Eastern Europe and the USSR had large German minorities. In the USSR this dated back to Catherine the Great, who in 1763 issued a manifesto inviting Germans to settle and colonize land on the Volga in exchange for tax and legal privileges. During Gorbachev’s Perestroika the German minorities began making use of the West German law of return that immediately granted them citizenship as Aussiedler – a consequence of the ethnobiological definition of German nationhood (but why, assimilated, tax-paying, Germanophone second-generation descendants of Turkish labor migrants wondered, should russified descendants of labor migrants to eighteenth-century Russia have easier access to citizenship than they?). Chapter 6 charts the history and lived experience of the 2.3 million Aussiedler who immigrated since 1987 and who have remained largely invisible in public consciousness. The chapter title encapsulates their fraught situation of dual non-belonging: discriminated against in the postwar Soviet Union as “fascists,” they hoped to rejoin fellow Germans when emigrating, yet in reality were excluded as “Russians.”

After Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz, a new war loomed on the horizon. In 1806, Prussia confronted the growing French ambitions in the War of the Fourth Coalition. It proved to be a mistake as Napoleon routed the Prussian army barely two weeks into the war. After humiliation of Prussia, on the battlefield at Jena, the French Emperor turned his attention to subduing his Russian foe and marched into Poland in the winter of 1806. Six months later, the Russians had been beaten and brought to the peace table and Napoleon was at the height of his powers.