Permanent “colonization”: Russian-Germans' view of labor

This article discusses the labor ethics of Russian-Germans who survived deportation in 1941 and lived in special settlements. The widest range of questions concerns the narrativization of the story of deportation and its consequences in the memoirs of this group. The main sources are written memoirs and interviews with people who were deported from the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to the Krasnoyarsk Krai and still have been living there. Most of these sources were collected during expeditions in 2016 and 2017 to several rural ares: Karatuzskii, Kuraginskii, Krasnoturanskii, Irbeyaskii districts. The author provides the analysis of the Russian-Germans identity, paying special attention to the question of their "Germanness". Analyzing their stories, the author highlights special understanding of labor: diligence, as an important quality, was characteristic of the Germans as an ethnic group, and through which their fate in Russia is determined. What role did labor play for informants? Where is it possible to draw a line in the understanding of labor when talking about the Soviet and national contexts? Labor was one of the most significant categories in Soviet life. The sources in question demonstrate that Russian-Germans have assimilated Soviet practices and values. Their work experience and labor merits became the prism of consideration of the Soviet past among deported Germans. When the informants started talking about their life path, they also turned to their work biographies, which manifested itself in stories about achievements, supported by diplomas, etc. The Soviet experience also determines their national identity, based on the idea of German diligence. However, the importance of labor remains high even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Labor continues to be an important value in the views of Russian-Germans, and diligence remains an integral quality of Germans. The motive of labor, the idea of labor took place in memories that characterized Germans as knowing how to work, not being afraid of work, always working well. In this point the author finds the ambivalence of labor and diligence in the informants’ representation. On the one hand, labor is important when telling about the Soviet experience. On the other hand, in the stories about labor, the informants' ideas about German national qualities are revealed. Thus, the idea of labor is influenced by the Soviet narrative form about labor. But already in the late Soviet years and the modern period, there is a rollback to ethnic, forgotten meanings that fill the idea of work with their new meaning. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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