Although he had married a Volga German, his family was spared being transported en masse to Siberia or Kazakhstan along with the other Volga Germans.

ECONOMIST: Alfred Schnittke

During the second world war, the mix of nationalities was further increased when Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens and others from the Caucasus were deported to Central Asia.

ECONOMIST: Central Asia

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.

ECONOMIST: Central Asia

The town's name had been changed from Boronsk to Marx to Pokrovsk and then to Engels the name of Marx's German collaborator being thought appropriate for the capital city of the Volga Germans.

ECONOMIST: Alfred Schnittke

The Volga Germans, who had settled in Russia more than 200 years ago, were deported to Kazakhstan and other parts of Central Asia in 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

ECONOMIST: Central Asia

In the second world war the Germans who had lived in the Volga region for generations were moved to Central Asia (and their hard-working descendants are now moving to Germany).

ECONOMIST: Central Asia

The majority of Kazakh Germans are descendants of the Germans who emigrated to the Russian Volga region some 200 years ago and were deported to Kazakhstan after Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941.

ECONOMIST: Kazakhstan: To the fatherland | The

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.

BBC: News - Today - Life in the oil-rich Siberian town of Strezhevoy

In the second world war, Stalin decided that Russia's Germans were disloyal, even though they had lived by the Volga for 200 years, and had them transported to Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan.

ECONOMIST: Mein Herr of Kirgizstan