Archive for the ‘latvia’ Category
To start the year, here is a selection of eight books recommended for family historians in the English-speaking world with roots in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus:
Armenia
The Crossing Place, by Philip Marsden, 1993. This is subtitled “A Journey among the Armenians”. Marsden travels across the Armenian communities of the Middle-East and Eastern Europe to the Republic of Armenia but it would be wrong to think of this book simply as a travelogue, as it is more a reflection upon the survival of Armenia and the meaning of Armenian-ness in the Old World. Of course it touches upon the 1915 Genocide but equally it highlights the determined persistence and endurance of Armenian life.
Bosnia
Bosnia: A Cultural History, by Ivan Lovrenović, 2001. Most English-language books about Bosnia tend to be written from an outside perspective and to pontificate about the 1992-95 War. This book is one of the refreshing exceptions to that trend and is recommended reading for anyone with roots, whether Croat, Jewish, Muslim or Serb, in this part of the continent.
Greece
Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, by Juliet du Boulay, 1974. I like reading anthropological and ethnographical works for the insight they give into the everyday lives and mindsets of a people. This book covers every aspect of the lives of the villagers of “Ambeli” (a pseudonym), a remote hamlet on the island of Euboea (Evia). There is still continuity despite changing times, and this work will give the family historian a profound sense of the lives of their ancestors in rural Greece and, of course, of how their distant cousins back in the old land continued to live well into the latter half of the 20th century.
Latvia
Walking Since Daybreak, Modris Eksteins, 1999. This is a family story written by a Canadian Latvian academic but, at the same time, a history of Latvia in the first half of the 20th century and a rare view into the lives of the officially recognised Displaced Persons, those individuals and families who for one reason or another found their way into UN relief camps in Occupied defeated Austria, Germany and Italy in the period 1945-52.
Lithuania
The Lithuanians in Scotland, by John Millar, 1998. Unlike all the other books I have chosen for this list, this one is more about the lives of an Eastern European people in their host land than their native land. This book is an easy read and very good on the lives of Scottish Lithuanians and the difficulties they experienced in Scotland (such as anti-Catholic prejudice and being mistaken for Poles). As the title suggests, though, it will not give you much on the home country Lithuania (which was of course part of Imperial Russia at the time of emigration).
Poland
I might have chosen one of several works by the tremendous contemporary writer Andrzej Stasiuk. I have selected Dukla (1997). It’s imaginative non-fiction, reflections on the nature of being in the remote rural and mountainous Beskidy regions of Poland’s Podkarpackie province (once part of the Austro-Hungarian Galicia kronland). There are satellite dishes and there are motor cars, but there is also a strong sense that, beneath the superficial changes of modernisation and despite the impositions of the Communist era, peasant life in this part of the country at the end of the 20th century continued pretty much as was from previous centuries.
Russia
I couldn’t choose between two Great Russian Novels in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. These are Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959) and Vasily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter (1994). The former is the greater work of art, but both cover a vast sweep of Russian history in the 20th century and capture the Russian experience in all its daunting multiplicity.
Serbia
A Serbian Village, by Joel M Halpern, 1956. This is subtitled “Social and Cultural Change in a Yugoslav Community”. While this might sound like a dry academic book, the author, an anthropologist, writes in fascinating detail about the particularity of daily life, culture and customs in the village of Orašac. Although by the 1950s life in the Šumadija region had already started to embrace modernity, there is still enough of traditional rural Serbia intact to make this book a great insight into the lives of peasant ancestors from continental Serbia.
This week the family history website Find My Past has published the central index to the register of merchant seamen on British vessels. The original record series was created by the then Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman (part of the Board of Trade). It is now held on microfiche at The National Archives in Kew, England and can be seen under shelf references BT348, BT349 and BT350.
The resource takes the shape of record cards which form a central index to seamen registered to serve on British-registered vessels within the period from approximately 1918 to 1941.
What makes the Central Index Register cards interesting from an Eastern European genealogical research perspective is that many of those employed in the British merchant navy were engaged at overseas ports. For example, there are large numbers of records relating to Estonian, Greek and Latvian sailors. Additionally, there are smaller but still significant quantities of seamen from Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, and even some from landlocked Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some of these men may have settled and even become naturalised in Britain but presumably a majority remained citizens or subjects of their country of birth.
The front and back of each index card have been scanned and an online index published so that the records of individual merchant marines can be searched for and located. Two, three or more cards of different dates exist for some individuals.
The cards evolved a little over time, from CR1 to CR2 to CR10 types, and the details recorded changed too. However, the basic format remains the same, as does the core detail of name, year and place of birth, rating, Discharge A Number, ship name and/or official registered number, and date. Some cards give physical descriptions, while others sport a black and white passport-style photograph and signature.
The data is handwritten onto the printed index cards. The handwriting is not always legible and may be faint or contain abbreviations. The place of birth information on the cards will reflect the date at which they were created and the spellings current at that time, sometimes anglicised or misspelt. For example, the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa often appear as Dagö and Ösel respectively (typically minus their diacritics), being their old Swedish names, and similarly the Saaremaa capital Kuressaare is often given as Arensburg.
This online collection is not a complete record of those sailing on British merchant vessels between the Wars. The majority of cards dating from 1913 to 1921 are known to have been destroyed in 1969. Moreover, a fourth record series at The National Archives (shelf reference BT364) is not being published, on account of data protection and personal privacy concerns. The series BT364 also covers the period 1921 to 1941 and was extracted from the materials that now comprise BT348 to BT350 inclusive. It remains possible that this series, which has also been scanned and indexed, may be released too in due course.
A final note: while some of the individuals contained within these records will have seen service additionally in the Royal Navy at some date, it must be emphasised that the majority would have served only on British merchant vessels and were not in the armed forces.
Who was recruited?
In the early 18th century, the expectation was that one man would be enlisted into the army from every 20 families within a community each year. All social estates, high and low, were liable for military service. However, over the decades many privileges and exemptions were granted so that by 1858 an estimated 20% of the otherwise eligible male population of the Empire was in fact exempt – this included landowners, members of merchant guilds, those with a higher education and the like, but also all those living in specific regions of empire such as Bessarabia. The burden of “other ranks” military service therefore fell heaviest on the peasantry and the urban poor.
How were recruits selected?
In rural Russia, the peasant community itself – the mir – was responsible for putting forward a list of candidates. While the mir or commune probably knew who among its members was eligible for the draft, the undertaking of the Russian censuses, producing the periodic but somewhat irregular revision lists (now of great value to family historians with roots in the former Russian Empire), formalised the process by identifying and recording the population. Unlike censuses in Britain, for example, which were used solely for social planning, the Russian revisions were used explicitly for taxation and conscription purposes.
Each year, the commune produced a shortlist of potential recruits which was then submitted to an army induction centre set up temporarily for the purpose in the nearest town in the volost or uezd (or district). The requisite number of men would then be conscripted into the army, while those not selected could expect to be put forward again the following year. Of course, some men were rejected by the army for not meeting its physical criteria and would unlikely to be conscripted in any year. Others, such as those with disabilities, were deselected by the commune itself and never made the list. To a certain extent, both the commune and the army were sensitive to the fact that each conscript was a lost worker and a lost taxpayer, with the peasants knowing that someone else would have to make up the deficit in labour and money. This meant that there was usually a conscious effort to spare only sons, or only working males in families. In a household of many brothers or sons, it was almost inevitable that one or more would be drafted. However, it was also possible for wealthier farmers to use influence or to purchase a surrogate from a different community to take the place of their brother or son who had been placed on the shortlist. Finally, commune members perceived to be unproductive, or exhibiting anti-social behaviour or committing petty crimes, would be sure to top the shortlist.
While therefore the commune exercised a measure of influence over who was recruited and who not, it is easy to see that the whole process of conscription was a source of stress and tension within each community. This was particularly the case as army service was neither short nor sweet…
How long did a soldier serve in the army?
- Before 1793, a soldier could expect to serve in the Russian army for life.
- From 1793, this was reduced to 25 years.
- From 1834, military service was reduced to 20 years.
- From 1874, the term of service was reduced to 18 years, of which initially the first 5 years were to be spent in the regular standing army and the subsequent 13 years in the reserves. However, later this was changed to 3 years in the army and 15 years in the reserves.
What happened to a new recruit?
Enlistment into the army was a transformational experience. Not only would the recruit very probably leave the vicinity of his native village for the first time but he would be unlikely to return for many years, if at all. Instead, he would be swallowed up into the army corpus, be billeted upon unwilling householders and endure all the hardships of army life which were severe even during peacetime.
However, something else rather peculiar immediately happened to a new recruit. His legal status in Russian society changed. That change was a form of emancipation, albeit deferred until such time as he was discharged from the army. Upon joining the army he ceased to be exposed to any of his former tax or labour obligations, whether to state, church or landowner. Effectively, he was now a free man, just a free man conscripted into the unfreedom of army life.
What about soldiers’ wives and children?
If a recruit was already married, with or without children, the usual scenario was long term separation. There was no easy mechanism for wives and children to go upon the strength, although some managed to continue to cohabit with their men when they were stationed in garrisons or fortresses. Instead, the recruit’s family was subject to great uncertainty and potential hardship. Wives, too, became legally free when the soldier attested. This meant also that they were entitled to an internal passport granting freedom of movement and employment. However, a disproportionate number of wives either drifted into prostitution in towns, or had illegitimate children; some remarried bigamously.
Soldiers’ children were a subcategory in the system of social estates. Sons, including until 1856 the illegitimate children of soldiers’ wives (where the soldier was not himself the father), were registered and expected to enter military service when they came of age.
In Imperial Russia, the status of women and children was determined by that of their husbands or fathers. This is why a soldier’s wife became free when he was recruited. However, this also meant that a soldier’s widow who remarried could become a serf or a peasant owing normal dues once again, and similarly a soldier’s daughter who married a serf lost her free status and became herself enserfed (until emancipation).
Unmarried recruits were of course strongly discouraged from marrying.
What happened to a soldier once discharged from the army?
If a soldier survived the hardships of a full term in the army, he would be discharged to enjoy for the first time and as best he could the freedoms he had acquired when he was recruited. Now he had theoretical freedom of movement; he was exempt from taxation; he did not have to labour for the landlord. However, at the same time he received only a small lump sum and had no immediate means of support. Therefore he was also free to become jobless and hungry and poor. In these circumstances, it was not unusual for a discharged soldier to have to live upon charity, or to become a hawker or a casual labourer, or to struggle to ply a trade. Other old soldiers entered state service as messengers or guards, or in the police or fire services. Additionally, until reforms in 1867, significant numbers of retired soldiers were settled in so-called veterans’ towns or on virgin lands owned or claimed by the state, often in frontier situations.
Others where they could returned to their native village to farm the family plot if it still existed, or to buy a new plot if they had the money. In fact, the 1867 returns henceforth required discharged soldiers to return to the community from which they had been recruited, at least partly to prevent the social problems associated with ex-soldiers which were a growing cause for concern in cities and towns.
Revision lists are the nearest Imperial Russian equivalent to the censuses conducted in places such as Canada, USA and Britain which are so familiar and indispensable to family historians in those regions. While those censuses were intended as a count of the population at a particular point in time and were conducted over a single night or weekend every 10 years, the Russian revision lists were generated for taxation purposes and were more irregular in frequency and duration, with each one tending to take up to a year or more to be completed.
The revision lists, also known as revision of souls, are extremely useful to those genealogists with ancestral roots in the Russian Empire, which of course covered great swathes of territory outside its current borders, for instance in the Baltic and in the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine. The term “revision” derives from the detailed comparison which is being made by the census-takers between the census being undertaken and its immediate predecessor.
Although revision lists evolved and therefore vary over time, essentially each revision list enumerates all residents (or at least all male residents) of a particular place. In the Baltic provinces, with the exception of land owned by church or state, most land was in the hands of a small number of the usually Baltic German elite. Their estates were divided into the demesne (the manor or farm – hof – and its surrounding estate lands) and the peasant farmsteads or smallholdings, all of which were named, and of which there could be a hundred or more on any one single estate. Agricultural labourers lived both on the estate lands and on the smallholdings of other peasants. Those smallholding peasants did not have an opportunity to own their farmsteads until this was made possible by the land reform measures implemented first in 1849 and then ratified in 1860 in Livland (Livonia) and in 1863 in Kurland (Courland). Thereafter, peasant ownership expanded rapidly until by the 1880s most smallholdings were owned by their occupiers.
What the revision lists provide, among other things, for the family historian is evidence of movement. This is because each revision records not just where an individual is resident at that time but also where he or she was resident at the time of the previous revision, if different. For example, the 1850 revision gives where a person was living in the 1833 revision. This of course makes it possible to track a person across time.
It is important to understand that migration in early and mid-19th century European Russia, for instance in the Baltic provinces, was generally local. Usually, we are not talking about emigration beyond Russia or beyond the province, but about small-scale movements of only 2 or 3 km in most cases.
Movement between estates was minimal. Those peasants making such movements were usually young men and women in their twenties getting married. Military conscripts were the only other major group of individuals who moved outside the estate.
Movements within an estate were common. Some smallholders moved to another farmstead, while many agricultural labourers were mobile, even moving annually between different farms on the estate.
A revision list such as the 9th revision in 1850 records departures and arrivals. For those individuals who were present at the time of the previous revision in 1833 and have left since, it records when they left and their destination. For those who were living elsewhere in 1833 and have since arrived, the place of origin is recorded. Just as the 1840 and 1850 American censuses, or the 1841 and 1851 English censuses, show only where individuals were living at those two dates, and are silent on any movements in between, so the 1833 and 1850 revision lists only plot where a person was at these two dates, not any interim places of residence. For instance, an agricultural labourer could quite conceivably have moved every year between the two revisions but will only be recorded on them at the two qualifying dates of 1833 and 1850. This also means that a person who is at the same place in 1833 and 1850 may of course have lived elsewhere in between but returned. The family historian must therefore accept that they are only being presented with snapshots in time and not with an unbroken seamless record of movement. Nevertheless, the significance of the revision lists cannot be under-estimated for those researchers investigating their ancestors and the structure and composition of family trees in the Russian Empire in the 19th century.
In the Russian Imperial provinces of Livland (also known as Livonia) and Kurland (also spelt Courland), the peasantry obtained surnames over a process of years between the 1810 and the 1830s (the so-called period of name-giving). It is worth a genealogist with roots in this region taking the time to understand the background to this process, as it may explain certain facts or why the family historian is confronted with a potentially insurmountable brickwall in their Latvian research.
The Livland and Kurland countryside were dominated by Baltic German landowners, with a scattering of Polish and Russian counterparts. The land was essentially divided up into large estates, which in turn contained individual farmsteads as well as the generic estate lands. Some of the peasants were effectively heads of farmsteads, notwithstanding the fact that they themselves, as serfs, were the property of the estate owner, to whom they paid dues. Other serfs were agricultural labourers who worked on the estate and/or farmstead lands. Both types of serf were legally bound to their owner on the estate, although movement between individual farmsteads was common for the agricultural labourers. Neither type of serf bore a surname; rather, they would be known by a combination of their first name and the name of the place (usually the farmstead rather than estate) to which they belonged. Sometimes, the name of the father might be used as a qualifier to differentiate between individuals of the same forename on the same farmstead.
The legal process of the landless emancipation of the serfs took place between 1816 and 1819, although of course its implementation on the ground in the provinces occurred over a period of time extending into the mid-1820s and beyond. The serfs were freed but were freed without land. This meant that although they had legal freedom of movement, including the right to move between estates, they tended to remain on the land they had worked in recent generations and which was still owned by the landowners; they had no land of their own to buy or sell.
The process of taking surnames took place concurrently with emancipation for families and individuals. The process was controlled by newly created peasant courts set up at county (pagasts) level. Once chosen, names could only be altered by approval of the court. Details respecting the old and the new names were entered into court minutes along with details of emancipation. Unfortunately, survival of these minutes and of manorial rolls confirming the new surnames is far from complete.
The state set down both rules and guidelines, refined a number of times in the early 1820s, for the taking of family names.
The head of a farmstead was responsible for choosing the name which would be borne by him and his lineal descendants. The name selected by a man in his 50s or 60s would therefore cascade down to his living children and grandchildren and thereafter to his as yet unborn remoter issue. However, if this family elder had already died and, instead, there were a number of adult sons in, say, their 30s or 40s, each of these brothers was free to choose their own surname. This means that while they may all have taken the same surname, this was not always the case – siblings may bear different surnames.
The agricultural labourers and the peasants employed solely on estate lands acquired their surnames generally at a somewhat later date than the farmsteaders.
One of the rules established early on, in 1822, was the prohibition on taking the surnames of the German landowners, other nobility and what we would now call celebrities, who clearly did not feel flattered when a newly liberated serf graced himself with their grand and distinguished name.
By 1824, guidelines were being issued on what were regarded as appropriate and acceptable surnames. Peasants were encouraged to take surnames with a literal meaning in the local Latvian vernacular, rather than Germanic names. A suitable name might be that of the farmstead upon which they lived and worked. Also, given the small pool of forenames used in most rural communities, the authorities tried to dissuade peasants from assuming names based on patronymics, so as to avoid a plethora of families adopting the surname Jansons after men named Janis, Jēkabsons named after Jēkabs, Pētersons named after Pēteris, and so on.
But these were only guidelines and in most cases the peasantry was able to select a surname of its own choosing without intervention from the authorities. The existence of unflattering names derived from physical appearance or character suggests that some were assigned to the individuals concerned by the court or even the landowner, perhaps because their own suggestions were rejected, or they could not decide, or were in such reduced circumstances that they were not in a position to exercise choice – we will never know. However, most names were indeed based upon the identity of the farmstead, or taken from nature (trees, birds, animals and geographical features), or from patronymics. Surprisingly perhaps, contrary to what we might expect from most European surname dictionaries, only a relatively small proportion of names were occupationally derived.
To see the rolling out of surnames, one need only compare the 7th, 8th and 9th revision lists, carried out respectively from 1815/16 (in some places not undertaken until as late as 1826), from 1833 and from 1850. The revisions were those Imperial Russian censuses enumerating the individuals living on estates – the term “revision” refers to the comparison between the present census and its immediate predecessor, noting the changes caused for instance by death and in- and out-migration from an estate. The 7th revision usually shows very few surnames. However, by the time of the 8th, a great many peasants had acquired surnames and the process is fully complete by the 9th revision in 1850.
For an in-depth study of the period of name-giving in Latvia as it affected one particular Livland estate, please see the excellent and very readable article “Patrilines, Surnames and Family Identity”, by Andrejs Plakans and Charles Wetherell, published in The History of the Family, vol 5 no 2, in 2000.
The situation of the peasantry in the 19th century Russian Empire is much more complex than generally thought, and a genealogist with ancestors in the territories of rural Russia should be aware of this complexity so as to better understand the likely circumstances under which their ancestors may have lived.
Firstly, it is not true to think of the peasantry as being a single undifferentiated mass, or to say that all peasants were serfs. The Russian Empire was expanding in all directions at the start of the 19th century. The Poles in the Partition were not enserfed when they came under Tsarist jurisdiction; nor were the Finns after 1809 or the Bessarabians after 1812. Furthermore, where serfdom had previously existed in the Baltic, it began to be modified, first in Livonia (or Livland – roughly the north of modern day Latvia and the south of Estonia), where there were reforms in 1804, and then in Estland (today’s northern Estonia) and Courland (or Kurland, western and southern Latvia) where there was landless emancipation of the serfs during the years 1816 to 1819. This introduces another point worth emphasising: emancipation did not necessarily lead to increased prosperity and, in fact, the opposite was true in these Baltic regions – the serfs were freed without being gifted or sold land and therefore became more destitute than they had been before the reforms.
Elsewhere in the empire, most minorities, such as the free agriculturalists, were not subject to serfdom, something that the Russian peasantry did not understand and which could cause resentment – why should German colonists, for example, be free when native Russians were not?
Secondly, there were different types of peasant in the lands of Imperial Russia.
There were state peasants, who were literally owned by the state and worked upon state lands. They were the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance and later, from 1837, the Ministry of State Properties. Although state peasants enjoyed some rights and freedoms (for example, they could acquire smallholdings of their own and even become civil servants), they had to pay taxes, maintain roads and supply recruits to the army. Moreover, the state was a largely indifferent owner and did not invest in its properties.
Then there were privately-owned serfs, who were the property of the landowning aristocracy and gentry. Absentee landowners often left an estate manager in charge, not infrequently to exploit the serfs on the estate. Some landowners permitted their serfs to remit in cash not labour dues – in other words, instead of working upon the landowner’s estate, they could leave the land and go to work in a town or city, and pay their owner in lieu. Of course, while some serfs made a substantial amount of money and were able to purchase their freedom, the majority remained upon the land in reduced circumstances.
The serfs in Russia were emancipated from 1861. Unlike in the Baltic region of the empire in 1816, the serfs were able to purchase their dwelling and land, so as to become independent smallholders. As redemption prices for the privilege of emancipation were way beyond the means of many serfs, the state lent them monies at 6% annual interest for up to 49 years, thereby creating a generation of peasants perpetually in arrears to the state.
Then there was the issue of military service. By 1815 the Russian Army was 1 million strong and the state, entering peacetime, was apprehensive of demobilisation and its impact upon communities across Russia and its potential for unrest. At this point, it needs to be explained what military service entailed. Men were recruited at aged 20 years for a period of 25 years (reduced to 15 years from 1834). Once enlisted, a serf became a free man in law; hence, once demobbed he would be his own man, with no immediate source of employment but with the experience of handling a weapon. To mitigate the risks that this entailed, the army found ways of making military service mean life service, not releasing men at the end of their term (for instance, by imposing extra service as a penalty for the many disciplinary offences).
Between 1815 and 1858, the state found an ingenious way of dealing with demobilisation and managing the risk to stable civilian life of releasing ex-soldiers into the community. So as not to demobilise troops, agricultural “military colonies” were established. Previously uninhabited state land was colonised by a mixture of soldiers and state-owned peasants commandeered from elsewhere. The soldiers retained the status of soldiers, although in their everyday lives they became agricultural labourers working for the state peasants. The army was therefore kept at full strength and made economically productive and self-supporting. Furthermore, the reserve army was strengthened because of the newly acquired status of the state peasants residing in these military colonies. The head of the household and the eldest son remained state peasants. However, younger sons were classed as military canonists (the term used for sons of soldiers during their minority) and joined the reserve at aged 18 years. It is estimated that by 1825 over 750,000 soldiers and families had been settled on these military colonies in areas such as Mogilev, Novgorod and St Petersburg, as well as in the southern region of Ukraine.
Much has been written about Jewish aversion to military service and, of course, the Jews shared the same reasons as the Russian peasantry for not being keen on being conscripted into the army, plus had plenty more valid religious reasons of their own. In fact, the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was not subject to military service until 1827. However, from then on, the state pursued a russification programme for the Jews and required them to be available for service from aged 12 years. Community elders had to select the recruits whenever demanded each year and of course this led to tension and frequent flight to evade the draft.
It is interesting to note that the infantry divisions of the Russian Army tended to be garrisoned around the periphery of the empire, especially in the west. While therefore there might be a solitary division in the Caucasus, or one in Orenburg towards the restless Kazakhstan, the vast majority were stationed in occupied Congress Poland and the westernmost gubernia of Russia (areas now in Belarus’ and Ukraine) where there was a perceived and sometimes a very real threat of politically or economically driven internal unrest.
By the time Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, there were no fewer than 45 Waffen-SS Divisions, although seven of recent formation were not up to strength. Each Division was numbered and named.
Central and Eastern Europeans featured in several of these Divisions (as of course did Belgians, Danes, Dutch, Norwegians and so on):
VII Prince Eugen – Volksdeutsche recruits from the Balkans
XIII Handschar – Bosnian Muslims
XIV Galizien – western Ukrainians
XV and XIX – Lettische, or Latvian Legions
XVIII Horst Wessel – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XX Estnische – Estonian Legion
XXI Skanderbeg – Albanian Muslims
XXII Maria Theresa – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XXIII Kama – Bosnian Muslims and Croatians
XXV, XXVI and XXXIII Hunyadi or Ungarische – Hungarians
XXIX and XXX Russische – Soviet PoWs
XXXI Böhmen-Mähren – Volksdeutsche recruits from Czechoslovakia
XXXII 30 Januar – Balts from Courland
For more details, see Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford University Press, 1996.
It should be immediately apparent that the men in these units would have had very different reasons for joining the Waffen-SS. While the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and, say, the Hungarians may have shared many or all of the tenets of Nazi supremacist ideology, including anti-Semitism, it is much less clear that this would have been the case for some of the others. For instance, the soldiers in the Galizien Division (called the Halychyna Division in Ukrainian) almost certainly saw themselves primarily as fighting against Soviet communism and its expansionism, and for an independent Ukraine, not for the Nazis. The same could be said of the Latvians, for example, who were justifiably fearful of the Soviet Union destroying their short-lived pre-War independence (as, of course, was to happen): veterans, their families and supporters marched last week in Riga to commemorate the Latvian Legion, sparking the annual controversy as to whether they were nationalist freedom fighters or Nazi sympathisers. Among the men in the two Russische Divisions, joining may have been an alternative to languishing in prison camps, or a matter of compulsion.
In these circumstances, it is best not to rush to make value judgements if, during the course of your family history research, you discover that a grandfather, or an uncle, fought in one of these Divisions, as it is not possible to know with any confidence what his underlying motivations may have been at the time.
Up to six million civilians are thought to have been displaced within the Russian Empire between 1914 and 1917. Up to 30% of the inhabitants of Russian cities in wartime were refugees: places like Ekaterinoslav, Kharkiv, Kiev, Nizhny Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov and Samara, received tens of thousands of displaced persons. Refugees flooded into central, black earth and Volga basin gubernia, while many others crossed the Urals into Siberia, or found themselves deposited in Tashkent or elsewhere in Central Asia.
There were three broad types of refugee.
Firstly, there were refugees who fled the advancing German army as it threatened and occupied the Russian territory on which they lived.
Secondly, the Russian military authorities evacuated the population in the path of advancing German forces and as the Russian army was forced to retreat, usually operating a scorched earth policy to prevent resources (manpower, settlements, farms, crops) falling into enemy hands and transporting livestock and machinery behind their own lines to assist the war effort. This pattern also applied to Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which the Russian army occupied in 1914 but was then forced to withdraw from: Austrian subjects either fled or were evacuated to the Russian interior.
Given the rapid advance of the Germans through the lands of what are today Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, these first two types of refugee merge one into the other: if the population did not flee the Prussian military machine, they were evacuated by the Russians. Neither type can be said to have migrated voluntarily; both were displaced in response to irresistible forces. Nearly all found themselves with limited or no means of support by the time they arrived at their destinations in Russia.
As men of fighting age had often been conscripted into the Russian army already, the refugees of these two types were overwhelmingly the women, children and elderly.
The third type of refugee formed a tiny minority. This was the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie who were able to escape to the Russian interior in a more pre-planned way, making their own private transport arrangements and reaching the relative safety and comfort of a major city such as Moscow or St Petersburg. Even those who started out with money might find themselves in reduced circumstances as the war wore on for years without resolution.
Given their origin, most of the refugees were non-Russian. they were, for example, Jews (never trusted by the Russian army command), Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians (not to mention German subjects of Russia, who were deported as soon as possible to the interior, often to Siberia or Central Asia, for reasons of national security). Where possible, the different peoples tended to form their own refugee communities in Russia and this was one of the various factors which crystallised national consciousness and precipitated demands for independence in their homelands in the wake of the War.
In all likelihood, any genealogist whose family history lies in the borderlands of the Russian Empire either occupied by the German army or regarded as a military zone by the Russian army during the years 1914 to 1917 is likely to find their family history research disrupted. Black holes in the documentary evidence are probable; family timelines will appear obscure. Births, marriages and deaths may not have taken place in the expected village or town of origin but somewhere along the long route that the refugees travelled into Russia, or at one or more of the places at which they were temporarily stationed or settled. In conditions of wartime poverty, hunger and disease, untold numbers of refugees died great distances from home and the family historian may never be able to identify when or where such deaths took place and were registered (if, indeed, they were registered at all). Instead, you will find no trace of a death which you know must have taken place, or of the birth or baptism of a child you know to have been born, in these years. The war was also a period of family rupture: even when a nuclear family unit did not become separated during the chaos, the more extended family is likely to have become dispersed to different locations and there cannot have been many families where one or men of fighting age were not conscripted and separated from the families for years.
So this is one of the frequent challenges of Eastern European family history research. You cannot apply without reservation what you know from your experience of undertaking genealogical research in Australia, or Canada, or New Zealand, or UK, or USA. You should expect discontinuities in the family timeline and gaps in the surviving documentary record. You may never know where key family members were at certain dates. But the challenges are one of the many reasons why family history research in Eastern Europe is so interesting and rewarding, as each breakthrough does not come with the relative ease and certainty with which you may be accustomed from undertaking your research in the English-speaking world.
Before November 1918 you would not find Latvia in an atlas, for there was no such country. Pre-WW1 literature in English, following German usage, referred to Latvians as Letts or the Lettish (although strictly speaking this was a term for the native language). Latvia as a modern state was forged in the crucible of WW1, with the collapse of Empire, the October Revolution in Russia, and the victorious Allies’ partial and often expedient commitment to self-determination. The new nation state emerged from former Tsarist Russia, out of Courland, Livonia and part of the Vitebsk gubernia known as Latgale.
From July 1915 until the defeat of Germany, Latvia was under German occupation and, having fled or been evacuated with the retreating Russian army, up to one third of Latvians found themselves living in exile in Russia. Much of the momentum for independence built up among these Latvian refugees.
The right of return for former inhabitants was first extended under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in February 1918. Perhaps 400,000 refugees were repatriated from Russia in the months up to November 1918: note that this figure includes Baltic Germans as well as ethnic Latvians. A further 225,000 or so were repatriated between 1920 (following the Latvian-Russian Refugee Re-evacuation Agreement in June of that year, and the Latvian-Soviet Russian Peace Treaty in August) and 1924. This total includes, as well as Latvian wartime refugees, significant numbers of Latvian agricultural colonists, an estimated 200,000 of whom had settled in southern Russia and Ukraine from the 1880s onwards. Notwithstanding this movement of people, 186,000 Latvians remained in Soviet Russia, while an estimated 60,000 left newly independent Latvia for Russia (both ethnic Russians and Latvian communists disappointed with so-called White Latvia).
The wartime and post-War displacement of large numbers of Latvians, and the complexity of this background of upheaval, can complicate family history, which is seldom a simple linear narrative at the best of times. It may begin to explain why your grandmother seems to have been living as a young girl in Omsk in Siberia around 1918/19 (she was a refugee there); or why a great grandfather, who was a city boy born in Rīga and a Latvian Riflemen veteran, became a small farmer in Latgale in the mid-1920s (he was awarded land there by the new state); or why your great great grandparents, who were clearly ethnic Latvians, appear to have been living in the region of Kharkiv, Ukraine at the close of the C19th (they were pioneering colonists in the 1880s).
These events also mean that you may need to think laterally when researching your Latvian family history. For instance, if your ancestors came from Latgale (say, from Daugavpils, Ludza or Rēzekne), it is quite possible that at least some of the records you will need to use when reconstructing your family tree will be found, not in Latvia, but in Belarus, in which Vitebsk is now situated.