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    • Main contributor: David Heffernan
    Volga Germans in Kansas, c. 1875

    The Volga German Exodus was an event which primarily took place in the second half of the nineteenth century as tens of thousands of German Russians who lived along the course of the River Volga in western Russia left these lands and migrated thousands of kilometers to different parts of the world. German settlers had migrated to Russia in the eighteenth century and began living along the River Volga at a time when many of Russia’s Tsars and Tsarinas were of largely German heritage. Their numbers grew over time and they developed their own distinct identity as Volga Germans. However, in the nineteenth century the Russian Empire commenced a policy of Russification designed to break down the national identities of subject peoples such as the Finns, Poles, Baltic peoples and people in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This led to tens of thousands of Volga Germans joining the European mass migrations of the era to the western hemisphere. Some settled in different parts of Latin America, but most moved to North America and settled in the Canadian Prairies and the Great Plains of the United States. There is a large diaspora of Volga Germans in places as disparate as Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the United States and Kazakhstan today. Many people will be able to trace their ancestry to Volga German ancestors that left western Russia a century and a half ago in response to Russification and other pressures.[1]

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    Volga German exodus chronology of eventsVolga German exodus chronology of events

    Tsarina Catherine the Great

    There was a long history of Germans colonizing parts of Eastern Europe in the medieval era and this resulted in German colonies in places as disparate as modern-day Poland, the Baltic States region such as the Kaliningrad Oblast, Hungary and Romania. Few Germans, though, had ever penetrated as far east as Belarus, Ukraine or Russia. That changed in the eighteenth century when a series of Tsars of the Russian Empire married German noblewomen, cementing relations between the Russian royal House of Romanov and several of Germany’s leading aristocratic lineages. Indeed, Tsarina Catherine the Great, who overthrew her husband, Tsar Peter III, and became ruler of Russia in 1762, was herself a German woman from the port city of Stettin. It was primarily during her long reign that German colonists who brought much-needed proto-industrial skills were encouraged to come and live in Russia in the cities and towns and in the countryside along the long Volga River. These Volga Germans retained their German identity over the next several generations, continuing to speak German and also continuing to adhere to western forms of Christianity, whether Lutheran, Reformed or Roman Catholic, but not adopting Eastern Orthodox Christianity.[2]

    The Volga Germans were considered a problematic group by the nineteenth century. Catherine the Great was long gone and the Romanov dynasty's ties to Germany were less substantial. Instead the greatest of the north German states, Prussia, was now a regional rival of Russia’s, one that unified the German states into a German Empire in 1871. On top of this, the Tsars of the nineteenth century adopted a policy of aggressive Russification that sought to stifle the national characteristics of the various peoples they ruled over, groups like the Poles and Finns who spoke different languages and had their own distinct national histories. This program of Russification involved efforts to try and force these other ethnic groups to speak and write Russian as the language of government and education and so forth.[3]

    German migrants in Canada

    The Volga Germans responded by leaving western Russia in large numbers. This was a time when the European mass migration to the western hemisphere across the Atlantic on the large steamships of the age was already seeing millions and millions of Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles and many others leaving Europe for North and South America anyway. For instance, the Russian Empire’s Jewish people were departing in large numbers as well at this time. The Volga Germans joined them. What was different in their case was that many headed eastwards and took passage across the Pacific to the west coast of North America. There large numbers headed for the Prairies of Canada or the Great Plains of the United States where legislation like the Homestead Act of 1862 was making land available for those willing to settle out on the rugged frontiers. In this way the Volga German Exodus began around the middle of the nineteenth century and continued through to the early twentieth century. It was at its most intense between the 1870s and the 1900s after special privileges which the Germans had enjoyed in Russia since the eighteenth century were revoked at the start of the 1870s.[4]

    A substantial number of Volga Germans remained behind in western Russia. At the time of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War they were formed into the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and given renewed special privileges again by the Soviet government in the 1920s. However, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the Volga Germans became a suspect group. In a matter of months plans to forcibly remove 400,000 Volga Germans to the Soviet lands in Central Asia were being put into motion.[5] This meant that by the end of the Cold War there were nearly a million Volga Germans living in Kazakhstan and surrounding Soviet republics. A substantial number remain in Kazakhstan to this day, but many have since migrated to Russia or even back to Germany.[6]

    Extent of Volga German exodusExtent of Volga German exodus

    The German-American Society building in Portland, Oregon

    Roughly between 250,000 and 300,000 Volga Germans left the Russian Empire between 1850 and 1910. In the earlier phase they primarily headed for Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada and places like North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Colorado and Oregon in the United States. We have a clear enough idea of how many Volga Germans were living in some distinct parts of the United States by the early twentieth century. For instance, the first Volga Germans arrived to Oregon in 1881. By the time of the 1920 federal census, there were 7,000 Germans of Russian extraction living in the state, many in and around the city of Portland.[7] Others settled in substantial numbers in Colorado where they became involved in developing the state’s sugar beet industry.[8] In the later period some began heading further afield to Central and South America.

    Demographic impact of the Volga German exodusDemographic impact of the Volga German exodus

    The exodus of the Volga Germans from Russia, primarily in the second half of the nineteenth century, has had a demographic impact in many countries. There are, for instance, German Volga communities in countries as disparate as Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay in South America, a large community in Kazakhstan and also some in other parts of Central Asia and Mexico. However, the largest impact by far was in North America in the Great Plains and the Prairies in the central parts of the US and Canada. It is difficult to put precise figures on the number of Volga Germans in these two countries. For instance, there were just over 2.95 million Canadians who claimed some German heritage in the 2021 census.[9] There are over 40 million German Americans.[10] The issue is that these two countries were experiencing huge amounts of migration from the German Empire as well between 1871 and 1914. This means that the majority of German Canadians and German Americans are not Volga Germans. Nevertheless, several hundred thousand in Canada and well over a million in the United States are descendants of the Volga Germans who left Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century.[11]

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the Volga German exodusExplore more about the Volga German exodus

    References

    1. ↑ Fred C. Koch, The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present (Philadelphia, 1977).
    2. ↑ Roger Bartlett, ‘Foreign Settlement in Russia under Catherine II’, in New Zealand Slavonic Journal, No. 1 (1974), pp. 1–22.
    3. ↑ Theodore R. Weeks, ‘Russification: Word and Practice 1863–1914’, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 148, No. 4 (December, 2004), pp. 471–489.
    4. ↑ Timothy J. Kloberdanz, ‘The Volga Germans in Old Russia and in Western North America: Their Changing World View’, in Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4 (October, 1975), pp. 209–222.
    5. ↑ https://www.volgagermans.org/history/autonomous-republic
    6. ↑ https://www.volgagermans.org/settlements/resettlement-within-russia/kazakhstan
    7. ↑ https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/volga-germans-in-oregon/
    8. ↑ https://www.historycolorado.org/story/2021/03/11/strangers-strange-land-history-volga-germans-colorado
    9. ↑ https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/german-canadians
    10. ↑ https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/german-american-day.html
    11. ↑ https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/german/new-surge-of-growth/


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    David Heffernan. (2025, October 29). *Volga German exodus*. MyHeritage Wiki. https://www.myheritage.com/wiki/Volga_German_exodus