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Yunna Kinereish, a 22-year-old public relations student in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, identifies as a Kazakh German and works to keep the history of her community alive. As reported by Deutsche Welle (DW), she is one of 223,000 Kazakh Germans currently living in the Central Asian republic and a member of the Wiedergeburt Association of Germans in Kazakhstan.
The Legacy of Soviet Deportations
Kinereish recently performed in a youth theater play depicting the struggles of her Russian German ancestors. From the 18th century onward, Germans settled in the Russian empire, including Ukraine’s Black Sea region, following official incentives. However, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the deportation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from Russia and Ukraine to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Innocent civilians faced collective punishment, being labeled as spies and collaborators. More than a million people were deported, with at least 200,000 perishing due to expulsion, hunger, and forced labor. Kinereish noted that her family was driven from the ethnic German village of Kleinwärter in Ukraine, and she expressed deep emotional pain when performing these stories on stage at the House of Friendship in Astana.
Culture, Remembrance, and Film Documentation
The House of Friendship serves as the hub for German culture in Astana, offering language classes, social services, and remembrance projects centered on Soviet repression, primarily funded by the German government. Beyond theater, Kinereish documented her heritage through film. In 2025, she produced a movie about German women imprisoned in the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, known as ALZhIR, which was among the most notorious camps in the Soviet Gulag system.
During the Great Terror of the 1930s, Kazakhstan housed the Soviet Union’s largest camp network, through which 18,000 women passed simply because their husbands were condemned as enemies of the state. This total included 167 ethnic German women. Located outside Astana, the ALZhIR memorial complex features the Arch of Grief steel structure, personal items, original photographs, and camp quarters models.
Among the documented prisoners was Gertrud Platais, a print worker originally from Lower Silesia in modern-day Poland, who became a Soviet citizen. After her husband was arrested in 1938, she was convicted as a relative of a traitor, imprisoned in ALZhIR under extreme temperatures ranging from 40 degrees Celsius in summer to minus 40 in winter, and forced to work as an embroiderer until 1946. She was subsequently banished for life to the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp, or Karlag, before finally receiving rehabilitation in 1956.
Researching the Vast Gulag Landscape
Karlag operated as the largest camp system in the region, covering an area 22 times the size of New York City as an expansive economic and agricultural complex. Between 1931 and 1959, nearly one million people passed through Karlag, with approximately 10,000 prisoners dying from starvation, cold, illness, and forced labor between 1940 and 1950 alone. The Karlag museum, situated south of Astana in the former camp administration building near Karaganda, features reconstructed interrogation cells and ambient music that visitors find somewhat staged rather than authentic.
Katherine M. Erdman, an American anthropologist and archaeologist at Nazarbayev University in Astana, stated that many people and political circles in Kazakhstan show little interest in confronting the nation’s brutal history. Erdman, who has researched the Gulag system for a decade using drone technology and field interviews alongside her students, explained that forced labor fundamentally shaped the regional landscape, with factories and residential houses constructed by prisoners and using forced-labor bricks.
Erdman noted that while authorities sometimes aim to show the international community that the country addresses its dark past, researchers often encounter apathy or outright rejection from locals and administrators amid a general drive toward social and economic advancement. Despite the lack of state funding for her lectureship, academic research continues as young community members like Kinereish remain determined to pass down the painful experiences of their forefathers.
