An account of the Volga Germans. In case you’re not familiar with them, Catherine the Great thought her Russian subjects were lazy and dirty and (being German herself) thought the cure would be to import a bunch of industrious and clean Germans. They were promised free land, perpetual freedom from conscription, and travel expenses. A number of Germans took up the offer (to the extent that various German states prohibited emigration).

It didn’t last, of course. The exemption from military service was first to go, in the 1870s. That prompted a lot of the Volga Germans to pack up and move to the United States – mostly Kansas, which they found adequately similar to the Ukraine. They were the lucky ones. After the Revolution, the Soviets decided the Volga Germans were “rich peasants”; that led to confiscation and starvation in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, of course, the Second World War made Stalin uneasy about a bunch of German speakers in the middle of the country and they were peremptorily marched off to Siberia; the march did in about two thirds of the remainder.

Author George Walters is a pretty uneven writer. He’s fond of quoting long documents in the original German or Russian – without accompanying translations. His sources are limited; to be fair there wasn’t a lot of literature available once the Soviets took power. There are numerous political digressions, and Walters’ politics are inscrutable; as near as I can tell he doesn’t like Hitler or Stalin or Roosevelt or Eisenhower. Still, I didn’t know anything about the Volga Germans and now I do. ( )