Russian Germans in North America are descended from the many ethnic Germans from Russia who immigrated to North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Russian Germans frequently lived in distinct communities and maintained German language schools and German churches. They were primarily Volga Germans from the lower Volga River valley; Black Sea Germans from the Crimean Peninsula/Black Sea region; or Volhynian Germans from the governorate of Volhynia in what is Ukraine. The smaller villages were often settled by colonists of a common religious denomination who had come from the same area and so a town is made up of German-speaking Catholics, Lutherans. The people often settled together from the same region of Germany and so spoke the same German dialect.
Originally recruited and welcomed to the Russian Empire in the 18th century, when they were promised to be allowed to practice own language and religions and to be exempted from compulsory military service, the Germans from Russia found increasing hardship. With changes in politics, the Russian government took back some of the privileges that had been granted, economic conditions grew poor. Those conditions led to German mass migrations from Russia.
After the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, particularly under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, conditions for the remaining Germans in Russia declined considerably. The subsequent rise of Nazi Germany, with its concern about ethnic Germans in other lands and proselytizing to the German Volk, led to suspicions of any Germans in Russia. In 1932 and 1933, the Soviet authorities forced starvation among the Volga Germans according to Western observers. Soviet authorities seized food supplies under the pretext of famine in the rest of the Soviet Union, and they ordered the breakup of many German villages.[1]
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin ordered the deportation of Russian Germans to labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia, as he was suspicious of potential collaboration with the invaders.[2] In some areas, his forces attempted to bulldoze the German churches and reused their tombstones for paving blocks. Many Germans in the Americas sent donations back to their communities, but others permanently lost contact with their relatives during the social disruptions of the Ukrainian famine, Stalin's Great Purge, and World War II.