Kazakstan: German Exodus Slowing

For more than a decade, ethnic Germans have been leaving Kazakstan in droves to make a new life in a country about which they knew very little. But now the exodus has slowed to a trickle, and there are even people coming back after finding life in Germany harder than they expected.

German ambassador Andreas Koerting says 150 families have returned to Kazakstan this year. He hailed this as a “good sign”.

On a visit last month to Pavlodar region, where many of the community still live, Koerting said the number of people who had expressed a wish to go to Germany had fallen to 100,000, half the figure seen in previous years.

Not all of those who say they want to go will actually make the trip, but the drop is an indication that the exodus is largely over. This comes as a relief for the German government, which has been keen to stem the flow of ethnic Germans from all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Some 700,000 people have made the trip from Kazakstan alone – the bulk of more than a million or so Germans who used to live there.

Most of the German community in Kazakstan were deported there by Stalin in 1941. They previously lived as farmers in the Volga region of Russia, where Catherine the Great invited them as settlers.

For many, the uncertainty and economic decline which accompanied the end of the Soviet Union and the discovery that they were living in a country separate from Russia, prompted them to take advantage of Germany’s open-door policy.

Many found it hard to adapt to 20th-century Germany, since they had grown up as Soviet citizens and not even their great-grandparents would have had any memory of the country. By the 1990s many people spoke better Russian than German and had intermarried with other groups.

“We could not overcome the language barrier. And as the demand for the language increased – to get a job or study at school – we thought more and more about returning to Kazakstan,” Olga Schmidt, a recent returnee, told IWPR.

Olga emigrated with high hopes more than 10 years ago, following most of her relatives who had already gone.

But she found that people in Germany were not as welcoming as they might have been. “They viewed us as strangers,” she said. Now she is back home.

In an interview with the Kazakstan magazine Kontinent, Koerting said he believed part of the reason why former Soviet Germans do not integrate well is that they tend to settle together, forming inward-looking groups and failing to learn German.

In any case it has become harder to emigrate. Previously it was enough to prove German descent. A new German immigration law, which came into force in January, imposes stricter requirements, such as a language test on arrival. According to Elena Sadovskaya, head of the Kazakstan Conflict Studies Centre, the quota of people allowed to come from the former Soviet republics has also been reduced.

Germany is keen to encourage people to stay in their own countries, and has supported cultural programmes and small businesses in Kazakstan. But the German community in Kazakstan – like everybody else who lives there – face serious economic problems such as high unemployment.

According to community leader Alexander Dederer, many of the 350,000-strong community will try to leave for Germany anyway.

Many Germans feel that they are discriminated against, like other Russian-speakers or non-Kazaks.

“In Kazakstan, there is a clear preference for those who belong to the titular nation,” said one woman who asked remain anonymous. Her son had problems getting a good government job, and she put this down to Kazak officials favouring their own ethnic kin.

Venera Abisheva is an IWPR contributor in Almaty.