“Freedom in Exile?” Russian Germans, Jewish Quota Refugees and Their Life Experiences in Siberia
“Freedom in Exile?” Russian Germans, Jewish Quota Refugees and Their Life Experiences in Siberia

Summary/Abstract: In the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens of German or Jewish nationality immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany. Most of these emigrants came from Siberia or Central Asia – peripheral regions of the USSR – to which they were largely forcibly resettled during the Stalinist era. The majority lived there until the collapse of the Soviet Union, before they emigrated due to the worsening economic, professional and security conditions. When they arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany, many of them discovered that, despite the legal freedoms offered to them by the German state, they felt freer in the USSR. Russian Germans and Jewish quota refugees particularly remembered the period under Leonid Brezhnev (mid-1960s to early 1980s) as a period in which – despite the autocratic nature of the Soviet state – they enjoyed various freedoms, including on material, cultural and political levels. The perceived absence of the Soviet state allowed them to carry out individual actions in their everyday lives that they do not see as given in the Federal Republic due to the existing legal and social circumstances. As a result, many of them got the impression that they were ‘freer’ in their Soviet homeland than they are in their current everyday lives.

• Details
• Contents