Konstantinovka 2

We will return to Franztal in due course, but the village of Konstantinovka deserves at least one more post, if not more.

In the last post we learned where Konstantinovka is located: in the northeast corner of Kazakhstan, 22 miles west of Miloradovka, the small village where we think Heinrich Buller, son of our ancestor David, and his family and mother (David’s second wife) moved in 1908. The map below shows where within Kazakhstan the two villages were located (the two yellow pins). Note also that Siberia lies to the north and the corner of China appears in the lower right. The Mennonites of the Pavlodar area, in which both Konstantinovka and Miloradovka were located, were almost four times farther from the Molotschna colony (1,830 miles as the crow flies) than they were from China (475 miles).

It is important to keep this great distance in mind as we talk shift our attention to the founding of Konstantinovka. As we do so, we will consult Igor Trutanow’s Konstantinovka—A Mennonite Village in the Soviet Empire: The Last Chapter of the History of the Mennonites in Russia. As a side note, I highly recommend that anyone interested in reading about Mennonite life in the Soviet Union during the 1980s buy a copy of this book (Amazon and Lulu). Trutanow’s book is not stale history but rather a firsthand account from someone who lived among the descendants of the Mennonites who established this village.

Like Miloradovka, Konstantinovka was founded by Mennonites who emigrated from south Russia (modern Ukraine) (Trutanow 2015, 28). Trutanow writes:

In the fall of 1907, a group of Mennonites came to the future Konstantinovka. They had to prepare temporary shelters for the settlers from Tokmak [a city on the edge of the Molotschna colony] in the arid steppe. … They made bricks from the upper layer of the fallow soil. It was the only building material in the barren steppes of Kazakhstan. Timber for roofs, doors, and window frames was bought at the bazaar in Pavlodar. These mud huts had no wooden floors, so people lived on the bare ground. Once the shelters were ready, officials of the Pavlodar district administration visited the newcomers to inspect their housing situation. The officials gave the first Mennonite settlers a list of approved Russian names to choose for their new village: Olgino, Borisovka, Konstantinovka, and Natashino. The men from Tokmak picked Konstantinovka. … In the spring 1908, about two hundred Mennonites from Tokmak, Melitopol, and Chortitza settled in Konstantinovka. They travelled by train from South Russia to Omsk, Siberia, where they purchased horses and carts for transportation to Konstantinovka. Upon arrival, each family received 60 dessiatin (655.5 square meters) of fallow land. The agricultural equipment, ploughs, wooden harrows, seeds, wheat, oats, barley, and corn were purchased in Pavlodar. Only three years later, the new land was put under the plough. (Trutanow 2015, 37)

The situation and struggles that Trutanow describes for Konstantinovka were also encountered by Heinrich Buller, son of David Buller and his second wife. So, for example, earlier we read about how the settlers planned to overcome the area’s scarcity of lumber by building sod houses (see the Peter Fast letter here). Even more interesting is the fact that the Peter Fast letter references a group of forty families from the Molotschna colony who were planning to emigrate to the Pavlodar area in April of 1980. Is this the same as the group of two hundred whom Trutanow mentions, or were they separate groups of Mennonite immigrants?

Intriguingly, we also have direct evidence that Heinrich Buller planned to moved to this region in April 1908. In a 5 February 1908 letter to the Mennonitische Rundschau, Heinrich responds to an earlier question about his brothers and sisters as follows:

You ask about my siblings. We are only two, me and Sarah, Mrs. David Nickel; they are already in Siberia, and we plan, if it is the Lord’s will, to depart April 7, from here to there, where we intend to establish our home. (see here)

Clearly, Heinrich planned to emigrate to Siberia—by which he no doubt means the Pavlodar area—in 1908, and he hoped to begin his journey on 7 April. Did he leave then, or did he delay several weeks and travel with the forty-family group that Fast mentions?

We do not yet have answers to these questions, but we will continue to search for information that will shed light on them. Before I close this post, I am happy to provide an answer to a question posed at the end of the previous post: the Heinrich Buller who lived in Konstantinovka and who is pictured with his cow Romashka (see here) is alive and well. There may be more to report about him within the next week, so stay tuned!

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.