More on Volga Germans in Turkmenistan

The descendants of the Volga Germans that settled in the Sarakhs region (Krestov) near Ashgabat in Turkmenistan managed to avoid deportation in 1941 due to already being located in a remote area of Soviet Central Asia. However, like many Russian-German communities in Central Asia they experienced severe repression later in the 1940s. In the case of the Russian-Germans living in Sarakhs raion, Ashgabat Oblast, Turkmen SSR this repression came at the end of 1948. In December of that year, the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) of the Turkmen SSR requested that 64 Russian-German families be deported from this district. In response the central Soviet government mobilized all those capable of physical labor from these families for construction work on the Chelyabinsk metallurgy complex in the Urals. The Stalin regime forcibly resettled the remaining 310 ethnic Germans from Sarakhs, those judged to be incapable of physical labor due to illness, disability or age, to Tomsk Oblast in Siberia.

Source: N.F. Bugai, L. Beria -I. Stalinu: "Soglasno vashemu ukazaniiu..."(Moscow: "AIRO XX," 1995), p. 46.