Mennonite settlement in the Altai
The resettlement of the Plautdietschen Mennonites in the Altai region began after a bill on the transfer of free land in the Altai district to the resettlement office had been introduced in the Duma and the State Council on September 19, 1906 . In the years 1907–1908 the Kulunda steppe with an area of over 600,000 dessjatines (a dessjatine about 1.11 hectares) was made available for the resettlers .
The resettlers were given certain perks: reduced railway tariffs (they only had to pay 25 percent of the normal railway tariff), whereby children up to ten years of age were allowed to travel for free. For the carriage of a Puds goods 100 versts was one kopeck collected, exemption from local and state taxes in the first five years (in the next five years were collected only 50 percent of all taxes, and later in accordance with generally applicable rules) Exemption from military service in the first three years, interest-free loan of 160 rubles for the purchase of agricultural equipment, seeds, etc. like m. When the news of this regulation reached the Mennonite colonies in the Crimea , in southern Russia and in the Orenburg area , it aroused great interest among the landless and landless colonists. At that time, the price of land in the mother colonies was already so high that most of the landless farmers could no longer expect their situation to improve. Hence the desire of these landless farmers to try their luck in distant Siberia .
It should be noted here that Jakob Reimer, head of the district of Sagradovka in the Cherson Governorate , informed the Mennonite colonies of Samara and Orenburg about the plans to relocate to Siberia. This is also the reason why the applications from the resettlers from all these places at the resettlement office in Barnaul arrived practically at the same time, which explains that their villages were later founded in the immediate vicinity of each other.
At the end of April 1907 the representatives of various Mennonite settlements met in Barnaul and jointly submitted an application to provide them with around 60,000 Dessjatinen land in the Kulunda steppe. An employee of the resettlement office confirmed that Russian families do not settle on this land because there are no rivers and inland lakes.
The move of the Mennonites here was very intensive in the years 1907–1909 and lasted until the outbreak of the First World War.
In the 19 settlement areas, Mennonites initially founded 31 villages:
| Villages | Settlement area | Territory size |
|---|---|---|
| Friedensfeld, Orloff, Rosenhof | Besymjanny log | 4170 |
| Ebenfeld, Hochstadt | Vysokaya Griva | 2717 |
| Land crown | Golenki | 1450 |
| Alexanderfeld | Grishkovka | 1880 |
| Schönwiese | Degtjarka | 1895 |
| Nikolaidorf, Schönsee | Dyagilevsky No. 2 | 1871 |
| Nikolaipol, Rosenwald, Schöntal | Ivanov Log | 4631 |
| Karatal | Karatal | 1535 |
| Schönau | Karlovka No. 8 | 1230 |
| Alexanderkron, Halbstadt | Kussak | 3132 |
| Markovka | Markovka | 2138 |
| Chortitza | Perekrjostny | 1700 |
| Lichtenfeld | Petrovka | 1645 |
| Alexeifeld, Protassowo, Reinfeld | Protasov Log | 3304 |
| Flower place, Gnadenheim, Kleefeld | Redkaya Dubrawa | 4069 |
| Meadow field | Stepnoi | 1857 |
| Gnadenfeld, Tiege | Stupine log | 3145 |
| Alexandrovsky | Skljarovka | 1688 |
| Grünfeld | Chertyosh | 2605 |
From these villages as well as from nine villages founded by German resettlers of the Catholic faith, the district of Orlowo emerged on January 1, 1910. In the following years, the villages founded by the Catholic resettlers were combined to form the Novo-Romanowka district.
In 1916 the Orlowo district already had 34 settlements - Shumanovka, Berjosowka and Chernovka were added to the above.
The resettlers who founded these villages in the Kulunda steppe came from the colonies on the Molotschna (the districts of Halbstadt and Gnadenfeld in the Berdjansk district, Taurian governorate ) and from the Khortitza colonies (Chortitza district, Alexandrowsk district, Yekaterinoslav governorate including their daughter colonies) .
The number of settlers is estimated at around 1,200 families, the proportion of those from Chortitsa was around 200 families. The remaining Mennonite colonies in the Crimea, in the Orenburg and Samara governorates, as well as in Bashkiria etc. provided only a small percentage of resettlers.
The settlement of Sagradovka in the Kherson District, Cherson Governorate , which consisted of 17 villages and was founded by resettlers from the colonies on the Molochna in the first half of the 1870s, played an extremely important role in the organization of the resettlement of the Mennonites in the Kulunda steppe . In the years 1906–1912, 1,847 people moved from this settlement to Siberia, including 1,726 people in the Tomsk Governorate .
Something about agriculture that the new settlers used: They brought the four-field economy to the Kulunda steppe, mainly to grow wheat . In the first two years the field was tilled with wheat, the third either with oats or, more rarely, with barley . For the fourth year the field lay fallow, so that cattle grazed on it in the summer. In autumn it was plowed again with a single-blade plow. Later, however, multi-furrow plows, twist plows, iron harrows , seed drills, mowing machines with a pull-together and yeast binding machines were also used. Threshing machines for combination trains were still rare. Only the vegetable gardens were fertilized, because the dung was collected as fuel, because coal and wood could only be brought from far away and were therefore expensive.
Although the settlers did not lack hard work, the objective conditions made it extremely difficult for them to build a good and profitable economy. In many ways, the fact that the urban population of Siberia did not make up more than ten percent of the total population of this region at that time also contributed to this. With an average grain harvest of 50 poods per Dessjatine (about eight quintals per hectare), Siberia produced around 300 million poods of grain in 1909. The region's own requirements were not even half of this amount. So the excess grain had to be sold. But the high cost of transporting the Siberian grain to the European part of Russia made the sale unprofitable, which is why grain prices in Siberia were very low. It was not uncommon for the new settler to bring the grain he produced to Kamen or to Pavlodar , where he had to sell it at such a low price that the proceeds could barely cover the transport costs. It cost around 30 kopecks to transport a pud of grain to Kamen, while wheat prices in Siberia ranged from 20 to 70 kopecks for the pud. The industrial products required by the settlers, however, were almost all brought from beyond the Urals and were therefore quite expensive due to their long transport route. So, a mower cost about 150-160 rubles.
As early as 1914, all settlements and districts that had German names had to be renamed Russian. In general, the Russian names were based on the names of the settlement areas in which the respective villages were located.
Alexanderkron - Kussak, Alexanderfeld - Griškovka, Gnadenheim - Redkaja Dubrava, Grünfeld - Čertjož, Hochstadt - Wyssokaja Griva, Lichtenfeld - Petrovka, Landskrone - Golenkij, Nikolaidorf - Djagilevka, Tiege - Uglovoje, Wiesenfeld - Stepnoj.
Some of the villages were renamed by translating the German names into Russian: Ebenfeld - Rovnopol, Reinfeld - Čistoje, Rosenwald - Lesnoje, Halbstadt -Polgorod, Schönsee - Sineosjornoje, Alexeifeld - Polevoje.
A number of villages were given names that had no direct relation to the designation of the settlement area or to the German names: Blumenort - Podsnežnoje, Friedensfeld -Lugovoje, Gnadenfeld - Mirnoje, Nikolaipol - Nikolskoje, Rosenhof - Dvorskoje, Schönau -Jasnoje, Schöntal - Krasnyj Dol , Kleefeld - Krasnoye.
The Orlovo District was then incorporated into the Znamenskij District in 1924 and ceased to exist as an administrative unit.
In 1916, the settlements in Tomsk Governorate were examined by an inspection commission of the Settlement Authority, including in the Orlowo district:
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literature
- Aziatskaya Rossiya . Vol. 1. Saint Petersburg, 1914
- Očerki Altajskogo kraja . Barnaul, 1925
- Gerhard Fast: In the steppes of Siberia . Rosthern, 1952
- Sbornik statističeskich svedenij ob ékonomičeskom položenii pereselencev v Tomskoj gubernii . Ed. 1. Tomsk, 1913
- Altajsko-Tomskaja čast Sibiri po dannym s / ch perepisi 1916 goda . Tomsk, 1927