press could be taken as an indication that the war in the East was now seen as an essential part of Nazi crimes. Further development seemed to confirm this assumption. The exhibition turned out to be a forerunner of a museum in Berlin-Karlshorst that became the first permanent institution to remember this war and its crimes. In the euphoric early 1990s the museum was founded in 1995 as a joint venture between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation, so far a unique project. Also in 1995, a privately initiated exhibition, ‘A war of annihilation, crimes of the Wehrmacht’, opened and was positively received in Hamburg and Berlin. It was not considered sensational though, as it presented in its centre the participation of the military in a quite simplified way – a statement that was taken as a starting point rather than as a result in the academic discussion as well as in the aforementioned exhibitions. But the provocation suceeded in other places where the exhibition was shown and polarized the public, so that the Wehrmacht’s part in Nazi crimes became an issue for a broader discussion. On the one hand this (and later the subsequent totally revised version) confronted a large number of people with hard facts. For the majority the idea of the Wehrmacht staying ‘clean’ was no longer acceptable. But on the other hand the exhibition, with its intention to polarize, has made a number of conservatives, who had started to see things more critically, go back to their old positions claiming that the Wehrmacht had fought an honourable war, defending Germany against communism. The controversy stabilized this position for a minority. The survival of this kind of memory is a receding problem. It is more difficult now to make people realise the dimension of the

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damage done by the German invaders, above all by the military, in Eastern Europe. The crime characterizing the nature of National Socialism – the genocide of the Jews – has taken such a singular position in our Western discourse that any discussion of crimes committed in the Soviet Union focuses on the Holocaust, although that was only part of them. The many millions of Soviet prisoners of war and of Polish and Soviet non-Jewish civilians who became victims of racist murder, are rarely seen alongside the Jewish victims. To fully grasp the nature of National Socialism it is necessary to widen our perception and realize that the planning and partial execution of the murder of up to 30 million Slavs categorized as Untermenschen forms an essential part of the Nazi regime just as the Holocaust does.

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VIKTOR KRIEGER

Patriots or Traitors? – The Soviet Government and the ‘German Russians’ After the Attack on the USSR by National Socialist Germany

Instrumentalizing Volga Germans for Propaganda at the Beginning of the War After the Third Reich’s attack on the USSR the Soviet government still believed for a short while that it could influence the enemy ideologically with the rallying cries of class struggle. In speeches at the outbreak of war both Molotov and Stalin endeavoured to create a more nuanced image of the German population within the Soviet Empire and allowed themselves to be led by the hope of proletarian solidarity. This was heard clearly in a radio speech by Molotov on 22 June 1941: ‘This war is not forced upon us by the German (germanskii) people, not by the German (germanskimi) workers, farmers and intellectuals, whose suffering we sympathise with, but from a clique of bloodthirsty fascists rulers in Germany.’1 Even Stalin was provisionally in favour of a balanced view of the War, although he had already provided the War with its prefix ‘patriotic’ in his speech on 3 July: ‘In this great war we will find true allies in the peoples of Europe and America, and also among the German people, who are enslaved by the fascist rulers.’2 In this scenario of internationalist propaganda, still valid at that time, the German minority was to play a significant role in the Soviet 133

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Union. Countless meetings of anti-fascists took place during the first weeks of the War in the Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans (ASSRVG), in which almost all the adult German population took part. In these meetings appeals were made to the soldiers in all branches of the Wehrmacht, to workers, farmers and other members of ‘working’ classes in the land of the aggressors. Knowledge of these appeals was immediately sent to the party leaders in Moscow, was published in Soviet newspapers and was used as propaganda against Germany in the form of fliers and radio programs. A direct speech was given to the working-class population of Germany by Alexander Heckman, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Volga Republic, on 13 July 1941: To the working population of Germany. The fascist rulers of Germany, with the bloodthirsty animal Hitler at the helm, who have enslaved a number of European peoples, have stretched their bloody actions to the USSR . . . In these decisive struggles with the German fascist monster and the further strengthening of the friendship between people of all nationalities with the Russian people . . . The working Volga Germans, united in the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which is a solid territory of the Russian Federation, have their own state government based on the most democratic constitution in the world. Take me for example, I as a weaver and the son of a worker lived in constant need under the Tsar. Under the Soviet power I was educated as an engineer and rose to be a statesman, to be the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Republic. There are hundreds and thousands of such examples. The life of Volga Germans in the Soviet land is free, happy and prosperous. The life of working people in Germany under the rule of the fascist clique is one long nightmare, full of suffering and deprivation . . . In the name of the people of the Republic of the Volga Germans and in my own name I call on the German people (germanskii) to turn their bayonets on the fascist cannibals, help the people to rid their soil of the aggressors!3

Similar information and articles appeared in July and August of 1941 in several central Soviet newspapers.4 Taken together these appeals aimed to unmistakably signal that there was a consequent difference between the fascists, i.e. the enemy and the simple working Germans, regardless of the country in which they lived. The international solidarity of the workers should persevere. This observation appeared to be important for the Soviet Union at the

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time and the message was also treated as significant by the media. However, a rational public debate was missing, which often lead to such name-calling as ‘first bandit Hitler’, ‘fascist band of murderers’, ‘Hitler, the black blooded dragon’, ‘fascist cannibals’, ‘the Hitler group, gone mad from blood’ and ‘Mein Kampf, the Bible of the cannibals’. This kind of vocabulary had already become established in the mainstream of Soviet society during the 1930s through the process of ‘exposure’ and of banishing the Trotskyites along with other supposed people’s enemies, and thus it was brought back in the first days of the War for contemporary propaganda purposes. Changes in Soviet War Propaganda On the eve of military conflict with the Third Reich ‘romantic’ images of the future war as a ‘struggle against the property owners and capitalists’, in which the Soviet troops were received by ‘the working masses’ with enthusiasm, and hordes of proletarians in soldiers uniforms would rush to the side of the Red Army, was not only in the minds of the normal soldiers but also in the thoughts of the political leaders. Such dreams were fed by the experience of similar encounters in the Soviet-Polish War and on the annexation of the Baltic States and Bessarabia in 1939–40. Even the campaign against Finland, with its many losses and the clear refusal by Finnish civilians and those belonging to the military to support ‘the liberation from the yoke of imperialism’, changed little in this stance.5 The offensive Soviet military doctrine, according to which the enemy should be defeated on his territory, ‘with a destructive blow and few own (Soviet) losses’ (maloi krov’iu, moguchim udarom), stood in vivid contradiction to the harsh reality: in the process of the first two months of the War the Wehrmacht had stormed up to Kiev and Dnepr and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers had fallen. By the end of August 1941 1.5 million Red Army soldiers had been captured or had disserted to the Germans under the influence of Wehrmacht propaganda.6 Added to this, noticeable signs of local collaboration with the enemy were coming to light in the occupied areas. The following events contributed significantly to a radicalization of war propaganda. During the retreat from the recently annexed areas, employees of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del – NKVD) executed thousands

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of prison inmates and several military personnel, who had been under arrest.7 Russian authors estimate the number of arbitrarily shot inmates of the prisons to be exactly 9,817 people, of whom 2,464 came from prisons in the region of Lvov (Lviv). There were cruel executions on the evacuation march, such as the head of the prison in the town Glubokoe ordering up to 600 prisoners be shot in a wood.8 The Nazis made propaganda gains after the discovery of this mass murder. In the first statement from the Moscow foreign affairs ministry on the subject, the allegation was labelled a ‘libellous accusation’, whose only purpose was to ‘distract’ the public from their ‘own sins’.9 The reports and portrayals of German atrocities in the Soviet media were aimed initially at the criminalization of Wehrmacht personnel. Whoever expressed the slightest doubt about the credibility of such reports was dealt with immediately by the secret police. This happened to the well-known anti-fascist director and theatre manager Bernhard Reich, who portrayed German soldiers in his plays as ‘thinking people’ and not solely as ‘idiots, robbers or animal-like beings’, and thus contradicted the official propaganda. Reich was sentenced to several years in a labour camp on a charge of anti-Soviet propaganda.10 The fate of Heinrich Hoffmann from the village of Rosental in the Volga German Republic serves as one of the countless examples of ‘German bestiality’ and was even temporarily taken into the martyrdom ideology of Soviet heroes. Initially the army newspaper, Boevoi natisk, reported his heroic death on 5 August 1941. On 24 August the central newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda published a photo of Hoffmann’s bloody Komsomol book with the description of a fearless fight and spine-chilling account of the cruelty of ‘Hitler’s soldiers’. As a Soviet German who had courageously fought against his fascist blood brothers and had given his life for the party and for Stalin, Hoffmann at first appeared to be a suitable symbol for the embodiment of Soviet patriotism. In his name soldiers began to swear revenge, but in the midst of the deportation of Germans from the USSR, which began shortly thereafter, he was forgotten.11 That is why this Volga German was not included in the canon of Soviet heroes together with such names as Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia, Aleksandr Matrosov or Musa Dzhalil’, although at first his case followed the normal pattern of Soviet hero-making. The appeal for greater Russian patriotism, together with a more or less discernible anti-German sentiment, now clearly promised a better chance of success in mobilizing the masses. A ‘German hero’, even with the

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prefix ‘Soviet’ or ‘Volga’, no longer suited the freshly indoctrinated ideological direction. The agitation and propaganda organized by the Soviet leadership in the first few weeks of the War proved neither to be effective for the mobilization of the Soviet peoples, including the Russians, nor was it a good way to influence the enemy. During his meeting with William Averell Harriman, the representative of the US President, at the end of September 1941, Stalin is reported to have said, ‘We know that the people do not want to fight for a world revolution, they also won’t fight for the Soviet powers [. . .] Maybe they will fight for Russia.’12 After the failure of the first attempts to influence the advancing enemy with the sentiments of class struggle and international solidarity between workers and farmers, the official propaganda quickly became an uninhibited torrent of hate and cruelty. ‘German’ was increasingly used as a synonym for ‘fascist’, which was to have fatal consequences for the Russian Germans.13 The ASSRVG – with representatives in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and in the Russian Federation, and with workers in the state and party apparatus – protested against this U-turn, which went against their formal constitutional rights. The existence of a recognized ‘Soviet’ German minority with vested rights of autonomy certainly presented an obstacle for the war propaganda, with its characterization of the Germans as ‘two-legged animals’, ‘cannibals’ and ‘rabid dogs’.14 On the other hand, as in the First World War, the military leadership attempted to blame their failure on, among other things, the existence of ‘treasonous’ activities of the German population in regions near the front.15 On 3 August 1941 a battle update from the war council of the Southern Front arrived in the headquarters of the Supreme Command of the Soviet forces: 1. The acts of war on the Dnestr have proven that the German population shot on our retreating troops from windows and gardens. Furthermore it has become clear that the German troops invading a German village on 1 August were welcomed with salt and bread. In the immediate surroundings of the front there are many settlements with a German population. 2. We are asking the local authorities to give orders for the immediate removal of this unreliable element.16

Whether this message reflected the real situation or an invented story from the twilight world of spy hysteria, is in this case of

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secondary importance. This telegram carried Stalin’s note, ‘Tovarishchu Beriia. Nado vyselit’ s treskom – Comrade Beriia. Out with them with a bang,’ and pointed to another entry: ‘The People’s Commissar [i.e. Beriia] has been informed of this, 25/08/1941.’ With that the fate of the Russian Germans was sealed and on the very same day Beriia presented a draft for the decision to resettle the Germans currently living in the Volga region.17 One result of this draft was the decision by the Council for Evacuation and the War Council of the Southern Front to deport 53,000 Crimean Germans on 15 August. This was thinly veiled by officially calling it an evacuation.18 The Deportation of the German Minority Stalin, supported by his colleagues in the politburo, had by 26 August 1941 ordered the resettlement of the Volga Germans. This was camouflaged as a decision by the central committee of the Communist Party (Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol’sheviki) – VKP(b)) and the Council of People’s Commissars (CPC), i.e. the government. In this top-secret decision, to which only a close circle of party and state leaders were privy, there was no evidence of guilt on the part of the German minority. The directive, comprising nineteen articles and written in an emphatically factual fashion, gives the impression of an orderly planned resettlement. The regions of Altai and Krasnoiarsk, the areas of Omsk and Novosibirsk, as well as Kazakhstan, functioned as reception areas. The complete plan was entrusted to the NKVD.19 The secretly formulated party and government decision to liquidate a Soviet republic which was firmly anchored in the constitution did, however, require permission, if only for a purely formal legal ‘blessing’ from the state apparatus. Thus, the decree, ‘Pertaining to the re-settlement of the Germans in the Volga District’, which was supposed to give the whole operation ‘legitimate’ grounds, was signed two days later on 28 August, by the head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, in the name of the President of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. This decree was only published in the News of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and in the local press.20 Through a further decree on 7 September 1941 the annexation of the territory of the Volga German Republic into the bordering regions of Saratov and Stalingrad followed.21 Contrary to the ‘internally’ recorded government and party decisions, hefty

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accusations against the Germans were raised in the official decree on 28 August 1941. They were accused of harbouring ‘thousands and tens of thousands of saboteurs and spies’ who on a certain German signal would carry out bomb attacks. On the basis of this allegation, the German minority was declared an enemy of the Soviet state and was ‘resettled’ in the eastern parts of the country. On 9 September 1941, Serov, the leader of the ‘German’ operation and a deputy of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, reported to his boss Beriia that at this time four (!) agents from the German secret service were active in the area. As an example of the anti-Soviet sabotage in the Volga German Republic such grotesque evidence was brought forward as ‘torn pictures of the Soviet leader, of destroyed private gardens or fruit plantings’.22 This did not however stop the secret police in the service of the Bolshevik leadership from retrospectively discovering the presence of thousands of traitors to the fatherland among the deported Germans. In the ensuing weeks, the NKVD began a witch-hunt for the Germans to catch, isolate and deport those who remained unregistered. Because the registration of the Germans in the town of Tula did not occur with the involvement of the military authority, an undercover operation to track down all the Germans currently resident in the town and territory is being carried out with the help of the housing department. On top of that the same work is also being done by special departments in industry and in the authorities [. . .] and by the undercover informants of the operative department of the NKVD. This work should be finished by 27 September this year [1941].23

Over the next few months the exile of other groups of the German population, who did not enjoy the ‘status of autonomy’ – for example, from the Ukraine, the Trans and North Caucasus, from the towns of Moscow or Gor’kii – followed as a result of the secret decision taken by the state committee for defence (Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony – GKO), on the orders of the Council of People’s Commissars, under the command of the NKVD and the various war councils of the individual army fronts. The complete ‘German operation’ was carried out under a press and publicity blackout. According to official figures, by the end of 1941, 799,459 people had been ‘resettled’ from the European territories of the Soviet Union to Kazakhstan and Siberia, including 444,115 Volga Germans.24

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The measures taken by the state and party leadership according to the resolution on the deportation were clearly directed at the complete and total eradication of every trace of German life in the Soviet Union.25 Immediately after the publication of the decree on 28 August 1941, the dissolution of the national cultural institutes in the independent republic began. On 30 August the final edition of a German language newspaper was published with a hurried translation of the decree. Teaching in the German language was immediately forbidden; all German educational institutes in villages and even in towns such as Marxstadt and Balzer, where Germans were the absolute majority, were forced to close. The wave of disbanding also affected cultural institutions such as the German State Theatre in Engels and the theatres in Marxstadt and Balzer, the German state teacher training college, the teachers’ institute and the technical colleges, the state folk schools of the ASSRVG, the Philharmonie with its symphony orchestra and German state publishers. The writers’ and composers’ association, the organization for the fine arts and other cultural organizations were disbanded.26 Even writers of German origin were immediately rejected from the Soviet writers’ association.27 In order to fully eliminate the memory of the former inhabitants, the Supreme Soviet had at its disposal the decree from 19 May 1942 on the Russification of German place names. Some places already had both German and Russian names, so from then on only the Russian name was to be used. The others were given mainly patriotic Soviet names: the town of Balzer became Krasnoarmeisk, which means member of the Red Army; one of the oldest and biggest Volga German settlements, Mariental (founded in 1766), mutated into Sovetskoe; Jost was renamed Oktiabr’skoe. Where there were inhibitions due to abiding ideological reasons, the renaming was slightly more restrained: the former capital Engels was allowed to keep its name, which it had only been given in October 1931, while with Marxstadt, only the first half was to remain – the revealing German suffix of -stadt had to go.28 The systematic method of destroying national cultural institutions and the erasing of the memory of the over 175-year-long history of the Volga Germans is best illustrated in the example of the museums, archives and libraries. The central museum of the ASSRVG was founded in 1925 in Engels (at the time still called

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Pokrovsk). Alongside numerous linguistic, ethnographic and folkloric expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s for the research and conservation of the intellectual and material culture of the Volga Germans, the collection also grew thanks to state purchases of contemporary art, as well as gifts. All in all, it owned 5,400 exhibition pieces in 1940.29 After the dissolution of the Volga German Republic, it did not take long before the museum was closed and other organizations moved into its rooms. The museum of local history in Engels was founded after the central museum was re-profiled, i.e. cleansed of everything that referred to its German inhabitants. After the War, the director of the museum, I. Struin, made an informative statement on the fate of the exhibition pieces, collections and magazine provisions: Up to 1946 the exhibition pieces and treasures of the museum were laid chaotically in a shed, where many were damaged because of dampness. In this time [between 1941 and 1946] the museum changed its residence many times and three directors came and went [. . .] With the exception of 1936 no full inventory list remains, no description, no records. Because of these conditions many valuable exhibition pieces were damaged, rotted or fell into the hands of thieves.30

The central library of the ASSR of the Volga Germans was dissolved in a similar fashion. The library, founded in 1918, also housed alongside the scientific, educational and aesthetic literature in German, Russian, French and other European languages, testimonials of the history and culture of the Volga Germans and other geographical groups of Germans in Russia and the USSR. A considerable number of these books, which were collected over many years, were destroyed due to inappropriate storage; selected works were confiscated. About 3,500 valuable publications, mainly in Western European languages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries were selected in 1943 by a delegation from the University of Saratov to be taken to their academic library. A further part of the collection, which had no direction connection to the German Russians, was strewn across the country in different libraries in an attempt to top up their foreign language sections. Books with the stamp of the central republic library of the ASSRVG in Engels, can be found in the state libraries of Moscow and St Petersburg, in lending libraries in Volograd, Karaganda, Novosibirsk, Almaty and dozens of other towns.31

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The fate of the collections of documents from the central state archives of the Volga German Republic was not as tragic as that of the documents from other national institutions. The 1,475 items and the 320,195 records which were registered on 1 January 1941, provide an invaluable source of the socio-cultural, religious, demographic, economic and political development of the German population on the Volga during the Tsarist Empire and after the October Revolution in 1917.32 In the process of only a few days, the archives comprising 10,000 bundles of paper from agricultural and industrial firms, authorities and institutions were confiscated. Numerous scripts were lost for ever in the ensuing chaos. As far as can be ascertained, the papers were not intentionally destroyed. Russians and Ukrainians comprised about a third of the total population in the territory of the ASSRVG, while in the capital, Engels, they formed an absolute majority, so in many cases it was impossible to cleanly separate the documents by nationality. A branch of the Saratov regional archives was created for the safe keeping of such documents. Despite the losses suffered, the archives managed to keep a considerable collection of documents on the history of the Volga Germans. However, the collection remained closed to the public and academia. Those who wanted to research in the archives were immediately thought to harbour anti-Soviet sentiments. Until the end of the 1980s it was forbidden to refer to Soviet publications in the library in Engels; even during the period of perestroika all mention of the archives and their catalogues were missing from reliable reference books.33 In addition to the cultural destruction, the Soviet state also economically ruined the citizens of German origin. The August ukase led to a wave of confiscations of private, collectivized and state wealth. Those who were deported were only allowed to take some food, bed linen and clothes with them. Their household contents, preserved food, tools, animals and their cultivated land fell into state hands. After the deportation alone in the eleven southern cantons the following wealth of the German kolkhoz lay fallow: 908,600 hectares of farmland, 333,102 houses with outbuildings, about 120,000 cattle, more than 120,000 sheep and goats, almost 20,000 horses and approximately 1,500 camels.34 In order to give this widespread dispossession the appearance of an ordered resettlement project, the government passed a bill on 30 August 1941 issuing ‘guidelines for the repossession of the wealth from the kolkhoz and the collective farmers, who were resettled

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as a result of a special decision’.35 These guidelines even foresaw compensation for the Germans, which – given the property they had forcibly abandoned – could have only been felt as mockery: once in the new settlements a percentage of the confiscated cattle were to be replaced in type or remunerated according to state prices; no member of the family was to receive more than 3 double hundredweight of corn. Further, the law foresaw cheap credit for the building of houses in the new colonies. City inhabitants were allowed to sell their households or contract others to do so on their behalf. Nonetheless the actual economic situation of the kolkhoz in Siberia and Kazakhstan, the complete concentration of the land’s resources on the war effort, and a rapid currency depreciation reduced these modest promises to waste paper.36 A large-scale ethnic redistribution was taking place – by 3 September 1941, as the deportation was in full swing, the government of the USSR decided to send 44,744 Russian and Ukrainian families from the Zaporozh’e, Kursk and other territories to the recently vacated homes and businesses. The repopulation continued slowly, although more orders soon came from the government to facilitate the acceleration of the repopulation of the evacuated areas. However, at the beginning of 1945 the population in the former German cantons was still only 20–35 per cent of the pre-war level. A considerable part of the deserted houses and business premises fell into disrepair; parts were scavenged during the War for heating or they served the new inhabitants as replacement stones for other buildings. Many countryside villages were never resettled after the deportation of the Germans.37 Germans as Second-class Citizens The breach of law (Benjamin Pinkus), which the Soviet government committed by dissolving the ASSRVG and the resultant deportations, was not only disastrous for the Russian Germans in the fields of politics, culture and economics, but it also lead to grave reductions to their civil rights.38 In contrast to their totalitarian opponents in Germany the Soviet Union had not anchored the discriminatory legal norms regarding ethnic communities in the law.39 Through this skilled move the Bolshevik leaders were able for decades to deny the huge suppression, initially of the Russian Germans, and later of other nationalities.

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A complicated web of discriminatory regulations was soon in place resulting from the internal party decisions and the secret police briefings. A decisive role in this process was played by the department of special settlements (Otdel Spetspereselenii – OSP), which had been formed by 28 August 1941, was directly subordinate to the central apparatus of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and was solely concerned with the organization of the expulsions, followed by re-accommodation in Siberia and Kazakhstan.40 The state government must have recognized the growing gulf between, on the one hand the persecution of the former Kulaks because of a class principle, however vague, for which the Department for Work and Special Resettlement of the Main Camp Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei – GULag) was responsible, and on the other hand, the currently implemented repressions on an ethnic basis. The head (nachal’nik) of this authority, a major in the State Security, Ivan Ivanov, and his eight co-workers became very active in the period that followed in order to instruct their subordinates in the ‘correct’ way of dealing with the Germans who had by now been expelled from the brotherly Soviet peoples and were under the charge of the Interior Affairs Ministry. In numerous round robin letters to the district departments of the NKVD, Ivanov told them over and over again: seek and disclose the fascist agents among the resettled Germans; track down every expression of discontent; force the Germans, irrespective of their family status and professional or academic qualifications, to work in the kolkhozes and sovkhozes; and scrutinize their whereabouts within their designated areas.41 The party and government decision from 26 August 1941, along with other regulations, ensured that the resettlement of the Germans was only possible in small countryside villages or small district towns. Finding accommodation or moving to a regional town, an industrial area or even a major city was strictly forbidden. Added to this, the deportation soon also affected those Germans who lived in the eastern areas of the Soviet Union. Many had been there for generations; their mass deportation had never been intended. On 16 August 1941 the central committee of the communist party of Kazakhstan decided upon the deportation of Germans from the regional centres of the republic and henceforth they were banned from occupying any leading posts in the party, the soviet or in industry. A few days later the registration of Germans living in regional centres and industrial zones began. They were rounded up

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and banished to countryside settlements in the region of Molotov (Perm’), Cheliabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Chkalov (Orenburg) in the Urals. The forced resettlement from the large towns in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan followed in January 1942.42 For the national intelligentsia and professionals this was the beginning of a fatal development with devastating results which reached their low point when they were forced into the labour camps. Clearly all these measures were aimed at the destruction and humiliation of the political and cultural elite among the German Russians. What sort of professional future could be expected for the 212 doctors, teachers, actors and a further 452 state employees from Engels, the capital of the Volga German Republic, on the Siberian collective farms, specifically in the territory of Kansk, in the Region of Krasnoiarsk? As city dwellers they arrived with little food and could not even hope for a meagre compensation for their confiscated cattle or wheat. Very few were successful in finding employment in the district centre; most were defenceless against the hard physical farm labour and were already starving by December 1941.43 In the district of Oiashino, in the territory of Novosibirsk, 574 of the 1,300 Germans fit for work were professional experts, among whom were 66 professors, their assistants, librarians and teachers, 47 doctors, 22 engineers, and 120 accountants and chief accountants. Professor Werner, head of the chair for microbiology at Saratov University, was forced to do simple work in the Gorn Kolkhoz in Novosibirsk, and the gynaecologist (Dr) Wilhelm was sent to the Kolkhoz Voroshilov to do general work.44 The mass deportation from 1943 to1944 led to a drastic increase of the number of people with limited civil rights. In accordance with a decree of 9 January 1945, special military headquarters were created in areas where the deportees were sent in order to observe and control them. In the designated areas the Germans, along with other deportees, were required to register themselves and any change in the number of family members (through death, escape, birth, etc.) within three days; they were unable to leave their place of residence without permission from the commandant. The regime of special colonies was tightened with the adoption of the decree from the presidency of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 26 November 1948, which stated that the banishment of the ‘punished’ people was to be ‘permanent’ and envisaged the sentence for escaping from the special colonies as twenty years forced labour in a penal camp.45

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Viktor Krieger Germanophobic Propaganda and Hostility among the Population.

The August decree was never mentioned by the Soviet mass media, the printed compendium of laws and the academic literature both during and after the War; only the scarcely available ‘News of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR’ published it. The regime could not face the disgrace of admitting that a people, despite years of ideological influence, was ‘entirely’ comprised of enemies of the Soviet Union. Obscure claims of ‘ten thousand spies and saboteurs’ among the Volga Germans also did not appear particularly believable. Numerous party and Soviet officials in the central authorities and in the places of deportation were told through official channels the ‘reason’ for the disbanding of the Volga German Republic. A ‘directive’ letter from the central committee of the communist party of Kazakhstan to the leading officials in the regions and districts, dated 4 October 1941, repeated the claims of the August decree and called on the party organization to sharpen protection of socialist property, increase vigilance and keep the newly arrived refugees under constant surveillance.46 A wide stratum of the Soviet population learned of the ‘political’ dangers of their new neighbours through word of mouth. Through indirect slander the Bolshevik rulers were able to safeguard their own history, to continue praising ‘the equal Soviet family of nations’ and to denounce the policy of ‘national suppression’ in fascist Germany.47 In addition, the extensive deprivation of rights and the defamation of Soviet citizens of German descent sent out signals which made clear that the propagation of national hate, chauvinistic remarks and every type of discrimination would not be prosecuted by the law. ‘We are allowing too much humanism to reign over these fascist scoundrels,’ said a district party secretary in the territory of north Kazakhstan, and with such an opinion of the German deportees he was not alone.48 Calls by the central committee of the VKP(b) on the twentyfourth anniversary of the October Revolution show the remains of the slogans of international solidarity: ‘Our greetings to the German people (germanskomu), who groan under the yoke of Hitler’s national socialist mob – we wish them victory over the bloodthirsty Hitler.’49 The constantly worsening conditions on the front, however, removed the last ideological blinkers. The clearest example of this change is the order from the supervisor of the

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head office for political propaganda for the Red Army, L. Mekhlis, which on 10 December 1941 ordered the replacement of the slogan ‘Workers of all Countries, Unite’ with ‘Death to the German Occupiers’ in all military newspapers. He justified this change by claiming that the international proletarian slogan had disorientated many in the armed forces ‘in the face of the assignment to destroy all German occupiers’.50 The immense suffering of the civilians and the complete destruction of areas around Moscow, which became apparent upon their first recapture during the fight for Moscow, immeasurably increased Germanophobic hysteria in the mass media. On the whole, however, the destruction was the result of merciless Soviet war policy. On 17 November 1941 Stalin ordered, in command No. 0428 from the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander, the destruction of all human settlements and housing within a 40-60 km radius of the German front. The arsonist commandos, who were formed especially for this purpose, began with a systematic destruction of the basics for survival, so that the German conquerors should freeze under the open skies. On 25 November the operatives of the Fifth Soviet Army alone reported the destruction and burning of fiftyfive settlements.51 The concerns of the Soviet population who fell under the German occupation were not taken into consideration: ‘The Soviet arithmetic is simple – to send one German and with him a hundred Russians to ruin is a heroic action. But if one spares the life of one German along with a hundred Russians – that is bad; that amounts to treason.’52 Molotov’s diplomatic notes of 25 November 1941, ‘On the outraging bestialities practised on Soviet prisoners of war by German authorities’, and of 6 January 1942, ‘On the general plundering, the thefts from the population and the dreadful bestialities of the German authorities in the territories under their occupation’, increased the country’s desire for pogroms. The main aim of the Soviet mass media was the propagation of hate against the enemy within – as programmatically announced by the famous author Aleksei Tolstoi in a Pravda appeal on 28 July 1941. Supporting him in this regard were a whole host of famous authors, such as Leonid Leonov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Il’ia Erenburg, Konstantin Simonov et al. Poems such as Simonov’s ‘Kill him’ or Surkov’s ‘I hate’ obviously served to raise fighting lust in the troops. Il’ia Erenburg’s pamphlets and articles even described the Englishman Alexander Werth, not particularly known for his sympathy towards the Germans, as ‘nothing short of propaganda for a race war’.53

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Uncountable articles in flyers and newspapers, books and magazines, radio programmes and films discriminated primarily against Germans (i.e. not against the enemy or the fascists). Violent feelings were propagated, clearly poisoning the relations between the population of all other nationalities and the Russian Germans, especially since the Soviet authorities made no effort to differentiate between Russian Germans and the attacking nation. The picture of the enemy as including the ‘domestic’ Germans was soon ‘scientifically’ supported. The administration of the central archives of the NKVD published a collection of sources on German espionage in tsarist Russia. The documentation allegedly verified that Russian citizens of German descent, including farmers, all professionals, entrepreneurs, high-ranking public officials and officers, had en masse carried out activities as German agents. Such accusations appeared repeatedly in the detailed foreword of the collection, which promptly appeared as a book in its own right.54 This reporting, naturally without any critical screening, served as the basis for the writing of further works on German espionage in Russia during the First and the Second (current) World Wars, which eventually ran into several hundred thousand copies.55 Not only the secret police but also many literary figures profited from the stirring up of resentment against their fellow German citizens. In early 1943 the literary scholar Aleksandr Dement’ev wrote the book The reactionary role of the Germans in Russia’s history (printed in Leningrad, circulation 10,000 copies, during the siege of the city). A year later a collection appeared providing the worst possible descriptions of the ‘local’ Germans in the works of classical Russian literature, which Dement’ev had carefully selected and supplied with a disparaging commentary. Similar to the pattern of anti-Semitic propaganda, the planned publications were full of prejudices, suspicion and slander of every type.56 The well-known author Pavel Bazhov had been publishing his malicious caricatures of Tales on the Germans (Skazy o nemtsakh) in several newspapers since August 1941. These later appeared as brochures and books for mass circulation. He was helped by the use of the most primitive clichés and common stereotypes in his works, in order to underline the clear intellectual and moral superiority of the Russian masters and workers in contrast to the German administrators, miners and professionals, who had been active in considerable numbers in the iron industry in the Urals since the beginning of the eighteenth century.57

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A growing antipathy and bitterness against Germany, German culture and language increased constantly as the war continued with its human and material war victims. Local NKVD authorities’ reports reflect the hopeless situation of the German Russians. A completely irregular relationship, even antagonism, has arisen among some leading specialists in economics, the kolkhoz director, production managers, and the district party and soviet regarding the accommodation and employment of the specially resettled Germans [. . .] Instead of finding accommodation for them, the director of the salt works behaves towards them coarsely, calls them parasites and swears crudely about them [. . .]. In the district of Sharipovo the chairman of the kolkhoz ‘Proletarian Work’, Komisarenko, explained in a conversation about supplying the refugees with bread, ‘all Germans should die of hunger, I will not give them any bread [. . .]’. The female collective farmer Churilova explained to the German Schmidt, ‘Why did they bring you here to our district, it would have been better if they had killed you back there. You are traitors, you should die of hunger, or be sent out into the cold, so that you fascists can feel it’ [. . .] Of the 7,396 children only 2,403 go to school. This can be explained by the fact that the majority of children do not own shoes, warm clothes or school equipment. Children older than the age of twelve do not go to school because they must work in the industry or go into service. Also the lack of knowledge of the Russian language plays a part [. . .]. In the schools in some districts the German schoolchildren are thoroughly terrorised by their Russian peers and called ‘fascists’. That is why they stop going to school.58

Similar incidents were also recorded by the security services in other territories, to which deported Germans were sent. The responsible party and Soviet organizations did not, however, see fit to take any measures in the face of such grave disrespect of Soviet law. Indeed, expressions of discontent at the living conditions in the new location, or complaints about national discrimination, were often dismissed and punished as anti-Soviet agitation, propaganda, or as slander against the actions of the party and government.59 Forced Entry into Labour Camps and Terrorization by the Secret Police As a result of the secret decision of the Politburo of the VKP(b) on 31 August 1941 entitled ‘On the Germans living in the Ukrainian SSR’, all men between the ages of sixteen and

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sixty were conscripted into military construction units.60 The acting leader of the NKVD, Chernyshev, reported the creation of thirteen construction battalions with a total of 18,600 men by 3 September 1941.61 On 8 September 1941, Stalin signed directive No. 35105 of the People’s Commissariat for Defence, which stated: ‘In the military, including military academies, military colleges and agencies of the Red Army, soldiers of German descent are to be sifted out from the reserves and the command corps and sent to construction troops in the central military zone.’ Only a few soldiers of German descent were to be retained on special recommendation from their superiors.62 Officers were sacked from the Army without the usual transfer into the reserves and sent to remote areas, while the rank and file had to continue their service in labour battalions. At the beginning of 1942 there was an almost total transferral of German military personal into labour camps.63 Thus the foundations were laid for the forced labour of Russian Germans. The next stepping stone towards special treatment of the German minority was the widespread deportment of youths, men and women to labour camps, which had been operating since early 1942. These were disguised by the officers and later by the authorities as trudovaia armiia or trudarmiia: ‘work army’. Officially these measures were called ‘mobilisation of the workforce’, although the commander in the camps’ headquarters GULag, General Lieutenant Nasedkin, openly admitted in an internal lecture that the forced admission of Germans to the labour camps was above all seen as a measure of repression and punishment towards this national minority.64 Because Stalin’s regime apparently wanted to keep the civil rights of those deported to a minimum, recruitment of construction troops for the construction battalions was out of the question. At the same time they made use of a clever trick: because it was technically impossible to lawfully pass judgement on all adult Germans in such a short time, to legally send them to a punishment camp, a new category of GULag was created – the trudmobilizovannyi nemets – ‘work mobilised German’, which meant that these forced labourers never appeared in GULag statistics. The majority of Germans found themselves in work camps as a result of the top-secret resolutions of the GKO from 10 January (No. 1123), 14 February (No. 1281) and 7 October (No. 2383) 1942. Further mobilization followed over the coming months and years, which in the face of the exhaustion of the human potential yielded considerably smaller contingents. The legal status of those

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mobilized can be characterized as a mixture of that of camp inmate, construction worker and military personnel, although the camp-inmate characteristic was the most dominant. That can be seen primarily by the fact that the distribution of food and clothes was carried out according to normal GULag regulations. A further similarity with the GULags is revealed in the role of the NKVD to keep the mobilized German troops and labour columns under surveillance, and to enforce strict order and discipline. Furthermore, these Germans were isolated from the normal workforce, were accommodated in barracks and were deprived of their freedom of movement. As with GULag prisoners, they were assigned the most strenuous physical jobs and unskilled work, such as railway and industrial construction, coal and oil extraction or wood cutting. Their forced conscription by the local war commissariat and their subordination to military courts gave this group the appearance of military recruits. The existence of party and Komsomol organizations at the sites – albeit with severely restricted authority – and the envisaged wages in accordance with the salary scale of their civilian careers ultimately suggested the survival of some elements of civil rights. The same fate awaited healthy men of other minorities who were capable of work, whose ‘motherland’ was at war with the USSR. The GKO resolution of 14 October 1942 (No. 2409) proclaimed these regulations for Soviet citizens of Finnish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Italian or Rumanian descent. All in all during the War, no fewer than 350,000 of the approximately 1.12 million Russian Germans who came under Soviet jurisdiction were sent to forced labour camps.65 A speciality of this conscription was its absolute inclusiveness: alongside the simple workers and farmers, the entire intellectual and functionary classes of the Russian Germans found themselves in the camps. This included deputies from the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and from the Union Republics and Autonomous Republics; ministers and government officials; party, economic and Soviet specialists; professors and lecturers; writers and doctors; teachers and engineers; officers and judges from the Volga German Republic. Numerous German and Austrian emigrants from the Sudetenland were also threatened with this forced recruitment and some of them endured years in labour camps.66 The highest concentrations of German workers were those on construction sites for industrial buildings and penal camps that specialized in tree felling. Thus on 1 January 1943, on the

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construction site of the Cheliabinsk cabin collective of the NKVD of the USSR, there were 27,783 trudarmiia workers; on the site of the Bogolov aluminium plant, a further 12,683, and in Ivdel’lag, 12,266 people, the latter two sites belonging to Sverdlovsk region. Miserable living and working conditions, the pitiless coercion and a feeling of the impunity of the camp leaders and managers rapidly produced a large number of deaths and cases of serious illness among these Germans. According to official statistics in 1942, 12,047 members of the forced labour force died on NKVD projects alone, or 10.3 per cent (117,429) of Germans who up until 1 January 1943 were registered there. Due to complete physical exhaustion, a further 8,073 people were demobilized, of which the majority subsequently died.67 In the labour camps all contact with conscripted Germans other than the most necessary was strictly forbidden, rules that were consistent with the treatment of prisoners. But as they were being used toward the members of a particular nationality – who according to formal legal grounds did not belong to the category of prisoner – they took on a racist undertone. This can be seen from the many instructions and orders which denounced close contact with the German forced labourers and doled out hard punishment to offenders. Above all, relationships with Russian women were subject to repressive measures – because of ‘intimate contact with one of the mobilised Germans’ the Kolkhoz secretary for the organization for non-contracted workers in Ivdel’lag lost her position and was expelled from the communist youth organization. A female doctor had to tolerate public denunciation because on a few occasions she met one of the German forced labourers in her own flat, and that ‘was contrary to the strict regulations of the building authority of Cheliabinsk iron and steel combine’, which forbade ‘relationships of any sort between personnel and the mobilised German workforce’.68 In addition to military supervision, Soviet secret police played a major part in the suppression of these Germans. Representatives of the secret police were to be found in the work places and were called the notorious ‘Operative-Cheka Department’ (OperativnoChekistskii Otdel – OChO). The OChO acted mainly autonomously and were territorially subordinate to the district administration of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the operative administration of the GULag central. In April 1943 the NKGB (People’s Commissariat for State Security) was formed from the

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ranks of the NKVD. Supervision of the German labour force essentially remained the responsibility of the NKVD. Only in the case of suspected espionage and serious legal or economic wrongdoing did the NKGB assume the investigation. A massive wave of repression seized the Russian Germans: by July 1944, 8,543 forced labourers were arrested on the grounds of attempted escape, alleged acts of sabotage and counter-revolution, and also because of self-mutilation and ‘intentional’ weight loss. Of these, 6,392 were sentenced to many years imprisonment and 526 to death.69 In the majority of cases the punishment was handed down by a special council of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs thus circumventing proper criminal jurisdiction. The terrorization of forced labourers served many purposes; on the one hand it was an important method of intimidating them and making them compliant – in particular the intellectuals, professionals, the former civil servants and leaders of business. The ruination of the national elite reduced the Germans to a weak-willed, disposable mass. On the other hand the number of convicted or exposed counter-revolutionary organizations among the Germans had to be large enough to provide a raison d’être for every single Chekist to secure their job and spare them from being sent to the front. And last but not least, credible evidence of the Germans’ treacherous and criminal activities had to be discovered in order to support the deprivation of their rights retrospectively. An analysis of the early commemorative books of the victims of political repression in the territory of Sverdlovsk indicates that during the years 1941-45, the German minority received a fifth of all convictions, although their employment rate during this time hovered between a mere 3 and 4 per cent.70 The search for the suspected connection between the German minority and political, intelligence and military posts in the Third Reich was the focus of attention right from the beginning: dozens of secret processes with hundreds of accused were aimed at confirming the existence of Hitler’s ‘5th Column’ in the USSR.71 In June and August 1942, on the construction site of the Cheliabinsk iron and steel combine, the OChO arranged two trials of the recently arrived trudarmiia workers’ ‘counterrevolutionary and mutinous’ organizations. The leaders of one of the groups of conspirators was Jakob Müller, the first party secretary of the canton of Krasnoia, in the Volga German Republic from 1938 to 1941, and Wladimir Hartmann, the chairman of the executive committee of

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the same canton. The second organization was supposed to be led by Theodor Trautwein and Alexander Root, the second and third party secretaries of the same canton of Krasnoia. In the investigation papers a case was made that since the beginning of the 1930s the ringleaders had been spying for Germany and had actively taken part in preparations for an armed revolt which was to take place just after the start of the War. According to the confessions of the accused, only the well-timed resettlement of Germans had stopped their treacherous plans. In the labour camps they began preparing for an uprising which was to take place at the approach of the German Army, this time expected as far as the Urals. Of the fifty-one Germans prosecuted, of whom many were in groups – economic, soviet and party – of middle and lower rank, twentyfour were executed, the rest receiving many years imprisonment. In the years between 1943 and 1945 dozens more former German intellectuals and leading groups from the Volga German Republic were criminally prosecuted at the camp in Kransnoiarsk.72 In this and in many other cases the state security used forced confessions to implicate the former leaders of the ASSRVG in treason and subversive activities. Its aim was to discredit and, where possible, to criminally prosecute them, in order to legitimize Stalin’s regime retrospectively, the disbanding of the Volga Republic and the repressive measures taken against citizens of German descent.73 The following secret trial is easily the most important among the hundreds of cases against German forced labourers during the War and in the early years after it. It is concerned with the delegates to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the last head of government of the Volga German Republic, Alexander Heckmann, the third secretary of the territory’s party committee, Heinrich Korbmacher, the former People’s Commissars Friedrich Fritzler (farming), Johannes Maier (finance) and other leading economic and soviet officials, who served their time at the construction site of the Bogoslov Aluminium works of the NKVD. They were found guilty of heading a counter-revolutionary organization in the former Volga German Republic and of arranging an uprising in collaboration with the German Wehrmacht, behind the back of the Red Army. Heinrich Korbmacher was the first to be arrested, on 24 April 1944; Alexander Heckmann followed on 22 May and the others by early July. The Chekists of Sverdlov were clearly keen to complete their assignment from the Moscow headquarters of State Security and to fabricate from these people the alleged

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‘command centre’ of the mutinous counter-revolutionary organization. By means of torture, these prominent Germans were forced to admit their formation of an anti-Soviet organization in the former ASSRVG and of planning to carry out extensive sabotage. On top of that, they were accused of preparing this ‘expanded’ underground organization for an armed uprising against the Soviet powers following an attack from Nazi Germany.74 The investigation, which lasted more than a year, the prisoners’ contradictory statements and the ‘particular importance’ of this case led the Deputy People’s Commissar for State Security, Colonel General Kobulov, to order the Moscow NKGB headquarters to take on further investigations from 4 November 1945.75 The case became the responsibility of the department assigned with particularly important investigations on behalf of the NKGB of the USSR. Heckmann, Korbmacher, Fritzler and Maier were transferred to Moscow. Everything pointed to a large-scale show trail, with public condemnation of the ‘treason’ committed against the socialist homeland by the Volga Germans and, by association, by all the Russian Germans. However, for such a plan to work, credible confessions and trustworthy evidence was needed. With mere personal confessions the risk of public condemnation was far too great if the evidence was to be based on mere personal confessions, particularly as during their stay in Moscow prisons the accused had distanced themselves from their previous confessions made under duress. The careful investigation took over six months and included official visits to Sverdlovsk and Krasnoiarsk, where dozens of previous and new witnesses were questioned. Everything which could be related in any way to this process – the rich state security archive, current and closed investigations, extensive personal indexes etc. – was subject to meticulous examination. These far-reaching inquiries revealed nothing new and no trace of any rebellious group or fascist dissidents could be found. The final indictment therefore declared that ‘the membership of Korbmacher, Heckmann, Fritzler and Maier to an anti-Soviet rebellious group could not be proven.’76 They were then simply charged with anti-Soviet propaganda with ‘nationalist’ tendencies and on 9 August the special council sentenced each to four years’ imprisonment. As later investigations from the Khrushchev period proved, this and other group punishments could only be carried out by drastically violating the legitimate laws of the time. Most of the people involved were later pardoned – after they had died.

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From 1945 and 1946, the labour columns were steadily disbanded and members of the ‘German special contingent’ were transferred to the permanent staff of firms or construction companies where they had been employed during the War. They still did not, however, enjoy the same rights as normal Soviet citizens and were instead given the status of special settler – as were almost all of the remaining Germans in Siberia or Kazakhstan. If their finances permitted, their families were allowed to join them. Or, if their managers and the special commander agreed, they could return to the place from whence they had come. Conclusion Under the pretext of collaboration, the Stalinist leadership declared the Russian Germans state enemies and banished them to the eastern territories of the country. Without exception they were deprived of their rights, primarily to enable the patriotic mobilization of the Soviet society for the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Sent east and subject to the ‘special regimes’ of the NKVD, they had to work principally on construction sites, in pits or doing hard physical labour on the land, and were barred from all intellectual work or positions of responsibility. In contrast to other nationalities the state leadership ordered the forced admission of every German man, woman and youth into labour camps. Soldiers and officers of German descent were sifted out of the military and also sent to labour camps. Official Germanophobic propaganda stirred the flames of national hatred; personal insults and abuse relating to nationality remained unpunished. Attentive observers quickly recognized the fatal connection between the unbridled hatred of the Germans and the evergrowing xenophobia. The well-known literary scholar Sergei Bondi had already said in July 1943: ‘I really regret the anti-democratic tendencies that one sees every day. Look at national chauvinism. From what is it evoked? Most of all through the mood of the army, which is anti-Semitic, anti-German and against all national minorities.’77 The fateful ideological developments of the post-war period, with its greater Russian chauvinism and its anti-Western slogans, the fight against the so-called ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and ‘grovellers to the West’, is hardly imaginable without the groundwork and clichés

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laid and ‘tested’ during the War. The fate of the Russian Germans clearly shows that the Soviet totalitarian regime was fully able to embrace racist measures of suppression, despite internationalist lip service and the rhetoric of class struggle. Translated by Catherine Venner

Notes 1. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki. 1940–1941, vol. 23, book 2 (2). 2 marta 1940 – 22 iiunia 1941 (Moscow, 1998), pp. 764–5. German version in Gerd R. Ueberschläger and Wolfram Wette (eds), Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion.‚Unternehmen Barbarossa’ 1941 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 271. 2. Quoted from I. Stalin, O velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow, 2002), p. 15. In German, Josef Stalin, Über den großen Vaterländischen Krieg der Sowjetunion, 3rd edn (Moscow, 1946), p. 13. Here the different meanings of the two Russian words nemetskii and germanskii should be explained. Nemetskii means belonging to the German Volk in the ethnic sense. Germanskii, apart from describing the old Germanic tribes, serves in relationship to the state as a national feature and as such has a political nature. 3. ‘“Povernite Vashe oruzhie . . .” (Ispol’zovanie povolzhkikh nemtsev v kontrpropagande na naselenie i vooruzhennye sily Germanii letom 1941 g.)’, in Voenno-istoricheskie issledovaniia v Povolzh’e, 2 (Saratov, 1997), pp. 274–94, here pp. 279–83. 4. ‘“Povernite oruzhie protiv bandy gitlerovskikh ubiits!” Golos krest’ian Respubliki nemtsev Povolzh’ia’, in Pravda 194, 15 July 1941; the same in Krasnaia zvezda 164, from 15 July 1941; ‘Sil’nei beite prokliatykh izvergov: pis’mo Konrada Geringera iz kantona Kukkus, Respublika nemtsev Povolzh’ia’, in Krasnaia zvezda 202, 28 August 1941. 5. See also V. Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupatel’noi voiny. Sovetskaia propaganda v predverii ‘sviashchennykh boev”, 1939–1941 gg. (Moscow, 1997), p. 67; V. Tokarev, ‘Sovetskoe obshchestvo i pol’skaia kampaniia 1939 g.: “romanticheskoe oshchushchenie voiny”’, in Chelovek i voina.Voina kak iavlenie kul’tury (Moscow, 2001), pp. 399 ff. 6. Ortwin Buchbender, Das tönende Erz. Deutsche Kriegspropaganda gegen die Rote Armee im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 60 ff.; Hartmut Schustereit, Vabanque (Herford and Bonn, 1988), p. 73.

158 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

Viktor Krieger Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 781–2; Bogdan Musial, ‘Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen’. Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 (Berlin and Munich, 2000), pp. 200–9; Alfred M. de Zayas, Die Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle. Dokumentation alliierter Kriegsverbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 7th expanded edn (Munich, 2001), pp. 327–35. A. Kokurin, N. Petrov, GULag: struktura i kadry. Stat’ia deviataia, in Svobodnaia mysl’ 5, 2000, pp. 109–24, here p. 110; ‘Evakuatsiia zakliuchennykh iz tiurem NKVD SSSR v 1941-–42 godakh’, in Voennoistoricheskii arkhiv 2, 1997, pp. 232–53, here p. 252. Pravda, 14 July 1941. A selection of documents from the investigation is to be found in ‘Vernite mne svobodu’. Deiateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii – zhertvy stalinskogo terrora. Memorial’nyi sbornik dokumentov iz arkhivov byvshego KGB (Moscow, 1997), pp. 304–20. ‘Wir nehmen an ihnen Rache für dich, Genosse!’, in Nachrichten (Engels) No. 203, 29 August 1941; David Wagner, ‘Das Komsomolmitgliedsbuch Nr. 12535944’, in Bis zum letzten Atemzug, vol. 2 (Alma-Ata, 1972), pp. 171–81. Quoted from B. Nikolaevskii, Tainye stranitsy istorii (Moscow, 1995), p. 204. E. Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke. Istoricheskii opyt Rossii (Moscow, 1999), pp. 263–79. A typical example is the wordplay of the title in the main article ‘Besposhchadno istrebliat’ fashistskoe zver’e’, in Pravda, 3 January 1942. After heavy defeat during the First World War, in mid June 1915, 10,000 Russian citizens of German and Jewish descent from the Baltic States, Poland, Volynia and the Ukraine were accused of collaboration with the advancing German and Austro-Hungarian troops and forcibly resettled by their governments at the suggestion of the military authority. Cf. Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 507–9; S. Nelipovich, ‘“Nemetskuiu pakost” uvolit’ i bez nezhnostei . . .’ Deportatsii v Rossii 1914–1918 gg.’, in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1997, 1, pp. 42–53; Frank Schuster, Der Krieg an der inneren Front. Deutsche und Juden im westrussischen Kriegsgebiet während des Ersten Weltkriegs 1914–1916, MA thesis (University of Gießen, s.a.), available online: http://www.uni-giessen. de/~g814/Schuster.html Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1990, 9, p. 195; in German in Alfred Eisfeld and Victor Herdt (eds), Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956 (Cologne, 1996), pp. 54–5. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, Vol. 2, book 1: 22 iiunia – 31 avgusta 1941. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 2000), p. 521.

Patriots or Traitors? 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

159

A. German and A. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v ‘Trudovoi armii’ (1941– 1945) (Moscow, 1998), p. 29. The text of this directive can be found in A. German, Istoriia Respubliki nemtsev Povolzh’ia v sobytiiakh, faktakh, dokumentakh, 2nd rev. edn (Moscow, 2000), p. 229–33. Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR 1941, No. 38; Bol’shevik and Nachrichten (Engels), No. 204, 30 August 1941, also published in German in Eisfeld and Herdt (eds), Deportation, pp. 54–5. Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR 1941, No. 40. German translation in Eisfeld and Herdt (eds), Deportation, p. 72. German, Istoriia Respubliki nemtsev, pp. 240–2. Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-e – 1950-e gody), Part 2: Deportatsiia nemtsev: sentiabr’ 1941 – fevral’ 1942 (Moscow, 1995), p. 116. Ibid., pp. 171–2. These are primarily presented via the example of the Volga Germans, because for the first time in the history of the USSR such actions took place in relation to a titular nation and with such excess. Lessons in the native language, and German educational and cultural institutions outside the ASSRVG had already been extensively forbidden or disbanded during the 1930s. A. German, ‘Gorod Engel’s – stolitsa respubliki nemtsev Povolzh’ia (Nekotorye siuzhety iz istorii goroda 20-30-kh godov)’, in Soobshcheniia Engel’skogo kraevedcheskogo muzeia, fasc. 5: Nemtsy v Saratovskom Povolzh’e (Saratov, 1997), pp. 46–55; E. Erina, K istorii nemetskogo gosudartstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, in Rossiiskie nemtsy na Donu, Kavkaze i Volge (Moscow, 1995), pp. 336–45. Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura. 1953–1957: Dokumenty (Moscow, 2001), pp. 454–5. Karte der ASSR der Wolgadeutschen/Beiheft (Göttingen, 1997), pp. 27, 30–1. N. Malova, ‘Otdel sotsialisticheskogo stroitel’stva Tsentral’nogo muzeia ASSR nemtsev Povolzh’ia i ego ekspozitsiia 1931–1941’, in Soobshcheniia Engel’skogo kraevedcheskogo, pp. 139–45; E. Fleiman, ‘Iz istorii kraevedeniia v Avtonomnoi respublike nemtsev Povolzh’ia (1918–1941)’, in Rossiiskie nemtsy na Donu, pp. 223–32. Quoted from Malova, ‘Otdel sotsialisticheskogo stroitel’stva’, p. 144. N. Popkova, ‘Pervye itogi rekonstruktsii fonda Tsentral’noi biblioteki ASSR NP’, in Kraevedcheskie chteniia. Doklady i soobshcheniia IV – VI chtenii (Saratov, 1994), pp. 192–4. E. Erina, ‘Sud’ba arkhivov nemtsev Povolzh’ia v gody voiny s fashistskoi Germaniei v 1941–1945 gg.’, in Nemtsy SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i v pervoe poslevoennoe desiatiletie 1941–1955 gg. (Moscow, 2001), pp. 525–33. Gosudarstvennye arkhivy SSSR. Spravochnik, Parts 1 and 2 (Moscow, 1989).

160 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

Viktor Krieger V. Kherdt (Victor Herdt), ‘Etno-demograficheskie protsessy v Saratovskoi oblasti v 1940-e gody’, in Rossiiskie nemtsy na Donu, pp. 211–22, here p. 215. The text of this instruction is printed in Deportatsiia narodov SSSR, pp. 94–105. Viktor Bruhl, Die Deutschen in Sibirien, vol. 2 (Nürnberg, 2003), p. 28– 44. Kherdt, ‘Etno-demograficheskie protsessy’, pp. 215–19; O. Skuchaeva, ‘“Novye raiony” Saratovskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: migratsionnyi aspekt’, in Nemtsy SSSR, pp. 115–24; A. German, Nemetskaia avtonomiia na Volge. 1918-1941, Part 2: Avtonomnaia Respublika 1924–1941 (Saratov, 1994), pp. 320–8 (‘Pokinutaia zemlia’). Beniamin Pinkus and Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen in der Sowjetunion. Geschichte einer nationalen Minderheit im 20. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 1987), pp. 321–38. An extensive analysis of the national socialist term völkische Ungleichheit (racial inequality) and the principle of privileges which stems from it, as well as the theoretical grounding and practical use that can be found in Diemut Majer, ‘Fremdvölkische’ im Dritten Reich. Ein Beitrag zur nationalsozialistischen Rechtssetzung und Rechtspraxis in Verwaltung und Justiz unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der eingegliederten Ostgebiete und des Generalgouvernements (Boppard am Rhein, 1981) (Schriften des Bundesarchivs, vol. 28). The statute of this department is printed in Lubianka. VChK-OGPUNKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB. 1917–1960. Spravochnik (Moscow, 1997), pp. 270–1. More in Viktor Krieger, ‘Personen minderen Rechts: Rußlanddeutsche in den Jahren 1941–46’, in Heimatbuch der Deutschen aus Rußland 2004 (Stuttgart, 2004), pp. 93–107; L. Oberderfer, ‘Deportirovannye nemtsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri (1941–1944 gg.): Deistvitel’nost’ i pravovoi status’, in Sibir’ v XVII–XX vekakh. Problemy politicheskoi i sotsial’noi istorii (Novosibirsk, 2002), pp. 187–200. Krieger, ‘Personen minderen Rechts’, pp. 99–100. Head of the local department of NKVD in Kansk (Krasnojarsk region), Zabludovskii, to head of OSP, Ivanov, 17 December 1941, on the accommodation of 1,500 Germans from the town of Engels, in Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 9479, op. 1, d. 85, l. 230. Bruhl, Die Deutschen in Sibirien, p. 46. L. Belkovets, ‘Spetsposelenie nemtsev v Zapadnoi Sibiri (1941–1955 gg.)’, in Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev. Nakazannyi narod (Moscow, 1999), pp. 158–80; L. Burgart, Nemetskoe naselenie v Vostochnom Kazakhstane v 1941–1956 gg. (Ust’-Kamenogorsk, 2001); V. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR. 1930–1960 (Moscow, 2003). Among the affected

Patriots or Traitors?

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

161

peoples were Chechens, Karachays, Germans, Ingush, Kalmucks, Crimean Tatars as well as Greeks, Turks, Iranians and Kurds from the Trans-Caucasus, and Armenians, Greeks and Bulgarians from the Crimea. Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana. 1921–1975. Sbornik dokumentov (Almaty and Moscow, 1997), pp. 102–4. See for example the leading article ‘Sem’ia narodov SSSR – edinyi nerushimyi lager’ in Pravda, 29 December 1941. Iz istorii nemtsev . . ., pp. 107–8. Pravda, 31 October 1941. Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia. Tom 17–6: Glavnye politicheskie organy Vooruzhennykh sil SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine 1941–1945 gg. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1996), p. 91. ‘“Vygnat’ nemetskikh zakhvatchikov na kholod v pole”. Prikaz Stavki Verkhovnogo Glavnokomandovaniia 17 noiabria 1941 g.’, in Istoricheskii arkhiv 1993, 3, pp. 148–50; Skrytaia pravda voiny: 1941 god. Neizvestnye dokumenty (Moscow, 1992), pp. 213–14. Cf. the German translation of this order and its interpretation in Christian Hartmann and Jürgen Zarusky, ‘Stalins “Fackelmänner-Befehl” from November 1941. Ein verfälschtes Dokument’, in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 48 (2000), pp. 667-74. Recollections of a Russian émigré, R. Neratova, V dni voiny: Semeinaia khronika (Sankt-Peterburg, 1996), p. 149. Alexander Werth, Rußland im Krieg 1941–1945 (Munich and Zurich, 1965), p. 16. Nemetskii shpionazh v tsarskoi Rossii. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1942); Off-print of the introduction, I. Nikitinskii and P. Sofinov, Nemetskii shpionazh v Rossii vo vremia voiny 1914-1918 gg. (Moscow, 1942). See e.g. I. Nikitinskii and P. Sofinov, Nemetskii shpionazh v tsarskoi Rossii (Saratov, 1942); I. Nikitinskii, Gitlerovskii shpionazh (Moscow, 1943). A. Dement’ev, Reaktsionnaia rol’ nemtsev v istorii Rossii (Leningrad, 1943); idem, Russkie pisateli v bor’be protiv nemetskoi reaktsii i agressii, in Velikie idei patriotizma v tvorchestve russkikh klassikov (Leningrad, 1944), pp. 39–75. I am grateful to Sergei Nelipovich (Moscow) for this reference. P. Bazhov, Skazy o nemtsakh (Sverdlovsk, 1943); ibid., (Cheliabinsk, 1944); ibid., (Moscow, 1945); V. Cherepov, ‘P.P. Bazhov i khudozhestvennaia kul’tura Sverdlovska 1941-1945 godov, in Ural (Ekaterinburg), 2004, 1; the text is available online: http://magazines.russ.ru/ ural/2004/1/cherep6.html The majority of these Germanophobic tales still exist in many editions. Only lately have Russian academics begun to tackle critically this chapter in writing history. V. Liapin, ‘Nemetskie oruzheiniki na Urale’, in Deutsche auf dem Ural und in Sibirien (XVI–XX. Jh.). Nemtsy na Urale i v Sibiri (XVI–XX vv.) (Ekaterinburg, 2001), pp. 138–42.

162 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

Viktor Krieger ‘Über wirtschaftliche Unterbringung und Arbeitseingliederung der Sonderumsiedler, die in der Region Krasnojarsk angesiedelt sind’, 25 May 1943, in GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 133, l. 330–2, 337. German, Nemetskaia avtonomiia, pp. 314-19. Nemtsy SSSR, p. 48. Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny . . . I. Stalin, Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gg.) (Moscow, 1998), p. 52. I. Shul’ga, ‘Iz’iatie iz riadov Krasnoi Armii voennosluzhashchikhnemtsev v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (1941–1945 gg.)’, in Nemtsy Rossii v kontekste otechestvennoi istorii: obshchie problemy i regional’nye osobennosti (Moscow, 1999), pp. 347–58. A typical example is the fate of an experienced military pilot, First Lieutenant Viktor Fuchs. In September 1941 he was recalled from active service for no reason and sent together with a further twenty officers of German descent to the town of Magnitogorsk, where they were set to work with spades and shovels on the construction of a railway. Their protests had the support of the military prosecutor of the district, which brought about a postponement. Fuchs worked for some months as leader of the construction department of the local school for civil aeronautics, until he was removed from his position and forcibly conscripted to a labour camp at the beginning of 1942, V. Fuchs, Pogrom. Dokumental’naia povest’ o prestupleniiakh sovetskogo rezhima – fizicheskom unichtozhenii nemetskoi natsii v SSSR s 1930-kh godov i do kontsa stoletiia (Krasnoiarsk, 2001), pp. 157–71. ‘Lektsiia nachal’nika GULaga V.G. Nasedkina, prednaznachennaia dlia slushatelei Vysshei shkoly NKVD SSSR, 5 oktiabria 1945 g.’, in GULag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei). 1918–1960 (Moscow, 2000), pp. 296–315, here p. 310. Viktor Krieger, ‘Verweigerungs- und Protestformen der Rußlanddeutschen im Arbeitslager (1941–1946)’, in Ralph Tuchtenhagen and Christoph Gassenschmidt (eds), Ethnische und soziale Konflikte im neuzeitlichen Osteuropa. Festschrift für Heinz-Dietrich Löwe zum 60. Geburtstag (Hamburg, 2004), pp. 145–79; idem, ‘Nekotorye aspekty demograficheskogo razvitiia nemetskogo naseleniia 1930-kh – 1950kh godov’, in Nemtsy Rossii: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe i dukhovnoe razvitie 1871–1941 gg. (Moscow, 2002), pp. 470–92. Carola Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im Sowjetischen Exil 1933 bis 1945 (Münster, 1996), pp. 186–93; Barry McLoughlin, Hans Schafranek and Walter Szevera, Aufbruch – Hoffnung – Endstation: Österreicherinnen und Österreicher in der Sowjetunion, 1925–1945 (Vienna, 1997), pp. 578–85; lists of members of the Communist parties of Germany (131 members), Austria (74), Finland (7), Hungary (76), Rumania (57), Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland Germans, 44 members) were handed over from the control commission of the Komintern to the NKVD with the request that

Patriots or Traitors?

67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

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these members of the party be excluded (as party reservists) from recruitment to the trudarmiia, or that those who had already been called up be released, 20 November 1942, in GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 107, l. 84–106. Calculated according to card indexes in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1172, l. 1–16. Krieger, ‘Personen minderen Rechts’, p. 103. ‘GULag v gody voiny. Doklad nachal’nika GULaga NKVD SSSR V.G. Nasedkina. Avgust 1944’, in GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) . . ., pp. 272–96, here pp. 285–6. Calculated according to Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. Sverdlovskaia oblast’, vols 1–3: A–B, V–D, E–I (Ekaterinburg, 1999– 2001); Klaus Segbers, Die Sowjetunion im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1987), p. 244; G. Kornilov, Ural’skoe selo i voina (Ekaterinburg, 1993), p. 38; G. Malamud, ‘Mobilizovannye sovetskie nemtsy na Urale v 1942–1948 gg.’, in Repressii protiv rossiiskikh . . ., pp. 128–45, here p. 131. For more information on the procedure of NKVD/NKGB by means of the example of a region deep in the hinterland, see Andreas Decker, ‘Stand Hitlers “5. Kolonne” im sowjetischen Hinterland? Zu Einsatz und Verfolgung deutscher Agenten im Ural während des Zweiten Weltkrieges’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52 (2004), 3, pp. 421–31. Alexej Gauß, ‘Wir blieben Kommunisten’, in Neues Leben (Moscow) 25 January 1989, p. 7. Viktor Krieger, ‘Patrioten oder Verräter? Politische Strafprozesse gegen Rußlanddeutsche 1942–1946’, in Karl Eimermacher and Astrid Volpert (eds), West-östliche Spiegelungen Neue Folge: Russen und Deutsche im 20. Jahrhundert, Vol.1: Verführungen der Gewalt. Russen und Deutsche in den beiden Weltkriegen (Munich, in print). Details of this case are to be found in the State Archive of the Administrative Authorities of the Territory of Sverdlovsk (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Administrativnykh Organov Sverdlovskoi Oblasti, GAAOSO), f. 1, op. 2, d. 28234, toma 1, 1a, 2, 3, 4 (criminal case A. Heckmann, H. Korbmacher u.a.). Orders from Lieutenant Usmanov, leader of the investigation team of the NKGB authority in Sverdlovsk, on the handing over of the inquiry into A. Heckmann and others to the NKGB, 4 November 1945, in GAAOSO, f. 1, op. 2, d. 28234, tom 1, l. 244. Indictment on 12 July 1946, which was confirmed by the acting Minister for State Security, Ogol’tsov, in GAAOSO, f. 1, op. 2, d. 28234, tom 1a, l. 184–7. Vlast’ i chudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia. Dokumenty TsK PKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul’turnoi politike 1917–1953 gg. (Moscow, 1999), p. 491.

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ELKE SCHERSTJANOI

‘Vot ona prokliataia Germaniia!’ Germany in Early 1945 Through the Eyes of Red Army Soldiers

In January 1945, the Red Army started the final phase of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War, leading large military units to eastern Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. More than 3 million Soviet soldiers fought for what was officially called the ‘final and complete victory’ over Hitler’s Germany. It was a dynamic fight, involving heavy losses, but with an edge of triumph. Most of the soldiers were setting foot on German soil for the first time. For them, it was not merely enemy territory, it was the soil of their main adversary, the site where the enemy was moulded, had its most important reserves and where its people had their dwellings. The aim was, as Stalin said in his order of the day on 1 May 1944, to deal ‘the wounded German beast [. . .] a deathblow in its very own lair’.1 This Feindbild (concept of the enemy Other) of the wild animal developed from traditional concepts. What could the – mainly young – men on their advance through German territory have been feeling? What did they discover? What value did they give their discoveries? How did the perception of the Other in this specific military context develop, and what differences can be seen between this and, for example, the German troops’ perceptions during the Blitzkrieg? What did the Red Army soldiers see in the Germans, apart from the ‘beast’? How, and how much, were their perceptions politically guided? In brief, what did individual Red Army soldiers experience in the spring of 1945; these soldiers who considered themselves in later years, long after the War, as liberators, having liberated even the Germans?

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To answer these questions, we need more than anecdotal stories and memoirs. Sources as close to the actual events as possible are necessary. But authentic statements of individual perceptions and assessments were not collected in the Soviet Union in such a way as could be used by today’s research. In addition, this particular historical context was not the subject of academic discussion after the War. There were few depictions, memory was ‘unproblematized’, and the politically unfavourable was stigmatized. This meant there was little reason to keep such sources, even in private family archives. To study Russian soldiers’ experiences in Germany, as a comparison accompanying the research and discussion of the German Wehrmacht’s experiences in Russia,2 entirely new sources were necessary. Diaries and letters from the front seemed to be the most promising. Contrary to popular belief, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA) did frequently write diaries. However, very few of the notes, often written in shorthand or a secret language, have been preserved, and those that have are privately owned.3 A great deal of Soviet military mail, on the other hand, has survived in archives. An initial analysis of approximately 300 letters indicates what the victors were reporting home about a defeated Germany in the spring of 1945.4 Writing from the ‘Lair’ The ‘beast’s lair’ offered unique materials. Most of the Red Army soldiers had been relishing the prospect of marching into Germany and the idea of fair and bloody retribution. They wanted to be there when Hitler’s Germany capitulated. Nevertheless, Germany and the Germans were by no means the main topic of the letters, even after the soldiers had arrived in the ‘lair’. Most of the letters ignored this topic, or mentioned it only in passing. The largest portions of the soldiers’ letters were still devoted to family issues and to their own health. From March/April 1945, they started reporting more about this foreign world, but only immediately preceding and after the victory were some letters – and only some, not all – dominated by descriptions of what the soldiers had seen in Germany. German life was not, therefore, particularly interesting to the soldiers, or, to be more precise, they did not express any particular interest in it in their letters.

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The analysis shows significant variation in the extent and detail of the letters’ descriptions, and also in their evaluations. The historian cannot clearly demarcate these as differences in perception, nor as differences in evaluation, since subjective perception and evaluation can only appear in letters through a screen of subjective intended and possible formulations. Also, due to insufficient details about the letter-writers, it was impossible to ascertain the effects of age, life experience, exposure to war and the front, nationality or education on their perceptions of this foreign world. All the same, some initial general insights could be gained into the processes of perception towards the end of the War, in areas inhabited by Germans. The intensity and diversity of the ground troops’ observations depended primarily on the character and speed of their march,5 on the distance covered between battles, and on the amount of time spent in one place without coming under fire. It was impossible to discover the civilian aspects of the foreign territory during actual hostilities, even when this was house-to-house fighting in residential areas. It is absurd to differentiate, in this phase of the War, between soldiers in the first line of attack and those following, because the formations and type of combat were constantly changing. Interestingly enough, there are no specific differences between the noncommissioned soldiers and the officers, nor striking characteristics among the Guards regiment letters. The most perceptive observers, who also gave the most exhaustive accounts of German civilian life, were to be found among the scouts and those politically responsible in all arms of the services. Assiduous ‘reporters’ were also among those in the general combat troops who had relatively ‘safe’ positions, for example, the telephonists who also tended to be the best informed. The Red Army soldiers’ descriptions and portrayals are almost always judgemental, often unwittingly so. It is noticeable that the formulations and metaphors used in the letters – among all ranks – are often the same as those utilized by the propaganda machine. It is not always clear whether this politically acceptable language was only drawn upon in order to please the censor, or if the meanings had indeed been accepted and internalized. The one does not exclude the other. And this does not apply equally to all topics. The use of such formulations tended to decrease, just as it would in peacetime: available interpretations are brought into play more frequently at the beginning of an extended observation of the

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Other, and only over time does a new, independent interpretation and evaluation slowly develop. The majority of the Red Army soldiers could not have acquired these predispositions from first-hand experience. On the other hand, there were practically no insights left over from the prewar educational programmes. Knowledge about German culture, science and lifestyle, which was conveyed through the Soviet educational system or through cultural contacts, played almost no role in observations from 1945, and when they did, it was only to show the dramatic changes. The latter were also emphasized for the combatants via political-ideological channels – soldiers’ newspapers, Communist Party and Komsomol meetings and radio broadcasts. It is, once again, unclear to what degree the letters adhered to these guidelines for reasons of security. It seems as if they thought the ideological interpretations were correct and sufficient, at least at the time of their observations. They must have had a great deal of resonance with the soldiers’ own experiences. There is, of course, the possibility that the victors had selective perception. To put it another way, were there things the Red Army soldiers wanted to see and to interpret in particular ways? Were there certain phenomena that they unconsciously ignored, that they simply did not want to know? In most cases, this will never be clarified. Nevertheless, it can be claimed that the initial perceptions of German civilian life were, without exception, seething with hate. This explicable, comprehensible hatred determined the soldiers’ insights into the Other and dominated their basic attitude towards the Germans until the end of the war, if not longer. Interestingly, this hatred towards enemy Germany and its population did allow observations which modified the sweeping judgements. The soldiers began to differentiate among ‘the Germans’ before the end of the War. It was generally ideologically trained observers who, as communists, took recourse to class differences. After closer examination of civilian life they began once again to discriminate between poor and ‘privileged’ Germans; between those who beat up foreign workers and those who did not; between those who cowered in basements and those who escaped in good time. These more subtle observations can be seen in several letters before the official change, in mid-April 1945, of the Soviet attitude towards the Germans. This does not, of course, question the power of the party and state/military leaders to set the agenda. Rather, there is a feeling that the first careful moves away from the simple

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equation German = fascist were made in a general agreement with official interpretations. Nevertheless, there were still many elements in the German civilian world from which the letter-writers continued to distance themselves. German Prosperity The first thing the Red Army soldiers thought worth mentioning on their advance into eastern Prussia was the quality of the streets. They noticed that even unimportant roads linking small villages were in excellent condition. The sewerage system in rural areas caught their attention too. Descriptions of these aspects were generally given without particular evaluation, in the midst of accounts of their march. Agriculture was usually next on the list, many noticing the wealth of livestock and the good equipment. The farms seemed to be profitable and the buildings were numerous, big and solid. Some letter-writers saw all the villages and areas as equally ‘rich’, and did not notice any really poor homesteads. An explanation for this could be the overwhelming impression given by the whole region, or by the writers’ superficial observations. This initial view of the agricultural conditions alarmed the Red Army’s political leaders. They decided early, in February 1945, to offer explanations to stop false conclusions being drawn about social conditions in Germany. ‘Perhaps a private farm on a manor estate in eastern Prussia is indeed richer than a kolkhos. And a backward person may well draw the conclusion that he supports private agriculture and is opposed to the socialist form of economic relations,’ said the head of the Political Administration of the Second Belorussian Front, Lieutenant General A.D. Okorokov, raising the subject of potential dangers ahead. He called for energetic measures against such voices and recommended that the Soviet press portray eastern Prussia as ‘a reactionary nest’.6 But the soldiers were not swamped with ‘political economics’. Instead, a press campaign was started, whose basic message was that German riches and prosperity were the direct result of the fascist raid through Europe. In the letters, possessions signalizing wealth were said to have a foreign country of origin. Many products even apparently had the official marks of Soviet factories. This interpretation also began to be part of the descriptions of German homes. It was mentioned in so many of the letters that a certain

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amount of consensus must be deduced. The soldiers discovered ‘Yugoslavian carpets, French curtains, furniture from the Crimea, Russian silk’ and other ‘stolen goods’. ‘What they took from us, they have simply left here with their own things,’ was one soldier’s comment on the large number of livestock. In the houses, they found Soviet-made ‘chairs, beds, soap, cologne, matches, textiles and much more’. Another wrote: ‘If you look closely at the furnishings in the rooms of any German, you’ll find many of our Russian goods. Chairs, spoons, tablecloths, and many other household goods. They stole all this from the territory they had occupied in our country and brought it home. And now they don’t know what to do with it.’ A young artilleryman wrote home at the end of March 1945: ‘It’s probably interesting for you to discover what kinds of farmhouses they have here. I have to tell you, they lived well here, with quality livestock, quality furniture. The houses are of brick. But the Fritzes got it all for free. If you go in the house, you see that everything is looted and stolen.’ This view of things was corroborated by the rules for dividing the booty found ‘on Poland’s freed territory’ between Soviet and Polish institutions. Consumer goods and works of art in German homes were confiscated by the RKKA ‘only if they were looted from the territory of the USSR or her allies [. . .] or if they were brought in from Germany. All other goods lie within the jurisdiction of the Polish administration.’7 What could be more convenient than finding stolen goods everywhere? Although there can be no doubt about the character of the German policy of conquest and occupation as an economic pillage, there is a question mark above the actual impact this had on private households in eastern Prussia and Silesia. Some foreign products were without doubt purchased through normal market relations before the War. But the result of the successful official interpretation of observers, which would admittedly have been unacceptable without vivid recollections of German pillaging raids throughout the Soviet Union, was that Red Army soldiers saw it all as scandalous proof of German greed. Soon the soldiers began to come across their fellow Russians who had been transported to Germany to work. Their fates were also offered in the letters as terrible proof of German exploitation and cruelty. ‘Everywhere there are Russians and Poles who are returning from slavery. They tell terrible stories,’ wrote one young captain to his girlfriend in February 1945. In one or two cases, this can be seen as a concession to the censors, but we know from later

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memoirs that such descriptions were often used as an illustration of the view of German affluence as exploiters’ or racist affluence. That the former foreign workers were now ‘the bosses’ was reported home with relish. Particularly worthy of mention for the letter-writers were the ‘grand palaces’ – perfect examples of the looting and exploitation. They were magnificent buildings, ‘where the walls shine like marble, where silk net curtains have gold edging, and when you lie down to sleep, you sink into the bed, like into the sea. Now I am also sitting in the estate of a rich German,’ wrote a twenty year old to his parents at the end of January 1945. ‘There are divans, sofas, silk everywhere, and the floor shines like a mirror.’ Such affluence was despised not only because it was looted wealth; it was also the nobility’s wealth. This could well have been the first time most of these soldiers and officers came into contact with the ‘class society’. None of the letter-writers suggested that they were thinking of cultural values when they entered this elegant world. Most would have felt like the twenty year old mentioned above: ‘Just imagine a soldier who has never seen anything like this now feels like he’s in charge of it all. It isn’t surprising, because he has a hard journey to get there, and with his hard work he earned the right to be lord of all these treasures.’ Only later, almost at the end of the War, did some of the more educated letter-writers recall information from school about cultural/art history, and begin to compare. The first phase of this acquaintance with German prosperity paid – in the letters at least – little attention to economic efficiency, because businesses were shut down and many destroyed. The theory that Red Army combatants in Germany were immediately impressed by the efficient infrastructure and the exemplary business organization is certainly questionable. Even if the sources of these testimonies are open to criticism, the letters are, nevertheless, the more authentic documents. The hatred of the Fritzes and the flush of victory in the spring of 1945 allowed a certain amount of respect in only one regard: the Germans’ furious, never-ending defensive fight. Only the continuous perceptions of German behaviour, living and working conditions once the fighting ended enabled members of the Red Army to move away from a militant view of the enemy. But in early 1945, German prosperity merely prompted Red Army soldiers’ hatred, disgust and destructiveness. The assertion that ‘both officers and regular soldiers were anxious to explore the

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strange and delicious world of bourgeois decadence’ and ignored the warning ‘not to be diverted by the seeming riches of the west’, must be severely qualified for the period before May 1945.8 These letters show that the soldiers’ initial reaction to the affluence of Germany was considerably influenced by the timing: these first contacts occurred at exactly the same time as the first insights into the worst aspects of Nazi rule – prisoners of war and extermination camps. Political propaganda seized upon this, of course, but an organized multiplication of those experiences was hardly necessary. Reports from Majdanek and other camps were already known in east Poland in the summer of 1944. New horror stories from Auschwitz or Warsaw spread like wildfire and gave a whole new tenor to the perception of Germany’s prosperity. The wealth per se was still desirable, but after the shocking awareness of these German crimes it was considered in unanimously negative terms. It was rejected as wealth acquired like that. At the same time, soldiers’ letters seem very believable when they say that they would be fine without all this prosperity, if only they could get home quickly. ‘Mum, when you go into any house, everything you could want to eat is there – but it’s all so strange and you just don’t want any of it. I would live from potatoes alone if I could just come home,’ said one young medical orderly, who had been a farmer on a kolkhoz before the War. It was not to be expected that the letters would describe organized looting and pillaging as it is generally against one’s unconscious ethical barriers to commit such a thing to paper. The peaceful ‘normal world’ should find out as little as possible about this sort of violence in the soldiers’ daily life at the front, even if this normal world explicitly supports a craving for revenge. Even so, Red Army letters did include hints of ill-gotten gains. German civilians’ sudden flight offered the conquerors relatively easy access to all the private possessions of eastern Prussia: in empty flats, in train stations, on the streets. What was not immediately consumed, made to disappear into the unit’s soup kitchen – for many soldiers this was the start of a period of feasting – or taken by the commanders, was simply too tempting to be left as unclaimed property, and was picked up and hauled along for the journey. Particularly attractive were small valuables such as watches, jewellery and souvenirs, and often items with a high practical value, such as warm clothing and sturdy shoes.

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On the one hand, the letters indicate that there were soldiers who had scruples; others found enemy belongings simply repulsive. But in many cases, it was real necessity which drove the soldiers to ‘ragcollecting’ and looting. The Soviet Union was in desperate need of supplies, and many soldiers immediately thought of sending packages home. By 1945 these, in addition to the soldiers’ meagre incomes, would become one of the most important sources of new products for families.9 Most desirable were durable, pretty textiles and luxury foodstuffs which had become rare. The kolkhozes had barely even seen black tea during the war; coffee and chocolate were unattainable. The Red Army soldiers’ voracity for representative booty, and also for rare products and simple items for daily use is therefore explicable. More difficult to explain is the almost reckless way they helped themselves. As they continued their advance through Germany, the soldiers made an increasing number of comparisons. They came to urban, and therefore wealthier, regions – which had, admittedly, suffered much greater damage – but at the same time, they met large numbers of German refugees. Here they also discovered poverty, for example by looking at the others’ footwear. One captain and party organizer wrote to his wife at the end of March 1945: ‘The whole of Germany is walking on wooden soles. This footwear with wooden soles is not even only for indoors, they are also shoes for going out. And if it isn’t wooden soles, then some sort of substitute. You meet this substitute at every turn.’ And he notices that: ‘The majority of Germans are starving, in the true sense of the word. They are living from paltry rations and have absolutely no way of getting anything else.’ But this sort of message was an exception in the letters. And such observations apparently rarely led to feelings of sympathy among the soldiers in early 1945. Some questions about the perceptions of German wealth remain unanswered. The analysis of individual views does, however, move the focus towards contexts which have thus far been neglected. It suggests that certain attitudes were set in place by the almost unimpeded access to strangers’ personal effects in the first days of the conquest of German territory, which had dramatic effects on the numerous subsequent encounters with the German population. At this later stage, not only unclaimed possessions were taken, but goods were forcibly stolen and people were coerced into handing them over. The characters with this predisposition – irrespective of

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rank and education – seem to have been fully intoxicated by the situation, and this fostered the criminal quality of their attitudes. The military leadership of the Red Army spoke, in this context, of barakhol’stvo, a word for which there is no adequate English counterpart. The root is barakhlo (junk, plunder, unnecessary stuff) and stands for ‘collecting junk’, which on the one hand refers to senseless impediments to their march, but on the other hand alludes to the unfavourable impression made by the troops. Both of which should, in the eyes of the troops’ leaders, be stopped. Whether the military leaders found additional reasons to curb the troops’ raids is unknown. According to official Soviet reports from the Berlin area, soldiers in the thrall of their victory also bought goods at extortionate prices. At first they indulged in treats such as beer. Some quality possessions were also bought for booty at prices way over the market value. This behaviour shows the degree to which not only rare products, but also the ‘honest purchase’ of such products were lacking after many years of abnormality. And it apparently befitted their victorious mood to be able to throw money around without reserve. In letters home, where every kopek was necessary, this was understandably not mentioned. German Scenery Despite war and destruction, the letters often refer to nature and living conditions – something that is universal to all invading armies, and is interpreted as the expression of a longing for normality. In most cases, comments in the Red Army letters on the weather and first impressions made by the surroundings also seem to fulfil two functions. Firstly, they describe important survival conditions, and secondly, the soldier indicates – generally subconsciously – that he has retained civic ways of perceiving, or at least still recalls their structure. Peter Knoch spoke of a ‘contrasting experience of destruction and nature’ which belongs to daily life at the front.10 During their advance on German territory, the early melting snow with its inhospitable dampness and then the beautiful spring of 1945 offered the soldier suitable writing topics. Often in passing, sometimes in comparison, he would comment on the weather and recall how spring would blossom around his home at this time.

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I know that it’s hot where you are, spring is on its way, sowing time is not far off. Here, spring is well under way. The trees are sprouting, the grass is getting green on the pastures and roads, the winter grain on the fields is like velvet. You can hear the birds cooing in the grove all day long. The evenings are wonderful, warm and quiet. Soon the lilac will bloom. That’s what it’s like here in May. But, you know, Zhenia, spring doesn’t have the same effect on people here as it does at home. Everything is different.

So wrote one soldier who had gone to the front as an eighteen-yearold volunteer, to his sister. In the main, however, they were short, sometimes stereotypical formulations, which could nevertheless signalize civic behaviour. At the start of the battles the soldiers, bitter and triumphant, realized that German towns and villages were burning. ‘Automatically, you’re pleased to see Germany in such a state,’ wrote one artillery captain to his mother, one month before the major offensive. ‘Finally, it is experiencing for itself the old Russian proverb: “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword”. Now it’s paying for everything it did to us.’ For many Red Army soldiers the advance was their first taste of foreign lands. ‘I’m seeing German towns and villages. I’d never have thought I would see all this,’ one twenty-year-old Muscovite wrote home at the end of January. Some letters reveal how exciting this aspect of the conquest was for the soldiers. Occasionally, thoughtful moments would occur, tied to short ‘escapes’ from military life – for instance, a short trip into safe territory. ‘We drove out towards a small hamlet [. . .], which was one kilometre from the sea. It was a disappointment – you couldn’t see the sea at all, and the countryside was nothing like countryside near a sea – just some fields, a dam . . .’ was one major’s description of his first contact with the Baltic Sea in January 1945. But the hard fighting and rapid marches prevented the vast majority of soldiers from seeing such sights. Also, the letters do not allow a final judgement on how preoccupied the soldiers were with the ‘tourist’ aspects of the victory march. ‘Scenery’ was a topic that was low on the list of priorities to write about. According to a soldier’s logic: as a survivor, one can describe it all much more accurately, whereas a dead man’s perceptions are of no interest to anyone anymore. Often they would hint at their surroundings and promise more descriptions later. It is probable that the War did not only take most soldiers abroad for the first time; for many of them, especially the younger soldiers,

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it was also the first time they had ever left their home regions. Someone who had been at the front a long time had seen a lot of Otherness. Unfortunately, the letters discovered here offer no way of differentiating between the perceptions of a soldier with more experiences of the Other, and a young recruit who went directly to enemy territory from his home. The accounts in the letters are generally too meagre to be able to formulate from them culturally specific questions regarding the perception of Germany as an-Other world (from an apolitical perspective). By and large, descriptions of German scenery, towns and details of settlements found their way into the correspondence of the particularly keen and experienced writers. Nevertheless, unprejudiced observations of even apolitical issues were difficult. The enemy villages were, at first, not only different but distasteful. It was the same time as the loud calls for retribution. An observer who enjoys the view of ruined enemy settlements will not develop much curiosity for its attractive features. ‘Everything here, beginning with the earth itself and finishing with the planted forests, the houses, everything here is dismal, and calls for retribution in the name of our home,’ according to one letter of a volunteer, born 1913, who had gone from the Caucasus via the Crimea and Ukraine to Eastern Prussia. And in another: ‘How foreign it all is here, the earth and the wood and even the sky. And even the air seems different. It all smells like Prussia.’ Only very slowly and with the increasing number of relatively peaceful occasions for observation, did Red Army soldiers develop the ability to discover unknown habitats and landscapes. Houses made of stone, beautiful villas, tiled roofs, castles and palaces, the Baltic Sea, beautiful mountain scenes. Every now and then they discovered peculiarities of ordinary buildings: the construction and function of cellars, the location of fields around the houses. As soon as they were billeted, they could take a closer look. ‘We aren’t fighting now,’ wrote one twenty year old just before the end of the War. ‘We’re near an old port, living in nice flats and in a very civilized way, like in a health spa. The village, a town really, where the owners of the urban factories and plants lived before us, is very pretty. Instead of fences they have planted bushes, and they’re interwoven so nice and tight that they’re much more secure than a fence.’ In another letter, the same author writes: ‘The houses are made of stone and all are sinking in greenery. Climbing plants are growing up the walls, and their pretty blossoms are blooming.

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There are also big trees growing along the streets. So, when you walk along a road, it’s like walking through a tunnel.’ The conquerors displayed fairly typical ways of perceiving foreign worlds, similar to those shown both for peacetime and also for other more open peoples, more accustomed to travel: what fascinates one person, repulses another. And so one soldier at the end of March thought that for the Russian eye this kind of life is boring, it just about suits the Germans; it’s not for us. The roofs are dull, high and pointed. Or take the animals: there are only colourful cows. The houses are all alike [. . .]. What else: the roads are good, the countryside is nice. But there is no place for my soul here. It leaves me cold, and I say, let it be pretty all around, the further I travel, the more I look with my heart back to you and to Russia.

A conspicuous amount of time was devoted to describing the cities. To have been in Berlin was a special event that one certainly had to write home about. Apparently the army leadership organized trips to Berlin for the troops as soon as the fighting was over. Seizing a car was also no problem for the victors, and so many soldiers found their way in groups to and through Berlin. The accounts of these drives or walks through the ruined capital were extensive. They generally began by declaring that Berlin had been utterly devastated. All the soldiers wanted to see with their own eyes the streets and buildings of the Reich capital they knew so well from the press and films, and which had such a close association with Nazi rule: Unter den Linden street, the Brandenburg Gate, the Victory Column and the Reichstag. The letters reflect a mental mix of victorious euphoria, contempt for the vanquished enemy, the joys of life and hopes for peace. That the centre of Berlin had only houses of four or five stories was apparently remarkable. One announced triumphantly that the Berlin underground was no match for the Moscow metro. For one historian the Reichstag was ‘once a majestic and beautiful building’, but for a lawyer it seemed like ‘a huge, dismal building, nothing attractive, a dome on the roof and two, three bronze figures on horses in military poses’. Whereas the – relatively rare – observations of German towns and scenery began to be described more often and more comprehensively from late April 1945, descriptions of Berlin not only differed in their

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celebratory language and in their embedding within news of the victory, they were also the first peacetime letters and were now clearly more descriptive. They were based on perceptions free from the psychological pressures of conflict. This first flush of emotions was, therefore, accompanied by the start of a normalization of communication, i.e. Berlin became interesting simply for its cityness. It presaged the new, peaceful dimension of future observations, as the soldier became an individual ‘tour guide’ for the family. ‘Fritzy’ and ‘Frauy’ Little can be discovered about German civilians from Red Army soldiers’ letters. However, this is precisely an indirect indication of the sparsity of friendly encounters, since the topic ‘violence against civilians’ places the soldiers under an even stronger culturally enforced reluctance to describe than the topic of ‘looting’. In addition, it was vital that evidence of misconduct did not fall into the hands of enemy propaganda. Censorship in all armies of the world bans such information. Some of the letters analyzed did, nevertheless, offer starting points for a historiographic trail. It cannot reconstruct the treatment of the defeated – there are other, more meaningful sources for that – but it does indicate the victor’s changing mentality. Officially the soldiers’ inexhaustible hatred at the start of the offensive was aimed at all Germans without exception. Within units, ceremonial personal commitments were made to be unrelenting in avenging all the suffering. But in great measure the first contact with the nemtsura, the ‘German lot’, was indirect rather than direct. The first thing they came across was deserted homes. Going into enemy homes, which had only recently functioned normally, was one of the great attractions of capturing German living space. It gave the intruder a chance to thoroughly examine German public life: how ‘they’ lived, dressed and slept, what ‘they’ ate, what ‘they’ read and which pictures ‘they’ hung on the walls. It offered an initial window on the enemy’s particularly vulnerable, intimate living conditions, which may well have recalled memories of the intrusion of German soldiers into Soviet citizens’ lives. The hate-filled drive into the German private sphere made the objects in that foreign world appear as witnesses of an abhorrent life. As the letters show, during such forays the theme of ‘German looted

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goods’ was soon joined by the theme of ‘kitsch’. Both themes led to contempt and unrestrained destructiveness. Firstly, there was the question – often articulated in the letters – of why these welloff Germans had wanted to take the very last possessions from the poorer Russians. From this perspective the destruction of German living space could be seen as justified revenge. The second aspect was a more general – non-military – phenomenon of encountering the Other: the foreign culture is ridiculed. But also in this case the intruders’ aloof and arrogant attitude had been drastically exacerbated by the War. Outbursts of hatred were especially noticeable when the idiosyncratic, foreign world suddenly exposed its militant side, for instance when angel figurines and frills were discovered in German bedrooms next to a portrait of the man of the house wearing his uniform.11 Hitherto unknown items from the Western world, such as ‘pornographic’ pictures, often had a repellent effect. They aroused the curiosity of many soldiers, but violated their sense of morality. ‘The newspapers and especially the magazines are full of pictures of naked men and women in all sorts of poses and positions. That’s the most popular literature,’ wrote one young captain and war correspondent to his girlfriend in February. The extent of this rejection is not clear. But there is no reason to attribute it to un-modern prudishness. Overall, that the first encounters with Germans was via their abandoned homes seems only to have intensified the victors’ hatred. This not only prolonged recognition of the enemy’s humanity, it stimulated the kind of thoughts which made an understanding more difficult. Even later, after the soldiers had made direct contact with the inhabitants, they not only destroyed the foreign furnishings, but also made a point of dirtying them with rubbish. When the Red Army met German civilians, the latter found themselves in a terrifying, hopeless situation, making them seem even more abhorrent and repulsive. They seemed to be frightened, hysterical, stupid, tired and often dirty figures. That the most helpless among them as a rule were also the poorest was not immediately clear, or relevant. One letter from early February 1945 reads: We’re walking through dozens of towns, hundreds of villages, and everywhere it’s the same scene: the roads are filled with Germans; German women, children, men dragging themselves along, pushing little carts with stuff they could grab at the last minute. In most cases, they threw

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away all their possessions, leaving them behind in the houses they had lived in peacefully just a few hours ago, not imagining that the wave of war could reach them; believing war was a trip to foreign countries, devastating for other peoples, bringing suffering for women and children of any nationality, just not the German.

At first, the majority of descriptions of groups of refugees were filled with hatred. An older soldier (born 1904) told his sister at the end of February that that they were ‘evening the score with the Hanses and Fritzes; their despicable wives [the German word Frau written in Cyrillic] and snake-like brood are running as far as the eye can see. But I don’t think they will get far. We’ll follow them to the ends of the earth.’ For all the soldiers the hour of reckoning had now arrived. One political officer – born in 1906, previously a worker in a factory, fighting at the front since 1941 – from Eastern Prussia wrote to his wife in early February 1945: Their homes are burning, their possessions are in ruins, their cattle is running around unsupervised, and they themselves are homeless. And you want to say to every one of them: There, that’s what you get for making us suffer; that’s what you get for the suffering of my family, and hundreds of thousands of other families. And that’s for the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Soviet people, for the deaths of our wives and children, who you didn’t regard as human, treated worse than animals, and ruthlessly annihilated. You look at these monstrous products of humanity with disgust, whether they are men, women or children. The men were the direct executors of these crimes; the women helped them, if not physically then morally, and the children were preparing themselves to commit just these same crimes as their fathers; considering themselves from birth onwards as something ‘superior’. They’re dragging themselves westward, not knowing what’s awaiting them, or where they will end up. They look pitiful, but there is no sympathy for them.

At home many were waiting for exactly that news. ‘You can feel the satisfaction – the Germans have now (at least here) understood what war means,’ said another soldier’s letter. Here a central problem concerning the attitude towards the enemy civilians is emerging: how much should one take revenge, what do they deserve? The military leadership of the Red Army spread the message that ‘beating an old woman to death in the back of beyond will not speed up Germany’s downfall.’12 Political

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officers were also quick to point out the psychological consequences of unchecked demonstrations of hatred.13 Although the effect was primarily seen in terms of a dramatic destruction of military discipline, the terrible ramifications for civilian society must have been clear to at least some of the elites. The first attempt to counter this was with newspaper articles which highlighted the difference between the inhumane conduct of German occupation and the Red Army’s honourable task: we are not German, we do not beat women and children!14 And more than a few soldiers adopted the formulation. ‘There is no sympathy for them. Quite the opposite, you look at them with contempt, and they only keep their lives because we are not the Germans and don’t fight against women and children.’ But this often sounded like an incantation; the effect is difficult to ascertain. The formulation was more probably the expression of a boundary around those forms of retribution deemed acceptable, i.e. other than ‘killing’. At first, the activities at the front offered the soldiers plenty of opportunities to justify – to themselves or to others – the killing of civilians or prisoners. The suspicion of diversion or of resistance to the looting was sufficient. From January to March 1945 official retribution took on the form of mass detentions and deportations. ‘If you could only see how frightened the imprisoned Fritzes look around,’ declared one soldier in February. Another triumphantly wrote: ‘And how pitiful they are now, they even say hello to us.’ Due to the internalized taboos mentioned above, the letters tell us practically nothing about more distasteful actions. On the contrary, there are blatant lies, suggested for instance by the letter of an older captain, born in 1900. He writes to his daughter: ‘Now the German population is experiencing what the Russians had to live through during the occupation. The only difference is that we do not see dead civilians on the roadside; no ridiculing of children, women or the elderly.’ The largest number of individual killings and crimes were, according to Zeidler, in Warmia in eastern Prussia, the regions to the west and south of Warmia, Danzig, western Prussia and eastern Pomerania.15 The high point of arbitrariness was in the first two months of the offensive. At this time the soldiers’ desire for retribution was particularly compelling, and a great mass of disoriented German civilians were stuck between the fronts. The Red Army leaders had in no way prepared themselves for the specific matters of organization and discipline needed during the

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temporary occupation of enemy territory. There were no official instructions for the occupying troops, leaving the door wide open for individual undertakings and arbitrary acts of reprisal.16 Calls to rein in vengeful feelings were lost in the wind if revenge could be taken with little or no interference. Specialist literature refers to the negative effects of punishment battalions consisting of criminals who abused the situation, deserted and travelled onwards in groups, murdering and looting.17 The extent of such desertion is, however, unclear. The feeling of being ‘the boss’ was also enjoyed by many of the disciplined Red Army soldiers, who did things by the book. Several letter-writers share these sentiments. Their power over foreign lives and property was felt to be justified: it gave them carte blanche to do whatever they liked, unrestrained by political or moral appeals. Easily available alcohol helped. For long-term active soldiers already used to violence, the first encounters with Germans only served to exacerbate the troops’ mood in a very unfortunate manner. It is the nature of a deep hatred, screaming to humiliate the Other, that the avengers can see nothing positive in their victim. Both resistance and accommodation, or ingratiation can increase the hatred. Whether they looked away or greeted deferentially, whether they were slow to help clear up or keen to work, whether they hid ‘diversionists’ or offered everything from their hideouts to the soldiers – German civilians were repugnant to the conquerors. ‘When you meet these women and all sorts of Ottos and Friedrichs they mumble “Good comrade”! [The German written in Cyrillic as ‘Kut Kamerad’] And you feel surprised and angry,’ admitted one letter-writer in late February 1945. And in early March one Guards officer and editor of a divisional newspaper wrote to his relatives: Oh, how repulsive they all are. You can’t imagine. Especially here in Prussia. To understand it properly and feel it, you have to have seen this land and these people. Dull and disgusting. On the outside human, but really animals – ready for real baseness. It could make you sick how agreeable and servile, but it’s clear it is all an act, and the main thing is, it is their cowardice that makes them like this.

Another commented in late March: The Germans are acting all humble towards us. This example shows how far the German nature has fallen: [. . .] When a German woman

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was asked where any remaining German soldiers could be found, she showed them where the Germans soldiers actually were. In general there are, as well as the German spies, many who betray their own people. Of course, there are also those who walk by and look away or down. You can feel the helpless rage.

Non-violent contacts also remained highly distanced. The ‘Fritz women’ and ‘Fritz children’ were watched with cool curiosity. In early February, a political officer wrote to his sister whose husband had fallen at the front: The old, the women and the children look at us in fear and with pleading eyes. They feel their guilt towards us and beg for their lives. No, we don’t touch them, we don’t fight them. We are just satisfied that they now find themselves in the same position that our people were in from 19411942, and that they are frightened of us. “Russian soldier is good” they say, as if from one script. Of course, if we don’t kill them, which they have earned after all, then we’re “good”.

Another officer near Berlin noted on 1 May: ‘On the streets there is one long chain of carts, laden with belongings, covered wagons filled with possessions, with children. They all have tired, frightened, timid faces. Now is the time that they feel what war means.’ Pity occurred very rarely, at diverse times, and was very dependent on the situation. A silent exception was apparently made for small children. We do know of cruelty towards children from German eyewitness reports, especially early on during the Soviet advance into Germany. There was no special treatment for young girls and boys over about twelve years of age. However, many witness statements mention leniency towards, and help for, smaller children. Whether female soldiers acted in a less vengeful or more caring way has not been studied. Attitudes of timorous gender solidarity and motherliness have been shown.18 For a few soldiers at the front, seeing children was a premonition of the end of war and destruction. ‘In the villages and towns we are passing through, I always watch the small children, and imagine how they compare to Svetlana,’ wrote one father of a four year old to his wife in April 1945.19 Extreme forms of violence, and a manifestation of the terrible brutalization of Red Army troops, were the cruel executions of female military personnel and rape of female civilians. Those alive during the War, as well as politicians and historians, have been

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extremely busy with these aspects.20 Particularly in the West, they were – and are – the most salient themes in the public discussion of guilt during the War.21 In Russia the topic is still taboo.22 This is not the place to go into historiographic work or the political instrumentalization of memory. The phenomenon of ‘war rape’ requires more lengthy discussion, but here we will point only to a few of the most compelling problems. It is doubtful whether the Red Army soldiers’ excesses, which can in no way be described as individual cases,23 were caused by troops’ lengthy enforced celibacy. This explanation was articulated not only by the German Wehrmacht, who added racist commentaries, it also resonated with many victims of the violence. Even today, some academic descriptions suggest this reason. And the argument can be found among male and female Soviet participants in the War. The Soviet leaders’ later attempts at justification are often referred to. They, however, only utilized the combat soldiers’ ‘natural need’ for ‘a bit of distraction’ to avoid admitting weaknesses in the political leadership. Last but not least, the recent war in the Balkans confirms that sexual excesses are not only the prerogative of men who have been in the field a long time. The idea that violence against women escalated in 1945 because the Stalinist USSR frowned upon sexual passions, as if the men could finally give their desires free rein – under the pretext of retribution – on enemy territory, is patently absurd.24 This sort of theory is based on political prejudices and indicates a lack of knowledge of Soviet life. A further one-sided explanation is the one spread among the victors that German (and other) women freely offered themselves to the victorious soldiers, either for personal advantage, or – ridiculous! – as a military diversion. The latter develops a warning given at that time by the RKKA leadership that German women infected with venereal disease were offering themselves en masse as prostitutes in order to weaken the enemy. There are many indications that rape was used in this as in other wars, irrespective of the complex reasons in each individual case – primarily to satisfy a desire for violence and power. It was a ritual of humiliation, a form of pay-off, known also in modern patriarchal societies. The idea, based on biologistical assumptions, that a universal male hatred of women was escalating, seems nonsense. On the other hand, the theory that the longing for retribution was exacerbated by ‘German claims of superiority’, and was therefore directed mainly at German women, seems plausible.25

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The suggestion that official directives ordered the ‘destruction of German women’s racial arrogance’ is not only unproven, but also questionable.26 An order of that kind was unnecessary to sanction physical violence and public humiliation as a kind of ‘society-wide violation’ via the weakest of the defeated, the traditional victims of such rites. But an obligation arises from this idea that one primary motive can explain the excessive ritualized violence: we must look at the complex motivations for signs of change or displacement resulting from the transformation of violence. Historical research to date has neglected the search for variations in the extent and characteristics of the rapes. Naimark also treats all rapes from 1945 to 1946 as motivated by basically the same grounds. Soldiers’ letters do not mention rape, but they do suggest that the blind hatred decreased throughout the advance. They suggest the theory that the observation of civilian lifestyles, even if they are the enemy’s, has an overall ‘pacifying’ effect. The number of violent acts against women only decreased slightly in the spring of 1945 but remained extremely high. Towards the end of the War, however, the motives become more ‘normal’, the actions less excessive. The trend was away from brutal public humiliations and beatings towards the – still violent – collection of traditional patriarchal victor’s rights, i.e. towards actions which avoided public places, but could still profit by the presence of a few other victims or perpetrators. The moment of sexual desire also only began to take on importance as the conquest progressed. Presumably the perception of ‘house and home’, of motherliness and housewifely care recalled memories of familial harmony and female intimacy. Later, in peacetime, with troops’ movements constrained by the barracks, another motive arose for many soldiers to prove their manliness. At the same time, intimate relationships developed with regular non-violent contact. These were, however, often based on one-sided dependency. But all that is part of a new topic – everyday life under peacetime occupation – which generates different attitudes than does life at the front. It is possible there were soldiers in early 1945 who had not seen attacks against innocent civilians with their own eyes. ‘How much suffering and pain they’ve caused us, and yet I’ve seen no cruelty or malice directed from the Russian soldiers towards the enemy’s elderly or women,’ said one letter home. But by the end of the War no Red Army soldier could claim to know nothing about

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the excesses towards German civilians. Nevertheless, Lev Kopelev summed up correctly in 1976, after the majority of German reviewers had highlighted only the parts his war memoirs relating to Eastern Prussia, and of those primarily the accounts of Soviet brutality (which he could understand): But is it possible that the blind brutality of the avenger and the crimes of the scoundrel can absolve, or even just slightly rehabilitate, those very criminals whose terrible deeds led to the calls for revenge in the first place, and who supplied the very arguments used by the most merciless preachers? Back then, in the winter of 1945, many in the army were just as surprised and distressed as I was, and condemned the vengefulness and other base instincts emerging from four years of war in a few soldiers during our advance from the Volga to the Oder. As we also condemned the cruel passions which pour out in the delirium of a victorious assault. Many others countered the rape and plunder much more effectively than did I.27

The attitudes of the Red Army soldiers in the spring of 1945 towards Germany and the Germans ranged from the deepest hatred, contempt and disgust to a certain shapeless respect for particular – including military – achievements. This is not surprising. Much more surprising is that the distorted image of Germany and the Germans built up during the War lost its cruel elements relatively quickly after the end of the War. This was probably due to the eastern victors’ lack of racist Feindbild. They saw in the enemy Other an ‘animalized’ human; one who is disciplined and hard-working, but is nevertheless also enraged, ignorant, greedy, arrogant, evil and fanatical. This historically anchored image of a ‘wild animal’ apparently remained so sketchy and superficial that it was soon dismantled through personal encounters after the Red Army victory and in peacetime. Translated by Felicitas Macgilchrist

Notes 1. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, ‘Befehl des Obersten Befehlshabers Nr. 70, 1 May 1944’, in J. W. Stalin, Über den Großen Vaterländischen Krieg

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2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

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der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Verlag der Sowjetischen Militärverwaltung in Deutschland, 1945), p. 117. See, for example, Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.), Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994); Omer Bartov, ‘Brutalität und Mentalität. Zum Verhalten deutscher Soldaten an der “Ostfront”’, in Peter Jahn and Reinhard Rürup (eds), Erobern und Vernichten: Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941–1945 (Berlin: Argon, 1991), pp. 183–99; idem, ‘Von unten betrachtet. Überleben, Zusammenhalt und Brutalität an der Ostfront’, in Bernd Wegner (ed.), Zwei Wege nach Moskau: Vom Hitler-Stalin-Pakt zum ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’ (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1991), pp. 326–44, English edition: Bernd Wegner (ed.), From peace to war: Germany, Soviet Russia and the world, 1939–1941 (Published in assoc. with the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt Potsdam, Berghahn, 1997); Peter Jahn, ‘“Russenfurcht” und Antibolschewismus: Zur Entstehung und Wirkung von Feindbildern’, in Jahn and Rürup, Erobern, pp. 47–64; Peter Jahn and Ulrike Schmiegelt, Foto-Feldpost: Geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939–1945 (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 2000); Thilo Stenzel, Das Russlandbild des ‘kleinen Mannes’: gesellschaftliche Prägung und Fremdwahrnehmung in Feldpostbriefen aus dem Ostfeldzug (1941–1944/45) (Munich: Osteuropa-Institut, 1998); Wolfram Wette, Die Wehrmacht: Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002). See Wladimir Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946: Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten, ed. and comm. by Elke Scherstjanoi (Berlin: Aufbau, 2005). Elke Scherstjanoi (ed.), Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland. Briefe von der Front (1945) und historische Analysen (Munich: Saur, 2004) describes the difficulties of collecting and analyzing these sources, hence it is omitted here. The letters analyzed are those which reached their addressees. Writing conditions, aims and problems with the censor are described. The quotes that follow are from the letters cited in the book. The perceptions of air force and navy personnel were generally less intense. Lecture by A.D. Okorokov at a meeting of political workers of the Second Belorussian Front and the Central Political Organization of the RKKA, 6 February 1945. Extract in Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten, pp. 59–62. Directive from the Military Council of the First Belorussian Front, 10 February 1945, in Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten, pp. 112–13. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 1995), p. 69. At the end of the War a private soldier was receiving – depending on length of service – approx. 175–190 roubles pay per month; a sergeant

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

Elke Scherstjanoi approx. 500 roubles (excluding supplements). The average wage of a worker in the centrally managed Soviet industries was approx. 570 roubles. The average price of 1kg of wheat-flour in the Soviet Union in 1944 was 162 roubles, 1kg of beef 244 roubles. (M.P. Zinich, ‘Ispytanie i velichie naroda’, in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 19411945, kniga 3: Osvobozhdenie (Moskva, 1999) p. 348-62. See Peter Knoch, ‘Kriegsalltag’, in Peter Knoch (ed.), Kriegsalltag. Die Rekonstruktion des Kriegsalltags als Aufgabe der historischen Forschung und der Friedenserziehung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), pp. 222–51, here p. 230. No letter mentions that photos or other evidence of brutality against the inhabitants of occupied territories were found in German homes. The Red Army soldier Fedor Zverev claims to have seen such evidence in over 100 German houses. Text of the interview in Helke Sander and Barbara Johr (eds), BeFreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Munich: Kunstmann 1992; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), p. 123. Okorokov’s lecture, 6 February 1945. Manfred Zeidler cites German sources for the Red Army leadership’s measures, from January 1945, for strengthening discipline, controlling excessive alcohol consumption and stopping wanton destruction, plundering and assaults on the elderly or women. Kriegsende im Osten. Die Rote Armee und die Besetzung Deutschlands östlich von Oder und Neisse, 1944/45 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), pp. 155–60. Highlighted by an item in the Krasnaia Zvezda, 9 January 1945. Zeidler, Kriegsende, p. 153. A.P. Jakushevskii, ‘Protivnik’, in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 1941– 1945, kniga 4: Narod i voina, pp. 241–80, here p. 271. Lev Kopelev, Khranit’ vechno (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975); interview with Kopelev in Sander and Johr, BeFreier, pp. 135–6. Swetlana A. Alexijewitsch, Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht (Berlin: Henschel, 1987; Hamburg: Galgenberg, 1989). That the child-loving Russian was neither cliché nor a myth of postwar East German ideology is shown by Wolfgang Engler by means of school essays from early 1946. Wolfgang Engler, ‘“Die Russen kommen”: Wie die Ostdeutschen Krieg und Nachkrieg erlebten und welche Folgen das hatte’, in idem, Die Ostdeutschen. Kunde von einem verlorenen Land (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999) pp. 3–13. Instead of a lengthy, nuanced discussion here, see Erich Kuby, Die Russen in Berlin 1945 (Munich: Scherz, 1965). The extraordinary amount of interest can be partially explained by the enduring socio-cultural reserve concerning the topic ‘sexuality and violence’. What could be more fascinating than the process – not yet completed – of freeing society from this taboo? Norman M.

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22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

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Naimark, in his book, also makes rape the central dominant problem for The Russians in Germany. The Russian ambassador in London reacted strongly to Antony Beevor’s book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (London: Viking, 2002). He was particularly opposed to the claim that Red Army personnel had sexually assaulted the Russian women they had just freed from concentration camps. Efim Barban, ‘Eshche odno padenie Berlina’, in Moskovskie Novosti, 1 July 2002, p. 14. Although no serious institution in Germany questions the extent of sexual crimes against German women at the end of the War, there is no halt to efforts to document the number of women who were raped. The exact number is apparently ‘extremely important in order to even begin to understand the dimensions of the social and political ramifications’. (Sander and Johr, BeFreier, pp. 46–73). None of the calculations is methodically persuasive. The numbers game contributes no new knowledge. Such is Beevor’s argument, Berlin, p. 32. Naimark, The Russians in Germany, p. 114. This apparently appeared in a Soviet flyer ascribed to Ilja Ehrenburg. Lev Kopelev, contemporary and philologist wrote: ‘I saw and read this so-called “Ehrenburg-Flyer” for the first time here in West Germany after 1980 [. . .] It is a fairly primitive collation of various quotes from Ehrenburg’s wartime essays, plus several sentences (calls for murder, for rape – “destroy the racial arrogance”) which Ehrenburg could not have written, neither morally nor linguistically; they are written in such an atrocious Russian, and seem to have been translated from another language. None of my acquaintances and comrades can remember a flyer of this sort. It seems that only the German troops knew of its existence and it was probably an attempt by Goebbels cadres to strengthen the Wehrmacht’s resistance.’ (Cited in Bernhard Fisch, ‘Ubej! Töte! Zur Rolle von Ilja Ehrenburgs Flugblättern 1944– 45’, in Geschichte-Erziehung-Politik, 1997, 1, p. 22). Lev Kopelev, ‘Chemu istoriia nauchila menia’, in idem, O pravde i terpimosti (New York: Khronika Press, 1982), pp. 5–16, here p. 6.

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JENS REICH

Supervision and Abdication – East German Intellectual Life under Soviet Tutelage

From time to time I need to reflect on my life. Not my personal life, this is not the place, but my life as a citizen in a European country. The Berlin wall came down fifteen years ago, and with it communism fell in all of eastern Central Europe. It may sound blasphemous, in view of all the turbulent events during the 1990s and in the new millennium, if I say that I still perceive my life as consisting of two parts: forty long winters of personal discontent and eternal hope under the umbrella of the Yalta agreement of 1945, as compared to a short, quiet, slightly boring life thereafter as a citizen free of oppression and without permanent circumspection under the stern gaze of Big Brother. I was a few months old when Hitler invaded Poland and my family did not hear from my father for years. He served as a doctor in the medical corps of the Wehrmacht. I was three years old when my mother decided to leave inner Germany and to return with us children to her homeland of northern Bohemia (she had been a Czechoslovak citizen until 1939), to get away from the Allied bombers. I was four years old when I overheard the adults in my family whispering in the parlour rumours of unspeakable atrocities being committed behind the Eastern Front. I was six years old when we were forced to leave Bohemia because we were ethnic Germans. The same year I survived with my mother and sister two major air raids (Plauen and Halberstadt). We saw scores of corpses and felt hot firestorms brought about by hundreds of burning houses. Afterwards, in search of shelter in the nearby forest, we had to crouch in a ditch by a field whilst being attacked by a low-flying 191

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British plane. We saw the victorious armies. First the Americans, who distributed chocolate to the children. Later they retreated and the Red Army came in fulfilment of the occupation lines agreed to at Yalta. I was ten years old when the German Democratic Republic was formed under the banner of an anti-Fascist and peaceful Germany – the fourth German Republic after 1871, 1933 and West Germany of 1949. It was claimed in would be a much better one than any of its predecessors and contemporaries. I was brought up with the conviction that the Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe was not legitimate, but would last forever. My parents did not say this explicitly, but their conviction was unmistakable. My father had become weary from all he had seen and experienced himself, and only wanted to live in peace and work at the hospital, where he became the head physician. I had to learn to organize my life under the circumstances, which was normal for a high-school student in East Germany. We were under permanent pressure to improve grades in order to be admitted to further professional training; we had to compensate for not belonging to the privileged ‘working class’. These efforts inevitably included lip service to the prevailing ideology. It is not without a feeling of shame today that I reread the essays I wrote on the worldwide peace movement against US imperialism and its West German accomplice. We had to write this, tongue in cheek, knowing that all this was propaganda, perhaps not without factual foundation, but anyway blind to the sins of our ‘own’ camp. We studied Marxism-Leninism at high school and university. We reproduced the basic tenets of this partly philosophical, partly socio-economic world-view. But there was always a hidden thought at the back of one’s mind: ‘They say that . . .’ Marxist philosophy was a criticism of everything except of itself. Likewise, any critique of political economy of socialism was prohibited, or allowed only in a subservient mode, called ‘constructive’. All this marked the fallout from dialectical to dogmatic materialism. What remained of a onetime intellectual adventure was only hollow formalism. Until well into our mature intellectual and professional lives we had to rattle the castanets, and nearly everyone did it with a bored expression on their faces. I have early reminiscences relating to Russia as a child, in those first years after 1945. The first recollection is from early 1945, when a stream of refugees passed through northern Bohemia, where I lived with my mother and sister in the house of my grandparents.

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Nearly every night we had people as guests for the night, who then headed westwards. Once there was a boy, somewhat older than me and therefore condescending, who told me pompously that they were fleeing ‘from the Bolshevists’, who would rape all the women. It was the first time I had heard the word Bolshevists and did not know what raping was, but his description filled me with a deep horror. Months later the impression I got was exactly the opposite. It was after my father had been released from the army medical corps, returned home and opened his practice. His consulting room was inside our apartment. Patients used to wait in the hall. I once saw a Russian officer there together with a figure under a blanket. The officer was the interpreter, and when my mother who helped as receptionist asked him why his comrade was hiding under the blanket, the officer said, ‘He’s got venereal disease – he’s so ashamed.’ A rapists being ashamed – a paradox! Another incident, Mother stood and I stood in a long queue outside the bakery awaiting the bread delivery when a Russian Army patrol came past and approached a child sitting sideways in a pram. The queue froze with fear. One of the soldiers, however, tenderly stroked the child’s hair and asked him with amiable naivety (I can still hear it): ‘Nu kak tebia zvat’, milyi moi, Vitiok shtoli?‘ (He perhaps had a son by the name of Vitalii at home). The queue relaxed and smiled – not all Russians were as bad as their reputation. However, some time later, a squad came into our home and arrested my grandfather (who was seventy-five) and took him to a camp in Siberia. The reason for this is to this day unknown. He died in the camp some time later of typhoid. An aunt of mine living a few streets away was brutally raped and some months later gave premature birth to a girl, who was severely handicapped and died as a child. By contrast, months later again, when as a schoolboy I was a passionate chess player, the teacher took our chess group to a match with a soldiers’ team at the Soviet garrison’s headquarters near the town; we played in a tournament and were spoilt with candies. Another more lasting influence than these early recollections were the regular visits to our flat of a pensioner, a very old man, who had lived a long time in Russia even before the revolution of 1917, and kept an unbelievable number of boxes with index cards of Russian words and Russian grammar. He liked to invite children and play fascinating quiz shows, with Russian riddles, songs and sketches, which I can still recall today. For me this made an early and deep imprint of the Russian language and literature, and it shielded me

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against the absolutely listless dislike of the Russian language that prevailed at school, where Russian was soon to become our first and only foreign language. These are my early impressions of the Soviet Union and so they remain very ambivalent. Brutal enemies and nice friends – at the same time. Stalin as a symbol of terror, later on Brezhnev as a symbol of utter stagnation, and finally Gorbachev as the saviour. Tanks mercilessly crushing the uprising of June 1953, and in 1992 friendly Russian military units waving goodbye to Germany, where a million of them had camped for more than forty years. Following the advice of my father, I chose medicine as my profession. He said that this is something where one can do satisfying work and remain a decent person, at least more so than if one went into humanities. Ideology is an outside etiquette when you give a patient an injection, but it is the deep foundation of your activity when you translate belles-lettres. As a doctor you have to just close your inner ear and pay lip service, but as an intellectual you have to listen attentively and lie. To this day I still have doubts whether this was the right strategy. At least by the late 1970s it became obsolete and tended towards intellectual cowardice. What I have described is the outline of a typical intellectual biography of somebody living outside of the ruling ‘nomenclature’ in the German Democratic Republic. This was of course not the only possible type of biography, as there were others who identified themselves with the political system, learned to believe in nearly every political or ideological tenet, and had therefore a broader range of choice of activity and future profession. And there was also a third group, probably the most numerous one, which chose neither to believe nor to disbelieve. They chose to lead a simple life, respecting the powers that be, mastering the problems of everyday life. However, conflicts of decision with such an attitude could arise when the system demanded more than just silent tolerance – when they were invited, for instance, to become an officer of the Volksarmee, an army whose strategic goal was to occupy West Germany if the opportunity should arise. Or, more seriously, the decision to shoot into the air (accepting punishment afterwards) or to shoot at a Grenzverletzer (violator of the border), when one was only a conscripted soldier, called up to ‘defend the fatherland of socialism’ at its western border. According to my experience these general types of intellectual conflicts and biographies were similar in all East European

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countries. It made a difference, however, whether or not a country was a historically stable nation. Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary were established nations. East Germany was not. Neither were, as it turned out after 1990, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. This made a considerable difference in terms of intellectual education. Young people in a stable nation state sought a position, in terms of their country, to bring it forward as a socialist state or to liberate it from ‘occupation’ (even those who were not occupied in a literal sense). People of my age from, say Hungary or Poland, irradiated an air of firm natural identity with their own country. I used to feel slightly uncomfortable in their presence with my split attitude towards my own nation, aware of their unspoken contempt for this miserable specimen of Germany called GDR. I felt this, but it would have been useless to say it. You just were East German, irrespective of whether you distanced yourself from it or not. In particular people from my profession (biomedicine) displayed an attitude of slight condescension towards us East Germans. They could overcompensate the relatively miserable state of their universities and research laboratories by applying for and getting grants and working trips to the West. East Germany, as a rule, did not allow us to accept such offers, only a politically ‘reliable’ minority, the so-called Reisekader (with travel passport). I think it is justified when I generalize by saying for adherents of the ruling class as well as those in more or less outspoken opposition, irrespective of age and educational status, there was a perceptible climate of mutual uneasiness between East Germans and the neighbouring inhabitants of the ‘socialist camp’. I am convinced that this uneasiness has not disappeared with the epochal change of 1990. For young people in states without a stable national identity there were more options, as it were, than being patriotic and against or in favour of the ruling class. East Germans could aspire towards reunification of their nation, or could reject this as a hostile takeover by the West. Both contradictory attitudes have been cemented by the events of 1989 and what followed. Nowadays one can easily find among young students at Humboldt University in Berlin those displaying an ostisch (Eastern) attitude, with nostalgic memories of a period that they only know from hearsay, in defiance of the other very outspoken ‘unified’, Western- style, liberal students at the same seminar. Young people in Yugoslavia were still more complicated in their national allegiance. They had the choice to develop a Yugoslav

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identity, or a national feeling below that federation, maintaining Slovenia, Serbia or Croatia, against Tito’s nation. Or they might defend this federal solution. In some cases there were other cultural conflicts in parallel or beyond the national problem, religious tradition for instance. Religion was certainly less of an issue for most young East Germans, as this country, if anything other than godless, was loosely secularized Protestant. Relations between the few Catholic GDR citizens and Catholic Poles tended to be again somewhat strained by a very different tradition and historic memory. A third dividing line was the historical fate of the state where we lived. Young people from East Germany had to somehow come to terms with Germany’s role in the world wars of the twentieth century, the German occupations of other countries, the annihilation of their peoples and the extermination of European Jews. The three options here were: to accept all this as a horrible legacy for which one, even if obviously innocent as an individual, had to bear liability; to deny it by saying that ‘anti-fascist’ resistance of one’s parents also included oneself as the ‘victors of history’; or again indifference towards the historical past. Young people in other East European communist countries had it easier if their countries had been victims, as Poland had. It was more complicated if they had cooperated with Nazi Germany in some way or other, like Hungary or Rumania. All these cultural features allowed for modification of the basic intellectual set-up and for a rich panel of cultural identities. Of course, this is still a rough classification. But in my experience, it served us well if you happened to meet somebody from one of those countries and found yourself in a discussion about fundamental convictions and opinions. The Soviet Union was an exception. The majority of educated ethnic Russians cultivated a feeling of belonging to a colonial empire with a mission to civilize, not unlike Britons in the nineteenth century. They used to display an air of superiority over the score of nationalities which had already belonged to the empire for centuries. And they tended to extend this feeling also to the third-world countries under Soviet influence or hegemony, and even, though to a lesser extent, somewhat uncertainly, to the nations newly acquired after 1945. Their was a clear distinction between nashi (ours) and the others, in a possessive sense, combined with the conviction that ‘we help them all’ (and some are ungrateful). Elements of this were

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perceptible even among those ethnic Russians who were sceptical or critical of the official politics. Doubts in this respect could be counted as an exceptional attitude of self-denial. I could not but admire or envy this cultural self-assertiveness, which rested, among others, on a highly conscious feeling of the immense richness of the Russian language (which indeed is a prodigy of emotional and intellectual diversity). This self-assurance was so compact that it could, rather paradoxically, result in a slightly paternalistic, but nevertheless appreciative attitude towards the subjugate cultures of those numerous Uralic, Siberian, Middle-Asian and TransCaucasian nationalities. I think this obvious conviction and selfimage has been deeply hurt by the events that followed the decay of the empire after 1991 in the countries of the ‘near abroad’ (again, difficult to translate this peculiar blizhniaia zagranitsa, being another expression of a subconscious conviction of who ‘belongs to us’). Millions of ethnic Russians had to take a step back into the second echelon, where they had once been the masters, and many others were forced to emigrate back to home and poverty in Russia. The obvious popularity of Putin’s policies in the Chechen conflict testifies to the deep offence and insult inflicted by the loss of the empire. Only the Jewish community seems to be free of this feeling of frustration. Deeply Russian in their cultural outlook as they are, the eternal persecution and oppression of them in Tsarist and then Stalin’s times prevented most of them to share that feeling of colonial dominance. Let me add as an aside at this point (violating my headline) that as a German who lived in the second half of the twentieth century I had the rare privilege to meet, during my working visits in the intellectual and academic research community of Russia, hundreds of Jews in everyday life and develop closer friendship with scores of them. We could live with them, completely at ease, without boot-licking philo-Semitism or deploring anti-Semitism, without this permanent mutual mistrust against exaggerated esteem that nowadays (after the Nazi crimes) makes the mutual attitude of Germans and Jews (Israelis) so stiff and inhibited. Jews are a peculiar brand in Russia (or should I say, they were?) after centuries of persecution and compressed isolation, those Ashkenazim of the East, many of them (but not all) charming in their vivid sense of humour and intelligence. The Greater-Russian paternalistic cultural attitude towards the neighbouring cultures did not always work. I have not only the

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proud Caucasian peoples in mind, who were never subdued. I include the East Europeans, Balkans and Baltics, Poles, Czechs and Hungarians who managed to shake off the hated supremacy at the historical moment of glasnost and perestroika, when the Soviet Union appeared to be prepared to grant liberty and a new possibility of living together with equal rights. The failure of the Russian culture to make a lasting impression on her subject nations and ethnicities was obvious long before the actual collapse of the empire. The most striking testimony to this is the refusal of the subjects to adopt Russian as the language of traffic and cultural exchange. About 10 million East Germans now between the ages of thirty and sixty-five have received five years of intensive school instruction in Russian. About half of these, when receiving some form of higher education, had ten to twelve years of teaching, but you will have difficulty to find anybody (outside the former nomenclature or those with some special intellectual leaning or education) who can say at least a few words in Russian or read a few lines on a poster. The absence of the Russian language in the public sphere of the former Eastern bloc is a remarkable example of negative achievement, and I hasten to add that I think it is neither a political nor cultural obstruction alone that produced this result after two generations that have been instructed three times a week. East Germans in particular, by contrast to most of the other peoples, were not particularly hostile against Russians. They even appreciated Russian cultural events such as music and circus, and accepted somewhat ironically the party-official nickname ‘the Friends’. I know of incidences where the rural population fed the poor starved soldiers of the Soviet occupational army as they begged for food at the barb-wired garrison fences. I rather tend to think that didactic incompetence played a role here, combined with political propaganda imbued even in the elementary stage of learning the foreign language. At any rate, the Soviet Union is an empire that did not exert lasting cultural influence in her satellite states. A stark contrast to the German phenomenon of not being able to speak a word in Russian are the peoples who actively refuse Russian for antipathetic reasons even though they understand and even could speak it well enough. An example: we are close friends with a family in Warsaw. We always had our most joyful conversations in Russian because they learned idiomatic Russian by being deported for more than a decade to Kazakhstan when

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Stalin annexed Eastern Poland in 1939. And yet our friend Michal repeatedly asked me to speak English if we were together on public transport. He felt uneasy speaking Russian, as the anti-Russian sentiment was (and is) so widespread in his country and in Eastern Europe in general. It sometimes borders on the ridiculous. I remember a visit in Lithuania in the 1990s when I was invited to a very joyous festivity of Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian) universities, with wonderful costumes, brilliant vocal music and the merry dances of the students. Those nations speak completely different languages and young students as well as the dignitaries addressed each other through the microphones in clumsy English, although I am convinced that nearly all of them would have understood Russian and could speak it fluently, if not idiomatically correct. Still more astonishing is the adamant refusal to speak Russian in certain regions of mid-Asia or Trans-Caucasus. Stalin forced the Cyrillic script on them (after Lenin, who introduced the Latin alphabet) so that only specialists can now read the old books and documents written in Persian or Arabic letters. Now the new generation eagerly discards the Cyrillic script as well, and this has the consequence that they have to start again. Many years ago I visited the university library of Ulan-Bator in Outer Mongolia. It consisted of thousands of volumes of Russian scientific literature and of countless textbooks and review journals translated from the English into Russian (the famous referativnye zhurnaly). Within a few years nobody will be able to read modern technology in Cyrillic. And for a long time they will not have the vital information in their own new language, and hardly have enough money to buy literature in English. Hopefully the Internet will be able help them, but the renunciation of Russian seems to be irreversible. It is sometimes asserted that the GDR period brought a renewed close relationship between the Russian and German cultures. I think this is a myth. There are certain intellectual circles that had intimate connections, for instance several prominent writers. But this was against backdrop of mutual non-awareness. The best Soviet films were shown and acknowledged over the years, but without making a really lasting impression on what was produced at the same time in Poland, Hungary or GDR (except perhaps in certain intellectual circles – I mean the films by Tarkovskii, Riazanov, Mikhalkov and others). The Russian avant-garde from pre-Stalinist times was a historical phenomenon, and was not presented in the official representation of culture. Still more insignificant was the

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influence of the ‘near West’ (from the viewpoint of the Soviet block) on Russian culture. Taking Germany as an example, the Russian theatre community remained unimpressed within their antiquated Stanislavskii-Meierkhol’d tradition at a time when during the late 1950s East Germany, very paradoxically, hosted the world-renowned avant-garde theatre of the time: Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary theatre style was scarcely noticed or known in the Soviet Union. The famous modernized rendering of Chekhov and Gor’kii at the West Berlin Schaubühne was only known in Moscow in the 1990s when it was already long gone in Germany. Until the late 1980s modern German literature ended, for the average educated Russian, with Heinrich Böll and Erich Maria Remarque; even Thomas Mann was hardly read, and neither was Günter Grass. The young West German moviemakers of the 1970s were not admitted into the Soviet Union by the authorities and were hence known at best to the few Reisekader of the cultural establishment. The Frankfurt school of philosopher-sociologists, Theodor Adorno in particular, were unknown to all the Russian intellectuals I have met over the years. The world-famous artist and painters’ schools originating in Dresden and Leipzig (before some emigrated to the West) failed to exert any influence on Russia. The numerous brilliant Soviet performers of classical music were highly appreciated in East Germany, but the special East German performance culture of baroque music (Bach, Handel etc.) was not appreciated in Moscow. I can add many more examples of mutual non-attention and could provide similar ones from the other Eastern bloc countries. I blame neither the Russians nor ourselves for this lack of mutual interest, for each culture is indeed free to adopt whatever it finds suitable from another one. I just wish to point out that the intimate political and economic connection of East Germany and Russia did not bear fruit in the cultural sphere. And I think one can say much the same for the other East-European countries. The officially prescribed exchange among the ‘brother nations’ was not sufficient to create a spontaneous nearness and mutual acknowledgement as it did during the nineteenth century. To my mind this cultural alienation among the East European peoples, not only in their attitude towards the Russians but also mutually, explains why we became so foreign to each other after the end of that period. Once again taking East Germany as example, in principle we had enough people who were professionally close to the Soviet Union. We had tens of thousands who graduated each

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year or became doctors in the Soviet Union. Moscow’s Lomonosov University ranked perhaps three or four in popularity for GDR students. There are hundred of thousands of East Germans who lived in the Soviet Union and in other Socialist countries, learnt their languages, married, and travelled widely in the Balkans, in Poland, or in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless I was compelled to feel regret when witnessing the complete overnight severance of all this after 1990. I am no exception, of course. My professional obligation necessitated a complete switch from Russian to English, from Russia to Western Europe and the US. Most of my friends at the institutions of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and the Soviet universities, are now in America or Western Europe, or if they did not manage this now live very modestly if not miserably in their homelands. It appears to me to be a precondition of close cultural exchange between two nations that a relationship of mutual affection should develop, slightly mockingly, towards each other – a type of attitude that the Italians and Austrians have now adopted, after centuries of enmity. Such an emotion never developed in the Eastern bloc, neither towards the centre nor among themselves, during half a century (sometimes more) of living together ‘in the camp’. Whenever I meet people with affection towards the culture of Russia or of other Eastern countries they usually are from ‘the West’, although (or because) they have much less shared experience with these cultures. Perhaps it is the distance that makes it easier to come together, without all those prejudices in mind that have been formed during the period under ‘the Empire’. There is a stark contrast of how the one-time colonial powers (Britain and France for example), after all atrocities and arrogance of colonial history, could remain cultural centres in intensive contact with their former subjugates, whereas the Russian Empire disintegrated with all her underlings vehemently trying to disown each other. I state this with regret, despite having done exactly the same myself. Perhaps a future generation will do better.

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KLAUS SEGBERS

German-Russian Relations in the Early Twenty-first Century. Some Reflections on Normalcy

Before addressing the topic of Russian-German relations directly, some context is necessary. If we take these bilateral relations as our object of interest, i.e. our dependent variable, we have to look for factors defining and shaping them. In this case, I see basically three groups of factors: the global context; the specific fabric of Germany’s external relations; and the structure of Russia’s foreign policy. I will examine them in this order before finally addressing the bilateral dimension. The Global Context The first aspect is the general context of global politics. We are living in an environment which is new in many ways. We are living in a post-Westphalian, but also in a post-cold war world. In a sense, the post-9/11 landscape reinforces, rather than produces, these new features. Westphalian and cold war language still dominates most private and public discourses on global and world politics. But it is no longer linked to a context that can be sufficiently described in these terms – because the macro structure has undergone significant changes. The Westphalian political system is no longer in place, even though its formal relics – nation states – are still around and active. The binary cold war system has crumbled – or has been overcome. States and governments do not control many processes of global politics any more. The basic activities are represented and may 203

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be described as flows (of capital, communication, entertainment, images, goods and services, people) rather than as organized exchanges. The container state is still around, but the containers have lost many or most of their black-box attributes. There are multiple processes going on inside the domestic sphere, increasingly blurring the boundaries to the external world. There are many linkages between ‘internal’ activities and the outside, often bypassing national governments. Moreover, the currency of politics has changed. Military power still matters – sometimes – as has been demonstrated most recently by the US-led campaign against Iraq in 2003 and by the measures imposed on Yugoslavia by the West in the 1990s. Nevertheless, this is hardly an appropriate, and certainly not the only tool to achieve the main players’ goals in global times. The armed forces of the only remaining classical world power, the US, can still – alone or with allies – inflict considerable harm on one or two state adversaries and thereby deny them certain options: Saddam Hussein was forced out of Kuwait and, in the second round, out of power, similar to Milosevic who was forced out of Kosovo and subsequently out of power. But this is no guarantee for positive solutions, i.e. for effective and sustainable reconstruction, as both cases aptly demonstrate. In the Middle East, the US has not been and is not able to enforce an acceptable and durable solution. The currency of military power, when applied to a very complex world, cannot produce adequate outcomes. In this new context, transnational capital flows are more relevant than national budgets; transnational cultural images and discourses are challenging national identities; strategies of access and denial, of inclusion and exclusion are more decisive than guarding national borders. In such an environment, a new cartography of power and access is urgently required in order to overcome the old standards of mapping. New tools for spreading influence and for dominating the nodes of webs and networks are emerging. The nodes and hubs of flows, cascades of power tools, new centralities in patchworks are at least as important as conquering the capitals of states. Stalin’s well-known question about the number of the Pope’s divisions looks outdated. What matters today is the influence in, and over, rating agencies, content producers and images. Shown below is a list of six attributes of global politics which are characteristic of the new inter- and transnational context after the Westphalian and the cold war systems:

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The game of global politics is a multilevel game. Relevant actions, interactions, and flows take place and have effects on different levels at the same time: the global, the international, the transnational, the national, the regional, the societal and the individual. This complicates the problem of intentionality. The likelihood of unintended consequences of an action on one level is multiplied by the linkages between many levels. In addition, the levels cannot be isolated from one another. Many more relevant actors are involved in global politics than in international politics at any time before in the last hundred, fifty or even fifteen years. These actors are related to the spheres of the state, the market and the social and societal context. Important cleavages are public v. private, and state v. non-state. Who are the relevant players? States still play an important role as regulators, and especially as the target for public expectations. But this role is diminishing and changing. State actors have to locate themselves in a colourful picture containing many other players. Additionally, there are international organizations, international regimes, transnational corporations, NGOs, regional players (supra- and sub-state), the media, domestic structures and interests, and individuals – from George W. Bush and Bill Gates to Jörg Haider and Mohammed Atta. Or Mother Theresa. While the playground of world politics is becoming much more colourful, the relative strength of different groups of players is shifting – depending on the game and on the availability of hard and soft resources. The decisive power currencies of all kinds of players are much more diverse than merely seeing the military as the core element of hard power. Asymmetries between the diverse players can be extreme – the relations between Al Qaeda und the US or between Falun Gong and the Chinese authorities are just two examples. There are no clearly delineated boundaries between the domestic and the external spheres of politics any more. The global environment can have a decisive impact on domestic constellations. Domestic structures and coalitions produce significant changes in the transnational landscape. Even rather sophisticated concepts like second image reversed, twolevel games and the internationalization of domestic politics look slightly outdated today. To put it bluntly: the problem is not so much one of linkages between the domestic and the

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Klaus Segbers international spheres, but rather the vanishing of the markers between those realms. The nature of interactions is increasingly difficult to monitor, to control and to govern. Diplomats may talk about many things, but their impact on capital markets is limited – to say the least. The impact of satellites transmitting content into different cultural settings can rarely be predicted and is difficult to regulate. Many capital and content flows are difficult to organize and cannot be regulated effectively – at least not by the traditional instruments and strategies inherited from the Westphalian and cold war settings. The very concept of regulating and controlling processes and developments is in crisis. Regulation requires a clear conception of the relevant players’ interests and resources, viable mechanisms for monitoring, sufficient funding, tools for impacting on the players involved, and incentives for relevant players to accept governance mechanisms. First and foremost, however, it requires a clear stipulation of what should be regulated and how it should be regulated. There is much talk about global governance but very limited clarity about how this should be done.

In reality, we have a patchwork of parallel, co-existing and competing norms, tools and systems of governance. The very term ‘governance’ is in crisis. What is needed is fresh thinking about new concepts which are more appropriate for the early twenty-first century – concepts of moderating and of navigating. To moderate processes does not mean to change their direction, but to influence the intensity and the pace of their development. To navigate trends and currents is even less of an ‘engineering’ concept: here one just tries to move in – or among – the currents of processes, the sources and driving forces of which are beyond anyone’s control. One could add that the very style of doing politics is itself changing. The increasing mediatization of political agendas, in the form of info- and poli-tainment, and permanent election campaigns under intense media scrutiny, is producing a growing legitimacy gap between citizens’/voters’ expectations and the ability of politicians to produce acceptable outcomes. Additionally, ad-hocism is becoming the dominant mode of politics, i.e. the consistency of politics is decreasing.

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This list gives a brief impression of what is new in global politics, compared to both the Westphalian and the cold war systems. The new qualities of these attributes have not been designed and did not come to bear in 1989 or 1991, or in 2001. But those years and the events related to them symbolize the changing currents at a deeper level. My basic prediction is that these new attributes will be present for quite some time – certainly beyond 2010. We should not expect any player or institution to restore some sort of higher order in the game of global politics. The world is not unilateral or neo-imperial – whatever degree of military powers the US may reach. It is also obviously not a UN-regulated world either. We have to live in, and cope with, this kind of an insecure environment, at least for the coming decades. Germany’s Foreign Relations: Factors and Patterns The second of the defining factors is Germany’s external relations. Several aspects are relevant here. First, Germany’s postwar development was decisively on the side of strengthening and expanding civilian elements of modernization. Most of the investment and energy from state and from private sources focused on technology, and on economic and social improvement. Military aspects were, if not quite neglected, never the centre of attention. This was, of course, partly due to constraints imposed by the Allies after the Second World War. But it was also because there was a fairly broad domestic consensus for this pattern of development. Later, the term Zivilmacht was coined for this. Second, there was a specific policy style developed by economic, social and political actors for doing politics: corporatism. Compared to other European countries, Germany’s post-war development was remarkably consensual, despite the fact that there were serious economic and social adaptations to be implemented. The coal, steel and ship industries declined. Despite substantial state subsidies to assist these industries to adapt to changing technologies and market opportunities, they eventually crumbled. Even so, there were few mass protests and little social unrest directed at these changes. The reason for this was corporatism. In tripartite negotiations, the government, trade unions and industrialists’ associations finally arrived at mutually acceptable solutions – and carried them out. This

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was the core of the so-called Modell Deutschland (German model), providing the formula for successful post-war development. Third, there was a high degree of dependency on imported energy resources, which has been a constant factor. The competitiveness of the German coal industry decreased in the 1960s and 1970s. The first serious move of OPEC in the early 1970s made it clear to everyone how dependent Germany was on importing oil – and gas. For the first time, the country of the Autobahnen had empty highways, because of the ‘energy crisis’. Currently, Germany has to import 78 per cent of its energy resources, a significant amount: 98 per cent of all mineral oil resources are imported, 82 per cent of natural gas, and 55 per cent of coal (see Figure 1). Fourthly, Germany distinguishes itself through the significant role of societal actors. This is especially true regarding the role of the German regions, the Bundeslaender. All of them have their own representation in Brussels, many of them in other countries too, as far as away Asia. Also, the role of all kinds of NGOs in generating and maintaining transnational activities and links is important.

98% 82% 55%

Mineral Oil

Natural Gas

Coal

Figure 1. Germany’s energy resources, 78% of which are imported. Source: Verbundnetz Gas AG, 2003

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The fifth and final factor is the role of history. For decades, historical legacies connected to the inter-war years and the Second World War constituted significant constraints – formal and informal – on Germany’s sovereignty and on actual foreign protocol. This limitation was lifted only by the ‘4 plus 2’ treaty in 1990. But in the period before, and especially after, reunification, these limits have been gradually disappearing. Germany is politically sovereign – though of course economically shaped by globalization as are all other global actors. The consequences of German reunification, feared by many, could almost be disregarded. No new assertiveness has developed. While the country is still deeply embroiled in domestic problems, partly related to reunification, but also to demographic developments and to embedded social brakes hampering adjustment to changing conditions, the actual foreign policy turned out to be surprisingly pragmatic. This is a case where the notorious word normalization really makes sense. These five factors and conditions produce a foreign policy which is bound to be integrationist and institutionalist. Zivilmacht – corporatism – the logic of being a trading state, the relevance of non-state players and the consequences of reunification all point in the same direction: it is real, and legitimate, to have particular German interests. But they will be pursued primarily by working in and through European and other institutions. In this regard, it is not easy to identify Germany’s specific concerns. Germany’s foreign policies are pretty much European. Nevertheless, it is possible to attempt to list the relevant German interests. First, and by far the most important, are European issues: institutional reforms, enlargement embedded in a new institutional setting, the stability pact – although, even now, Germany is violating it for the third year in a row. And managing and regulating migration, as an important all-European issue. Second, and due to more or less common demographic trends and to globalization, social systems – health, pensions, and taxes – have to be reformed and adapted efficiently, preferably in a European context, to avoid intra-European competition (the race to the bottom). Third, the undeniable global role of the US has to be set into a web of global institutions. This is not directed against US interests per se. It is the result of Germany’s positive experiences with rules and institutions. And it is also a strategy of safeguarding against the unilateral execution of dubious policies resting on unfounded and unconfirmed assumptions.

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The Russian Federation’s (RF) external politics in general and external behaviour in particular, are dependent on two groups of factors: transformation, i.e. the accelerated systemic changes that started in the mid-1980s; and globalization with all its implications. While there are many issues that can be – and are – disputed in detail, there can hardly be serious doubt that these variables precluded a consistent Russian foreign policy (the same goes for domestic politics, of course). In the natural absence of coherent ‘national interests’ – though not of groups and people claiming to represent them – we have to talk about the external behaviour of many regional, economic and bureaucratic groups rather than of a foreign policy of the state. The single most important link to the outside world has long been energy. While oil and gas are indispensable for domestic economic development and social stability, they also provide an overwhelming part of the hard currency income for the exporting companies as well as for the state budget. Only with these revenues was it possible in the period after the financial crash in 1998 to largely overcome the notorious ‘virtual economy’. Also, the growing middle class profited from the energy-dependent economy, in addition to income from Western aid programs and NGO support. At the same time, the high degree of dependency on energy exports made the country vulnerable for the volatile developments of the world energy markets. In any case, the linkages between the RF and the global economy became even stronger. This remains one of the most important reasons for the fact that an isolated development of Russia is no longer possible. Furthermore, Russia’s external behaviour is embedded in a domestic context. It cannot be understood or explained without that. Here, several developments are relevant. First of all, compared to the early and mid-1990s, most of the relevant players now define their preferences differently. Instead of looking only for shortterm advantages, they see their prosperity depending much more on medium- and long-term calculations and developments. Time horizons have become much longer, a process also encountered in other regions and historic precedents undergoing rapid and sometimes violent transformation. Those shifting interests are what the late economist Mancur Olson has described – and predicted – as the conversion of roving into stationary bandits.

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Only when, and if, this conversion takes place – possibly the most important variable of transformations – can one expect that reliable forms of cooperation will appear, and that conditions will be ripe for a relative increase in stability. No formal institutionalization for a state based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) is conceivable with short time horizons. The result is, among other outcomes, an increasing degree of saturation in most of the important groups of the business and political elites. These groups are, in turn, becoming rather interested in securing – in legal terms – what they had previously grabbed. The visible tendencies toward longer time horizons and toward stabilization found their expression in something which may be called a new equilibrium, symbolized by ‘Putin’. Here, we define ‘Putin’ firstly as a phenomenon signalling exactly this tendency, then as a person. This new equilibrium signified by the ‘Putin’ phenomenon produces a visible acceleration of institutional changes. There was progress in central-federal relations, in the hardening of budget constraints, in new tax and customs regulations, in the new land code, and in the introduction of reforms in the banking sector and the kommunal’noe khoziaistvo. By and large, we may expect the continuation of institutional changes because they are in the interests of the relevant political and economic players, and also of the increasing middle class. At the same time, these dominant tendencies toward stabilization by no means indicate a political, economic and social development free of conflicts. There are always players who perceive themselves as being treated unfairly. Unsatisfied groups are not silent bystanders. This is especially dangerous when there are significant gaps between the political clout and the material base of players, as is the case with many of the so-called siloviki. The Yukos affair is a colourful demonstration of this. So while the general tendency is still directed toward global integration and internal stabilization, there is no guarantee that the fragile boat will not be rocked by someone, and that the rocking could not last for some time. What does this mean for Russia’s external behaviour? First of all, domestic concerns matter most. Foreign issues follow later, firmly fixed on back benches. By far the majority of the rhetoric regarding the CIS, the integration of former Soviet states, unions with Belarus and similar dark corners of the failed empire are for domestic consumption. So they are certainly meaningful, serving

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the interests of groups speculating with the sentiments of certain generational groups, but their external relevance is limited. The same goes for geopolitical machinations, often fuelled by potential Eurasian, Asian or Chinese alliances and similar myths. The hard facts are that, after a hard time of hostile rhetoric, the seemingly irresolvable topic of NATO enlargement was dropped immediately once the issue was settled in Brussels. Similarly, the seemingly insoluble topic of Kaliningrad’s border regimes of the EU approaching the East has been settled. After 9/11, the Russian government, hardly known for sympathy towards US hegemonic ambitions, hastened to declare support for the alliance against terrorism. There were no objections against the deployment of US troops in Central Asian countries. During the Iraq crisis, the Russian position was, on the one hand, firmly institutionalist, but at the same time, balanced – more so than the German position during the 2002 election campaign. And so goes, and flows, the story of Russian intransigence. Still, this does not mean that there are no risks for Russian external relations and, consequently, for the domestic landscape. Prices on world energy markets are notoriously unstable. Russian domestic development is highly dependent on these volatile markets. Political instability in the Balkans, in the Trans-Caucasus and in Central Asia may have an impact on Russia. The future external orientation of the US and the tools of that policy are, to put it mildly, unclear. China is being perceived, at least in Russia, as a dynamic, vibrant neighbour, even a potential competitor. And other, sometimes neglected, factors such as the digital/informational divide are important for domestic developments and transnational linkages of Russia. Bilateral Relations But what does all this mean for Russian-German relations early in the twenty-first century? These relations are, as I tried to show above, pretty much shaped and even determined by factors producing an integrationist, institutionalist, pragmatic German external policy, and a gradually changing, increasingly stable Russia. Both countries are primarily inward looking, in terms of the agendas of their elites and the interests and outlooks of their societies.

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First of all, and most importantly, there are no significant bilateral problems. For the first time since the Second World War, bilateral relations are basically cloudless. The issues which are debated tend to be of a technical nature. Let us have a brief look at the issues. The topic of the ‘RussianGermans’ has virtually been put to a rest. While the infamous clause in the German constitution granting citizenship to almost everyone who can somehow prove that there were German ancestors is still valid, working procedures have been introduced guaranteeing that no more than about 100,000 persons per year enter Germany. This has somewhat reduced the significance of the mathematical miracle that the continuing outflow of ‘Germans’ since the early 1990s (up to 200,000 persons a year) did not significantly reduce the number of persons declaring themselves German. The notorious debt question has also been put to rest. The consolidation of the Russian state budget, achieved primarily due to a high income from exporting energy to world markets, provided enough cash flow to guarantee punctual repayments of debts to private and state lenders. The much overplayed issue of Beutekunst – reconstitution of art objects taken away during the Second World War – has basically been stripped of unnecessary symbolic value. This problem can mostly be solved by following a reasonable tit-for-tat strategy. So – are there no problems at all? Well, almost none. Some tasks remain, for instance the multilateral ones. Perhaps the most important task is to combine the implementation of the next round of EU enlargement with the design of a realistic status for the Russian Federation. The implementation of the Schengen regime is just one example of what remains to be done. Also, the overdue redefinition of NATO’s mission and the open question of an independent European security policy identity cannot be completed without somehow bringing Russia into the picture (together with Ukraine). What about the prospects for future bilateral relations? With regard to politics, there are hardly any highly contested topics to talk about. The most relevant issues are the conditions for investment in Russia and, to some extent, the civil society interactions. More difficult issues like the prospects for Chechnia and the Russian government’s behaviour there, drug trafficking and organized crime are being mentioned, but they do not block or impede progress in other fields.

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What about the economy? Here are some statistics: • •

German-Russian trade in 2001: €24.8bn (+ 17%) Germany: Russia’s most important trade partner beyond the CIS (10% of Russian exports, 12% of Russian imports). • Germany: 18% of all foreign investment in Russia ($6bn, incl $1.5bn foreign direct investment). The fifth largest investor after the US, Cyprus, the Netherlands and the UK! • German firms: biggest business community in Moscow (1,173 representations (+30%), 1,352 joint ventures). Finally, a look at relations between social players and societies is appropriate. A robust texture of transnational relations is, in global times, an important condition of a stable and prosperous bilateral fabric, as are other indicators. The first thing that comes to mind here is the by now rather long history of town-twinning. Similarly, there is an increasing number of partnerships between professional associations, universities, institutes, NGOs, and – just people. Last but not least, there are an increasing number of comparatively and regionally qualified experts on Eastern Europe in Germany. They have something to do – the role of stereotypes is still (too) high, in schools and textbooks, in the media and in public discourses in general. Conclusion All these factors point in the direction of, if not harmonious, then at least conflict-free bilateral relations. At the same time, one should see that the relative importance of Russia in the German public discourse has been declining, already for some time. This reflects the post-cold war situation, and the less conflictridden transformation of Russia since 1998. In terms of policy recommendations, I would list the following. Stability remains an important aim of Western policy. In combination with ongoing institutional reforms, especially in the economic realm, this is the best that can be expected. The ‘rule of law’ will gradually become more relevant, but it cannot be imposed from abroad. Still, economic and political players should never hesitate to point out that, and why, arbitrary decisions – as apparently in the Yukos case – are detrimental for blooming external relations.

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Germans and others must learn, and accept, that Germany does not have a special role in and for Russia and Eastern Europe. Germany’s participation is required, but as part of European unity. There is no special relationship. Also, democracy cannot be imported like Swiss cheese. Not because Russians are unable to practice it, but because internal conditions have to be ripe for Western-type forms of representation. The same is true for social capital and for civil society development. Western policy-makers and societies, and especially the media, should also be prepared for shifting at least some of their attention away from the state-to-state level of interaction toward the transnational, and toward more societal interactions. Finally, we have to accept – and not only for Russia – that politics are increasingly inconsistent. The degree to which decisions can be implemented in a directed and organized way must be permanently reassessed.

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Index

Abramov, 63 Abramovich, Rafail, 57 Adorno, Theodor, 200 Aicheval’d, Iulii, 53, 55 Albrecht, Georg, 18 Aldanov, Mark, 64 Alexander I, 100 Alexander II, 32 Al’tman, Natan, 64 Amburger, 12 Julius, 19 Aminado, Don, 64 Andersch, Alfred, 123 Arkhangel’skii, Alexei P., 63 Arkhipenko, Aleksandr, 64 Arkwright, Sir Richard, 20 Arnshtam, Aleksandr, 64 Atta, Mohammed, 205 Avalov-Bermondt, Pavel, 45, 60 Averchenko, Arkadii, 64 Babel, Isaak, 53 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 200 Baedecker, 13 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3 Balabin, 63 Bansa, 12, 14 Bauer, Josef Martin, 123, 124 Bazhov, Pavel, 148 Beek, Gottfried zur, 61 Belyi, Andrei, 53, 64, 65 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 53, 66 Bergius, Rudolf, 126 Beriia, Lavrentii, 90, 138, 139 Bibó, Istvan, 42 Biskupskii, Vasilii, 60, 62 Bismarck, Otto von, 32

Bloch, Raisa, 62 Blomberg, Werner von, 109, 113 Boguslavskaia, Ksenia, 65 Böll, Heinrich, 200 Bondi, Sergei, 156 Botkin, Sergei von, 47, 50 Brauchtisch, Walter von, 109 Brecht, Bertolt, 200 Brezhnev, Leonid I., 194 Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich Graf, 102 Broido, Eva, 57 Brutskus, Boris, 53 Bubnov, Nikolai, 23 Bukharin, Nikolai, 112 Bunin, Ivan, 53 Bush, George W., 205 Carell, Paul, 123 Carsten, Francis L., 104 Chagall, Marc, 65 Charchoune, Serge, 65 Chekhov, Anton P., 200 Chelishchev, Pavel, 65 Chernov, Viktor, 58 Chernyi, Sasha, 64 Chernyshev, Vasilii V., 150 Chicherin, Georgii, 66 Churchill, Sir Winston, 31, 32 Colville, John, 31 Cuno, Wilhelm, 107 Dahlmann, Dittmar, 2, 3 Dallin, David, 57 Dan, Fedor, 56, 57 Deist, Wilhelm, 129 Dement’ev, Aleksandr, 148

217

218 Diagilev, Sergei, 65 Diakova, Olga, 54 Diederichs, Eugen, 40 Dittbender, Walter, 84, 86 Döblin, Alfred, 35 Dostoevskii, 3, 16, 35–41 passim, 66 Dragomirov, Vladimir, 63 Dubnov, Simon, 61, 62 Dzhalil’, Musa, 13 Ehrenburg, Ilja, 3, 64, 66, 147 Einem, von, 12 Einstein Albert, 66 Carl, 65 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 127 Engels, Frederick, 32, 81 Erickson, John, 104 Erpenbeck, Fritz, 81 Esenin, Sergei, 64, 66 Evlogii, Bishop, 55 Ezhov, Nikolai, 90 Frank, Semen, 61 Friedrich, Hedwig, 23 Fritzler, Friedrich, 154, 155 Fromm, Friedrich, 109 Gabo, Naum, 65 Gates, Bill, 205 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 64 Gessen, Iosif V., 50, 53, 54, 58 Gessen (Hessen), Sergei, 23 Glatzke, Hans W., 104 Glinka, Mikhail, 55 Goebbels, Joseph, 41 Gogel, Sergei, 53 Gollwitzer, Helmut, 124 Golovin, 62, 63 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 128, 194 Göring, Hermann, 103 Gor’kii, Maksim, 16, 35, 53, 64, 200 Gorlin, Mikhail, 62 Grass, Günter, 200

Index Grigor’ev, Boris, 65 Gromme, E. W., 18 Gul’, Roman, 61 Haider, Jörg, 205 Halder, Franz, 123 Hammerschmidt, 12 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 200 Hanemann, 19 Harnack, Arved, 40 Harpe, Josef, 109 Harriman, William Averell, 137 Hartmann, Wladimir, 153 Hasse, Otto, 106 Heckmann, Alexander, 134, 154, 155 Hermann, 14 Hillgruber, Andreas, 129 Hindenburg, Paul von, 113 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 31, 40, 41, 61, 62, 109–14 passim, 120, 123, 129, 134–6, 146, 153, 165, 166, 191 Hoetzsch, Otto, 33, 40, 52 Hoffmann, Heinrich, 136 Hohenzollern, 8 see also Wilhelm II Horowitz, Vladimir, 65 Hussein, Saddam, 204 Iashchenko, Aleksandr, 53 Iasinskii, Vsevold, 53 Il’in, Ivan, 53, 61 Iudenich, Nikolai N., 45 Iuzhnii, Iakov, 65 Ivanov, Georgii, 64 Ivanov, Ivan, 144 Jahn, Peter, 4, 5 Jäkel, Paul, 86 Jellinek, Georg, 22 Jessner, Leopold, 66 Jünger, Ernst, 40, 66 Kalantarov, Mikhail, 22 Kalinin, Mikhail, 138

Index Kaminka, Avgust, 53, 58 Kaminskii, Grigori, 79 Kammhuber, Josef, 110 Kandinskii, Vasilii, 65 Karsavin, Lev, 59 Kautsky, Karl, 35 Kazem-Bek, Aleksandr, 59 Keitel, Wilhelm, 109 Kellermann, Bernhard, 66 Kerenski, Aleksander, 56, 58 Khludov Aleksei, 17 Gerasim, 17 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 53, 64 Khrushchev, Nikita, 155 Kirdetsov, Grigory, 58 Kirill Vladimirovich, Grand Prince, 49, 60 Kirov, 83 Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 123 Kistiakovskii, Bogdan, 22, 23 Kizevetter, Aleksandr, 53 Kliuchnikov, Iurii, 58 Knoch, Peter, 174 Knoop, 2, 13 Andreas, 18, 19 Daniel, 17 Gottfried, 19 Johann, 18 Johann Ludwig, 19 Julius, 11, 17–19 Baron Ludwig, 11–20 passim Theodor, 18 Kobulov, Bogdan Zakharovich, 155 Koenen, Gerd, 3 Kogan, A.E., 50, 53 Kokoshkin, Fedor, 22 König, 12 Konsalik, Heinz, 123–5 Kopelev, Lev, 186 Kopp, Viktor, 45 Korbmacher, Heinrich, 154, 155 Kosmodem’ianskaia, Zoia, 136 Krebs, Hans, 109

219 Kreiter, 63 Krestinskii, Nikolai, 66 Krieger, Victor, 5 Kroner, Richard, 23 Krüdener-Struve, Baron A., 50 Kulenkampff, 18 Kusikov, Aleksandr, 64 Kuskova, Elena, 58 Kusonskii, Pavel I., 62 Lampe, Aleksei von, 62, 63 Landau, Grigorii, 61 Landauer, Gustav, 66 Laqueur, Walther, 1 Lebedev, Pavel, 107 Lenin, Vladimir, 21, 38, 81, 199 Leonov, Leonid, 147 Liebknecht, Karl, 61 Link, Werner, 109 List, Wilhelm, 109 Litvinov, Maksim, 113, 114 Löbe, Paul, 66 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 21 Ludendorff, Erich, 38, 100 Luk’ianov, Sergei, 58 Lunts, Lev, 64 Luther, Arthur, 55 Luxemburg, Rosa, 61 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 64, 66 Maier, Johannes, 154, 155 Mamontov, 20 Mandel’shtam, Osip, 2, 24 Mann Heinrich, 38 Thomas, 3, 31, 34, 37–9, 65, 200 Manstein, Erich von, 109 Marc, Moritz, 12–14 Martov, Iulii, 56, 57 Marx, Karl, 32, 78, 81 Masing, Johannes, 51 Matrosov, Alexandr, 136 Medved’ev, 20 Mehlis, Georg, 23

220 Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod, 200 Mekhlis, L., 147 Melgunov, Sergei, 54 Meretskov, Kirill, 111 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 39, 66 Messerschmidt, Manfred, 129 Mikhalkov, Nikita, 199 Milch, Erhard, 103 Miliukov, Pavel, 56, 58 Milosevic, Slobodan, 204 Model, Walter, 109 Moeller von der Bruck, Arthur, 39, 66 Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, 133, 147 Morozov Savva, 16, 17 T., 12 Müller, Jakob, 153 Müller von Hausen, Ludwig, 40, 61 Mussolini, Benito, 39 Nabokov, Vladimir, 49–66 passim Nansen, Fridtjof, 48 Nasedkin, Victor, 150 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasilii, 64 Nicholas II, 60 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 41 Nikolaevskii, Boris, 57 Nikolai Markov II, 60 Nikolai Nikolaevich, 60, 61, 101 Nolte, Ernst, 31 Okorokov, A. D., 169 Olbricht, Friedrich, 109 Olson, Mancur, 210 Osorgin, Mikhail, 64 Otsup, Nikolai, 64 Palytsin, F.F., 101 Pasternak Boris, 2, 24, 64 Leonid, 61 Peter I, 11 Pevsner, Anton, 65

Index Pil’niak, Boris, 64 Pinkus, Benjamin, 143 Pirogov, Nikolai, 21 Plocher, Hermann, 110 Prokopovich, Sergei, 58 Polgar, Alfred, 65 Potekhin, Iury, 58 Puni, Ivan, 65 Putin, Vladimir, 197, 211 Radbruch, Gustav, 23 Radek, Karl, 66, 104, 105 Rathenau, Walther, 34, 35, 40, 61 Reich Bernhard, 136 Jens, 6 Reisner, Larisa, 64 Remarque, Erich Maria, 200 Remizov, Aleksei, 64 Riazanov, Eldar, 199 Rickert, Heinrich, 23 Rockefeller, John D., 20 Romanov, 8, 60 see also Alexander I, Alexander II, Kirill Vladimirovich, Grand Duke, Nicholas II, Nikolai Nikolaevich, Grand Duke, Peter I Root, Alexander, 154 Rosenberg, Alfred, 40, 60, 113, 120 Rowohlt, Ernst, 66 Rozengol’ts, Arkadii, 107 Ruge, Arnold, 23 Ruperti, Alfred, 15 Savitskii, Petr, 59 Sazonov, Sergei, 54 Scherstjanoj, Elke, 5, 6 Scheubner-Richter, Max von, 60 Schickedanz, Arno, 60 Schiemann, Theodor, 33 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 53 Schleicher, Kurt von, 113 Schlesinger, Moritz, 45, 52

Index Schliemann, Heinrich, 12 Schlippe, Theodore von, 50 Schlögel, Karl, 3, 42 Schmidt, Paul, 123 Schmitt, Carl, 40, 66 Schulenburg, Friedrich Werner Count von der, 87, 88, 114 Schulze-Grävenitz, Gerhart von, 20 Schumacher, 14 Seeckt, Hans von, 102, 105, 113 Segbers, Klaus, 6, 7 Serov, Ivan A., 139 Severianin, Igor, 64 Shabel’skii-Bork, Petr, 60 Shaposhnikov, Boris, 107, 111 Shchukin, 17 Shestov, Lev, 54 Shkuro, Andrei, 63 Shmelev, Ivan, 64 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 147 Shterenberg, David, 65 Shvarts-bostunich, Grigorii, 60 Simmel, Georg, 23 Simonov, Konstantin, 147 Smirnov, S., 50 Sodhi, Kripal Singh, 126 Sokolov-Mikitov, Ivan, 64 Soldatenkov, Koz’ma, 17 Speidel, Hans, 109 Spengler, Oswald, 3, 40, 66 Sperrle, Hugo, 109 Spies, 12, 13 Stadtler, Eduard, 3, 39, 40 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich, 4, 31, 41, 81, 93, 133, 136–8, 147, 150, 154, 156, 165, 194, 197, 199, 204 Stanislavskii, Konstantin, 16, 200 Stepun, Fedor, 23, 63 Stieglitz, 12 Stolypin, Pjotr A., 33 Strasser, Gregor und Otto, 41 Stravinskii, Igor’, 65 Stresemann, Gustav, 102,103, 105, 112

221 Struin, I., 141 Struve, Petr, 53 Student, Kurt, 109 Sukhanov, Nikolai, 54 Sukhomlinov, Vladimir, 54 Surkov, Aleksej A., 147 Svatikov, Sergei, 22 Taboritskii, Sergei, 60 Tarkovskii, Andrei, 199 Theresa, Mother, 205 Thorwald, Jürgen, 125 Tikhon, Bishop, 55 Timoshenko, Semyon, 111 Tischler, Carola, 4 Tito, Josip, 196 Tolstoi Aleksei, 58, 64, 147 Lev, 16, 24, 35 Trautwein, Theodor, 154 Trotzkii, Lev, 41, 61 Tsvetavea, Marina, 64 Tukhachevskii, Mikhail, 66, 113, 114 Vinberg, Fedor von, 60, 61 Vlasov, Andrei, 47, 63 Vrangel, Pjotr N., 45, 46, 50, 59 Vysheslavtsev, Boris, 61 Weber Alfred, 23 Max, 22, 23 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 130 Werner, 145 Werth, Alexander, 147 Wilhelm, 145 Wilhelm II, 32 Williams, R.C., 54 Windelband, Wilhelm, 23 Wogau, von, 2, 12–15 Karl von, 14 Wolde, 18 Wolf, 126

222 Zaitsev, Boris, 53, 64 Zeidler, Manfred, 4, 181 Zenker, 12, 18 Zernack, Klaus, 2

Index Zhivago, Sergei, 23 Zinner, Hedda, 81 Zinov’ev, Grigorij, 61 Zola, Emile, 38