Writer Andreas Saks’s return to public and cultural activities. The repressed Volga region German’s fate traced in the documents of the Astrakhan Writers’ Organization (1964–1966)

Abstract

Russian ethnic German writer Andreas Saks (1903–1983) played a big part in the development of the Volga German Autonomous Republic and also German culture in the 1920– 1930s. Before the Great Patriotic War, he headed the Republic’s Union of Soviet Writers but as the war broke out he was forced to move to Siberia together with other German habitants of the Republic. During the war and post-war years of Stalinism he went through repression, the expulsion from the Bolshevik party and the USSR Union of Writers, endured forced labor in the hardest physical and moral conditions. In the late 1950s during de-Stalinization and the “Thaw”, Andreas Saks was reinstated in the CPSU and the USSR Union of Writers. He was also allowed to move from the Krasnoyarskii Krai to the city of Astrakhan. The article covers his public and cultural activities during his first years back in Astrakhan (1964–1966). The hitherto unknown archival documents from the Astrakhan Writers’ Organization were used as a source for the article. Their analysis shows that Andreas Saks has always remained faithful to his socialist ideals. He pursued his own strategies for coping the psychological trauma inflicted upon him by Stalinist violations and repressions, and for consolidating his position as a Soviet writer.