Category Archives: Russia

by | 13 March 2024 · 2:45 am

Germany’s Eastern Victory in WW1

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 21-22, 25-26:

Germany’s confident hopes of a swift victory were halted in September 1914 by British, Belgian, and French troops on the Marne River in France. From this point onwards, the war on the Western Front became a stalemate, with 8 million troops stretched along a 450-mile front from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Numerous attempts to break the deadlock turned into dogged struggles for mere yards of territory, with millions of lives lost and little ground gained. Barbed wire entanglements impeded the advance of competing armies and machine guns mowed down advancing troops. It was a struggle in which an average of 6,000 troops were killed every day.

The stalemate in the west contrasted sharply with the stunning victories of the German Army on the Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915, masterminded by General Paul von Hindenburg, the chief of the Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung, OHL), and his brilliant Chief of Staff, the Quartermaster General, Erich Ludendorff. By the end of 1915, the Germans had driven the Russian armies back remorselessly over 250 miles. These stunning victories turned Hindenburg and Ludendorff into national heroes. As the war progressed, Kaiser Wilhelm proved incapable of effective leadership, which resulted in a power vacuum, filled by the military high command. In late August 1916, Germany became a de facto military dictatorship led by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who were able, until the later stages of the war, to ignore the wishes of the parliamentary parties.

…

On 19 July 1917, Erzberger introduced a resolution in the Reichstag for a ‘peace without annexations’, which was passed by 212 to 126 votes. It was the first major intervention by the Reichstag to oppose the war, but Kaiser Wilhelm refused to be bound by the Reichstag. Hindenburg and Ludendorff considered the resolution a ‘scrap of paper’ and ignored it. The blame for the political crisis was placed on Bethmann Hollweg, who had rightly been sceptical about unrestricted submarine warfare. He was forced to resign as Chancellor.

His replacement, Georg Michaelis, who took office on 13 July 1917, was the first German Chancellor who was not of noble birth. His background was in business, but his only previous minor political posts were as an undersecretary of state in the Prussian Treasury, and as the head of the Reich Grain Agency (Reichsgetreidestelle), the office responsible for the distribution of corn and wheat. The prime movers in the unexpected elevation of this inexperienced bureaucrat to the role of Chancellor were Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who felt he would do their bidding. True to form, Michaelis kept the Reichstag completely in the dark on matters of war and foreign relations. He was forced to resign on 1 November 1917 after his refusal to give support to Erzberger’s peace resolution led to the loss of a vote of confidence in the Reichstag.

In Eastern Europe, relentless German military pressure contributed to the abdication of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917, which eventually led to the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin coming to power in November of that year. Lenin’s return to Russia was assisted by his sealed train being given permission to cross German territory – an incident in which Ludendorff played a key role.

After seizing power, Lenin and the Bolsheviks opened negotiations for a peace settlement with Germany. This resulted in the signing of the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, under which Russia lost possession of 34 per cent of its population, 54 per cent of its industry, including 89 per cent of its coalfields, and 26 per cent of its railways, and was also obliged to pay 6 billion marks in compensation for German losses. The Treaty completely contradicted the Peace Resolution of the Reichstag, which had pledged ‘peace without annexations’, yet the Reichstag deputies ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk without suggesting any amendments.

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by | 28 December 2023 · 5:24 pm

Budapest in 1919

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 253-256:

The country was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Republic of Soviets – an imitation of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik regime in Russia, with all its expropriations, nationalizations, regimentation and terror. Short and unprepossessing, [Bela] Kun had a squat face, almost no neck and a flaccid mouth. But he was a surprisingly gifted speaker and showed some remarkably practical common sense amid the ideological jargon. A torrent of decrees poured out from the Revolutionary Council, but they were patchily implemented, especially outside Budapest. Not all of them were stupid and Kun’s regime, mainly of passionate young revolutionaries – Kun was one of the oldest in the leadership at the age of thirty-three – were convinced they could out-Lenin Lenin.

The Kun regime’s first decree on 21 March 1919, day one of the Revolution, proclaimed martial law and imposed the death penalty for any acts of ‘subversion’, which meant any opposition to his committee of Soviets. The second day he replaced the existing judicial system with ‘Revolutionary tribunals’ along the lines of those that had operated in the French Revolution.

…

Red Terror began from the Commune’s first day, presided over by Tibor Szamuely, a sinister figure who modelled himself on Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Russian Soviets’ secret service, the Cheka. He introduced Red death squads – the most feared, active in many parts of Budapest, were the red-scarved and leather-jacketed Lenin Boys led by a sadistic twenty-three-year-old thug, József Czerny. It is estimated that at least 1,000 people were murdered in Budapest and the surrounding area in 133 days.

…

The Russian Bolsheviks gave the Hungarian Soviet plenty of vocal support and a modest sum of financial backing, but when it faced the prospect of losing power did nothing to intervene on behalf of world revolution or the cause of Communism close-ish to home – Hungary has a border with Ukraine, then still part of the Russian Empire. Romanian and Czech troops invaded Hungary in the summer of 1919 in their battle for independence and nationhood. Between them they controlled nearly half the country by the time the Kun regime collapsed and its leadership fled – most of them to Russia. The Romanians occupied Budapest from 4 August. Three nightmare months ‘of horror and misery as bad as the Soviet Commune followed…it was one of the darkest periods,’ one survivor of the invasion recalled. ‘The Romanians embarked on a systematic programme of looting, expropriation, deportations and terror.’

Children were taken from homes and sent into servitude in Romanian villages and towns. More than 500 Hungarians were murdered by Romanian troops and estimates suggest that 1,000 women were raped. Valuable art treasures, large amounts of agricultural produce and industrial plant were loaded on trains and sent east to Romania. They stole, among other things, 4,000 telephones from private homes they had ransacked. Bands of soldier-looters took railway locomotives and carriages, industrial machinery, and thousands of horses and cattle worth nearly 3 million gold crowns, more than twelve times in value than all the loans Hungary received four years later to get the country back on its feet. The Romanians took treasures from the National Museum, but were prevented from taking more by Brigadier General Harry Hill Bandholtz, the American member of the Allied Control Commission, which was supposed to supervise the Romanian army’s disengagement from Hungary.

Kun escaped in November 1919 and found refuge in Russia. As he left, without a hint of irony, he told a comrade: ‘the Hungarian proletariat betrayed us’ – by ‘us’ he meant the Communists. For a while he was treated as a hero in Soviet Russia, as one of the leading martyrs of the cause of world revolution. He was relatively successful in a series of roles in the Comintern in the 1920s and early 1930s. But Stalin loathed him. He disappeared into the great maw of the Gulag and was shot during the Great Purge in 1938.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, economics, Germany, Hungary, industry, labor, migration, military, nationalism, Romania, Russia

by | 18 December 2023 · 10:58 am

Habsburg Revenge on Hungary, 1849

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 159-160:

Tsar Nicholas I – at least in public – urged the teenage Austrian emperor to show magnanimity to the defeated ‘rebels’. But Franz Jozsef, or his chief adviser, Prince Schwarzenberg, was in no mood for leniency. The savagery of Habsburg retribution against Hungary shocked Europe.

At dawn on 6 October 1849 Lajos Batthyány, the first Prime Minister of revolutionary Hungary, was dragged to the courtyard of the main military barracks in Pest. He had been held prisoner since the end of July and was sentenced to hang for treason by a court martial – even though it was established at his trial that he had argued against Hungary declaring independence precisely on the grounds that it could be seen as treasonous. He was too weak to stand or walk so he had to be carried from his cell to the place of execution; three days earlier he had tried to cut his throat with a knife smuggled into the jail by his wife. It was seen as a dishonour for a nobleman to die by hanging, therefore he had done what he could to avoid the shame. The prison infirmary had saved his life so that he was fit enough to be killed. In what was described as an act of leniency, the court changed its sentence to death by firing squad. He was shot sitting on a chair. He refused to have his eyes covered by a blindfold – and he himself gave the order for the execution squad to fire. Like a true Hungarian aristocrat, he spoke in words from three languages ‘Allez Jäger, eljén a Haza’ (Long Live the Fatherland). His body lay in public at the scene of the execution for a day and a half – in what is now Szabadság tér (Liberty Square) in the heart of Budapest opposite the US Embassy, almost exactly on the spot where a more than life-size, awkward-looking statue of President Ronald Reagan has stood since the 1990s. On the same morning in Arad, Transylvania, now part of Romania, twelve Honvédség generals and a colonel were hanged. The date is one of the most important public holidays in Hungary.

General Baron Ludwig von Haynau was despatched to Budapest by the emperor and Schwarzenberg to teach ‘the Hungarians a lesson they will never forget’. He took up the challenge with alacrity. ‘I am the man who will restore order. I shall have hundreds shot, with a clear conscience,’ he told the General Staff in Vienna. The illegitimate son of Elector Wilhelm I of Hesse-Kassel, he was more widely known as the ‘Butcher of Brescia’ for the atrocities he had carried out in Lombardy, including the public flogging of women and girls he had accused of sedition, and the execution of a priest who was dragged from the altar of his church by soldiers directly to the gallows.

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Filed under Austria, Hungary, language, military, nationalism, Russia, war

by | 28 November 2023 · 11:27 am

Hiroshima Castle

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1850ff:

In 1589 Mori Terumoto began what would be an eight-year project: he built a castle on an island in the delta of the Ota River, calling this part of his domain “Hiroshima,” which means “wide island.” At the beginning of the 17th century, the Mori fief was given to the Asano Clan, who held the castle until 1871. During the Restoration all of the buildings were torn down except the keep.

The castle is noted for the fact that the Emperor Meiji resided there for seven months during the war with China (1894-95). When Japan became involved in the war of 1904-5 with Russia, the castle was used as a troop garrison.

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Hiroshima Castle, along with a large portion of the city, was completely demolished in the historic first atomic attack. Reconstruction of the castle donjon was begun in 1958. It is built on the original foundation and is an exact replica of the former keep in exterior appearance. The structure is five stories, 117 feet high, and is in the style of the early Momoyama period. The donjon houses a museum and a lookout.

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Filed under China, Japan, military, Russia, U.S., war

by | 26 October 2023 · 6:50 am

Status of Moldova, 2006

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 363-364:

To this day, the Republic of Moldova, with its population of about 4.5 million people, remains the poorest of European countries. In 2002 it still ranked behind Albania, which, however, received four times the international monetary aid. In 2006 the per capita gross domestic product was a 991 US dollars (the comparative figure for Germany was at 34,433 US dollars). The world’s largest steel mill on the Dniester that once employed ten thousand workers has virtually fallen silent. The once-flourishing “vegetable and fruit garden and vineyard of Russia” lies fallow in many places. Its rich soils are depleted and overfertilized, its water polluted. As always, Moldova belongs to the ten largest wine producers in the world but has tried in vain to gain a foothold in the international market. Until recently, more than 90 percent of Moldovan wine production was exported to Russia. For that reason, Russia’s 2006 declared import ban has hit the Moldovan wine industry quite hard. The Republic of Moldova is therefore trying even more to intensify relations with the European Union; it strives for integration into the European structure as an independent partner. Germany is one of Moldova’s most important trade partners. Several German firms have already become successfully engaged in the region.

Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of young people still seek employment abroad. In recent years, almost 300,000 Moldovans have obtained Romanian passports, giving them freedom of travel. More than anyone, the elite (e.g., academics and physicians) are moving away. Hospital conditions are a catastrophe; tuberculosis and hepatitis are rampant. On the other hand, one finds a considerable number of Western luxury limousines and sports cars on Chișinău’s boulevards. Apparently a stratum of the nouveau riches is doing profitable business, e.g., in smuggling cigarettes, gasoline or with weapons out of Transnistria. Until early March 2006, there was no customs check between Transnistria and Moldova, allowing goods from Ukraine to flow into the country unhindered. As a result, the country lost an immense amount of tax collections. An especially lucrative business for the criminal circle—here subsumed under the name “Mafia”—is apparently white slave trade. Ostensibly, according to press reports, up to thirty thousand young women and girls have been placed in western and central European brothels in recent years.

The capital Chișinău has changed its appearance. Old Jewish residential districts on the city center’s edge were torn down over large areas from the close of the 1980s through the early 1990s and replaced by apartment buildings and arterial roads. Many large-scale projects ventured earlier now stand as abandoned ruins. Meanwhile, one can observe how with American support a new beginning of Jewish life is developing in the city. American youth groups of the Jewish movement Chabad assisted in the revival of a small district with Jewish facilities around a synagogue, which is conducted by the Lubavitch Hassidic school of thought.

In the heart of the old city Chișinău, behind high walls and relatively unnoticed by city dwellers and tourists, there is the house that Russian poet Alexander Pushkin occupied from 1820 to 1823 during his banishment to Kishinev. Here today is a small, lovingly appointed museum that houses witness to all phases of the poet’s life. Within sight of the building resided his protector, Governor of Bessarabia, General Inzov, of whose palace not a single trace remains today.

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by | 17 October 2023 · 6:29 am

Bessarabian German Fates

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 1-5:

The Germans in Bessarabia were the last of an emigrant band that resettled in Russia over the course of an eighteenth–nineteenth century state-sponsored colonization effort. After Russia’s defeat of the of the Turks in 1812, Czar Alexander beckoned foreign colonists to his country to “peuplate” the deserted southern expanse of the newly conquered province of Bessarabia and to bring about economic development of the region along the Black Sea’s northwestern coast. Over a span of 125 years, the foreign settlers predominantly from Southwestern Germany established more than 150 thriving communities and daughter colonies on a fertile but otherwise desolate plain. They were planted in the middle of a multi-ethnic population where they managed to lead a life of peaceful coexistence.

At the close of World War I, the lives of Bessarabian Germans took a different turn than that of their other German-Russian brethren. Their region fell under Romanian authority in 1918, not under Soviet rule. The Bessarabian Germans—at that time almost eighty thousand people—now were part of the German ethnics of Greater Romania, a population segment that in the years between the two world conflicts came to encompass roughly 750,000 Germans, translating into about 4 percent of Romania’s total population.

Bessarabian Germans, Bukovinian and Dobrujan Germans, Transylvania (Siebenbürgen) Saxons, Banat and Satu Mare (Sathmar) Swabians—all openly differentiated themselves in their history of origin and settlement as well as denominational and social composition, in cultural mintage, in ways of doing business and in mentality. Unlike in Transylvania, an urban middle-class culture had not come into its own in the relatively short settlement period of the Bessarabian Germans. Up until the resettlement of 1940, farming defined their way of life; they always looked upon themselves as “colonists.” In a rural, pietist-steeped culture, playing a leading role were pastors, teachers, as well as academics and other notables.

The history of German settlement in Bessarabia came to an abrupt end in 1940. A Soviet ultimatum in late June that year compelled the Romanians to clear out of the region within three days. On June 28, 1940, the Red Army marched into Bessarabia and North Bukovina. The premise for the Soviet annexation was the less than year-old Non-Aggression Treaty of August 23, 1939—the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact—drawn up between the National Socialist German Reich and the Stalinist USSR. An appending “secret protocol” to this treaty contained agreements between both countries concerning limits on their spheres of political influence in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The protocol’s German representative, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, made clear his government’s “total political disinterest” in Bessarabia.

The Soviet Union’s occupation now fully realized in June 1940, Bessarabia’s German population (about 93,500 people) faced expulsion from their homeland. Based on a September 5, 1940 German-Soviet resettlement accord regarding Bessarabian and North Bukovinian Germans, as early as October–November 1940 the evacuation had been completed by members of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office of “VoMi”) and the SS. The resettlers endured transport on Danube boats to interim camps in Yugoslavia [Serbia] and then by rail to almost eight hundred different “observation camps” in the “Old Reich,” in Austria and the Sudetenland. After extended encampment, the Bessarabian Germans—as Germans from the Baltic States, from Volhynia and Galicia before them—were resettled 1941–42 for the most part in German Wehrmacht-occupied Poland. Not long after, in January 1945, they—like millions of refugees from other countries of origin—fled westward from an approaching Soviet army. Thus the Bessarabian Germans were equally resettlers and refugees, for prior to their episode of flight, by being uprooted from their homeland they had experienced a massive breakdown of connectedness which was then followed in 1945 by a greater, catastrophic fall.

Landing in postwar Germany, most Bessarabian Germans were drawn to Swabia, the one-time home to most of their forefathers. Others settled in  the British Occupation Zone, mostly in Lower Saxony. Many fugitive Bessarabian Germans, whose arduous sojourns became bogged down in northern and central Germany, remained as refugee Neubauer* [*small farmers in the Soviet Occupation Zone who were settled on limited, newly created 5- to 8-hectare plots carved out of expropriated but uncompensated private estate land] in the Communist East Zone of that time, where so-called democratic agrarian reform appeared to foster a resumption of their rural way of life. Nevertheless, the laboriously restored farms were lost again in the wake of the German Democratic Republic’s agrarian collectivization in the 1950s and 1960s. Not a few Bessarabian Germans emigrated overseas in postwar years, mostly to Canada and the U.S., in search of a new home.

Though Bessarabian German integration into German Federal Republic (West Germany) society was accompanied by almost complete occupational reorientation, it has long since been deemed a success. All the same, it demanded an extreme measure of adaptability from resettlers originally cast in a rural environment and now catapulted into a postwar industrial society. Because the Bessarabian Germans dared not view their circumstances as temporary—unlike for other refugees and expellees, any hope of return to the former homeland was ruled out—they had no other choice that to build a new way of life under the given conditions as quickly as possible. In this process, they were aided by the idea that they, having taken a long historic detour, really had come full circle and were returning to their ancient homeland.

Today the former German Bessarabian settlement area is split in two and belongs to Moldova and Ukraine [and Transnistria].

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by | 16 October 2023 · 4:15 am

Soviet Occupation of Bessarabia, 1940

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 305-308:

The people of Bessarabia heard the news of a Soviet ultimatum on radio the evening before the invasion. It created profound shock in the German villages that soon paralyzed the entire country. It appeared that the Germans in Bessarabia would now meet the very same fate that they had escaped in 1918 by a stroke of luck. For years their friends and relatives on the other side of the Dniester kept them meticulously informed of the catastrophic effects of Soviet agrarian policies, collectivization and kulak persecutions, about famine and massive dying, political repression and deportation. The uncertainty over their future was enormous.

Gradually it leaked out that the German government was negotiating an evacuation, intending to transfer Germans in Bessarabia and North Bukovina to the German Reich. A precedent had been set in the fall of 1939 with the evacuation of about 67,000 Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia. In the winter of 1939–40, German resettlement commandos had removed an additional 130,000 Germans from Volhynia, Galicia and the Narev region towards the West across the new demarcation line.

In fact, a German delegation, residing in Moscow since July 22, 1940, was negotiating over the transfer of the population. On September 5, 1940, the “German-Soviet Russian Agreement Regarding the Resettlement of Germans from Bessarabia and North Bukovina” was signed. As news of this reached the German communities, it was greeted with an overwhelming sigh of relief. Meanwhile, during a better than two-month interval of excruciating uncertainty, it became clear to most of the Bessarabian Germans that the Soviet invasion meant the end of independent farming and a colonist culture founded on it for over five generations. as they had come to know it.

Agreeing to resettlement from their trusted home to a highly uncertain future required of the Bessarabian Germans a difficult decision. Especially for the older ones, evacuation meant a fundamental interruption to their way of life as they knew it that would demand of them and their families even more difficult adjustments ahead. On the other hand, they had no alternative if they wanted to avoid living in a Soviet sphere of power and partaking in the fate of other German colonists in the remaining Black Sea region—collectivization, deprivation of rights and deportation.

All the same, officers of the invading troops had generally treated the German population correctly. The promise of security that Molotov had made to the German government was largely adhered to. That was not true for the other nationalities. While the Germans were hardly bothered by the Soviet secret police (GPU)—except for isolated harassment or arrest—they were forced to observe how their affluent Russian, Jewish or Bulgarian neighbors were hauled off to interrogations—mostly at night—and often never heard of again. The German pastor, Erwin Meyer of the Leipzig, Bessarabia parish, wrote in his April 1941 personal essay:

“Almost none of the Germans were deported—many of the Russians, Bulgarians and well-to-do Jews were, however, taken away. Nothing was done to us, the pastors, but the Orthodox clergy had to immediately remove their vestments, cut their hair and shave off their beards—as was the case in Ismail. None of us Germans were evicted from our homes, but other nationalities were. German property was either not seized or returned immediately, but not in the case of others. Factories, mills and churches were not nationalized until shortly before our departure. We have German protection to thank for this.” (Jachomowski 1984, 61–62)

Not just fear of harassment from the Soviet secret police, but also the grave changes in everyday life in the wake of the Soviet occupation spurred on in the German villages a willingness to resettle. Shortages, mismanagement, deprivation of personal liberties and reprisals were on the horizon. Within a short time, consumer goods such as fabrics, notions, leather goods, sugar, salt, kerosene and tobacco were in short supply or available only at ever-increasing prices. The German community officials were dismissed and new village soviets formed. Local committees were placed under the jurisdiction of regional committees in which Russian communists set the agenda. The business world was also restructured. All private business was dissolved. Larger industrial firms and commercial enterprises remained largely intact but were placed under new managers. Even the German Commercial Association in Artsiz was reorganized after a Soviet model.

In contrast to this creeping dispossession, the property of German farmers, including large estate farmers, was not touched for the moment. They continued going about their work but were under the supervision of the village soviets. Soviet officials insisted that the harvest still be brought in before resettlement and, using absurd measures and harassment, often pressed hard against the work tempo and farming methods. The imposed and arbitrarily fixated taxes frequently exceeded the farmer’s proceeds but still had to be paid. Quickly, the accusation of sabotage came into play. Relatives and neighbors banded together to help out those farmers who had gotten into difficulties.

Church life and Stundist Brethren gatherings went mostly unhindered. Of course, holidays falling on work days were banned and, during the harvest, work had to be done on Sundays, too. In light of the profound disruptions in the lives of the German communities, Pastor Erwin Meyer came to the conclusion in his previously mentioned essay that “all rules and concepts, order and traditions and self-evident assumptions in living together with people” had been “turned upside down in the Soviet state.”

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Filed under Bulgaria, Germany, migration, nationalism, religion, Romania, Russia, USSR, war

by | 15 October 2023 · 6:18 am

Soviets Annex Bessarabia, 1940

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 304-305:

Soviet government officials never relinquished their claim to the region between the Prut and Dniester Rivers, for them a strategic area given up to Romania in 1918 because of Russia’s military weakness at the close of World War I. Indeed, Bessarabia was a fertile hinterland to the Black Sea harbor of Odessa, a checkpoint at the mouth of the Danube and bridgehead for a Soviet presence in Southeast Europe.

Providing a crucial premise for the Soviet’s seizure of Bessarabia was the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. It was signed on August 23, 1939, in Moscow by representatives of both countries. In the course of agreeing to “delimitation of bilateral spheres of interest in East Europe,” established in a Supplemental Secret Protocol in the accord, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop accepted that Estonia, Latvia and Finland should be added to the Soviet sphere of influence. He went on to declare Germany’s “total political disinterest” in Bessarabia.

After the Moscow agreements, the USSR’s annexation of Bessarabia was only a matter of time. On June 26, 1940, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented the Romanian envoy in Moscow an ultimatum in which he demanded that the Romanian government relinquish Bessarabia as well as the northern part of Bukovina to the USSR and leave the country within three days. The Romanian government was forced to bow to the Soviet demand after its petition for help in Berlin had been turned down.

On June 28 the Red Army marched into Bessarabia and North Bukovina. Even though the Romanian government had feared a Soviet offensive for some time, it was surprised by the invasion. By the first day, the quickly advancing Soviet vanguard had occupied the most important cities—Cetatea Albă in the south, Chișinău in the center and Chernivtsi (Chernowitz) in the north—and plunged the retreating Romanians into hopeless confusion. Fleeing Romanian government officials and armed forces feverishly took to their heels. Along the way, they grabbed at any sort of transportation—horses and teams—they could get their hands on in order to get themselves and their heavily loaded wagons to safety on the other side of the Prut. Romanian squadrons in retreat were constantly overtaken by Russian parachutists and tanks. In the chaotic retreat there were isolated attacks from bands of civilians. The invading, crack Soviet troops soon had everything under control.

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Filed under Germany, migration, military, nationalism, Romania, Russia, USSR, war

by | 14 October 2023 · 6:14 am

Bessarabian German Food Names

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 382-83:

Arbuse, harbus (Turkish/Russian) = watermelon

Baklashan, patletshane (Turkish/Russian), blue patletshane = eggplant (In some places tomatoes were referred to as red patletshane.)

Bliny (Russian) = blintzes, leavened pancakes

Borsch (Russian) = Russian cabbage and vegetable soup (red, white or green borsch)

Brynza (Romanian/Russian) = sheep’s milk cheese

Kalva, halva, “halvik” (Turkish/Russian) = sweet made from pressed hazelnuts or sesame seed with honey

Kolbasa, kalbas (Russian) sausage (“kolbasniki” = Russian nickname for Germans)

Makhorka, “makhorke” (Russian) = strong tobacco

Mamaliga, mamalig, mamlik (Romanian) = corn meal gruel, polenta

Maslina, masline (Russian) = olive

Pirogi, piroshki (Russian) = meat-filled pastries

Plachinta, plachenta (Romanian) = flat cake, baked dough with fruit filling (e.g., pumpkin, “pumpkin plachinta“)

Pomidori, pomadoren (French/Italian/Russian) = tomatoes

Popshoi, popshe (Romanian) = corn (popshoi pratzeln = to shell corn)

Shassla (French) = a wine variety (chasselas)

Tsibeben (Arabic/Italian) = raisins

Varenye (Russian) = fruit preserves, marmalade

Vereniki (Russian) = crescent pocket dumplings filled with meat, berries or curd cheese, also Maultaschen

Zakuska (Russian) = snack, hors d’oeuvre

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Filed under food, Germany, language, migration, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine

by | 12 October 2023 · 12:50 pm

Bessarabian German Invectives

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 384-85:

Baba (Russian) = old woman, mommy, grandma—also translated as a lethargic person: “Des isch doch a alte Baba … (That’s a tired old grandma.)”

Bagash (French/Russian) = baggage—also translated as riffraff: “Des isch a Bagasch! (What a bunch of riffraff!)”

Barysh, “barisch” (Turkish/Russian) = profit— “Der hat sein Getreide mit gutem Barisch verkauft. (He sold his grain at a good profit.)”

Besplatno (Russian) = free of charge— “Des mache mir ihm besplatno … (I’ll do that for him free of charge.)”

Bog (Russian) = God (deep sigh): “Bozhe moi” = “Mein Gott (My God!)”

Burshui (French/Russian) = rich burgher, bourgeois, teasingly used against a well-to-do colonist— “Isch des a Burshui. (What a bourgeois he is.)”

Chakai malka (Bulgarian) = “Halt mal!” “Wart mal!” (“Wait. Hold up.”)

Chërt (Russian) = the devil— “Chërt znaet! (Only the devil knows!)” or “Chërt vozny! (The devil take it!)

Dozhd (Russian) = rain— ” ‘S doschdelt. (It’s raining.)”

Fladira, fladiere (French) = to flatter, to court a girl— “Meinst Du, ich fladier ‘Dich …? (Do you think I’m flirting with you?)”

Gor’ko (Russian) = bitter (At weddings people shouted “gor’ko” and the bridal couple had to kiss.)

Gulyat’ (Russian) = play, celebrate, living devil-may-care, dawdle, waste money— “Wir haben g’hulait. (We really caroused.)”

Heide! Hei! (Turkish) = Come! Go! Forward!

Karaul, karavul (Turkish/Russian/Yiddish) = a call for help— “No han i aber Karaul g’schrie … (That’s when I called for help.)”

Khlopochnik (from Russian verb khlopotat’) = to bustle about = busybody— “Die klaportiert den ganzen Tag. (She’s constantly puttering around.)”

Khlopoty, “klapott” (Russian) = troubles, difficulties— “Mit dem hat sein Klapott” (He causes us nothing but trouble.)

Kryschka (Russian) = an end or a limit, in the sense of “Basta” or “That’s enough.” (When one has talked too long or made clumsy excuses, one says, “Nu kryschka!”)

Mamlik (Romanian) = cornmeal mush (also translated as “a weak-willed person”): “Des isch a Mamlikhaufa … (What a bunch of cowards!)”

Moire(s), “Mores” (Yiddish) = fear, dread— “Er hat Moires … (He has his anxieties.)”

Muzhik (Russian) = peasant, a simple person— “Des isch halt a Muschik … (What a simpleton.)”

Passleta(n) (French) = waste of time, a pastime

Plencha (Romanian) = to cry— “Was plenscht Du scho’ wieder …? (What are you crying about again?)”

Podruchik (Russian) = arm-in-arm— “Er isch mit dem Mädle podrutschik ganga … (He walked arm-in-arm with the girl.)”

Poshol (Russian) = Forward!— “Poschli! (Let’s go!)”

Prost, prostoi (Russian) = simple, ordinary; “proste Leut” = ordinary people— “Bei mir geht es halt prost zu … (My life is really ordinary.)”

Semechki (Russian) = sunflower seeds (also translated as trivialities, meaningless details— “Des sin mir sematschki … (Those are mere trifles to me.)”

Shutka, shutke (Russian) = joke or prank— “Er versteht kei’ Schutka … (He has no sense of humor.)”

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