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To Be Like All But Different: Germans in Soviet Trudarmee

Abstract This article analyses a peculiar form of labour mobilisation, known as the ‘trudarmee’, to which ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union, along with some other nationalities, were subjected in 1942–1945 after their initial deportations from the areas in which they had lived. The labour mobilisation of the war years was a form of forced labour obligation which existed outside of the immediate realm of the ‘traditional’ forced labour of the Gulag. The article considers the compatibility of the two forms of labour mobilisation and demonstrates that the ‘trudarmee’ labour mobilisation had features of both free and forced labour and thus deserves a space of its own in the existing historiography of Stalinism.