Volga Germans : Fire and Sword

With probing psychological depth, master storyteller, John Spiess, presents an intimate portrait of the migration of certain eighteenth century Germans to the lower Volga River region of Russia. Catherine the Great, the Russian monarch, had offered free land to the dispossessed of Germany after the Seven Years War; and these people'peasants, convicts, ladies of the night, army deserters, the generally disenfranchised'journeyed to there, believing in the promised gold at the end of the rainbow.The author admits, however, that theirs ?was a story of lies, treachery, broken promises, double-dealing, backstabbing, violence, killing, lust, and premature death from diseases, overwork and stress.' Further, ?those years of the 1760s for the Volga Germans were as bloody as anything in the blood drenched American west in the 1860s and ?70s. Those Germans had their own version of wild Indians burning down their villages and slaughtering people in wholesale lots, the Kirghiz tribes? of the vast steppe region of southern Russia. Indeed, for fervency of detail and sizzle of harsh reality, the story ?would probably be given an X rating if it were told in movie form.' You are transported imaginatively, all but bodily, into the wolf-circling blizzards, the gore-blasting tribal raids, the rollicking bawdy and intrigue of Catherine's royal court, the heartbreak of drought and pestilence set against a people's gritty struggle to survive'and all through the perspective of the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later peasant mind. Indeed, experiencing the worldview of such vital individual characters is a treasure worth possessing, a mind-expanding event.Spiess, John Charles is the author of 'Volga Germans : Fire and Sword', published 2007 under ISBN 9780970990969 and ISBN 0970990960.