Bullers in Molotschna 3

As suggested earlier (here and here), Peter D Buller probably did not own any land in the Molotschna Mennonite colony from the time that he married Sarah Siebert (1866) until their journey to the U.S. (1879). Of course, this leaves unanswered questions about Peter’s status in the community, how he and his family lived, and what led him to move his family so much within a ten-year period.

Peter D’s father David remains similarly unknown: Where did he live after emigrating from Prussia to Molotschna around 1820? Where did he and his wife Helena Zielke live and raise their family in the 1840s? Were they landowners or landless? Were they even farmers, for that matter?

I would like to say that all these questions will be answered in due course, but in fact they won’t. All we can do is sketch roughly the lives of the Bullers in Molotschna by exploring the various contexts in which they lived, worked, and worshiped. Thus, the next few “Bullers in Molotschna” posts will look at four of those contexts, to help us understand more fully what life was like for our ancestors and what led Peter D and all but one of his brothers and sisters to undergo the long journey to North America. After delving into the geographical context of the Molotschna colony below, we will examine, in turn, the socioeconomic, historical, and religious contexts.

The Geographical Context

As noted earlier, the Molotschna colony included within its boundaries approximately 500 square miles. It was bounded on the west by the Molochnaya River and fell mostly between the Tokmak River in the north and the Yushanlee River in the south. As shown in the map below, Mennonite-owned land also jutted to the south below the Yushanlee, in a rectangle roughly 8 miles wide and 28 miles long. This southern edge was also where the terrain gradually transitioned from the southern Avoz Lowlands to the Avoz Uplands stretching north.

Region surrounding the Molotschna Mennonite colony (lightly shaded area), with the
approximate (!) location of Kleefeld indicated. After Staples 2003, xviii.

The area was steppe land, a grassland plains region with trees only along the rivers (sound a little familiar?). One descendant of Molotschna settlers recalls what his grandmother told him about this new land: “They came to a barren steppe … no tree, no bush, only tall, dry, bitter grass and prickly camel fodder grew on the dry, cracked ground” (Staples 2003, 3).

The Molochtschna region in the area of the Molochnaya River. Photograph by Matvey Andreyev.

The southern edge of the Molotschna colony (Yushanlee River) was aligned roughly on the 47th parallel north (47.0º N), which places it significantly north, relatively speaking, of the Henderson area where Peter D later settled (40.90º N). Each degree of latitude equals 69 miles, so the northern location of Kleefeld would correspond to Bismarck, North Dakota.

The soil quality was not the best in the Ukrainian central steppe, but it was more than adequate for an agriculture-based economy, especially one focused on cereal grain cultivation. According to John Staples, the untilled area was covered with “a growth of feather grass intermixed with timothy, spear, and broom grass, wild oats, wild rye, and wild wheat” (2003, 6). David Moon adds that “the black earth (chernozem) of the [Ukrainian] steppes” was quite similar to the soil found in the North American Great Plains (Moon 2008, 205).

The climate was moderate (no doubt due somewhat to the influence of the Sea of Avoz and much larger Black Sea to the south), with average highs ranging from 21º Fahrenheit during January (the coldest month) to 70º in July (the warmest month). The average growing season (the time between the last spring frost and the first fall frost) was 180 days, a relatively long period (see Staples 2003, 8–10). Henderson, for example, has an average growing season ten days shorter.

On the banks of the Yushanlee River, 10–15 miles east of Alexanderkrone. Photograph by yurasik67.

The biggest challenge facing the peasant farmers of the Molotschna area was precipitation. The higher areas of the uplands received the highest average precipitation (up to 19.5" annually), but the lower, and especially southern, areas received substantially less, for example, 15" in the Yushanlee River area.

This last figure (15") is slightly below what the typical grain requires, but several additional factors complicated matters further (see Staples 2003, 6–7):

1. Precipitation was often not received when needed (when grain seeds were germinating) but somewhat later, during May, June, and July.
2. These are averages, which means that some years were drier than others. For example, during a fifteen-year period (1841–1855) in the village of Ohrloff (ca. 10 miles west of Kleefeld), precipitation fell below the 15.75" mark over half the time: eight years.

In spite of these obstacles, the Molotschna Mennonites generally fared reasonably well through a mixed-subsistence strategy that combined animal husbandry (mostly sheep but also cattle and horses), intensive gardening (around the village houses), and grain cultivation (primarily, unless I’m mistaken, the famous Turkey Red wheat that they later brought to the U.S.). Of course, not all was paradise, and the colonists did suffer through droughts, famines, severe blizzards, and Dust Bowl–like windstorms (“black blizzards,” Staples 2003, 9). Still, the Mennonite settlers fared no worse, and generally better, than most of those who lived around them.

Field near the Kurushan River almost directly north of Alexanderkrone. Photograph by Владимир Переклицкий.

Geography, of course, involves not just the characteristics of the land but also its location among other groups, and the Molotschna Mennonites were not the only people living in this area. At least four distinct groups lived on the edges and around the Molotschna colony and interacted with our ancestors in various ways (see further Staples 2003, xiii–xiv, 29–44).

To the north lay the state peasant land (shaded green in the map below) populated by Ukrainian and Russian peasants relocated into the Molotschna region because their original locales were too small to accommodate a growing population. These Russian Orthodox settlers were given smaller land grants than the Mennonites, and the land they were given was inferior to the Mennonite territory. The need to preserve agricultural land led to the development of much larger villages within this community than in all the other surrounding groups.

People-groups surrounding the Molotschna Mennonite colony (lightly shaded area in the center).
After Staples 2003, xviii

To the northwest of the Molotschna Mennonites were other German-speaking colonists (yellow area). The Mennonites were not the only group to be invited to emigrate to Catherine the Great’s newly won territory; Lutherans, Catholics, and other Protestants were also invited to settle the territory.

To the south of the German-speaking colonists (orange area) lived one group of Russian religious sectarians or separatists, the Doukhobors (the similar Molokans also lived in the Molotschna area). This group rejected the authority of the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox church. In spite of ongoing tensions, the Russian authorities allowed these separatists to settle in the Molotschna about the same time as the Mennonites.

The fourth people-group (purple area) is the most interesting: the Nogai Tatars. Historically this group 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

Surprisingly, Molotschna’s Mennonites appear to have had the greatest interaction with the Nogai. The Mennonites and Muslims not only lived side by side (note especially how close Kleefeld was to Nogai land); they also played significant roles in each other’s economic lives. But all that must wait for another post. For now it is sufficient to understand and appreciate the Molotschna Bullers’ geographical context: they lived on the south edge of a steppe, adopted a mixed-subsistence approach to economic survival, and interacted with people who could not have been more ethnically and religiously different.

Sources

Moon, David. 2008. In the Russians’ Steppes: The Introduction of Russian Wheat on the Great Plains of the United States of America.  Journal of Global History 3:203–25.

Staples, John R. 2003. Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. All the posts on the Bullers in Molotschna are indebted to Staples’s publications. This book, a revision of his PhD dissertation, is available at Amazon, although now costing double what it previously did.