From Privileged to Dispossessed

"From Privileged to Dispossessed" is a social and economic history of the foreign settlers who emigrated to the Volga region in Russia in the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the years 1860 to 1917, a period of rapid change in Russia, it is at once a detailed look at life in the lower Volga valley and a vital chapter in the history of the multinational Russian Empire, assessing as it does the impact of national policy in the outlying provinces. James W. Long's book shatters the prevailing view of the Volga Germans in Russia, showing them not untouched by time but remarkably adaptable to ever-changing circumstances. It reveals how numerous nineteenth-century government reforms and rapid economic development, and the subsequent restructuring of state and society, transformed their lives for good and ill. It also illustrates the striking continuity of a misguided nationality policy that alienated a loyal, productive minority group by means of rigorous Russification and expropriation of landholdings. "From Privileged to Dispossessed" makes extensive use of rare materials from major Soviet research libraries and of oral interviews with Volga German immigrants. The book will be of special interest not only to historians but to people of Volga German descent, whose ancestors had learned to survive in a foreign land a century before they came to the North American prairies in the 1870s. James W. Long, a professor of history at Colorado State University, is the author of "The German Russians" (1978) and of many articles about Russian history in the "Slavic Review" and other journals.