Bullers in the Soviet Union 2

Only a few hours remain in May, so it is time to get writing, lest the month end up a complete void. Although there are no posts to prove it, Buller Time has been active throughout May researching the topic of this series. This post will begin to lay out the broad strokes of what has been learned so that, as we proceed, we can understand the lives and experiences of the Bullers and other Mennonites we encounter within their proper historical contexts. We start with several clarifications.

First, the term Soviet Union is not relevant for the entire period we will cover, nor should the term evoke the same image throughout this entire period. Strictly speaking, the Soviet Union—or, more properly, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—did not come into existence until late in 1922; our examination will begin well before that date, during the years that led up to the creation of the Soviet Union. 

Further, even after 1922, the Soviet Union was not a static entity: like all governing bodies, the Soviet Union evolved and changed to meet the demands of a dynamic internal and international situation and to conform to the personal desires of various leaders, whether Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, or someone else. Consequently, those of us who grew up during the height of the Cold War, when children and parents alike feared nuclear war between the US and USSR, should not impose our memories of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and beyond on the earliest Soviet state of the 1920s and 1930s. There were similarities and continuities, to be sure, but each period should be examined on its own terms, so that our understanding of life in the Soviet Union at any particular moment is true to the facts as we know them.

Second, although the series refers to Bullers in the Soviet Union, the scarcity of family-specific data will frequently require us to discuss the Mennonite experience in general, then apply what we learn to any Bullers who may have been under Soviet control at that time. We will, to be sure, seek to identify specific Bullers in the historical record, and we will also attempt to place them on the family tree. 

We will begin, I imagine, with David Buller and his son Heinrich, during the last days of the Russian monarchy. However, we will also touch on other Bullers we can identify, including Katya Buller’s family in Kleefeld, a family of Bullers we discovered earlier seeking to escape Soviet control, and, I believe, even one Buller member of the Soviet Communist Party. With any luck, other Bullers will step out of the mists of history and take their rightful place in our larger family story.

The investigation will be informed, of course, by various resources, but two deserve special mention. First, Russia: A History (Freeze 2009) offers a scholarly but highly accessible account of Russian history from Kievan Rus in the late ninth century through Vladimir Putin in the early twenty-first century. Our general history of the Russian/Soviet context will be heavily informed by the narrative offered there. Second, our understanding of the Mennonite experience within the Soviet context will depend greatly on a series of lectures by Terry Martin on “The Russian Mennonite Encounter with the Soviet State, 1917–1955” (Martin 2002). Martin’s three lectures on this topic are freely available for anyone to read, and I encourage those who wish to understand the Mennonite experience in the first half-century of Soviet rule to read these lectures more than once.

With this background set, we are ready to begin the series proper. Our approach will be to describe as fully as necessary the historical context of a particular moment in Russian/Soviet history, then locate the Mennonite community and any Bullers known to us in that time and place. Our goal in all of this will be not only to learn both the names and lineages of members of our broader family but also to appreciate the challenges they faced during the waning of the Russian Empire and the rise and growth of the Soviet Union.

Sources Cited

Freeze, Gregory L., ed. 2009. Russia: A History. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Martin, Terry. 2002. The Russian Mennonite Encounter with the Soviet State, 1917–1955. Conrad Grebel Review 20:5–59. Available online here.