Kazakhstan’s Ethnic Germans Confront Soviet Deportation Legacy

In Astana, Kazakhstan, 22-year-old Yunna Kinereish, a public relations student, navigates a complex identity as a Kazakh German. “I am German by ethnicity. But I also feel that I’m Kazakh, because I keep the traditions with my family, and I have this mentality,” she says. Kinereish is part of the Wiedergeburt (Revival) Association of Germans in Kazakhstan, which represents an estimated 223,000 Kazakh Germans. Recently, she acted in a play at the association’s youth theater that depicted the fate of her Russian German forebears.

The history of Germans in the Russian Empire dates to the 18th century, when they were incentivized to settle in regions including Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. However, after Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Josef Stalin ordered the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Germans from Russia and Ukraine to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Over a million people were deported, and at least 200,000 died from expulsion, hunger, and forced labor. Kinereish’s own family was driven from the Ukrainian village of Kleinwärter, a German settlement.

Preserving Memory Through Performance

The House of Friendship in Astana serves as a center for German culture, financed primarily by the German government. It offers language courses, social work, and programs focused on the culture of remembrance regarding deportation and repression under the Soviet regime. Kinereish finds the personal stories brought to stage deeply moving. “It’s not easy for me, because it all touches my heart very deeply. I actually feel like crying. But when I’m on stage …, I have to be strong,” she explains.

In 2025, Kinereish created a film about German women incarcerated in ALZhIR, the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. The Soviet Union established its largest camp system in Kazakhstan during the Great Terror of the 1930s. ALZhIR held 18,000 women imprisoned solely because their husbands were convicted as traitors or enemies of the people. Among them were 167 ethnic German women, whose stories are told in Kinereish’s film.

Confronting a Brutal Past

Just outside Astana, the ALZhIR memorial stands beyond the Arch of Grief. The museum displays personal items, models of primitive quarters, original documents, and photographs. One photo shows Gertrud Platais, a German print worker from Lower Silesia who became a Soviet citizen. After her husband’s arrest in 1938, she was convicted as a “relative of a traitor to the homeland” and sent to ALZhIR, enduring extreme temperatures and forced labor until 1946. She was then banished to the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp (Karlag) before being rehabilitated in 1956.

Karlag, located about 250 kilometers south of Astana, was the largest camp complex, covering an area roughly 22 times the size of New York City. Nearly one million people passed through it between 1931 and 1959, with around 10,000 deaths recorded between 1940 and 1950 alone. Today, the Karlag museum occupies the former camp administration building, featuring reconstructed interrogation and torture cells, though it receives few visitors.

Researching the Gulag’s Footprint

Katherine M. Erdman, an American anthropologist and archaeologist at Nazarbayev University in Astana, has researched the Gulag system for about a decade. Her team uses drone flights, interviews, and on-the-ground research to locate camps and understand their lasting impact. “In many regions, the landscape has been shaped by forced labor,” she notes, pointing to factories built alongside primitive living quarters. However, she adds, “Often we’re just met with apathy, or flat-out rejection” when sharing findings with local administrations. Despite official desires to show the country is confronting its history, Erdman experiences a lack of interest and even rejection.