Victor Dönninghaus and Andrej Savin are well-known and experienced historians of Soviet Germans and other ethnic minorities in the USSR. Dönninghaus, who worked for many years as a deputy director of the German Historical Institute in Moscow, has researched mainly Moscow archives. Savin, who lives in Novosibirsk, is an expert in Siberian archives. Over the past twenty years, they have published many important documents on their subjects.
A new book by Dönninghaus and Savin, Under the Watchful Eye of the State: Religious Dissidents from among Russian Germans in the Leonid Brezhnev Era, raises several questions. First, the structure of the book is not very clear for a monograph. Almost 40 per cent of the book (about 135 out of 368 pages) is devoted not to Brezhnev, but to the Stalinist period. This is difficult to justify even if taking into consideration the authors’ aim to provide a chronology of the life of the German-speaking minority in the USSR. For example, the period of Nikita Khrushchev's repressions against believers in 1959–1964 is practically not covered in the book. Moreover, at the end there is a large (seventy-page) piece by a third author, Johannes Dyck, whose name does not appear in the title. Dyck's approach generally chimes in with that of the other two authors: 50 per cent of its text is about the Stalinist period, 50 per cent on Khrushchev and Brezhnev. However, he relies on documents not from Siberia, but from northern Kazakhstan.
The main chapters by Dönninghaus and Savin are also not very consistent. Chapter 4 is devoted to the issue of registration and de-registration of “free churches” of the Russian Germans. Chapter 5 is on the everyday political existence of churches (including holidays, rituals, and meetings of “prisoners of conscience”). Chapter 6 tells the same story but for the evangelical Christian Baptist church. Chapter 7 is the above mentioned piece by Johannes Dyck. Chapter 8 is a five-page essay that compares and contrasts religious dissenters with secular ones.
In reality, however, the authors of the book do not pay much attention to their chapters’ titles. They cite many statistics from the Council for Religious Affairs and fragments of documents from its regional representatives, which mention all the Christian denominations that attracted their attention, not necessarily always Protestant ones. Russian Germans could have been Catholics, Lutherans, Evangelical Christians, Baptists, Pentecostals, Mennonites, Adventists, Methodists, or Orthodox, but the authors do not even pose the question which Russian Germans belonged to which denomination. Neither do they seem to be interested in the extent to which the denominations they devoted chapters to were actually ethnically German. In the case of the Baptists, for example, where the Germans were already a minority at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which were dominated by the Ukrainians across the USSR, Dönninghaus and Savin sometimes describe repressions against pastors with obviously Ukrainian surnames without mentioning the Germans.
The constant quoting by the authors of documents from the Council for Religious Affairs is combined with their complete disregard for documents of the religious denominations themselves. There are no periodicals of such organizations in the bibliography, there are almost no memoirs, and very few confessional “stories” in the genre of self-description (although now almost every religious community has created memorial collected volumes about its Soviet past). The book presents other scholarly works in a very basic way, including those published in Germany and English-speaking countries. The authors have also foregone the opportunity to conduct oral interviews with former religious activists. This has dramatically reduced the authors’ ability to adequately examine topics mentioned in their chapters’ titles. The history of communities’ everyday life is especially neglected here.
In general, Unter dem wachsamen Auge des Staates is more a collection of disparate articles than a monograph. The book will certainly be useful for those who want to acquaint themselves with a substantial number of various statistics collected by the Council for Religious Affairs on large Christian denominations. It is possible to learn from it some details about the life of religious organizations that were known to the authorities. But it is difficult to see how typical the facts recorded in the documents really were, and in what way they related to the reality of religious life in the USSR.
