The landlessness problem

As has been mentioned a number of times and discussed more fully here, by 1860 roughly two-thirds of all Molotschna families were landless. The fortunate owned a home and supported themselves with some sort of trade, such as leather work, linen manufacture, carpentry, or the like. The less fortunate rented their living quarters and worked as laborers, often in the fields or homes of landowners.

To make matters worse, in addition to the farmland already assigned to the landowners, each village was allotted and controlled a significant amount of surplus or reserve land: over 30,000 acres colony-wide the colony. Originally this land had been set aside for future settlers, the children of the original owners. In practice, however, the surplus land was either rented to wealthy landowners (72 percent of the surplus) or designated as common grounds for the pasturing of livestock (Longhofer 1993, 396–98).

With little hope of convincing their land-owning co-religionists to right this wrong, to transfer the land to those for whom it had been set aside, in the early 1860s a group landless Mennonites took their case to the Russian government. Eventually they received the sought-for relief, and in 1869 the Russian land commission ordered Molotschna villages to distribute whatever land they held in reserve to the landless in their midst.

Heinrich Bernard Friesen offers a contemporaneous account of how this was worked out:

The local governing boards (Gebietsverwaltung) were the first to be directed to do something about the matter. At a meeting of the Boards and village magistrates a committee of several men was elected. These together with the boards and the agricultural society were to work out a plan to help solve the many problems. This committee worked out the following plan. All the land that had been open for leasing was to be settled, 32½ Desiatin [88 acres] to a family. Work was begun immediately to determine how much land there was to be settled and who would be eligible for the land. To find out where each one would have his land was determined by lot. (Friesen diary quoted in Longhofer 1993, 398)

Several points are worth noting.

1. Each original village landowner had been allotted a Wirtschaft (land-holding) of 65 dessiantines (ca. 176 acres); these new allotments were half that size: 32.5 dessiantines.

2. This reduced allotment was necessitated by the large number of landless and the small amount of remaining land. For example, Alexanderkrone controlled 8,100 acres, but 7,040 of those acres were already owned. Dividing the remaining 1,060 acres into 176-acre pieces would have provided land to only six new owners, hardly making a dent in the landlessness problem in Alexanderkrone.

3. Although the land was assigned by lot, there were eligibility requirements. Presumably only those who already lived in the village were eligible to receive a half-farmstead. One wonders what role, if any, family relationships in the village might have played. Also left unexplained is what happened if there were more applicants than half-farmsteads available. Were lots also used to determine who was in and who was out?

4. Since each village was already laid out around the original Wirtschaften, the new half-farmsteads were placed at one or both ends of the village. Thus in the schematic of Kleefeld below, the original village lies to the left (west), with the new (smaller) farmsteads added on to the right (east). (In all likelihood, the east end of the village also included the cottages of artisans and renters.)

Not surprisingly, this resolution to the landlessness problem was only partial and temporary. It was partial in the sense that it helped only some of the landless, not all. It was temporary because it did not adequately provide for the generations to come, who would soon swell the ranks of the landless even further.

More important, why does any of this matter to Bullers in or from Molotschna? For one thing, the time frame of the events is crucial: the landlessness problem reached its peak in the early 1860s and was addressed beginning in 1869; Peter D and Sarah moved first from Kleefeld to Alexanderkrone sometime between 1866 and 1869, then back to Kleefeld in 1871, then from Kleefeld to the U.S. in 1879. Given this amount of transience, it is clear that the distribution of reserve land did not benefit Peter D and family.

Moreover, by 1878 or 1879, it is almost certain that all the available land had been allocated; there was virtually no hope of Peter D receiving the hoped-for allotment. With continued landlessness a virtual certainty, he probably found it easy to leave Molotschna with the rest of the Johann Siebert party. Understanding the events of the 1860s helps us understand that decision a little better.

This is not the only significance that the landlessness crisis of the 1860s has for our family, but the rest of the story must await a (not-too-distant) future post.

Source

Longhofer, Jeffrey. 1993. Specifying the Commons: Mennonites, Intensive Agriculture, and Landlessness in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Ethnohistory 40:384-409.