POLICY OF TCARISM AND SOVIET LEADERSHIP CONCERNING THE ETHNIC GERMANS DURING THE FIRST AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Abstract

The publication's purpose. The goal of the research is to study the policies of the imperial and Soviet leadership regarding ethnic Germans in the period of the First and Second World Wars and to conduct their comparative analysis. The methodology of work is based on the principles of historicism, systemic, scientific, objectivity, as well as on the use of general scientific and special-historical methods and on the theoretical basis of modern historiography, according to which First and Second World War are considered as two phases of one historical event. This approach opens up the new opportunities for researchers, both in generating ideas, and in the context of the factual reproduction of the past war. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time in historiography there was made the search for historical parallels between anti-German campaigns concerning the civilian population that took place in two world wars. This allowed us to illustrate the inadmissibility of collective allegations in collaboration based on the ethnic grounds. Conclusions. Numerous deportations of ethnic Germans in 1915 were due to the declarative goals – to prevent the entry of ethnic Germans into the armies of the enemy during the withdrawal of the imperial army. The greatest difference of the policy of the «German issue» in 1914 – 1915 between the policy of 1941 – 1942 was that the actions of the imperial government directly have depended on the military failures of the Russian army. Until the beginning of the Second World War, the victims of repressions except the Germans were also Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and others peoples; officially this side of repression was not being propagated by the authorities. Close to 1941, such repressive actions had a class character. Deportation of the German population during the Second World War was of a purely ethnic character and was carried out as a preventive measure. Only the Soviet security forces in the peacetime resorted to restrictions on the right to life and to direct physical destruction of ethnic Germans. It is noted that the fear of tsarism and Soviet leadership before the fifth column during the war years has played a decisive role in the fate of the German ethnic minority. It is emphasized that in the extraordinary circumstances (war, occupation, the policy of total unification of non-indigenous nations) the ruling government tends to practice the use of the ethnic image of the enemy. Therefore, there is quite logical rhetorical question: who they are – the German colonists, the German refugees, the German special settlers and the Ukrainian «Volksdeutsche», if not «their own» convenient enemies?