WNIVERSITY STUDIES 
Vion. XV I ; INQIE SO 1G Not 
PS OCINET STUDY OF TH RUSSIAN GERMAN 
BY HATTIE PLUM WILLIAMS 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
For several years the writer has been engaged in a sociological 
study of the Russian German community in Lincoln, Nebraska, 
the results of which will be published ultimately under the title, 
The Czar’s Germans: a Study of an Immigrant Group in the 
Midwest. An understanding of the sociological problems pre- 
sented has made necessary an extensive historical survey of these 
people. 
The subjects of this study come from the two Volga provinces 
of Saratow and Samara, located in the southeastern part of 
European Russia. Their ancestors emigrated thither from vari- 
ous parts of Germany, particularly the southern states, in re- 
sponse to the manifesto of Katherine the Great in 1763. They 
are a part of the same stream of emigration from Germany which 
brought the Pennsylvania “ Dutch” to the American colonies and 
which, after the middle of the eighteenth century, was diverted 
for some years into various European countries. 
The Volga “ colonists,” as they have been called in Russia, have 
lived, during the past one hundred and fifty years, in their ex- 
clusively German villages, retaining their own language, customs, 
and religion. They have been influenced but slightly by the life 
about them, and untouched entirely by the great forward move- 
ments in the world at large. This is due to the facts that they 
did not consider the Russian civilization worth emulating, and 
that they were cut off from the world at large, and from their 
