Caucasus Germans
However, poor infrastructure, lack of organization of the officials responsible for the settlement and the refusal of the military personnel to have these lands populated by non-Russians were an obstacle to the steady and constant migration of the Germans.
In 1815, while participating in the Congress of Vienna, Russian Tsar Alexander I visited Stuttgart, a city in his mother's native Kingdom of Württemberg.
Upon witnessing the oppression that local peasants were undergoing either due to belonging to different non-Lutheran Protestant sects or to their participation in separatist movements, he arranged for their settlement in Russian Transcaucasia in order to form agricultural colonies.
The migration waves (especially to the Don Host Oblast) grew beginning in the second half of the 19th century with the capitalist influence on farming in Russia.
Unlike the settlement of Russian religious minorities, German colonies were located in "places that were more economically advantageous, close to cities or important transportation routes.
"[9] In eastern Transcaucasia, German colonists were overwhelmingly bilingual in Azeri, while Russian was formally taught in schools starting in the late 19th century.
[11] The Baltic German naturalist and explorer Friedrich Parrot encountered Swabian settlers near Tiflis on his expedition to Mount Ararat in 1829.
He listed their settlements and personally visited Katharinenfeld and Elisabethtal, describing them: These colonies may be known to be German at first sight from their style of building, their tillage, their carts and wagons, their furniture and utensils, mode of living, costume, and language.
[...] At last, after riding for five hours, I espied, high on the left bank of the river [i.e. the Khrami], symptoms not to be mistaken of the German colony: these were, regularly-built white houses, with good windows, doors, and ridge stone on the roof.
While visiting the great bazaar in Erivan (Yerevan) with Khachatur Abovian (the Armenian writer and national public figure), Parrot encountered "two Württemberg women, with five children" who "talked to one another in true Swabian dialect.
The two women who he met in Erivan returned from comparably benign captivity with a "wealthy Tatar chief" where they had been pressured to convert to Islam.
Furthermore, he told of a case where a man received a letter from his wife who had married a Persian cleric in captivity and therefore allowed him to remarry.
"[17] During his travels to the Caucasus during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829, the celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin visited one of the German colonies near Tiflis and recorded his experience in his Journey to Arzrum.
He related an account from Moritz von Kotzebue about an unsuccessful religious pilgrimage of German colonists to Jerusalem, led by a woman who "knew the whole Bible by heart, from beginning to end" and who "exercised a kind of magical influence on all around her.
"[19] During his travels in the Caucasus, Haxthausen was accompanied by Peter Neu, a Swabian colonist from the Tiflis area who had "a remarkable genius for languages and knew a dozen European and Asiatic tongues,—German, French, Russian, Circassian, Tatar, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Persian, Kurdish, etc."
In addition, he "possessed a rich gift of poetical imagination and had an inexhaustible treasury of märchen, legends and popular songs, gleaned from all the countries he had visited.
[23] Beginning in the 1880s, in addition to Helenendorf and Annenfeld, six more German colonies were formed the Elisabethpol Governorate: Georgsfeld in 1888, Alexejewka in 1902, Grünfeld and Eichenfeld in 1906, Traubenfeld in 1912 and Jelisawetinka in 1914.
[30] The Siemens smelteries were officially closed down in 1914 when the Russian Empire entered World War I fighting against Germany and the tsarist government banned all German businesses in Russia.
Due to the Russian-Ottoman military confrontation at the start of World War I, most of the remaining German settlers from the Kars Oblast were evacuated to Eichenfeld.
[35] After the outbreak of World War I, Russian government attempts to Russify the German colonies in the Caucasus created a local backlash.
[40] The forced collectivization of agriculture under the first five-year plan and the resulting famine of 1932-33 hit the North Caucasus and the local German community very hard.
They were told the voyage would only be for several days but many ships went back and forth for months, resulting in mass death from starvation and the climate, especially among children, the elderly and the sick.
The following eye-witness report relates a harrowing story of evacuation by ship: For two months ethnic Germans from the Caucasus were pointlessly dragged back and forth on the Caspian Sea, and more people, especially children, were dying of starvation.
Soon after Stalin's death in 1953 and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev to the Soviet leadership, the ban for the majority of the deported peoples to return to their homes was lifted.
Often this desire is closely related to Protestant beliefs, so as a result the New Apostolic Church works intensively with these young people as part of its regular youth programs.
In Azerbaijan, the remaining Germans are concentrated in the capital city of Baku, and many belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Community restored and officially registered in the early 1990s.
[48] In 2009, the non-functioning Lutheran church in Shamkir (and into which Annenfeld was absorbed), which had been used as a community centre in the Soviet era, was renovated and turned into a museum.
At the end of this publication there is an addendum about a small branch of the Caucasian Germans near Kars and Ardahan, now in eastern Turkey, near Ararat.
[51] Of the 60 families of Estonian origin who were settled in the village of Karacaören in the center of Kars by the Russians during the Ottoman-Russian wars in 1877, only August Albuk has survived.
