Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Moving along

I am now up to 63 pages on Catherine's Grandchildren. I am almost finished with the chapter on the 1930s which is pretty grim. It has lots of stuff on deportations, famine and executions. Not nearly as bad as the 1940s, but alot worse than the other decades covered in the work. There are no really good decades, but the 1960s may be the best one overall. It had no famines, mass arrests, deportations or major wars involving the Russian-Germans.

I think I am going to start working on the 1920s soon. There were a number of positive things happening among the various Russian-German communities during that decade. The unending misery of the 1930s and 40s is really starting to wear on me. It is made all the worse by the fact that the 1920s were a time of cultural and economic regeneration. The various German national administrative units established in the USSR during the 1920s have really interesting histories. I have already finished writing about the one in Azerbaijan. Now I need to write about the Volga German ASSR and the various German national districts in Ukraine, the two in Crimea, the one in the Kuban, the one in Georgia and the one in Altai.

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