I can’t recommend NewEurasia’s series of posts on ethnic minorities in Central Asia highly enough.
Russia watchers in particular, might be interested in the articles on:
- Russian-Germans in Tajikistan
- Russians in Kyrgyzstan
- Russian-Germans from Kazakhstan returning home (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Chechens in Kazakhstan
- Russians in Uzbekistan
Fascinating stuff.
April 1st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
I remember a couple of years ago working with Vladimir Smirnov, Kazakhstan’s only gold medal-winner in a Winter Olympics, on ALmaty’s ill-fated bid for the 2014 winter games. He was as blond, blue-eyed as they come and looked like he’s stepped from out of Bavaria.
He was, as I recall, an ethnic German Ukrainian whose family had been shipped by Stalin to Kazakhstan, after the war, and somehow survived the trip. Aren’t there still, like, almost a million ethic German Ukrainians in KAZ?
Amazing his family survived. 50% of those shipped dies en-route and 40% died when they got there. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=28051
April 1st, 2007 at 5:00 pm
He was as blond, blue-eyed as they come and looked like he’s stepped from out of Bavaria.
Psssst ! Don’t tell anybody that there is an even worse and more evil German behind every diabolic Russian. It took us decades to build this strategy.
If you give away our secret, you will prevent the new world order and put all those russophobes out of business.
April 1st, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Sadly, these Germans never seemed to have become involved in Russia’s automotive industry.