The republic was created following the Russian Revolution, by October 29Decree of the Soviet government, Volga German Workers' Commune, giving Soviet Germans a special status among the non-Russians in the USSR. It was upgraded to the status of Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on February 20, 1924, by the Declaration of the All-Union Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR. It became the first national autonomous unit in the Soviet Union after the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. It occupied the area of compact settlement of the large Volga German minority in Russia, which numbered almost 1.8 million by 1897. The republic was declared on January 6, 1924. At the moment of declaration of autonomy, an amnesty was announced. However, it eventually was applied to a small number of people. According to the policy of korenizatsiya, carried out in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, usage of the German language was promoted in official documents and Germans were encouraged to occupy management positions. According to the 1939 census, there were 366,685 Germans in the autonomy. By January 1, 1941, the Volga Germans Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic included the city of Engels and 22 cantons: Baltsersky, Gmelinsky, Gnadenflyursky, Dobrinsky, Zelmansky, Zolotovsky, Ilovatsky, Kamensky, Krasnoyarsky, Krasnokutsky, Kukkussky, Lizandergeysky, Marientalsky, Marxshtadtsky, Pallasovsky, Staro-Poltavsky, Ternovsky, Untervaldsky, Fedorovsky, Franksky, Ekgeimsky and Erlenbakhsky. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the end of the Volga German ASSR. On August 28, 1941, Joseph Stalin issued a formal Decree of Banishment abolishing the ASSR and, fearing they could act as German spies, exiling all Volga Germans to the Kazakh SSR and Siberia. Many were interned in labor camps merely due to their heritage. The Republic was formally extinguished on September 7, 1941. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, the situation for Volga Germans improved dramatically. In 1964, a second decree was issued, openly admitting the government's guilt in pressing charges against innocent people and urging Soviet citizens to give the Volga Germans every assistance in their "economic and cultural expansion". With the existence of a socialist German state in East Germany now a reality of the post-war world, the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was never reestablished. The land area is now mostly part of Saratov Oblast, except for a small area in northern Volgograd Oblast. Beginning in the early 1980s and accelerating after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Volga Germans have emigrated to Germany by taking advantage of the German law of return, a policy which grants citizenship to all those who can prove to be a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such a person.
Population
The following table shows population of the ethnic groups of the Volga German ASSR:
