> A lot of Soviet technicians came to Turkey in the 70's and it seemed to me
> that many of them were German speakers. I also see a lot of German-speaking
> Russians on Deutsche Welle. Also, thinking back to when the wall came down,
> my impression was most FSU people interviewed by the EU media spoke German.
> Am I right?
My paternal grandparents were Soviet citizens who spoke German almost exclusively and were fairly close to the Tsarist regime (except for great-grandpa, who apparently had strong Bolshevik sympathies.) My maternal ancestors were also "Russland Deutsch" who left Russia about 40 years before the revolution.
There were, on the eve of the Russian revolution, some 5 million German-Russians, mostly Protestant. Many, like my family, were Anabaptists who were not terribly welcome in Germany. They were present at all levels of Russian society, but were preponderantly among the wealthy and well educated. They were not all rich, many were quite poor, but in general they lived better than the average Russian and had no tradition of serfdom.
They were culturally unique: slavicised Germans. For example, in my family, we used the Russian patronymic tradition. My great-grandfather was Kornelius Petrowitsch Martens, because his father's first name was Peter.
Many Jews also spoke fairly good German, since its was very close to Yiddish and there were strong social ties between German and germanophone Polish Jews and Jews further east. All in all, perhaps 10 million Russians had close ties to the German language or German-speaking institutions before the revolution.
> CD: East Germany was a part of the Warsaw Pact, and an important one.
> Gorbachev speaks German (badly) as does Putin (fluently). (PS. Putin's
> nickname when he was Sobchak's assistant in St. Petersburg was "Stasi.") You
> were much more likely to study German than any other Western European
> language.
There was apparently quite little contact between East Germany and the Russian Germans during the Soviet era. I wrote a paper on Russo-German literature in my distant and misspent youth and found interviews with artists and authors in the Soviet Union who worked in German. One explicitly said that he had had very little contact with Germans of any kind, and all of them seemed to have lots of Russian influences to name and no contemporary German ones.
Putin speaks fluent German because it was once his job, as the KGB officer charged with stealing western technology via inter-German contacts. I didn't know that Gorbachev spoke German at all. There used to be an outfit in Leipzig called Robotron that manufactured unlicensed zx80 clones in the late 80's. You can still get software for them off the 'Net. It was one of Putin's babies.
> Also, there was a huge German diaspora in Russia during the 1700s and 1800s
> as part of the Westernization plans of various tsars. They would import
> engineers, architects, scientists and so forth. Until the 1950s, there were
> whole towns in Russia in which German was the daily language. There are
> enough Russians in Moscow who self-identify as German to support the
> newspaper Moskaue Deutsche-Zeiting (a friend of mine is the arts &
> entertainment editor).
Before WWII, German culture in the USSR was not in general suppressed and sometimes even encouraged. The Party could hardly complain that the language of Karl Marx was somehow contrary to socialism. When the war started, many unassimilated or partially assimilated German communities were relocated east, particularly to Kazakhstan, out of fear that they might harbour Nazi spies or sympathizers. Most of my relatives who remained in the USSR ended up in the Alma-Aty region. This is one reason why there was so little contact between the two.
I had the impression that by the 1970's, German had largely disappeared as a first language in Russia, and that Russian Germans were a pretty thoroughly integrated community. Germany has been complaining that immigrants arriving from Russia under the right of return for ethnic Germans can't speak any German at all. The Turkish community in Germany has made a lot of noise about how these Russians can get into Germany and live off welfare without ever learning German while third generation Turkish Germans who have never set foot in Turkey and speak nothing but German are still treated as unwanted aliens.
A lot of Russian scientific papers in the 50's and 60's have authors with German sounding names. The presence of so many high ranking ethnic Germans in the Soviet apparatus suggests that Germans were not terribly oppressed in the USSR, but there were strong pressures to assimilate, although perhaps no stronger than in the US or Canada.
Scott Martens