Немецкие колонисты в России и их потомки в Северной Америке.

Ethnic group

Russian Germans in North America are descended from the many ethnic Germans from Russia who emigrated to North America. Migration to Canada and the United States by Germans from Russia peaked in the late 19th century. The upper Great Plains of the United States and southern Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan in Canada have large areas that are populated primarily by descendants of Germans from Russia. Their mother tongues were High German or Low German dialects although ethnic German communities had existed in Russia for many generations. Russian Germans frequently lived in distinct communities and maintained German language schools and German churches. They were primarily Volga Germans from the lower Volga River valley; Black Sea Germans from the Crimean Peninsula/Black Sea region; or Volhynian Germans from the governorate of Volhynia in what is Ukraine. The smaller villages were often settled by colonists of a common religious denomination who had come from the same area and so a town is made up of German speaking Catholics, Lutherans. The people often settled together from the same region of Germany and so spoke the same German dialect. Originally recruited and welcomed to the Russian Empire in the 18th century, when they were promised to be allowed to practice own language and religions and to be exempted from compulsory military service, the Germans from Russia found increasing hardship. With changes in politics, the Russian government took back some of the privileges that had been granted, economic conditions grew poor. Those conditions led to German mass migrations from Russia. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, particularly under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, conditions for the remaining Germans in Russia declined considerably. The subsequent rise of Nazi Germany, with its concern about ethnic Germans in other lands and proselytizing to the German Volk, led to suspicions of any Germans in Russia. In 1932 and 1933, the Soviet authorities forced starvation among the Volga Germans according to Western observers. Soviet authorities seized food supplies under the pretext of famine in the rest of the Soviet Union, and they ordered the breakup of many German villages. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin ordered the deportation of Russian Germans to labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia, as he was suspicious of potential collaboration with the invaders. In some areas, his forces attempted to bulldoze the German churches and reused their tombstones for paving blocks. Many Germans in the Americas sent donations back to their communities, but others permanently lost contact with their relatives during the social disruptions of the Ukrainian famine, Stalin's Great Purge, and World War II.

Unlike many other immigrants to the Americas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germans from Russia wanted to continue farming and settled in agricultural areas, rather than industrial cities. Primary areas were the Plains states of Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, North and South Dakota with some movement to specific areas of Washington State and California (such as Fresno and Lodi) in the United States; Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada; Brazil; and Argentina. Those areas tended to resemble the flat plains of the Russian steppes. In addition, the upper Great Plains still had arable land available for free settlement under the Homestead Act. In the 2000 Census, North Dakota reported 43.9% of the population identified as having German ancestry. In 1910, 5% of the population of North Dakota had been born in Russia; it is likely that most were ethnic Germans. Large scale immigration to the Americas started in the 1870s and continued until the 1917 Revolution, when travel and emigration were stopped. Since the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the declining conditions in Russia, many ethnic Germans still living in the lands of the former Soviet Union sought German repatriation.

Germans from Russia were the most traditional German speakers. About 100,000 Volga Germans immigrated by 1900 and settled primarily in the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska. The south central part of North Dakota was known as the "German Russian triangle." A smaller number moved farther west and found employment as ranchers and cowboys. The largest groups settled mainly in the Great Plains: North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas and nearby areas. Outside those areas, they also settled in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York State, Oregon, Washington State, Wisconsin, and California's Fresno County in the Central Valley. They often succeeded in dryland farming, which they had practiced in Russia. Many immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1912 spent a period doing farm labor, especially in northeastern Colorado and in Montana along the lower Yellowstone River in sugar beet fields. Their family and community lifestyle and their contribution to the sugar beet industry on the plains of Colorado is well documented in "Work Renders Life Sweet: Germans from Russia in Fort Collins, 1900 2000." They were often sugar beet farmers almost everywhere they settled.

Other Volga Germans made new lives in the industrializing American cities, especially in Chicago, which had an immense upsurge in immigration from Eastern Europe during that time. Chicago now has the largest number of ethnic Volga Germans in North America. The largest area of concentrated settlement was in Jefferson Park, on the city's Northwest Side, mostly between 1907 and 1920. By 1930, 450 families of the Evangelical faith were living in that area, most of whom originated from Wiesenseite. Later, during the period of suburbanization, many of their descendants moved out to outlying areas such as Maywood and Melrose Park. Many families living in the Jefferson Park central business district along Lawrence and Milwaukee Avenue have Volga German immigrant ancestors.

Bernhard Warkentin, born in a small Russian village in 1847, travelled to America in his early twenties. Interested in flour mills, he was especially impressed with the wheat growing possibilities in the United States. After he had visited Kansas, Warkentin found the Great Plains much like those that he had left behind. Settling in Harvey County, Kansas, he built a water mill on the banks of the Little Arkansas River, the Halstead Milling and Elevator Company. Warkentin's greatest contribution to Kansas was the introduction of hard Turkey Wheat into Kansas, which replaced the soft variety grown exclusively in the state.

Negatively influenced by the violation of their rights and cultural persecution by the tsar, the Russian Germans who settled in the northern Midwest saw themselves an ethnic group that was separate from Russian Americans and had an entirely different experience from the German Americans who had immigrated from German lands. The Volga German settled in tight knit communities, which retained their German language and culture. They raised large families, built German style churches, buried their dead in distinctive cemeteries by using wrought iron grave markers, and created choir groups that sang German church hymns. Many farmers specialized in sugar beets, still a major crop in the upper Great Plains. During World War I, their identity was challenged by anti German sentiment. By the end of the World War II, the German language, which had always been used with English for public and official matters, had seriously declined. German is now preserved mainly through singing groups and recipes, with the Germans from Russia in the northern Great Plains states speaking predominantly English. German remains the second most spoken language in North and South Dakota, and Germans from Russia sometimes use loanwords, such as Kuchen for 'cake' although that word is primarily used for the sweet bread dessert made in a pie plate with topping like fruits or cottage cheese. The latter kind of Kuchen has been the state dessert of South Dakota since 2013. Despite the loss of their language, the Volga Germans have remained distinct and left a lasting impression on the American West.

During the 1970s, Dr. Kenneth Rock, a professor of history at Colorado State University, collected 60 oral histories of Russian German immigrants and their descendants as part of the "Germans from Russia in Colorado" Study Project. He documented life in the ethnic German communities in Russia, the immigration experience, work and social life in the United States, and interaction between the Russian German communities and the wider society in both Russia and the United States. They were often described as looking like Russians but sounding like Germans. Approximately one million descendants of Germans from Russia live in the United States. Modern descendants in Canada and the United States refer to their heritage as Germans from Russia, Russian Germans, Volgadeutsch or Black Sea Germans. In many parts of the United States, they tend to have blended to a large degree with the "regular" German Americans, who are much more numerous than Russian Germans in the northern half of the United States.

In addition to the large population of Volga Germans that settled on the American prairie, many also settled in the Canadian West. In the early 1870s, the Canadian government had begun to create promotional programs in Europe to entice settlers to the largely unsettled western areas in what would become Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia. Public policy also served to attract immigration following the passage of the federal Dominion Lands Act of 1872, which provided free grants of homesteads to those who settled on the Canadian prairie. Those German American immigrants brought not only their experience working on the American plains but also their accrued wealth, which gave a much needed boost to the economy of Western Canada. The communities were centered around religious homogeneity, the insistence on the tenets of adult baptism, and the refusal to bear arms or to swear an oath. Many Mennonites had been propelled to leave because of the introduction of extended conscription, which had been put into place in 1874 and was set to take effect in Russia in 1881. Many Volga Germans emigrated from the United States to Western Canada from 1890 to1909. They sought to escape rising land prices and the imposition of laws that had begun to encroach on their relative autonomy. Canada was seen as a new frontier and a place of vast land but little settlement. The immigrants settled mainly in the colonies of St. Peter and St. Joseph, East and West of Saskatoon, in central Saskatchewan.