The authors of this book, Olga Lapina, a journalist from the Krasnodar Territory, and Alfred Kokh, a politician and businessman, talk about the life of their ancestors, Russified Germans from the Kuban village of Dzhiginka. But the ethnographic essay is just an excuse for a more serious conversation. The story begins with the arrival of German colonists in Russia in the XNUMXth century.
The authors of this book, Olga Lapina, a journalist from the Krasnodar Territory, and Alfred Kokh, a politician and businessman, talk about the life of their ancestors, Russified Germans from the Kuban village of Dzhiginka. But the ethnographic essay is just an excuse for a more serious conversation. The story begins with the arrival of German colonists in Russia in the XNUMXth century. Settlers equip their economy, transfer their traditions to their new homeland, build relationships with neighbors, step by step ennoble the land, which the ruined landowners were forced to sell for next to nothing. And suddenly they become enemies. During the First World War, they are deprived of the right to their native language, after the revolution, their property is taken away, and during the Great Patriotic War, they are deported. The story is interspersed with «spiritual seances» in the form of Alfred Koch’s interviews with Stalin and Hitler. The leaders have their own great goals and their own logic (and Koch shows this masterfully). But is this logic of wars and revolutions necessary for people who have always seen the meaning of their lives in simply living, working, raising children?
Alpina Publisher, 318 p.