Bullers in Molotschna

Before our family sailed to America and settled in Nebraska, several generations lived in the Molotschna Mennonite colony in the Zaporizhia Oblast (province) of modern-day Ukraine.

The approximate location of the Molotschna colony is highlighted in red. Modern Russia is located to the north and east.

The Molotschna colony was located approximately 30 miles inland (northwest) from the Sea of Avoz, which itself is located to the northeast of the Black Sea. The colony comprised 324,000 acres, a rectangular area slightly more than 500 square miles in size. Molotschna was bounded on the west by the Molochnaya River, where the first villages were established, and thereafter expanded to the east along east-west tributaries: the Tokmak, Begemthsokrak, Kurushan, and Yushanlee (or Yushanly).

During the nineteenth century, the Molotschna area was a part of the Taurida province of the Russian kingdom ruled by Catherine the Great (born 1729, ruled 1762–1796) and her successors: Paul I (1796–1801), Alexander I (1801–1825), Nicholas I (1825–1855), and Alexander II (1855–1881). Catherine had won possession of a large area of southeastern Europe after her forces defeated those of the Ottoman Empire in the first Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774); Molotschna was a small part of this newly won region.

To solidify her hold on the territory, Catherine sought to populate it with loyal, or at least grateful, subjects. Thus in 1786 Catherine invited Mennonites in West Prussia (more on that later) to emigrate to Russia, with a promise of freedom and land: the Mennonites were free to govern themselves and to abstain from military service; in addition, each family would receive 65 dessiantines (ca. 175 acres) of land.

By 1789, the first Russian Mennonite colony was established in Chortitza, on the left bank of the Dnieper River (ca. 100 miles northwest of where the Molotschna colony was later established). Fourteen years later, after Catherine’s death and her son Paul I’s reaffirmation of certain Mennonite privileges, a second wave of emigration began—this time to the Molotschna area. Between 1803 and 1806, 365 Mennonite families traveled from West Prussia to the Molotschna colony. Emigration continued until 1835, by which time 1,200 Mennonite families (6,000 people) lived in the colony.

Nine villages were established in 1804 (Halbstadt, Muntau, Schönau, Fischau, Lindenau, Lichtenau, Blumstein, Münsterberg, Altona), with eight more added in 1805 and one in 1806. As the Mennonite population increased, new villages were founded, and the colony expanded eastward. As of 1863, sixty villages had been established throughout the Molotschna area. For a complete list, with acreages associated with each village, see the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Map © William Schroeder, used by permission. See http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/programs/archives/holdings/Schroeder_maps/.

The villages of greatest interest to us are Fischau (one of the original nine villages), Kleefeld (est. 1854), and Alexanderkrone (est. 1857). According to the Buller Family Record, David Buller was born in (West) Prussia in 1817 and came to Russia sometime between the ages of three and five (1820–1822). Thus, he was not part of the initial emigration to Molotschna but came sixteen or more years later.

At present we do not know where his family settled, although it is likely that David at some point made his home in Fischau, since several genealogies list that village as the 1847 place of birth for David’s second daughter, Elisabeth (see here). Other genealogies list Kleefeld as Peter D’s 1845 place of birth, but this is impossible, since Kleefeld was not founded until 1854. This mistake probably reflects the fact that the family was known to have resided in Kleefeld; that fact was simply misapplied to an earlier time.

At any rate, it is certain that Peter D lived in Kleefeld before moving to Alexanderkrone, where Peter P was born in 1869. The family returned to Kleefeld only two years later, in 1871, before leaving for the U.S. in 1879. How many other Molotschna villages our family might claim as our own is anyone’s guess. Equally a mystery is why Peter D moved from Kleefeld to Alexanderkrone and back to Kleefeld within the space of a few years, only to emigrate to the U.S. a mere eight years later.

Still, the family’s movements may give us hints about their station in life. One possible scenario is that David moved from Fischau to Kleefeld about the time the village was founded in 1854. If so, then one might reasonably think that he did so in order to secure his own land. If David was a landowner in Fischau, he probably would not have moved to Kleefeld but would have remained on his own property. The primary problem with this scenario is that we have no record of David living in Kleefeld. Further, one genealogy reports that David died in Waldheim, a Molotschna village in the northeast quadrant of the colony (see here).

In fact, David’s son Peter D is the only member of the family known with certainty to have lived in Kleefeld. Beginning from this known fact, it is reasonable to imagine that Peter D moved from Fischau to Kleefeld around the time of his marriage to Sarah Siebert in 1866; he was twenty-one at the time and would have wanted to establish his own household. Unfortunately, if Peter D’s goal was to secure land, he was probably too late (no village land would have been available twelve years after its founding). Consequently, it is not surprising that Peter D’s family moved from Kleefeld to Alexanderkrone two years after first arriving in Kleefeld, moved back to Kleefeld two years later, and undertook a monumental journey to the U.S. just eight years after that.

A future post will explore the socioeconomic realities of the Molotschna colony during this time, especially as they are reflected in known facts of the lives of our Buller ancestors who resided there. To anticipate that discussion, it seems most likely that Peter D was a farmer but not a landowner in the Molotschna colony, which ultimately prompted him to lead his family to the U.S. in search of a farm to call his own.

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The Zaporizhia Oblast is one of the Ukrainian provinces in which pro-Russian demonstrations took place during the first half of 2014. To read further about the Russian annexation of Crimea to the south and the Ukranian revolution and its aftermath, see here.