Friday, April 20, 2007

What I am writing instead of this Blog

The manuscript for Catherine's Grandchildren: A Short History of the Russian-Germans Under Soviet Rule is now up to 165 pages. This morning I wrote about the underground activities of unregistered Russian-German Baptist congregations in Alma-Ata (now Almaty) Oblast Kazakhstan during the 1960s. I intend to work some more on the book this weekend. I have a lot of material on the Russian-German emigration movement of the 1970s I want to add. I have written a fair bit about the movement in Estonia and Karaganda Oblast Kazakhstan. But, I have written very little about the movement in other areas of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Apparently there were very close connections between the activists in Estonia, Kyrgyzstan and the Jambul and Alma-Ata oblasts of Kazakhstan. Two of the most prominent Russian-German activists in Estonia during the 1970s, Viktor Trenkenschuh and Peter Bergmann, had both previously lived in Kyrgyzstan. A fairly high level of coordination thus existed between activists in Estonia and those in Kyrgyzstan and adjacent regions of Kazakhstan. I was pretty excited about finding an Estonian-Kyrgyzstan connection.

1 comment:

Cassandra Clifford said...

Otto, Cannot wait to read it when it's finished! Sounds great!

Cassandra