Konstantinovka 5

Thus far in this short series we have located the village Konstantinovka on a map and in relation to the village Miloradovka, where our ancestor David Buller’s son Heinrich moved with his family and his mother in 1907. We then contextualized the Mennonite presence in Siberia (the term being loosely used) within four specific stages of their history in the region. The last post sketched the geographical context of the Mennonite settlement of Siberia. We paid particular attention to Pavlodar, the area around the city by the same name, where twelve Mennonite villages—including Konstantinovka and Miloradovka—were grouped.

This post will supply an additional layer of context to our understanding of Mennonite life in Siberia, that is, the Mennonite migration east as a part of a significantly larger phenomenon within Russia at that time. What follows depends on the scholarship of Donald W. Treadgold and his work The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War.

We begin with a quick review of Russian history. For a good portion of its imperial history, Russian society included two types of serfs: state serfs were technically free but were tied to a particular plot of state-owned land and obligated to pay taxes on the fruits of their labor; private serfs enjoyed no freedom and were little more than the property, slaves, of the nobles who owned them and to whom they owed their labor. For all practical purposes, these two groups constituted the peasant class in Russia.

Unlike most of its European neighbors, Russia did not fully emancipate its serfs until quite late, in 1861, when Alexander II decreed that serfs on private estates—who constituted 38 percent of the entire population of Russia—and household servants were free citizens with all the rights of self-determination, including the right to own land. The state serfs, who were already free from a legal standpoint, were not directly addressed in the edict, but the effect was essentially the same for them.

We should stop here for a moment to compare the different situations of our Mennonite forebears with the vast population of Russian peasants. Before 1861, Mennonite farmers could own land, but Russian peasants could not; the government and the members of the nobility owned all of the land on which the peasants worked. After 1861, Russian peasants had the right to buy land, but there was insufficient land to meet all their needs. As a result, some peasants had plot sizes that averaged 4.5 dessiatines, or 12.1 acres (Treadgold 1957, 256), an area too small to support a family, let alone have surplus available for sale. If you recall, Mennonite full allotments were 65 dessiatines, or 175 acres. The disparity in landholdings is stark.

In other words, after 1861 Mennonites were not the only Russian residents to experience a land crisis. Newly emancipated Russian peasants faced the same reality. With a growing population and all of the land in Eurpoean Russia already claimed and cultivated, what were the peasants to do? Enter Siberia.

According to Treadgold, the Great Siberian Migration did not begin immediately after the serfs were emancipated in 1861. According to his table 2 (1957, 33), the explosion did not take place until 1891–1900, when over a million peasants moved east. More than double that number migrated in the period 1901–1910. Table 3 provides yearly totals for 1887–1913; the years 1900–1910 are of greatest interest to us, since 1907 was the year of Heinrich’s migration. 

1900	219,265
1901	120,125
1902	110,930
1903	125,500
1904	46,732
1905	44,029
1906	216,648
1907	567,979
1908	758,812
1909	707,463
1910	353,000

In other words, during the decade when Heinrich Buller and thousands of other Mennonites were moving to Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, millions of Russian peasants were moving along with them. In 1907 alone, over half a million Russian peasants made the same trip that Heinrich and his family made. In short, the Mennonite migration to Siberia was neither unusual nor an aberration; it was a minor part of a long-term, large-scale settlement of a frontier region. Treadgold compares it, albeit loosely, to the westward movement to settle the American frontier. The direction of travel was different, but the pattern of settlement was the same.

This is not to discount the significance of the Mennonite migrants. Treadgood mentions them as one example of the success of the government’s promotion of Siberian migration. 

The example of the Kulunda steppe (in the southern part of Barnaul county of Tomsk province) was illustrative. It had 913,000 desiatinas, and had netted the Emperor’s Cabinet only 3,000 rubles annually from Kirghiz farms and Pavlodar townsmen. In 1907, 1,089 Kirghiz farms were there. The Resettlement Administration had left them 167,000 desiatinas (more than 150 desiatinas per farm) and had turned 746,000 desiatinas into migrant lots. Within three years, 200 villages were settled with some 55,000 peasants (Ukrainian and in part Mennonite). There arose a trade center, Slavgorod. In place of one earth hut, in a year there sprang up a church, administrative building, two mills, bazaars, hospital, and pharmacy; there were preparations for opening a church school for girls and a school for boys; land was set aside for an experimental field. (Treadgold 1957, 174)

The area being described includes the Pavlodar and Barnaul (Slavgorod) Mennonite colonies. They were an important part, but only a part, of the successful settlement and development of the Siberian region.

That being said, one additional point deserves mention. The Russian peasants who had owned 4.5 dessiatines in European Russia had average landholdings of 38.3, or 103.4 acres, in Siberia. This was a substantial increase. However, according to Igor Trutanow (2015, 37), the Mennonite settlers of Konstantinovka received allotments of 60 dessiatines, or 162 acres. If this is correct, then one might easily imagine that the Russian government repeated its earlier practice of granting the Mennonite farmers larger tracts of land in hopes that their example of successful farming would be adopted by the Russian peasants surrounding them.

Before leaving this topic, we should consider also the means of moving such large numbers of people thousands of miles across often-barren expanses: the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Constructed between 1891 and 1916, this railroad carried the majority of migrants west with great efficiency. In order to encourage as many people as possible to make the trip, the Russian government reduced fares in 1898 from an average of 57 rubles per family in 1890 to 15 rubles in 1898 (Treadgold 1957, 131). The lure of available land and the low cost of traveling to it had the desired effect: thousands of Mennonites and millions of Russian peasants made the trip to the wide open spaces of Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe. David Buller’s son Heinrich was but one of the many people who made that trek.

Works Cited

Treadgold, Donald W. 1957. The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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