The Russian Steppe 2

Several posts ago we described the changes in environment that Benjamin Buller experienced when he moved approximately 500 miles southeast from Volhynia to Molotschna, from the mixed forest to the steppe land. A line-drawn map helped us to identify the regional differences, but nothing beats a photograph (even a satellite one) for more fully visualizing the reality on the ground.

For example, the first satellite photo below shows the extent of the steppe. As indicated by the aqua shading, the steppe stretched from the eastern portion of Europe across nearly the entire expanse of Asia. Moon defines it more specifically as follows:

The steppe region of southern and south-eastern European Russia and Ukraine is part of a vast belt of semi-arid grassland that extends for over five thousand miles from the Hungarian puszta, across present-day Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and into northern China. (Moon 2013, 6)

The rotation of the map is turned roughly 60º clockwise from what we are accustomed to seeing, but the red arrow points to the approximate location of Molotschna; the small body of water immediately below is the Sea of Azov.

This map is revealing in several ways: (1) it shows clearly that Benjamin and family moved from one vast ecosystem (the forest in the north) into another (the steppe to the south), which no doubt required a significant amount of adjustment on their part; (2) it gives us some perspective on the vastness of the steppe, which crossed two continents and a distance of 5,000 miles; and (3) it provides us insight into a later aspect of the Buller family history two generations down the line—more on that below.

The second map focuses more closely on the regions in which our family lived: Poland, Volhynia, and Molotschna.

The star above the word Poland marks the Przechovka Church near Schwetz; the star on the Belarus-Ukraine border is the location of the village Zofyovka, where Benjamin and family first settled; the star to the far lower right is roughly in the center of Molotschna. 

This satellite photograph shows that, in many respects, the Schwetz area and Volhynia were more similar to each other than either was to Molotschna. Varying stands of forest spanned the entire north, which presents a sharp contrast with the essentially treeless landscape across the steppe. Zooming in even more closely (below) only reinforces the impression: Volhynia was a region of mixed forest, Molotschna a vast, open expanse.

One last satellite photograph before we close: a wide shot that encompasses most of the steppe that we saw in the first photo.

Our family’s homes in Poland, Volhynia, and Molotschna are still easily visible, but another star has been added in the far upper right. Comparing this satellite photo with the first one above shows that that star is still squarely in the steppe. But what does the star mark?

If you recall, Benjamin Buller’s son David (Grandpa Chris’s great-grandfather) was married twice, with the result that David’s son Peter D Buller had a half-brother named Heinrich. That half-brother and his mother (we do not know her name yet) did not emigrate to North America, but in 1908 they moved several thousand miles east to northern Kazakhstan, what the Buller Family Record labels Siberia. The star in the upper right-hand portion of the photograph is Miloradovka, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, where Heinrich Buller and roughly forty other Mennonite families settled (see further here and here).

Previously it was difficult to understand why so many Mennonites of that time would move so far to the east to what appeared to be a barren landscape. Now it makes a good deal more sense. As we can clearly see in the first map of this post, the northern Kazakhstan region is squarely within steppe land. So, in spite of the great distance that the move involved, it was environmentally less of a change than what their (and our) ancestors had undergone in moving from the forest to the steppe. 

The moral of this story is that the more we learn about the setting in which our ancestors lived, the more we can appreciate the choices and the decisions they made. This will culminate several posts down the road when we consider what relevance the steppe land had for Peter D’s decision to leave it behind for the greener pastures of central Nebraska.

Work Cited

Moon, David. 2013. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Russian Steppe 1

As fascinating as it would be to visit Molotschna, our ancestors’ former home, that is unlikely to be possible anytime soon, given the current unrest in southeastern Ukraine. Indeed, one of the entities that proclaimed its independence is in the oblast (province) directly east of that in which the former Molotschna colony was located. Consequently, for now we must rely on books and maps and drawings and photographs to become better acquainted with our family’s former home.

David Moon’s The Plough That Broke the Steppes will be a informative guide on that journey, as we draw key points from his narrative that help us imagine the context in which Benjamin Buller and his family lived. For example, in this post we learn that the Buller emigration was part of a much larger movement that spread across the steppe land of Russia.

To be specific, in 1719, when our family still lived in Poland along the Vistula River, most of Russia lived in areas other than the steppe, being mostly in the northern forests. According to Boris Mironov, whom Moon cites, only 2.6 percent of Russia’s entire population inhabited the steppes.

By the end of the century (1795), the percentage of the population living in the steppe had increased to 6.7, and fifty years later it was roughly 14 percent. By 1914, at the beginning of World War I, over 21 percent of Russia’s population lived in the steppe region. Moon explains:

The total population of the steppe region in the European part of the Russian Empire, around 90 per cent of whom lived in rural areas, increased more than eightfold over the eighteenth century, nearly tripled over the first half of the nineteenth century, and trebled again by 1914. The rate of growth far exceeded that of the empire as a whole, and was part of the relocation of the centre of gravity of the population from the old forest heartland to the south. (Moon 2013, 16)

The implication of this is clear: the movement of our family and hundreds of other Mennonite families into Molotschna was a small part of a significantly larger population shift from the forest to the steppe. Native Russians in the northern forest region moved south to the steppe, and non-Russians (mostly “Germans”) moved into Russia and its steppe land. The dual impact of these shifts increased the steppe population substantially, both in relative and absolute terms.

As Moon explains further, this was not the only drastic change.

Field near the Kurushan River almost directly north of
Alexanderkrone. Photograph by Владимир Переклицкий

The dramatic increase in the rural population of the steppe region was accompanied by an equally dramatic change in land use. A primarily pastoral, and partly nomadic, economy was replaced by settled, arable farming. Pasture was ploughed up and transformed into fields of grain. The two developments went hand in hand as growing grain generates several times more calories per unit of land than livestock husbandry, and many times more than nomadic pastoralism. Thus, the change in land use to arable farming meant that the region could support a far larger, and settled, population. The nomads were compelled to settle or to leave. (Moon 2013, 16)

Here Moon adds some depth to our earlier discussions of the Molotschna colony. If you remember, we noted early on (July 2014) that south of Molotschna was the land of the Nogai, a tribe of Turkic Muslims who earned their living primarily as seminomadic sheep herders (see here). As Moon notes above, the influx of farmer settlers limited the options the nomads (Nogai) could pursue. Thus it is not surprising to learn that in 1861 the entire tribe relocated away from the steppe land bordering the Molotschna colony.

Another of Moon’s comments deserves special note: “Pasture was ploughed up and transformed into fields of grain.” This statement has a familiar ring to it, as though we have encountered this sort of thing before. In fact, we have, and we will return to that point in a future post—after we learn more about the Russian steppe, particularly the the so-called Azov Upland.

Work Cited

Moon, David. 2013. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Environment Matters

As noted several posts ago (here), David Moon’s The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 is rich in new information and prompts a number of questions that otherwise would not come to mind.

For example, Moon’s introduction describes the steppe in general and places it within the context of the larger Russian Empire. To that end, Moon helpfully includes a map showing the extent of the the different regions, or environmental zones, of Russia.

Map 2 in Moon 2013, 9; adapted from Pallot and Shaw 1990, xv.

The map is fairly straightforward: far to the north is the coniferous forest, with a substantial area of mixed forest below (around Moscow), then a thin layer of forest-steppe to the south and east of that and a thicker strip of pure steppe land even farther south.

Obviously, the steppe is of interest to us because Molotschna was located squarely within it. Learning about the steppe will thus help us to understand better the setting in which Benjamin Buller and other Mennonites of his day sought to carve out a living.

However, perhaps the map tells us far more than that Molotschna was located in the steppe. Perhaps the map helps us understand why some of the original residents of Waldheim abandoned their new home within a few years of settling there. It has been a while since we have talked about this event, so a brief refresher is in order.

The village Waldheim was established in 1838 with the arrival of eight families; additional families moved to Waldheim in the following two years, so that at the end of 1840 all forty Wirtschaften (or plots) had been assigned. All of Waldheim’s settlers had moved there from Volhynia, which lay to the northwest. In 1845, for reasons that have never been adequately explained, a sizable number of Waldheim residents—thirty-three families, to be exact—petitioned to leave Waldheim to move back to Volhynia. The map may suggest a reason for their change of heart. To help us visualize, the map below has a small red dot where Molotschna is located and a larger red dot roughly in the center of Volhynia.

Looking at the map this way may bring to light an important consideration. Benjamin and the other original Waldheim residents had previously lived well within the mixed forest. As Moon notes several times, this region was significantly different from the steppe. For example, the mixed forest was less susceptible to the droughts that plagued the steppe, and the temperatures were less extreme in the mixed forest than in the steppe, which suffered bitter cold in the winter and blazing heat in the summer. The two areas, although separated by only several hundred miles, truly offered substantially different environments.

Knowing this, one must wonder whether the Waldheim residents wanted to move back to Volhynia because, after five, six, or seven years, they had grown disenchanted with their prospects for success in the middle of the Russian (Ukrainian) steppe. We certainly do not know this, but it seems at least a reasonable possibility. As we have already learned (here), the claim that the returnees had been kept from owning land is demonstrably false; most of the returnees did own farmland, which they sold and left behind when they returned to Volhynia.

Something else must have motivated their decision to leave Waldheim behind. Maybe it was simply a matter of realizing that they preferred to farm in the mixed forest of Volhynia than the treeless steppe of Molotschna. Perhaps they had faced droughts in those few years or had suffered crop failures or at least disappointing harvests. Again, we do not know this, but it would not be surprising for people to want to return to a former way of life in the mixed forest if life on the steppe was going badly. At the least, we should keep this possibility in mind as we learn more about the steppe during the coming weeks.

Works Cited

Moon, David. 2013. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pallot, Judith, and Denis J. B. Shaw. 1990. Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613–1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press.1990

Immigration from Prussia to Russia

The published collection of Johann Cornies’s papers (for additional background, see here) continues to shed light on the context in which our family moved from Prussia (Poland) to Russia. Although Benjamin Buller and family emigrated from Prussia to Volhynia (in northern Ukraine) years earlier than the Cornies letter we are about to examine, it is reasonable to think that the types of terms that Cornies discusses were comparable to what Benjamin encountered, even if some of the details differed.

The year was 1833. It is apparent from Cornies’s response that David Epp of Heubuden in Poland had written asking Cornies to confirm or correct a report that Epp had heard, that the Russian government was prohibiting the immigration of Prussian Mennonites into Russia (i.e., the Ukraine). According to GAMEO, David Epp was an influential minister of the Heubuden congregation from 1817 through 1862, when he finally emigrated to Russia. Heubuden was located in northern Poland, only 25 miles southeast of Gdańsk (Danzig).

With that as background, we are ready to read Cornies’s letter to Epp:

Honourable David Epp, Heubuden, beloved friend,

Yesterday, 25 September, I received a response to my inquiry of 22 July about a prohibition against the immigration of Mennonites to Russia. The reply of 18 August came from State Counsellor Fadeev in Penza, who administers the majority of the southern German colonies. He knows of no Russian prohibition on immigration by Mennonites from Prussia. On the contrary, consent was expressly given for migration of 270 families (with acceptance of the specified conditions). Our District Office has been informed accordingly.

If those desiring to emigrate can show proof at the Consulate that they possess 800 rubles, the consul can still give them [entry] passes. The families wanting to emigrate should then come straight to this area where permissions can be negotiated, provided that the sum of money they possess has been declared truthfully, no more and no less. Each family must declare only its own possessions. Joint declarations are not allowed that would drag along someone with the family that is not part of it. Such subterfuges can cause us great harm, as have similar actions in the past. Declarations must be attested to by the signatures of the elders from Prussia.

Because Epp did not emigrate to Russia for another three decades, he probably was not asking about the rumored prohibition for himself but for someone else, perhaps for members of his congregation. Whatever the case, Cornies’s response touches upon the process by which one emigrated into Russia (moving around within Russia was a different matter).

First, as of 1833 Russia was willing to admit an additional 270 families to settle within its borders. Whether this number represents all immigrants or just Mennonites is not specified.

However, the borders were not open to just anyone; only those who could show proof of possession of 800 rubles were eligible to emigrate. It is difficult to calculate accurately how much money today this would represent; the most we can say from the context is that nine years earlier Cornies sought to purchase sheep for Molotschna colony: the anticipated price for a ram was 250 rubles and for a ewe 125 rubles. Thus, 800 rubles was slightly more money than would be needed to buy one ram and four ewes. All that to say, the 800-ruble requirement presumably did not limit emigration only to the rich, although it no doubt was intended to keep out the destitute.

Someone who had 800 rubles was to present proof of possession to the Russian consulate in Prussia. It seems that this proof consisted of a signed declaration of possession that was countersigned by the Mennonite elders of the area from which a family was emigrating.

Upon receipt of a fully executed declaration, the Russian consul would issue an entry pass that gave the émigré the right to cross the border into Russia. To be clear: those who wished to emigrate had to secure permission from Russia before they sought to enter the country. Left unsaid is that they also had to secure permission from the Prussian authorities to leave—and pay that government as well for the right to do so.

Once in Russia, the immigrant family was to travel directly to their final destination (here Cornies has Molotschna in mind) so they could negotiate permissions. One wishes that Cornies had elaborated on this a little further, since a number of details are left unexplained: With whom were the immigrants to negotiate: Russian governmental officials? local officials, perhaps a village mayor? What specifically was to be negotiated: where the new arrivals would live? what they would do? whether they would receive a land allotment? Answers to those questions will need to come from somewhere else.

One final detail is worth mentioning: Cornies warns against the practice of unrelated persons pooling their resources together to reach the 800 rubles minimum. So, for example, one can easily imagine a family with 600 rubles allowing an unrelated person with 200 rubles to “join” the family so that the composite group could then emigrate together. In fact, we have probably already seen an instance of just such a practice.

A little over a year ago we recounted how sixty-nine-year-old Heinrich Buller of Brenkenhoffswalde (remember him? the likely father of out-of-wedlock Heinrich Buller; see here) joined himself to the Ludwig Boettcher family in 1834 or 1835 (one or two years after Cornies’s letter) and immigrated to Russia with them. We knew then why Heinrich would have needed to join some family: immigration was permitted only to families of five or more people. What was less clear was why the Boettchers would have permitted him to join, since they numbered seven without him. Looking back, it seems reasonable to think that they allowed Heinrich to join their family, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because his contribution enabled them to reach the 800 rubles threshold. We do not know this for certain, but it seems highly likely. Clearly Cornies did not approve of these arrangements, but they took place nonetheless.

Little by little we continue to connect the dots and fill in the details. The more we explore and learn, the more we understand. Based on Cornies’s letter, we now have not only a clearer idea of the terms and the requirements that those who wished to emigrate had to meet but also why a member of our larger Buller family (not a direct ancestor) joined with another family when he emigrated to Russia in the mid-1830s.

Works Cited

Cornies, Johann. 2015. Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies. Volume 1: 1812–1835. Translated by Ingrid I. Epp. Edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Reimer, Gustav. 1956. Epp, David (1779–1863). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Of making many books there is no end

A particular book has dominated my schedule recently: William G. Dever’s Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah. If all goes as planned, all 700+ pages will be published this fall. Now that the majority of my work on the book is behind me, I hope to return to some semblance of regular blogging about topics of interest to Bullers and others who want to learn more about our Mennonite history.

The reference to Dever’s book is not just a throwaway; in fact, the approach Dever takes to the study of the history of Israel and Judah of ancient times (from David through the fall of Jerusalem in 586 or 587 BCE) has relevance for own own explorations. Dever begins not with texts that recount a history but with what can be learned from the contexts behind that story. His portrait focuses on archaeology: what we can learn both from the ruins of cities and from the small objects—pottery fragments, seal impressions, inscriptions,  even animal bones—found within them. Dever then compares the picture sketched by the material remains with the written text to see where they cohere, where they diverge, and where one illumines or complements the other.

This is, I admit, a significant oversimplification of what Dever accomplishes in Beyond the Texts, and we obviously cannot mine archaeological data for Poland, Volhynia, or Molotschna as Dever does for Israel and Judah. Nevertheless, we can take a cue from Dever and seek to understand more fully the contexts in which our ancestors lived, their physical environment or legal setting, to identify just two examples. Adopting this approach will, I believe, benefit us in at least two ways: it will likely help us to connect the dots of our family history and thus produce a more accurate sketch of the lives of our forebears from centuries gone by; this approach will also help us fill in some of the gaps between the lines thus sketched, to add color and depth to the portrait we seek to paint.

What might this look like? Two examples from some recent reading, both authored by Professor David Moon of York University (U.K.), offer a hint of what we might expect.

Several years back Moon authored The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (see here for the GooglePlay e-book version). I have barely begun reading this award-winning monograph, but already it has prompted me to consider questions that would never have occurred to me otherwise. Specifically, I learned that Molotschna and Volhynia are part of significantly different environments, or regions, if you will. In other words, when Benjamin Buller and family moved from Volhynia to Molotschna and then back from Molotschna to Volhynia, they were not merely traveling miles (or versty, to use the Russian term); they were traversing distinct environments. Might this help us understand why Benjamin and family moved from one to another and then back to their starting point—before David moved back to Molotschna yet again? We are not yet ready to answer the question (more reading awaits), but by stepping outside of our family history to explore the Russian–Ukrainian environment, we at least know enough now to recognize a question that begs to be asked.

Moon is also known for a 2002 essay published in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. The essay, titled “Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Internal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c. 1800–1914,” provides background to and documentation concerning peasant migration within imperial Russia, that is, the legal entity within which our family lived. Two words in his title bear special notice: internal passport. Nowadays we think of a passport as a document needed for travel between countries; in nineteenth-century Russia, certain residents of Russia were required to have official documents authorizing them to travel or move to another location within Russia. We have already encountered this system several times, although we did not know what to make of it. For example, when some of the original Waldheim residents moved back to Volhynia, to Heinrichsdorf, the census records that some did so with proper authorization but that others fled without permission. Moon’s essay enables us to paint a richer, deeper portrait of the reality that Benjamin and Helena and David and Helena faced, the limitations on their movement and the bureaucracy they had to navigate when they wished to enter or leave Russia or even move within the empire.

These two examples are only a taste of what we might learn about the environments and contexts in which our ancestors lived. We will return to them in due course and mine them for every detail they can provide. Other resources we hope to consult over the next months include the following, to list just a few:

• David Moon, “Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia's Frontiers, 1550–1897,” The Historical Journal 40 (1997): 859–93.
• Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia 1762–1804. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds. Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
• Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
• Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History. London: Routledge, 2007.
• David Saunders, “Russia’s Ukrainian Policy (1847–1905): A Demographic Approach,” European History Quarterly 25 (1995): 181–208.
• Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1991.

Perhaps it is, in the end, a good thing that there is no end of the making of many books. After all, they help us imagine our ancestors a little more clearly and thus enable us to understand from whence we came with significantly more insight and appreciation.

Works Cited

Moon, David. 2002. Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Internal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c. 1800–1914. Pages 324–57 and 424–32 in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. Edited by David Eltis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

———. 2013. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.