According to statistics, around one and a half million citizens of the Russian Federation are descendants of the so-called Russian Germans. A fairly large share of them would like to return to the historical homeland of their ancestors. But the road home often, in many ways, repeats the fate of Germans in Russia — full of charm, hope, and suffering. One such difficult case reached a happy outcome thanks to the involvement of attorneys from our firm.
A Siberian Story
Challenging a BVA Refusal
A refusal by the Bundesverwaltungsamt (BVA) to recognize late resettler status can be challenged before the administrative court — typically within one month of receiving the refusal.
The southern regions of Western Siberia, the Altai, and Kazakhstan are perhaps the most densely German-settled territories of the former Russian Empire. In the mid-nineteenth century, many Germans from the Volga region, Poland, and Estonia moved in entire villages to the Volga steppes, hoping for a better life — one that, in Russia, was often guaranteed by distance from the capital. Abundant arable land promised good harvests. The steppe filled with German farmsteads and villages intermixed with Ukrainian ones, another source of internal migration within the empire. In 1915, at the height of the First World War, the tsarist government of Nicholas II drafted a law on the forced deportation of Volga Germans to Siberia — it was easier to wage war on peaceful peasants than on the powerful Kaiser's army. On 6 February 1917, Tsar Nicholas approved the so-called "liquidation law," ordering the confiscation of the Volga Germans' land into state ownership. The Revolution derailed these plans. After the October coup, the Bolsheviks went so far as to establish a German republic. But even that happiness was short-lived. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Stolypin railcars carrying prisoners and exiles once again headed to Siberia. Germans deported from Ukraine and the Volga region were formed into labor battalions. And after the war ended, the path back to the land where they had lived in Russia for centuries was closed to them. German villages in Siberia grew by an order of magnitude.
Few people know that, under an agreement between West Germany's first chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Nikita Khrushchev, an arrangement was reached to reunite families torn apart by the war. That marked the first wave of German emigration from the USSR. Naturally, this opportunity was not widely publicized — the Soviets themselves needed the labor force. As a result, the common belief took hold that the borders to the West only opened to Germans at the end of the 1980s, with the peak of emigration coming in the 1990s. Our client, Viktoria Keil, is a descendant of Siberian labor-battalion workers. Her chance to return to Germany as a late resettler winked at her at exactly the time when everyone in the former Soviet republics who had somewhere to go was leaving en masse. Even then, it felt like a lottery.
The Future — Not a Game for Everyone
A mandatory condition for repatriation was having the correct nationality entered in the relevant field of a passport or birth certificate. The trouble was that, until quite recently, "Russian" was considered the "correct" nationality. Many people from mono-ethnic families accordingly registered their children as Russian, since this affected career prospects and even the ability to change one's place of residence. This was not unique to Germans: Russian children were, just as often, registered in Tatar, Jewish, and Latvian families across Russia. On top of that, almost everyone's family history contained a large number of errors made by semi-literate Soviet officials in issuing documents.
Another frequent condition for a successful path back to the historical homeland was knowledge of German not merely as a means of communication, but specifically with dialect features that were meant to prove genuine ties to the German cultural tradition in Russia.
Back then, this chance to end up in Germany truly only winked at Viktoria, stirring up both her fears and her dreams from the depths of her soul — and then sent a refusal of her right to resettle in Germany. Viktoria went back to her routine, setting aside for a long time any hope of becoming a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany. What followed was an ordinary life: work, hopes of prosperity, and recurring state economic crises. As it happened, in 2013 the German government allowed applications for late resettler status to be filed again.
Viktoria once again began gathering all the documents needed to apply at the German embassy in Russia. This time, however, she decided to seek the support of attorneys — which, as it later turned out, was a rather far-sighted decision.
There's Still Hope
The first thing our firm's lawyers ran into, upon receiving copies of Viktoria's documents by mail, was a "dance" of birth dates and letters in the spelling of names from one document to the next. Explanations had to be written in some places, additional certificates ordered in others, all to confirm that these various people — whose year of birth was recorded one way in some documents and another way in others, whose patronymics were spelled one way here and another way there — were in fact one and the same people: Viktoria's parents and grandparents. Viktoria's language certificate was not a problem: she successfully passed the Deutsch B1 exam at the Goethe-Institut in Novosibirsk. Once the paperwork was completed, the documents were submitted to the German Consulate General in Novosibirsk, and Viktoria eventually received a positive decision. But then a real problem arose.
Viktoria has an adult son, Sergei, who is twenty-four years old, and leaving for Germany without him was never part of her plan. In principle, this is a purely technical problem, resolved through the "family reunification" provision. The documents are submitted, in the same way, to the embassy or consulate responsible for the relevant region, and the required condition is a certificate showing at least Start Deutsch A1 language proficiency. This is exactly where things did not work out for Sergei. Two attempts at the course. Two attempts at the exam. Nothing seemed to stick. According to his mother, Sergei has a mild developmental delay. He had done poorly at school but had qualified for a manual trade. A medical certificate documenting his condition could have resolved the situation — but this particular developmental difficulty does not, today, amount to a formal diagnosis. Our firm's attorneys had nothing to point to in defending Sergei's right to reunite with his mother, since there is no legal provision governing such situations.
All our attorneys could do was explain the particulars of the situation to German officials, citing his school record and the fact that he had twice completed the full language course and twice failed the exam. Nothing suggested he was lazy — much suggested that certain tasks requiring concentration were simply difficult for him to manage. German bureaucracy is often criticized, but just as often it is highly formalized as it is genuinely aimed at resolving problems in favor of someone facing a difficult situation. We managed to convince the officials that Sergei needed a simplified version of the exam — and they agreed to administer exactly that, right at the German Consulate General in Novosibirsk. It worked. Sergei will soon be continuing his language studies in Germany. That is two fewer among the one and a half million descendants of Russian Germans in Russia whose story as a living people within another people is nearing its end. Would a second chance have worked out for Viktoria, given her son's particular circumstances, had she tried to handle it all herself? Unlikely. An attorney is not just statutes, regulations, and case law — an attorney is also personal connections with officials across various authorities where human fates are decided.
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