After the second world war, ethnic Germans were driven out and their empty villages repopulated, mainly by Bosnian Serbs.

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In recent years, the Soviet Union has considerably loosened emigration for some groups, mainly ethnic Germans and Soviet Jews.

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But disagreements with Germany chiefly over post-war expulsions of ethnic Germans are manageable.

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Although many Kazakhs may not be sad to see the Russians go, some regret the departure of the country's ethnic Germans, who are considered industrious.

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Understandably, ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan and in other former Soviet republics have rushed to take up the German government's offer to return to their historic fatherland.

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But in fact there was already a tiny settlement here - a small village of ethnic Germans exiled from their homes on the Volga river by Stalin.

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It took in more than a million ethnic Germans from central and eastern Europe in 1945-50, as well as hundreds of thousands of refugees from Hungary and Czechoslovakia after the troubles there in 1956 and 1968 respectively.

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It's not clear exactly how that came about - it may have been determined by the character of local commanders, or it may have been that the Germans drew ethnic distinctions between Jews from Central Europe and Jews from countries to the East.

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These divisions, imperfect to start with, were subsequently blurred further by heavy Russian immigration and Stalin's eastward push in the 1930s to ethnic groups such as the Volga Germans and Tatars.

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The regime exercised pervasive control over every aspect of people's lives, and suppressed deep ethnic and religious tensions between Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Roma, and Serbs to maintain communist orthodoxy.

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Although the Czech coalition government has persuaded itself that the joint declaration will forestall financial and property claims by Sudeten Germans -- whose welcoming of Hitler's "liberators" was directly responsible for this ethnic minority's subsequent relocation to Bavaria -- it seems unlikely to have that effect.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center For Security Policy