Category Archives: USSR

by | 24 January 2024 · 2:19 am

Soviet Famine of 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 84-86:

Stalin saw threats everywhere, even from those who were starving. The war left famine in its wake, the worst in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and early 1930s. The 1945 harvest was poor, followed by terrible weather in Ukraine, drought in Moldova and unseasonable rain which destroyed crops in Siberia. The following year’s harvest was one of the worst on record. The grain crop was a third of its 1940 level, the potato yield less than half. Between one and a half and two million people died from starvation. And the famine was exacerbated by ideology: the Soviets were sending large quantities of food to East Germany and other parts of its new empire in an attempt to prop up the popularity of local communist parties. They were also stockpiling food in case growing international tensions led to war.

The Kremlin used the same methods that had been adopted in the 1930s – grain was requisitioned from the collective farms and the peasants were accused of hoarding. Stalin sent his henchmen to demand delivery of the quotas of grain each region had been ordered to hand over to the State. Unsurprisingly, the results were the same; the famine worsened.

Typically, Stalin had little sympathy with the victims and blamed them for their own plight. Khrushchev was sent to Ukraine, as he had been in the 1930s when he was Party Secretary there. He was hardened to suffering in the Soviet countryside and had caused a good deal of it himself, sending thousands of people to their deaths in the camps. Now he reported that famine in Ukraine was ‘dire’ and that people were resorting to cannibalism. Stalin reproved him: ‘This is spinelessness. They’re trying to play tricks on you. They are telling you this on purpose, trying to get you to pity them and get you to use up your grain reserves.’

The State raised prices and halted bread rationing among workers in rural areas, but not the peasants on farms, meaning they had virtually no bread though they were producing the grain to make it. The same day, the little economic freedom that they possessed was taken away. Farmers on collectives were banned from growing produce for themselves on the tiny plots of land they had been allowed before.

Thousands of people who complained about the famine publicly were sent to the Gulag. Predictably, theft of food increased. In the summer and early autumn of 1946, 53,369 people were charged with stealing bread; three-quarters of them were sent to jail. New laws were introduced to raise sentences from three months to three years; at the stroke of a pen Stalin personally increased the sentence to five years – and more for repeat offenders. Starving people were sent to labour camps for years for stealing potatoes lying in a field.

In Ukraine, some people fought back. Partisans from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya), fought a low-level guerrilla campaign against Soviet forces, predominantly in western Ukraine and the eastern part of Poland in the Carpathian mountains, where at one point it numbered more than 30,000 soldiers. The UPA’s dream was an independent Ukraine of ethnic Ukrainians and for much of the war they had been fighting Poles as hard as they had fought Soviets. The sporadic fighting was little more than a minor irritant to the Kremlin, though Stalin took no chances. He sent more than 100,000 troops of his own, and pressed the Polish army to join the Russians in combating them. He used tried and tested methods – between 1945 and the end of 1947 more than 182,000 Ukrainians, mostly peasants or civilians who had nothing to do with the UPA, were despatched to the Gulag. The UPA fought on until the end of 1949, when they were finally crushed by the Soviets, though at the cost of over 1,200 Red Army casualties.

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by | 23 January 2024 · 5:47 am

U.S. Status in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 12-14:

The US experience of World War Two was entirely different from that of every other combatant nation. There was much hardship, to be sure, and loss of lives. But America was the only country to emerge from the conflict better off than when it entered it in 1941. No attempt had been made to invade and occupy the country; no cities were destroyed by bombs. There were no refugees roaming the American countryside, desperately searching for food and shelter as in much of Europe and Asia. There were no direct war casualties from military action in mainland America. Around 420,000 Americans from the services died in combat or went missing in action, which, given the scale of the fighting on three continents, is a modest number. British losses, at around 330,000 service personnel, were lower, but from a population about a quarter of America’s size. And combined American and British losses were fewer than Russian deaths in the Siege of Leningrad alone.

America’s economy boomed as never before. Its annual GNP doubled between 1940 and 1945 from $102 billion to $214 billion. Unemployment fell from 14.6 per cent to a historic low of 1.2 per cent. The war dragged the US out of the Depression. There had been rationing on a range of products such as milk, sugar, gasoline, rubber for tyres, some meats and vegetable oils, and even typewriter ribbon. But for most people, living standards improved dramatically as incomes rose by more than 50 per cent. The war was a leveller economically, unusually so in American history. The share of income of the top 5 per cent of the population fell by almost a fifth and remained that way until the gap began widening again in the 1970s.

America was the granary of the world, and its industrial workshop. At the beginning of 1946 more goods were manufactured in the US than in the rest of the world put together. During the war, America had created a new financial system that ensured the US dollar would become the world’s chief trading currency, which it continued to be well into the twenty-first century. Most Americans believed not only that US soldiers had done most of the fighting to win the war but, justifiably, that American money had bankrolled the Allies to help with the rest.

Immediately post-war, Americans wanted a brief period to celebrate victory. After that, the demands were equally uncomplicated. Dean Acheson, an advisor to the President who would become US Secretary of State three years later, put it in straightforward fashion. ‘I can state in three sentences what the popular foreign policies are among the people of the United States. 1. Bring the boys home. 2. No playing Santa Claus. 3. Don’t be pushed around.’ They also wanted the security that wealth could provide.

Before the war the only substantial US military base outside homeland America was in the Philippines. But Pearl Harbor marked the beginning of America’s development as a military superpower. In 1946/47 the defence budget was $13 billion, 36 per cent of national spending and thirteen times more than it had been for each of the nine pre-war years. It was to remain at similar levels for the next three decades. By the end of the war, new naval and air bases had been leased in the Americas, in Iceland, Greece and Turkey, in Korea and the Middle East. More than half a million US troops were stationed in Europe. As it turned out, many thousands would remain for the next forty years – and America would be the strongest military power in Europe. But however counter-intuitive it might seem in retrospect, at the time it was assumed on both sides of the Atlantic that the GIs would soon return home. When the final details of D-Day were being planned in spring 1944, the US military’s top brass asked President Roosevelt how long he expected occupation troops to stay in Germany and elsewhere after the war was won. The Commander-in-Chief was explicit: ‘At least a year, maybe two,’ he replied. But not more. That was still America’s clear intention throughout 1946. It changed only when the Big Three alliance began falling apart and perceptions in Washington hardened about the USSR’s objectives in Europe. Meanwhile, America’s allies – including the Soviets – believed the same. Winston Churchill wrote a note to the British cabinet before VE Day emphasising the point: ‘We must not expect that the United States will keep large armies in Europe for long after the war,’ he said. ‘I doubt there will be any American troops in Europe four years after the cease-firing.’

There was to be no return to isolationism. US soldiers, engineers and an army of idealistic bureaucrats would remake Japan as a modern democracy in the American image, but disarmed so it could never again pose a threat to its neighbours or to the United States. And though the plan was to bring the troops home, it was never the intention to withdraw from European peace-making and diplomacy.

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by | 9 January 2024 · 5:14 pm

Kádár’s Early Years

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 359-360:

János Czermanik was born, illegitimate, in the port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia), the son of a Slovak servant girl. His soldier father abandoned them both when he was born and he was brought up in abject poverty. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a toolmaker and was trained in repairing typewriters. He became a Communist at nineteen, when under the Horthy regime it was a banned organization. He was arrested in 1937 and spent three years in jail. During the war, under the codename Kádár (meaning ‘cooper’ or ‘barrel maker’), he ran the underground Communist Party and the pseudonym stuck. He narrowly avoided death when he was arrested again in 1944 and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, but managed to escape and return to Budapest. A tall, handsome, brown-haired man, he affected a cheerful disposition and an easy manner but was famously reserved. ‘Nobody ever knew what he was thinking,’ a long-time comrade said many years later. He was formally uneducated – he admitted once that he had ‘never read Marx’s Das Kapital and not much of Lenin’. But he had a naturally intuitive intelligence, was deeply perceptive about people and an extremely fast learner. He rose through the ranks as an apparatchik under Rákosi and succeeded Rajk, his great friend, as Interior Minister. It was his behaviour after Rajk was arrested that earned him a reputation for untrustworthiness and cynicism.

Godfather to Rajk’s baby son, Kádár betrayed his friend in a chilling manner, visiting him in a police cell to extract a false confession out of him. He knew Rajk was innocent yet made many speeches accusing him of a series of crimes. He was forced to watch Rajk’s execution, which left a deep impression on him. He told people that he felt sick at the sight and had to vomit – but he also noted, impressed, that the last words Rajk spoke were in praise of Stalin. Inevitably, it was soon his turn to be a victim of the purges. Arrested on bogus charges of treason, he was tortured until he ‘confessed’ and spent three years in jail; he was released during Nagy’s premiership when thousands of prisoners were freed. Soon afterwards he met Nagy and thanked him for his help in getting him released. ‘I hope that when my turn comes you would do the same for me,’ Nagy replied.

Kádár was no Stalinist and at the start of the Revolution he appeared enthusiastic about Nagy and his reforms. He voted within the leadership to press the Russians to withdraw their troops and for Hungary to leave the Warsaw Pact. But when the time came he could withstand neither the temptations nor the threats from Moscow. When he returned at the head of the new government he was loathed as a Judas. He could not leave the Parliament building in safety, so he would not have seen the placards which immediately went up around Budapest abusing him. A famous one that the Soviets destroyed several times but was immediately replaced somewhere else in the city declared: ‘Lost: the confidence of the People. Honest finder is asked to return to János Kádár, at 10,000 tanks Street’. He was so hated that when Khrushchev visited Budapest five months after the Uprising was crushed, even the Soviet leader seemed less unpopular than ‘the collaborator in chief’, as he was called for many years in Budapest. The Soviets did not entirely trust him either. Kádár was under probation by them for some time. Two KGB officers followed him wherever he went, ostensibly for his security, but also to keep an eye on him.

During my postdoc year in Romania in 1983-84, I attended an advanced Romanian language curs de perfecționare with classmates from the U.S., China, and East Germany. My favorite professor assigned us to do oral presentations for our final exams, on topics of our own choosing. My Chinese classmates, who were Romanian language broadcasters for Radio Beijing, had taken a tour of neighboring countries during our winter break, and they were impressed by Hungary’s relative prosperity during the 1980s. One of them talked about Kádár’s personal modesty and lack of a personality cult. She had experienced Mao’s personality cult, and gave her talk under the portrait of Ceaușescu that adorned every Romanian classroom at that time. I had no idea then about Kádár’s earlier perfidious rise to power. (My own talk was on the Hawaiian Great Mahele [Rom. Marea împărțire] in that revolutionary year 1848, which didn’t turn out so well for commoners.)

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by | 8 January 2024 · 3:54 pm

Budapest’s Broken Windows Era

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 362-363:

Kádár was the only East European Communist leader who merited an ‘ism’ after his name. After the agony of defeat, the immediate crackdown and brutal reprisals in Budapest, he began a partial thaw. Soviet troops returned to barracks and were no longer visible in the city streets. Within two years their numbers were halved. With the help of loans from Moscow, wages went up by 15 to 20 per cent by the middle of 1957, but times were hard for most people. ‘In Budapest it took three years before the city stopped looking like a war zone – again,’ said Zsindely, who was then working as a research chemist and trying to support two children. ‘The appearance of the city altered: it looked dowdier, greyer.’ The centre of Pest retained its Habsburg-era charm and beauty, even if it was grimier and dirtier, more tawdry. But the suburbs and the outskirts of the city were transformed over the next fifteen years. A series of housing estates to the south and east temporarily lifted the pressures of homelessness but changed the cityscape. Soon inhabitants saw one major drawback in the Soviet-era buildings, commercial and residential: the ‘five-year-plan windows’ which continually kept falling out of the blocks or broke their seals, adding to the inefficiency and ugliness. This was a common problem in large parts of the Soviet bloc and the story of these windows and the tower blocks is a microcosm of the craziness and rigidity of the economic system behind the Iron Curtain. Nationalized glass companies were set a production schedule as part of the larger ‘five-year plan’. The requirement was invariably the number of panes produced. When they were behind the quota – which was often – workers simply reduced the width and size of the glass to make up the numbers to save time. Hence, when the windows were installed they didn’t fit properly. Windows became a huge issue in Budapest living spaces throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Broken windows were frequently a metaphor in Budapest literature at the time for much of what was wrong with life in Communist Hungary.

During the Far Outliers’ year in Romania in 1983-84, we were advised not to buy cans or jars of food that had been produced toward the end of any month, because that was when the food factories went into sloppy overdrive to meet their monthly quotas after delayed shipments of produce coming in from the farms.

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by | 5 January 2024 · 5:20 am

Budapest Inflation, 1945

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 317-318:

The Hungarian national budget over the next eighteen months set aside as reparations five times more than was allotted for post-war reconstruction for Budapest. UN officials estimated three years after the war that total losses, calculating reparations, occupation costs and looting, amounted to 40 per cent of national income.

The currency collapsed – as it did in many places immediately after the war. Yet Hungary beat all records in terms of inflation. In July 1945 one US dollar was worth 1,320 pengős; by 1 November that year the exchange rate was one US dollar to 296,000. By spring 1946 hyperinflation took the rate to 4.6 quadrillion to the dollar (that is an almost unimaginable 15 noughts, 158,000 per cent a day). Most people in Budapest refused to be paid in money. As buildings were being repaired throughout the city, the walls in many rooms were decorated with large banknotes in fantastical denominations. In his marvellous book My Happy Days in Hell, György Faludy described the effect this had on daily life. A year after the war ended his publisher brought out a new edition of one of his books. He was paid 300 million pengős (which before the war would have been worth something like US$60 billion). When he collected his money, in cash, knowing it would have devalued by the time he had walked through Budapest, he ran to the central market a few blocks away. He spent the entire amount, he said, ‘on one chicken, a litre of olive oil and a handful of vegetables’. On 5 July a 100-quintillion-pengő note was issued – that’s twenty noughts; when an elderly gentleman in Budapest received one as wages he used it as part of the lining of his hat.

The currency was stabilized, largely with the help of the Americans. In April 1944, a fortnight after the German occupation, the Nazis had taken US$40 million ($570 million at 2022 values) in gold from various Hungarian banks. It fell into US hands at the end of the war and the Americans returned it a year later. Had the gold remained in Hungary at the moment of liberation, it is certain it would have been looted by the Red Army.

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by | 4 January 2024 · 4:07 am

Fall of Budapest, 1945

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 309, 315-316:

We have had three great tragedies in our country: the Tatar invasion in the thirteenth century, the Turkish occupation lasting 150 years – and the Soviet liberation. György Faludy (1910–2006)

…

If women were scared of rape, the fear among men was to be picked up off the streets and used as slave labour by the Soviets for public works like clearing rubble, shoring up buildings and repairing the city’s bridges. General Malinovsky reported back to Moscow that 110,000 men had been taken as ‘prisoners’ in this way. According to one well-informed journalist, ‘Count Géza Teleki [who would later himself become briefly Minister for Public Works] and a former Mayor of Budapest were seized without any warning and found two days later when an officer to whom they could talk finally released them. Prince Pál Esterházy was discovered in a cemetery burying dead horses.’ Around half of these detainees were returned home within weeks of the end of the siege. But the rest, including men from all walks of life and essential workers like firefighters, ambulance drivers, train and bus drivers – people who would be needed to rebuild Hungary – were transported east to the Soviet Union for forced labour on building projects in the Urals and Siberia. Some returned to Hungary decades later, but most never did – one of the Soviet war crimes rarely mentioned amid all the other horrors of the Second World War. Forty thousand of these men – abducted from their homes and from the streets – were corralled into a concentration camp near Gödöllő, 30 kilometres north-east of Budapest, in appalling conditions before being taken to the USSR.

…

Budapest in the spring of 1945 ‘was nothing short of hell on earth’, said the high-ranking prelate Bishop József Grősz at the end of the year. ‘Thousands of women from girls of twelve to women in the ninth month of pregnancy raped; men deported for slave labour. Almost every home looted; the city and its churches in ruins; the restaurants and stores empty, dead horses in the streets along with unburied bodies; in the cellars people half-demented with hunger, cutting pieces of flesh from animals dead for days.

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Filed under Germany, Hungary, labor, migration, military, nationalism, slavery, USSR, war

by | 10 December 2023 · 6:09 am

Ottoman Rule in Budun

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 64, 67-69:

Almost every time I visit Budapest, the first place I go is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of old cobbled streets, halfway up Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) on the Buda side of the river. Here is the graceful white mausoleum of Gül Baba, a Dervish Muslim holy man of the sixteenth century, a favourite of Suleiman the Magnificent, who oversaw the Bektashi order of monks entrusted with the spiritual welfare of the Janissaries. Mid-morning there is usually nobody about in the surrounding lanes – Ankara utca, Mecset (mosque) utca, Török (Turk) utca, Gül Baba utca – one of the most expensive residential neighbourhoods in Budapest. In April, after the frosts have melted away, the graceful stone tomb is surrounded by the scent of violets. A month or so later come the roses of Rózsadomb, pink damascenas mainly, said to have been brought to Buda by Gül Baba. Whether that is true or not, the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy when you consider the ways other imperial masters who conquered Hungary have left their mark on Budapest – Hitler’s Nazis, say, or Stalin’s commissars. Sitting on a bench at Rózsadomb gazing at the sweep of the Danube is a healthy place for a historian to loaf and think.

…

Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well. In the market, pork and wine were sold in the Christian-owned stalls, lamb, sherbet and coffee in the Turkish ones. The latter was one of the few things that the ‘infidel’ non-Muslims took a liking to straight away, though at first it was expensive; this was the birth of the Middle European coffee house that later would become so supremely important in the culture of Budapest.

In general, trade in everything was poor, for demand was so low. Vineyards in the Buda Hills rotted, so locals learned to use varieties of vegetable, for example corn, which flourished from the sixteenth century on. The main problem was that Buda’s population fell continuously over the 150 years of Ottoman occupation: the birth rate went down sharply, and over generations families left in order to better themselves, whether to Royal Hungary or to Transylvania. The drop was dramatic immediately after Mohács, and continued. Turkish figures registered a fall in tax-paying households throughout their Hungarian domains from 58,742 in 1577 to only 12,527 in 1663. At one point in the 1620s the German and Magyar population of Budun was not much more than 2,000. The Turkish garrison rose and fell depending on military operations in the Balkans, but the average was around 4,000. There were never more than 1,000 Turkish officials, traders and craftsmen living in the town. Besides the pashas, who were army commanders, magistrates and chief executives rolled into one, the most important Turkish official was the defter – the tax collector. As time went on, during the occupation they learned to be flexible. They did not wish to destroy the westernmost and most prosperous colony in Europe, but wanted to profit from it. They had no interest in overturning habits and customs.

One group benefited greatly from Ottoman rule. The Turkish occupation brought benefits for the Jews. Many sought refuge from the neighbouring Habsburg lands, where pogroms were common – or Transylvania, where Calvinism grew strong and the Jews were treated equally badly, if not worse. Many families had come from much further away in the Balkans, which were even poorer. In the 1580s the Jews formed around 20 per cent of Buda’s ‘Hungarian’ population. By the 1680s there were more than 1,000 Jews in Buda. The Turks allowed them freedom to worship – there were three synagogues in Buda by the middle of the seventeenth century – freedom to form communal groups and a measure of legal autonomy. The Ottomans, though, demanded high taxes, even higher than the Christian rulers had imposed. The Turks used the Jews for commerce; they ran the lucrative trade routes along the Danube eastwards from Buda across Turkish domains. The pashas of Buda often intervened on the side of Jews in cases where they had been wronged by Hungarian Christians. Jews would repay the Turks by aiding their defence of Buda against the Habsburgs in sporadic attempts to retake the town. And when the Austrians eventually succeeded, the Jews would pay a heavy price.

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Filed under Austria, economics, food, Germany, Hungary, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Turkey, USSR

by | 8 December 2023 · 2:24 am

Hungary’s Crown of St. Stephen

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 33-34:

Every 20 August, the date of St Stephen’s canonization and a national holiday in Hungary, a casket containing what is believed to be the king’s mummified right hand is carried in solemn procession around the basilica which bears his name in central Budapest. This grisly celebration, followed by a Mass, took place even in the darkest days of the Soviet era when the Communists tried to suppress religion. Yet the holiest relic associated with Stephen is not a skeletal hand. One of the most popular tourist sights in Budapest – all Hungarian schoolchildren are encouraged to see it once in their lives – is the Holy Crown of St Stephen. It was for a long time the central symbol of royal legitimacy and has been venerated for centuries. The validity of a King of Hungary was coronation with the use of this crown, and no other, in the ceremony. The crown is shrouded in myth, like so much of ancient Magyar history.

It is certain that the crown on display in modern Budapest was never worn by King Stephen. The original was lost or stolen soon after the king’s death and there are many theories about its fate. It is said that in 1044 it was found by soldiers loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III, and he returned it to the Vatican. The lower half of the crown on display now, the so-called ‘Greek part’, made in 1074, nearly forty years after King Stephen’s death, was a gift from the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII to the Hungarian King Géza I. The upper ‘Latin’ part was made in Hungary, probably at some point in the late twelfth century, to replace the lost original. The two halves were welded together around 1330, in order to make a solid base for a gold cross that surmounts the crown.

Lost again and found in a series of centuries-long dramas and adventures, the crown was taken to Austria towards the end of the Second World War by Hungarian fascists – either, as one group said, to sell it on the black market or, as others claimed, to preserve it from the clutches of the Communists. Somehow it fell into the hands of the US army in Vienna in 1945. The Americans kept it in Fort Knox, to ensure its safety, until 1978 when it was ceremoniously returned to Hungary. The crown and other royal regalia thought to have belonged to Stephen or his immediate successors were then installed by a Communist regime aiming for national respectability in a large shrine in Budapest’s National Museum under permanent armed guard. To mark the millennium of the Hungarian state, the first of Viktor Orbán’s governments in 2000 transferred all the royal jewels, amid great solemnity and fanfare, to the Parliament building. In a republic, it seemed at first sight an odd place to move the crown jewels, but in the Hungarian context there was logic to it. For a nation that has been occupied by other powers for so many periods in its history, the crown has always been the symbol of independence and freedom, rather than of royalty. And besides, the crown jewels are magnificently presented in inspiring surroundings.

Stephen brought order out of chaos, stability and the beginning of a legal code. He is, rightly, one of the most revered figures in Hungary’s history.

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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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