VGI Updates

Volga German families settled in Simmern following the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Volga German families were settled in the village of Aydarly following the 1941 deportation.

Friedental was founded in the early 1900s. Volga German colonists settled there as early as 1906.

The 1941 Deportation Decree saw 452 ethnic Germans deported to Kazakhstan. 

Today, the former village of Friedental was renamed to Druzhnoye in 1949.

Population

Neu-Friedental was founded in 1918. Volga German families settled in the village of Neu-Friedental in the North Caucasus.

Today, the name of this village is Rote-Fane.

What today is called Abinsk was first settled in 1863 by Azov Cossacks, but a fortress had existed there since 1834.

The town had a variety of historical names, but became Abinsk in 1963.

EWZ records indicate that ethnic Germans from Bessarabia, Volhynia, and the Volga began settling there as early as 1889.

Gnadau was founded in 1871. German colonists from the Kherson village of Neudorf began relocating there in 1884. They were joined by colonists from the Volga German colony of Dönhof and other colonies from the Wiesenseite.

The ethnic Germans living in Gnadau were deported in 1941 to the Zhambyl Oblast of Kazakhstan.

Neudorf was founded in 1924 as a Khutor (farmstead) by colonists from neighboring Gnadau.

Ethnic Germans from Neudorf were deported in 1941 to southern Kazakhstan.

Volga German families settled in the village of Novostroyka (now Druzhba) in the 1930s. They were joined by additional families from Kazakhstan in the 1950s.

Akkol was known as Alexeyevka from 1887-1997. 

Volga German families settled in the village of Alexeyevka in Kazakhstan arriving on deportation train convoy No. 188 from Seelmann at the end of September 1941.

In 1989, ethnic Germans made up 16.1% of the population of Alexeyevka. This diminished significantly when most of them moved to Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

The city of Ganja dates back to 859.

In 1935, Joseph Stalin renamed the city Kirovabad after Sergei Kirov. In 1991, when Azerbaijan re-established its independence, the ancient name of the city returned.