The geographic distribution of the German population in the former Soviet Union was determined by state regulations and by the need for workers in new centers of industrial growth, as well as by deportations to Novaya Zemlya and Siberia. To this day the German population displays the high degree of mobility it acquired out of economic and political necessity. An analysis of German settlement patterns in the Soviet Union from 1926 to 1989 shows a consistently large German population in Russia and Ukraine and a rapidly expanding population in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia during the same period.
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