Halbstadt 7

The previous post (Halbstadt 6) commented on the one-sentence report of the Mennonites’ arrival on the steppe. The next sentence in the community report, the focus of attention in this post, identifies who their closest neighbors were in their new home. For the German text and a translation of the full Halbstadt report, see here.

The steppe was used at that time partly by the crown peasants of the parish village Grosstokmak, lying 10 versts away, and partly by wandering Nogais.

crown peasants. At this time roughly half of Russia’s peasants were serfs, indentured individuals who not only lived and labored on land owned by someone else but also were bound to that land in a very real way, with no freedom to leave for a better position or to relocate to a better estate. Russian society recognized different types of peasants, based on who owned the land on which they served. David Moon writes, “the main categories were the seigniorial peasantry (or serfs) who lived on nobles’ estates, the state peasantry who lived on land belonging to the state, and the appanage peasantry whose land was the property of the imperial family” (1999, 22). The latter group, appanage peasants were also called court peasants, so presumably the phrase crown peasants refers to members of that grouping.

parish village. To learn what is meant by the term parish village, we turn once again to David Moon, who writes, “From the sixteenth century, most rural settlements were either villages (sela) or hamlets (derevni). The main distinction between them was that villages had churches, and were the centres of parishes that included the nearby hamlets. Villages were usually larger than hamlets” (1999, 200). Based on the community report’s designation, then, we can safely conclude that Grosstokmak was the central Russian village in the immediate area.

Grosstokmak. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (here), Tokmak was established in 1784, just twenty years before Halbstadt, by Russian state peasants (i.e., members of the state peasantry mentioned above) from the Poltava gubernia, a province roughly 165 miles to the north-northwest. The town took the name Tokmak from its location on the Tokmach River, which empties into the Molochna River a little more than 2 miles west of the village. According to a German Wikipedia page (here), the village was generally known as Tokmak but occasionally referred to as Grosstokmak (or Groß-Tokmak), which means Great Tokmak. One would think that there must have been another, smaller Tokmak that was distinct from Great Tokmak, but I know of no such village or hamlet in the area.

10 versts. The verst was a Russian measure of distance of that time period, equal to .66 mile. Thus the 10 versts from Tokmak to Halbstadt was roughly 6.6 miles.

Nogais. As reported earlier, historically the Nogai Tatars stemmed from the Golden Horde led by Nogai Khan, a descendant of Ghengis Khan. The Nogai, who were Muslim and spoke a dialect of Turkic, were settled in the Molotschna region by the Russian government between 1792 and 1810 in an attempt to prevent their defection to the Turks, against whom Russia warred periodically during this period. The Nogai were seminomadic herdsmen who moved their flocks and herds through the Avoz Lowlands (see further here).

Work Cited

Moon, David. 1999. The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made. London: Longman.