«Strict supervision or eviction?»: toward a question of the situation of germans in Petrograd province in 1914-1916

Abstract

With the outbreak of the First World War, the German population of the Russian Empire had a hard time as they were labeled as “parasites on the body of the Russian people”. Legislative acts were adopted against them, which were restrictive or prohibitive in nature. At present, there are many works in which the authors addressed the changes and problems of the situation of Germans during the period in question. But they studied mainly the regions of the Volga region, Novorossiya, Siberia and the Caucasus, as for the Petrograd province, the topic almost did not attract the attention of researchers. In the article the authors attempt to show how the “liquidation legislation” introduced in 1914-1916 influenced the development of the Petrograd province. The authors attempt to show how the “liquidation legislation” introduced in 1914-1916 affected the life and activities of German colonists. The main sources for our article were materials from the archival collections of the Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg, the Russian State Historical Archive and the periodical press. The authors of the article came to the following conclusions. The policy of the authorities was ill-conceived. Their interference in the issues of private land ownership, when the estates of German owners were liquidated without taking into account their economic profitability and the presence of Russian citizenship, had a detrimental effect not only on the farms themselves, but also hit the economy of the state. In addition, numerous violations on the part of officials provoked a lot of complaints about their actions. As a result, local and central administrations had to reconsider their decisions if Germans proved their Russian citizenship or if their relatives received awards on the battlefields.