[SOVIET RELIGIOUS MUSIC SAMIZDAT – GERMAN PROTESTANT SONGBOOK] Handbound manuscript songbook of religious hymns and devotional songs in German (two in Russian), from the Orenburg community of Soviet "Volga Germans", ca. 1956–1969.

Octavo (17 × 10.3 cm). Original hand-bound brown buckram over boards; with [406] pp. of manuscript text in purple, blue, red, and black ink to checked notebook pages. Boards bumped to corners and lightly distended; light soil to some pages; small ink stains and signs of wear; still about very good. Item #55299

A one-of-a-kind volume of religious samizdat, this hand-made songbook is a unique artifact of the forbidden religious life of the Volga German community in the USSR after WWII. Written in a neat hand, the volume contains three carefully numbered sections (each section likely copied directly or from memory from a different original printed source) with 404 songs in total. Melodies for some of the songs are also indicated in the volume, but without musical notation it is unclear how knowledge of the melodies was preserved in the community. Living in an officially atheist Soviet state, the unknown maker of this prayer and song book seems to have used it actively in the Orenburg Volga German religious community, most likely under the guise of harmless communal meetings such as weddings, memorial services, birthdays, and anniversaries. The sections of the book that contain songs appropriate for such occasions show the heaviest signs of use. The regular use of such songs also helped members of the community to preserve and pass on the German language.

Germans were first invited to settle in the Volga region of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century by Catherine the Great. The empress promised them religious freedom and linguistic autonomy in exchange for working unsettled land. Remarkably, despite widespread Russification campaigns of the nineteenth century, German settlers managed to preserve their language and culture into the twentieth century. Negative attitudes toward the German language during WWI and the official atheist position of the new Soviet state pushed the language and religion of this community underground. Soviet anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s had an especially devastating impact on the German Protestant community of the Volga region, with priests arrested and religious books and church property confiscated. During WWII, attitudes toward the “enemy” German language and culture in the Soviet Union reached a new low. The 18000 Germans from the Orenburg region, where this song book seems to originate, were stripped of their property and sent to the “labor army” to be used as free labor by the Soviet State. The “special settlement” regime pertaining to the Orenburg Germans was finally lifted in 1955, during the thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953. The thaw also lifted some of the restrictions on religious practice, but only for practitioners of Russian orthodoxy. Most protestant confessions were labeled as “sects” and officially outlawed in the new Soviet Criminal Code of 1960 at the behest of Nikita Khrushchev, during a period known as the second Soviet Anti-religious campaign in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The religious property confiscated in the 1920s, and the personal property confiscated during WWII was never returned to its German owners. This volume was most likely created after 1955 to replace the confiscated devotional books. This post-1955 date is also consistent with the materials used in the making of the volume. The volume was made by combining three standard-made Soviet notebooks, which can be seen at the spine, and the slightly different colors of the paper of the three blocks. Notebooks of this sort, with 96 leaves, rounded edges, and lined, were made in the mid to late 1950s according to the standard ledgers of the Soviet paper industry. The scale of the final volume, which resembles a standard protestant devotional book, is also significant, as it would have been most familiar to someone used to handling protestant devotional books in the past. The songs in the beginning of the volume were written in ink, with the last songs written in ballpoint pen which received wider circulation in the Soviet Union only in the late 1960s, making this the later end date of the volume’s creation. By the 1970s, study of the Greman language was once again possible in Soviet schools, and anti-religious censorship was once again relaxed. The volume remains a remarkable memento of the perseverance of the German religious community in the Soviet Union. A completely unique object; we cannot trace or are aware of a comparable volume in the trade.

Price: €1,500.00

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