Memories about the deportation of volga germans: main narrative and motives (based on Krasnoyarsky kray data)

The policy of Soviet was linked with categories "nationality" or "nation". This link became the base of future issues of transformations policy in perestroika. When the time of transformation had come population encountered the problem of creating new identity or remembering old one. Nationality was important notion during a Soviet development and still is for post-soviet countries. The case of Volga Germans allows to pay attention to transformation of their national identity after the deportation and what form it has today in people' memories. This article is devoted to the memory about the deportation of Volga Germans in 1941, who have stayed to live in the former forced settlements (specposelenie), their oral histories about the deportation and its consequences. Major sources are interviews with people who were deported from the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (VGASSR) to Krasnoyarsk region and who stayed to live there. All informants can be attributed to the generation of postmemory. It means that their memories about the deportation were formed by parents' and grandparents' stories. Interviewes were collected during expedition in Karatuzsky district and Irbeisky district of Krasnoyarsk region in 2016. In this research six interviews with woman who were born before the deportation in VGASSR and after in Siberia are analyzed. These stories show main narrative and repeating motives bright. Main attention is paid to the form of the stories. On the one hand, the paper is concerned with the problem of narrativization. The narrative about deportation may be considered and contradict to the narrative about great victory in the war. On the other hand, some informants have the narrative about the deportation. They began their stories from the fact that their family had period of 24 hours for travel arrangements. It can be called as the marker of relocation in general. But at that time there is contesting this sustainable motive story. This short time period separates previous stability and good life in VGASSR and following unstableness and severities after the deportation in Siberia. The unstableness appears through there is the constant movement from one place to other place. In other words, the dynamics in informants' life after the deportation begins to be determining characteristic of stories of deported people or their descendants. Unstable on new place in oral histories continues by the motive of "naked bump" ("golaya kochka"). Informants underlined the predicament in forced settlement.

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