Volga Germans (Volga Deutsche) in the United States
German-speaking emigrants from Russia, the Volga Germans formed a significant wave of settlement in the upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest in the period from 1870 to 1920. Largely rural agricultural workers, these colonists exhibited a unique blend of Russian and German heritage and remain a strong force in the region through their contribution to farming and religious and educational institutions.
Originally brought to Russia beginning in 1763 at the command of Czarina Catherine II, who was born a princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, the settlers were meant to provide a stable frontier on the lower Volga River and to introduce more intensive and efficient agricultural practices to Russia. Russian agents recruiting in the war-weary Hessian states (Darmstadt, Kassel) and the Rhine Palatinate found volunteers eager to escape high taxes and compulsory military service, but they also found German governments wary of losing their workforces. Catherine issued a declaration offering each settler family 162 acres of land, loans with a 10-year interest-free period, and livestock at government expense. Most promisingly, settlers were permitted to keep their language, religion (Roman Catholic or Lutheran), and school systems, and to run their own civil and criminal courts locally, and were forever exempt from military service. By 1798 approximately 39,000 Germans lived in 104 colonies (32 Roman Catholic, 72 Protestant, largely Lutheran) on the Volga, and in 1804, Alexander I issued another invitation for Germans to settle in the Black Sea region (Koch 1977, 69).
The German colonies prospered and increased the grain yield of the Ukraine and Volga regions substantially, but their self-contained and unassimilated German communities incited the envy and hostility of their Russian neighbors. In 1871 Alexander II and the Russian senate abruptly suspended the 1763 law, making the colonists the equals of newly freed serfs and requiring them to serve in the imperial army.
The loss of their own courts made them subject to Russian harassment, and pan-Slavism increasingly threatened the Germans’ carefully kept separate identity, pushing community leaders to investigate emigration options. Mennonite Volga Germans who held deep pacifist beliefs left for America from 1872 through 1874, while others successfully transplanted their entire communities to Brazil, Argentina, or Paraguay.Learning of the Volga Germans’ willingness to leave Russia, agents of U.S. railroad companies—such as Carl Schmidt, born in Saxony and representing the Kansas Pacific, or Bavarian Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific—enthusiastically promoted settlement along their lines in Kansas, the Dakotas, and Oregon. These efforts attracted an average of 30,000 Volga Germans per year between 1876 and 1914 (Koch 1977, 212—220), and, aided by the Homestead Act and subsidized loans from the railroads, planted Volga communities across the upper Midwest. Volga Germans, unlike many emigrants of the period, came in community groups rather than as individuals or families, although the provisions of homesteading broke down the practice of living together in a town and farming outlying lands in favor of families living in sod houses on their own claims.
The Volga Germans meshed well with other immigrants to the region, especially the Reich Germans and Scandinavians, with whom they shared many religious and cultural traditions, including the institutionalized Lutheran Church. Roman Catholics among the immigrants were welcomed and served by the Capuchin Brothers in Kansas and the Roman Catholic missionary fathers of the Dakotas. They quickly gained a reputation for thrift, honest dealing, and skill in cultivating winter wheat, sunflowers, and sugar beets, which they had done in Russia. Although many households continued to use German at home and in religious services, the settlers assimilated their children through the public schools and became highly valued American citizens, with large proportions of men serving in World Wars I and II.
Emigration ended with the start of World War I, although in 1921, learning of the disastrous famine in Russia, Volga Germans in the United States quickly raised $550,000 for relief of the settlers who remained behind and encouraged emigration for those under increasing pressure from the Soviet government as spies or wealthy kulaks. Heritage societies, like the American Society of Germans from Russia, founded in 1968, and the North Dakota Historical Society of Germans from Russia, which represents the descendents of the state’s 23,000 Volga Germans, continue to promote and preserve the cultural legacy of these significant settlers, hosting annual conventions and sponsoring important document collections like that of North Dakota State University.
Margaret Sankey
See also Argentina; Brazil; Kansas, German Dialects in
References and Further Reading
Aberle, George P From the Steppes to the Prairies. Bismarck, ND: Bismarck Tribune, 1963.
Koch, Fred C. The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1977.
Long, James W. From Privileged to Dispossessed: The Volga Germans 1860-1917. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1988.
Scheuerman, Richard D., and Clifford E.
Trafzer. The Volga Germans: Pioneers of the Northwest. Moscow: University of Idaho, 1980.