Konstantinovka 1

A little more than a month ago (here) I mentioned a book written by Igor Trutanow: Konstantinovka—A Mennonite Village in the Soviet Empire: The Last Chapter of the History of the Mennonites in Russia. I have since purchased and read the book (reasonably priced at Amazon here). I may, in time, offer a more complete overview of the book, but this post seeks only to introduce this Mennonite village and several of its former residents who are important to us. 

I begin with a correction: Konstantinovka is not, as stated earlier, 5 miles west of Kleefeld in the Slavgorod Mennonite Settlement in western Siberia; I have no idea what led me to think that it is. Konstantinovka is in the same general vicinity, but farther west. The satellite photo below shows the city of Pavlodar in the lower left; Konstantinovka is located north–northeast and is marked by the yellow pin on the left.

The yellow pin to the right is also important to us, since it marks the location of the village to which David Buller’s second wife (after Helena Zielke) and their son Heinrich moved (here and here). Both that village, named Miloradovka, and Konstantinovka are located in Kazakhstan, which was earlier part of the Russian Empire and then, until 1991, part of the Soviet Union. 

Pinpointing Konstantinovka’s location is important for several reasons. First, as one can see in the photograph above, Konstantinovka was only 22 miles west of Miloradovka. It was close to a village of some importance to our family. 

Second, although the most common Mennonite names in the village were “Dick, Enns, Epp, Fast, Franz, Friesen, Janzen, Klassen, Lemke, Martens, Neufeld, Penner, Peters, Rempel, Thiessen, Toews, Warkentin, Wiebe and Wiens” (Trutanow 2015, 81), at some point Konstantinovka became home to at least one Buller family.

As mentioned earlier, Trutanow writes of a friend he made during his years in Konstantinovka: a man named Heinrich Buller who had a wife named Helene and a sister Elisa (long deceased). Trutanow includes a photograph from sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s of Heinrich and his cow Romashka.

Although we cannot say precisly how we are related to Heinrich, we can be fairly certain that he is a member of our family. It is a little odd, I admit, to see a photograph of a relative who lived on the other side of the globe and who eked out a living in a poor village located on the Kazakh Steppe. 

Trutanow explains that all the Mennonites fled Konstantinovka after the breakup of the Soviet Union, that is, after they no longer lived under the oppressive control of the Soviet government. Trutanow writes, “All my friends and colleagues in Konstantinovka went as Spätaussiedler (late repatriate) to their ethnic homeland,” to Germany (2015, 164). Presumably Heinrich and his mother Helene were part of that group. 

Does Heinrich still live there today? That we do not know, but perhaps Trutanow has kept in contact with his old friend. Trutanow, who lives in Canada now, helpfully included his email address in his book. The search for Heinrich is not yet ended.

Work Cited

Trutanow, Igor. 2015. Konstantinovka—A Mennonite Village in the Soviet Empire: The Last Chapter of the History of the Mennonites in Russia. Toronto: Lulu.