Russia Emigration and Immigration

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Emigration and Immigration

Online Records

• 1750-1805 Auswandererkartei der Deutschen nach Ungarn und Rußland, 1750-1805 (Emigration index of Germans in Hungary and Russia, 1750-1805)
• 1834-1897 Immigrating to the United States at MyHeritage ($), index.
• 1890-1960 Passenger Lists Leaving UK 1890-1960 at FindMyPast; index & images ($); includes those with Destination of Russia
• 1898-1922 Immigrants from the Russian Empire, 1898-1922 to Canada
• 1904-1914 Germany, Bremen Passenger Departure Lists, 1904-1914 at MyHeritage; index & images ($); includes those with Destination of Russia
• Russians To America at FindMyPast; index only ($)
• 1935-1945 Russian Immigrants from China to Australia, Brazil, and the U.S.A. An Alphabetical database of Russian immigrants who were living in China/Manchuria. Entries include individuals who left between 1935-1945. There are 56,472 of various lengths.
• 1941-1943 Leningrad Evacuation Database. Searchable database for the 1.7 million people evacuated from Leningrad during 1941-1943. Project in progress.
• 1946-1971 Free Access: Africa, Asia and Europe, Passenger Lists of Displaced Persons, 1946-1971 Ancestry, free. Index and images. Passenger lists of immigrants leaving Germany and other European ports and airports between 1946-1971. The majority of the immigrants listed in this collection are displaced persons - Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp inmates and Nazi forced laborers, as well as refugees from Central and Eastern European countries and some non-European countries.
• Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild Choose a volume and then choose Italy under "Listed by Port of Departure" or "Listed by Port of Arrival".

Germans from Russia

In 1763 Catherine the Great of Russia offered free land, no taxes for thirty years, freedom of religion, and other incentives to encourage Germans to settle her vast, sparsely populated domain. Dozens of German colonies were established and grew until World War I. Many Russian Germans moved to the United States, Canada, or South America beginning in 1874.

• 1870-1945 Auswandererkartei von Rußlanddeutschen nach China und Nordamerika : 1870-1945 Index cards, arranged alphabetically by surname, for German-speaking emigrants from Russia to China, North America, Argentina, elsewhere. Includes birthplaces and dates for both spouses and children, date of emigration and destination, place and date of marriage, children's names and documentary references.
• 1899-2012 United States, Obituaries, American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1899-2012, index.
• Odessa Digital Library
• 1929-1930 Auswandererkartei der Rußlanddeutschen, 1929-1930 Index cards, arranged alphabetically by surname, for German-speaking emigrants from Russia to Germany, Canada, Brazil, Paraguay, etc.

Emigration and Immigration Records

Emigration records list the names of people leaving and immigration records list those coming into Russia. These records may include an emigrant’s name, age, occupation, destination, and sometimes the place of origin or birth.

Background

According to the first census of the Russian Empire in 1897, about 1.8 million respondents reported German as their mother tongue.

Germans in the Russian Empire

The earliest German settlement in Moscow dates to 1505-1533. A handful of German and Dutch craftsmen and traders were allowed to settle in Moscow's German Quarter, as they provided essential technical skills in the capital. Gradually, this policy extended to a few other major cities. In 1682, Moscow had about 200,000 citizens; some 18,000 were classified as Nemtsy, which means either "German" or "western foreigner".

Vistula Germans (Russian Poland)

• Through wars and the partitions of Poland, Prussia acquired an increasing amount of northern, western, and central Polish territory. Eventually, Prussia acquired most of the Vistula River's watershed, and the central portion of then-Poland became South Prussia. Its existence was brief - 1793 to 1806, but by its end, many German settlers had established Protestant agricultural settlements within its earlier borders.
• After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, what is now central Poland became the Russian client-state known as Congress Poland. Many Germans continued to live in this central region.
• During World Wars I and II, the eastern front was fought over in this area. During the last year and after World War II, many ethnic Germans fled or were forcibly expelled by the Russians and the Poles from Eastern Europe. The Russians and Poles blamed them for being allies of the Nazis and the reason that Nazi Germany had invaded the East. The Germans were also held to have abused the native populations in internal warfare, allied with the Germans during their occupation. Under the Potsdam Agreement, major population transfers were agreed to by the allies. The deportees generally lost all their property and were often attacked during their deportations. Those who survived joined millions of other displaced peoples on the road after the war.

Volga Germans (Russia)

Czarina Catherine II was German, born in Stettin in Pomerania (now Szczecin in Poland). After gaining her power, she proclaimed open immigration for foreigners wishing to live in the Russian Empire in 1763, marking the beginning of a wave of German migration to the Empire. She wanted German farmers to redevelop farmland that had been fallow after conflict with the Ottomans. German colonies were founded in the lower Volga River area almost immediately afterward.

• German immigration was motivated in part by religious intolerance and warfare in central Europe, as well as by frequently difficult economic conditions. Catherine II's declaration freed German immigrants from requirements for military service and from most taxes. Moving to Russia gave German immigrants political rights that they would not have possessed in their own lands. Religious minorities found these terms very agreeable, particularly Mennonites from the Vistula River valley. Nearly all of the Prussian Mennonites emigrated to Russia over the following century, leaving no more than a handful in Prussia.
• German colonization was most intense in the Lower Volga, but other areas also received immigrants. Many settled in the area around the Black Sea, and the Mennonites favoured the lower Dnieper river area, around Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro) and Aleksandrovsk (now Zaporizhia).
• In 1803, Tsar Alexander I, reissued Catherine's proclamation. In the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, Germans responded in great number, fleeing their wartorn land.
• The abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire in 1863 created a shortage of labour in agriculture. The need for workers attracted new German immigration, particularly from the increasingly crowded central European states. There was no longer enough fertile land there for full employment in agriculture.

Black Sea Germans (Moldova and Ukraine)

• The Black Sea Germans - including the Bessarabian Germans and the Dobrujan Germans - settled the territories of the northern bank of the Black Sea in present-day Ukraine in the late 18th and the 19th century.
• The first German settlers arrived in 1787, first from West Prussia, followed by immigrants from Western and Southwestern Germany (including Roman Catholics), and from the Warsaw area. Also many Germans, beginning in 1803, immigrated from the northeastern area of Alsace west of the Rhine River. They settled roughly 30 miles northeast of Odessa (city) in Ukraine.

Crimea

• From 1783 onward the Crown initiated a systematic settlement of Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans in the Crimean Peninsula (in what was then the Crimean Khanate) in order to dilute the native population of the Crimean Tatars.
• In 1939, around 60,000 of the 1.1 million inhabitants of Crimea were ethnic German. Two years later, following the end of the alliance and the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union, the government deported ethnic Germans from the Crimea to Central Asia in the Soviet Union's program of population transfers. Conditions were harsh and many of the deportees died. It was not until the period of Perestroika in the late 1980s that the government granted surviving ethnic Germans and their descendants the right to return from Central Asia to the peninsula.

Volhynian Germans (Poland and Ukraine)

• By the end of the 19th century, Volhynia had more than 200,000 German settlers. Their migration began as encouraged by local noblemen, often Polish landlords, who wanted to develop their significant land-holdings in the area for agricultural use. Probably 75% or more of the Germans came from Congress Poland (Russian Poland), with the balance coming directly from other regions such as East and West Prussia, Pomerania, Posen, Württemberg, and Galicia, among others.
• Shortly after 1800, the first German families started moving into the area. A surge occurred in 1831 but by 1850, Germans still numbered only about 5000. The largest migration came after the second Polish rebellion of 1863, and Germans began to flood into the area by the thousands. By 1900 they numbered about 200,000. The vast majority of these Germans were Protestant Lutherans (in Europe they were referred to as Evangelicals).
• Limited numbers of Mennonites from the lower Vistula River region settled in the south part of Volhynia.
• Baptists and Moravian Brethren settled mostly northwest of Zhitomir.
• The Germans in Volhynia were scattered about in over 1400 villages. Though the population peaked in 1900, many Germans had already begun leaving Volhynia in the late 1880s for North and South America.

Siberia

• Between 1911 and 1915, a small group of Volhynian German farmers chose to move to Eastern Siberia. They settled in Pikhtinsk, Sredne-Pikhtinsk, and Dagnik in what is today Zalarinsky District of Irkutsk Oblast, where they became known as the "Bug Hollanders". They apparently were not using the German language any more, but rather spoke Ukrainian and Polish. They used Lutheran Bibles that had been printed in East Prussia, in the Polish form known as fraktur. Their descendants, many with German surnames, continue to live in the district into the 21st century.

Caucasus Germans

Germans settled in the Caucasus area from the beginning of the 19th century. A German minority of about 100,000 people existed in the Caucasus region, in areas such as the North Caucasus, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. In 1941, Joseph Stalin ordered all inhabitants with a German father to be deported, mostly to Siberia or Kazakhstan.

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