History Of Germans In Russia And The Soviet Union
The German minority in Russia and the Soviet Union was created from several sources and in several waves. The 1914 census puts the number of Germans living in Russian Empire at 2,416,290. In 1989, the German population of the Soviet Union was roughly 2 million. In the 2002 Russian census, 597,212 Germans were enumerated, making Germans the fifth largest ethnic group in Russia. In 1999, there were 353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan and 21,472 in Kyrgyzstan. According to the 2001 census, 33,300 Germans lived in Ukraine.
In the Russian Empire, ethnic Germans were strongly represented among royalty, aristocracy, large land owners, military officers and the upper echelons of the imperial service, engineers, scientists, artists, physicians and the bourgeoisie in general. The Germans of Russia did not necessarily speak Russian; they spoke German, while French was often the language of the high aristocracy. Now, however, the Germans in Russia usually speak only Russian and have adopted Russian culture and have a poor command of German. For this reason, Germany has recently strictly limited their immigration, and the fall of Germans in the Russian Federation has moderated as they no longer emigrate to Germany and as Kazakh Germans move to Russia instead of Germany.
Read more about History Of Germans In Russia And The Soviet Union: Germans in Russia and Ukraine, Decline of The Russian Germans, Demographics, Germans in The Baltics, Famous Russian-Germans
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, history, germans, russia, soviet and/or union:
“If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... gathering news in Russia was like mining coal with a hatpin.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
““Is there life on Mars?” “No, not there either.””
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“The sacred obligation to the Union soldiers must not—will not be forgotten nor neglected.... But those who fought against the Nation cannot and do not look to it for relief.... Confederate soldiers and their descendants are to share with us and our descendants the destiny of America. Whatever, therefore, we their fellow citizens can do to remove burdens from their shoulders and to brighten their lives is surely in the pathway of humanity and patriotism.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)