“We want to remain Germans but live in Ukraine, our second fatherland,” says Volodymyr RENPENING, Deputy Chairman of the Crimean Nationalities Committee
FROM THE HISTORY OF GERMANS IN THE CRIMEA
The common perception is that Germans began to resettle in the southern Russian Empire, including the Crimea, under Catherine II. But, to be more exact, that was a planned resettlement. The empire began to adjust to European standards in the days of Peter I who actively used German experience and specialists. After the Crimea was annexed by Russia Grigory Potemkin wrote the empress in The Plan of Settlements in the Tauric Region that it was necessary to settle here the “colonists who know the economy to the utmost and will thus set an example to local residents.”
It is proven that 510 male and 410 female “Danzig colonists” were resettled in the Crimea in 1787-1788, and in 1803 the settlers were given 10,000 desiatynas (1 desiatyna = 2.7 acres or 1.0925 hectares — Ed.) of “the most suitable land” in what was known as “the old Crimea,” but not until 1805 were the German Crimean colonies officially registered. Most of those settling in the south were Mennonites, although there were also Catholics and Protestants among them. A total 181 mother colonies were founded on the Black Sea Coast, in Besarabia, and the Southern Caucasus. There were several colonies in the Crimea: three — Neusatz, Friedenthal, and Rosenthal (now Krasnohorsk, Kurortne, and Aromatne in Bilohorsk district) — in Simferopol district, and three — near Sudak, Heilbrun, and Herzenberg (now Pryvitne and Pionerske) — in Feodosiya district. Those were settlers from Wuertemberg, Baden, Prussia, and other German states. Still in 1805, newcomers from Switzerland founded the colony of Zuerichthal in the Eastern Crimea (now the village of Zolote Pole, Kirovsk district). In 1810 (1811 according to other sources) the Germans founded the colony of Kronenthal in Simferopol district. These became the Mutterkolonien from which the Germans began to resettle to other Crimean populated areas, establishing affiliated colonies there.
What caused the German to emigrate was not only the invitation of Russia but also consequences of the Seven Years War in their fatherland, French occupation following the war against Napoleon, poor harvests, starvation, as well as tough and often unfair methods of governance, such as the sale of soldiers to the British in America, and limited freedom of religion.
The colonists were granted sizable 60-65 desiatyna land plots in the Crimea; they were exempt from conscription and for three, five, or ten years from taxes. Yet, the empire’s care for the new settlers was not so much charity as an aspiration to reap a profit of its own. In an 1804 instruction to Tavriya governor, Minister Mertvago noted that the colonists should set an example for the rest, so they “should be encouraged to do manual and rural labor and discouraged from making an easy living by selling wood.”
The colonies were self-governing. The German households imported machines and the best breeds of cattle from abroad. Soon after, the colonies turned into thriving enclaves. The Germans possessed huge high quality land plots and sizable herds of cattle, they exported various goods, primarily grain. By 1841, there had already been quite affluent landlords among the colonists, such as Bitzler (340 desiatynas of land), Zeemann (353 desiatynas), Miller (353 desiatynas), or Faut, who had a large and high quality vineyard in the Sudak Valley. We know the impressions of Anatoly Demidov who described a German colony near Simferopol after his tour of the Crimea in 1837, “...all landowners supply good milk, they are also excellent bakers, so the residents of Feodosiya buy cream, zwiebacks, wheaten bread, and other baked items mostly from them.” The Germans were also considered fine truck farmers, growing onions, cabbages, cucumbers, melons, watermelons, and potatoes.
During the 1853-1856 Crimean War Russia had to fight against a broad coalition (Britain, France, Turkey, and Sardinia). What was subjected to a test was not only the military system but also the attitude toward the state of various ethnic minorities living in the Crimea. Utilization of the local resources became a major problem due to the absence of railroads leading to Crimea. The German colonists accounted for 7% of the Tavriya guberniya’s population and were the third largest ethnic group after the Tartars and Russians. Their colonies were “a beautiful sight showing all the way the seal of enlightened care, neatness, and rewarded labor.” A Russian officer, en route to Sevastopol with his soldiers, noted that the German colonists “love their new fatherland as dearly as we, its true children, do and are ready, as we are, to sacrifice all their property to it.” Along with people of other ethnic groups, the Germans offered substantial help to the Russian Army, supplying fodder, food, carts, and horses for weapons, ammunition, clothing, and transport for the wounded either free or for a nominal payment. German women worked as nurses, helping to treat the wounded.
In the 1860s and seventies the government of Russia invited Germans to set up new colonies in the Crimea. According to official statistics of the Russian Imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs, there were as many as 45 German-populated areas in the peninsula in 1865: colonies, landlord-owned and communal villages, one state village, and some farmsteads. The colonies were tiny towns with well planned streets, slate-roofed stone buildings, and a school in the center. Practically all the colonists were literate. The schools functioned on a self-financing basis. There were 180 rural German schools, two urban boys’ schools at Neusatz and Zuerichthal, and one girls’ high school in the Crimea. To continue their education, the children were sent to Germany.
1897 was the year of the first empire-wide census which recorded 30,027 Germans in the Crimea. Most were Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, but there were also families that went Orthodox. In the early twentieth century, about 3% of the colonists were large landowners, 80% medium-sized well-to-do landowners, and 17% landless peasants. The latter usually rented land and were also quite well-off, owning a horse and a plow. The Germans were mainly engaged in land husbandry, with craftsmen, such as wheelwrights and blacksmiths, occurring in big colonies. The German colonists quite rarely moved to the cities. As the urban Germans arrived from Germany, they were usually out of touch with their rural confreres. Every Crimean city had a small isolated German colony: the one in Simferopol, for example, numbered over 1,000.
The history of the Crimea is studded with the names of many world-famous German scientists and cultural figures. Towering among them are, above all, P. S. Pallas and F. K. Muelhausen. Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811), a zoologist, botanist, geologist, ethnographer, full member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, was invited to Russia as professor of natural history and lived in the Crimea almost without interruption from 1795 through 1810, devoting many of his studies to exploring the peninsula. His Simferopol estate, used as a summer retreat and a scientific research ground, comprised a residential building, two attached houses, auxiliary structures and , and the enormous Caroline’s garden, so named in honor of his wife, that stretched down the banks of the Salgir for a solid two miles. Among those who set up this garden was C. C. Steven, founder of the Nikitsky Botanical Gardens. Still standing, if down at the heel, is the manor of a well-known physician, botanist, meteorologist, alternate member of the Medical Surgical Academy, public figure, F. K. Mielhausen (1775-1853) who lived there for about 30 years and was buried in Simferopol. What has remained of what once was a large country estate that included a residential house, auxiliary structures, and a 60-ha huge garden is only the house in bad need of major renovation and restoration. Also in a poor state of repair is the Koessler estate, a historical and cultural monument. Among the members of this family were scientists, military servicemen, teachers, lay justices of the peace, and trustees of educational institutions and hospitals.
THE END OF PRIVILEGES
However, the golden age of German colonists in Russia soon ended. Their privileges were abolished. There were several waves of Russian German emigration to America in the early twentieth century: people chose to cross the ocean in search of a better life. In 1940 there were about 400,000 Germans in the US, who migrated from Russia, as well as hundreds of thousands more who moved from Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The year 1914, when World War I broke out, stirred up broad anti-German sentiments with propaganda being aimed not only against Germany but also against Germans residing in Russia. As early as August 1914, the local authorities were instructed by St. Petersburg to detain 4500 ethnic Germans who were still citizens of Germany and deport them beyond the Volga River. This was the first German deportation. Soon after, conscription-age German men of Russian citizenship were deported by order from the capital. Arrested at home, the Germans were then sent to Simferopol and Sevastopol jails or held in police stations. On February 2, 1915, the tsarist government decided to abolish German landowning. A special body was instituted in Tavriya to liquidate the German settlements as well as assess and record the real estate of the colonists.
The attitude toward Germans changed only after the February Revolution. A regional committee of the Crimean Germans was soon organized by A. F. Heine, a Simferopol court juror. Many Germans came back to the Crimea from exile. 1918 saw the formation of the First Katerynoslav Communist Cavalry Regiment whose soldiers, including Germans, fought against the German occupiers in Ukraine and the Crimea. In 1920 the German cavalry regiment was engaged in hostilities against Wrangel, Makhno and the Poles as part of Budionny’s First Mounted Army. In 1918, when German troops advanced on the Crimea, local colonists supplied them with intelligence data. From 1919 on, German men aged 18 to 40 were mobilized first to Gen. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia and then to Baron Wrangel’s units. In many cases, this was a forced mobilization.
When Soviet power was finally established in the Crimea in November 1920, the Germans were for a long time opposed to the new order. They shunned government offices and were generally apathetic. Only about ten Germans joined the Russian Communist Party in the first five years of Soviet power. In December 1920, the regional Communist Party committee formed a German section to reinforce persuasion efforts among the colonists. Communist International member Pogani published the newspaper Red Crimea for the Germans, while in 1921 the German section begins to put out the newspaper Hammer and Plow. A German Soviet Party school was opened in 1921, to be soon transferred to Odesa where two religious newspapers — for Lutherans and Catholics — were also published until the end of the 1920s.
In 1930, a German Biyuk- Onlar district was established with a center of the same name (now Zhovtneve, Chervonohvardiysk district), as well as 36 German village councils all over the Crimea. Two, Biyuk-Onlar and Thaelmann, districts publish German newspapers. In the 1930s, the usually economically-strong German farms were dispossessed as part of campaign against the so-called kurkuls (well-to-do farmers — Ed.), with many Germans being deported from the Crimea. Nor were the Germans spared the unprecedented purges of 1937- 1939. Many Germans had relatives abroad, so even one foreign letter was sufficient to accuse a person of “espionage” and make him of her vanish forever into secret police dungeons or the GULAG. Practically all German families were left without fathers who were either executed or deported to prison camps. Mixed marriages and assimilation, the “Sovietization” of all walks of life, the dispossession of kurkuls, and the repression organized by Stalin and Beriya finally undermined the economic and social foundations of the German ethnic community on the territory of Russia and Ukraine.
But the Crimean Germans were still to undergo their greatest ordeal: 1941 came and as soon as August 17-20, i.e., a week before the Volga Germans were decreed to be resettled, the Crimean Germans were deported from the peninsula. The first party of the deported numbered 50,000, soon followed by another 2,000. Later on, the 400,000 ethnic Germans in the Asiatic USSR, mostly those deported from the German Volga Autonomous Republic, were supplemented by another 300,000, mainly women, children, and the elderly. All men aged 15 to 60 and childless women were sent to the so-called labor army, in fact a forced-labor camp where they were treated as traitors to the Fatherland. Women and children were under strict secret police surveillance. These inhuman conditions claimed the lives of about 300,000 Soviet Germans, including those from the Crimea.
THE GERMANS TODAY
The collapse of the USSR signaled a new stage in the life for “Soviet” Germans. Despite all their efforts, they failed to restore the Volga Republic. When requested, Boris Yeltsin said he could only furnish them the former missile proving ground Kapustin Yar! Only Ukraine’s first President Leonid Kravchuk officially invited the Germans to Ukraine. By 1996, about 220,000 Germans had left Central Asia, Russia, and Kazakhstan (mostly for Germany), with some of them to come back to Ukraine and the Crimea. Quite a lot has already been done for the successful integration of the Germans into Ukrainian society, but leader of the Crimean Germans, Volodymyr Renpening, former chairman of the People’s Council (Volksrat) of Crimean Germans, member of the previous-convocation Crimean Supreme Council from the German ethnic constituency, and now deputy chairman of the Crimean Nationalities Committee, speaks today more about problems and difficulties in the life of his fellow countrymen.
You can judge it by yourself. The rehabilitation of Germans still remains only on paper in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Crimea. The law on rehabilitation of the deported, also looked forward to by the Ukrainian Germans, is still to be passed in this country. In this situation the Germans are losing faith in the future and trust no promises.
According to Mr. Renpening, “Today we witness the culmination of the destruction of the German diaspora. In truth, Ukraine is not always to blame. The point is the Germans still remaining on the territory of Ukraine have, as a rule, lost their linguistic and cultural association with Germany and are not recognized as Germans in their historic homeland. Accordingly, they cannot go to Germany as compatriots. At the same time, the Germans who have returned to the Crimea cannot gain Ukrainian citizenship, and over 500 have no internal passports. The past 55 years have completed the process of forced assimilation: the mother tongue has been lost, more than 70% of marriages are mixed, the Germans rank among the least educated, the last sprouts of German culture are withering, the Germans are no longer so punctual because their nature has been Sovietized so much, their cemeteries, churches, and monuments have been destroyed, there are no ethnic schools, districts, village councils, or even German toponyms in the Crimea. It is impossible to revive the historically-known German villages and districts because the whole setup of life has changed. On the one hand, we want to remain Germans, but, on the other hand, we want to live in Ukraine, the country that has become our second fatherland. First, there are no chances of moving to Germany. Secondly, we are attracted by climatic conditions more favorable in the Crimea than in Germany. Third, there is the favorable attitude of the local population. Fourth is the level of civilization higher than in Asia. Fifth, the state shows a tolerant attitude toward speaking Russian, now our native language. Sixth are the close ties between Ukraine and Germany, which allow us to feel optimistic about the future. So there is only one way out: to take into account the present state of affairs and find the most suitable ways of organizing the life of Germans in Ukraine,” Mr. Renpening concludes.
The self-organization of the Germans in Ukraine remains a difficult problem, Mr. Renpening believes. But, failing this, it is impossible to solve the problem of preserving German self-identification in Ukraine in the context of a complicated history. On the one hand, the 1992 law On National Minorities envisages the establishment of national cultural autonomy, but, on the other hand, this country has no law on such autonomy, so it is impossible to set them up (tell that to the quite active Council of National Cultural Societies headed by Illia Levytas! — Ed.). Speaking of the deported Germans — and only a part of them is recognized as such — we also see a paradox: their organized return seems to have been going on since 1992, but there is no program: in other words, the organized return has still not been organized. The Germans have been, so to speak, linked to the program of repatriating the Crimean Tartars not least by the alphabet: first come the Armenians, then the Bulgarians, and only then the Germans.
Germany has also gone back on its commitments. The historical homeland is also protecting itself in terms of legislation, providing that those who have lost the native language are no longer Germans. This humiliates and infringes on the dignity of German settlers. For they are not to blame for coming under an almost 50- year-long most cruel persecution exclusively on the ethnic grounds.
Mr. Renpening thinks that, with account of the fact that 400,000 Germans were deported from Ukraine in 1941 against 200,000, only half as many as the Crimean Tartars in 1944, the problem of Germans should be given the same status as that of the Crimean Tartars. He suggests that the German-Ukrainian commission on the problems of Germans in Ukraine urgently resume its work, the national self-organization of Germans be duly recognized (naturally, without laying claims to territoriality or statehood), governmental bodies be established patterned on the Chornobyl Ministry to help integrate the Germans and Crimean Tartars in Ukrainian society, and solve their economic, cultural, and social problems. He believes it is also necessary to draw up the Crimean Germans program and the concept of German self-organization in Ukraine by 2015.
“We, Germans, respect the national rights and interests of the Ukrainian people and other ethnic groups in Ukraine,” Mr. Renpening says, “but we also have national interests of our own which we want to defend. We are Ukrainian citizens, but we also want to be Germans, as were our fathers and forefathers, and this will only help us work for the benefit of our new fatherland. But we can only solve these problems by means of a common effort...”
The editors express gratitude to participants in the Renaissance Foundation program called the Integration of the Crimean Tartars, Armenians, Bulgarians, and German into Ukrainian Society or rendering assistance in the selection of materials and supply of information on the history of Crimean Germans.
