Red front
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Red front Рот-Фронт |
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| Basic data | |||||
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| State : |
 Kyrgyzstan
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| Territory : | Bye | ||||
| Coordinates : | 42 ° 43 ' N , 75 ° 7' E | ||||
| Residents : | 796 (2009) | ||||
| Structure and administration | |||||
| Community type : | Village | ||||
Rot-Front (Рот-Фронт) is a 1927 as "mountain valley" (Бергтал) founded and since 1931 Red Front -called village in Rajon Ysyk-Ata in Kyrgyzstan .
It was laid out in autumn 1927 by 25 families of landless, German-speaking Russian mennonites about 60 km east of Bishkek . The first settlers came from the four villages of Köppental, Nikolaipol, Gnadental and Gnadenfeld in the Talas Valley (see Bakaiata ). Due to a lack of land, the farmers were forced to look for new places to settle. At the beginning of the 1930s, this settlement was officially named Rot-Front , but the name Bergtal continued to be used by the Germans and the speakers of Plautdietschen .
history
The Mennonites moved from the Volga and the Black Sea region of Russia to Central Asia at the end of the 19th century , as some like-minded family fathers in St. Petersburg had negotiated the promise in 1879 that their sons would not have to do military service if they were to join the new connected areas of Turkestan. The governor in Tashkent assigned them land in the Talas Valley, which was distributed among them when they settled in 1882. There was no more land; It was difficult to lease land from the Kyrgyz as well. Over the next 50 years the number of landless in the villages increased and the willingness to move to other places in order to get land increased. The government recognized the problem and in 1925 allocated land for these landless people in the Tschu Valley for a new village, which was given the name "Grünfeld" (later renamed " Thelmann Kolchos "). The number of landless people in the German villages in the Talas Valley was so great that only a part of them could get land in "Grünfeld". After further petitions, in 1927 the government again allocated land for the settlement of a village at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains. This settlement was named "Bergtal".
The first school teachers gave their lessons in private homes in German. Even after the village school was established, the German language of instruction was retained until 1938; after that, teaching was only in Russian.
In the early 1930s, a collective farm was formed from the private sector in “Bergtal”, and the village was renamed “Rot-Front”.
During the Second World War , the Bergtaler suffered the same fate as all ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. They were not abducted, they already lived in a region where others were deported, but more than a third of the men drafted were killed in the forced labor of the " Trud Army ". Women were also sent to forced labor. Many children were left without parents and without care.
After the war, the life of the inhabitants and the economy of the village recovered only slowly. The upswing only came in the 1960s and 1970s; the Germans were also slowly able to get together again for church services. Since the majority of the residents still had relatives in Germany, it was possible to apply for resettlement to Germany since the 1980s. From 1986, when perestroika was announced, until the collapse of the Soviet Union , the vast majority of residents had applied for resettlement to Germany. When the agricultural kolkhozes collapsed after 1991, many residents lost their jobs. The Kyrgyz language was introduced as the state language. By 1992 more than half of the former 900 German residents had moved from the “Red Front” to Germany. Today only about 150 people of German origin live in the village. However, "Rot-Front / Bergtal" is one of the few villages in Central Asia in which a noteworthy closed German minority still lives. Almost all of them have relatives in Germany, visit each other and have a permit to travel to Germany.
Todays situation
After Kyrgyzstan declared independence in 1991, the remaining German inhabitants of the village successfully campaigned for the settlement to bear its old name Bergtal again in addition to the official name of Rot-Front and to be able to identify it on the village sign. Today, the place name sign reads “Rot-Front” in Cyrillic and below it “Bergtal 1927” in Latin (to be precise, the sign incorrectly reads ßergtal ).
A local Kyrgyz woman who had studied German as a foreign language gave German lessons in the village school for a few years. Through the mediation of the German Embassy in Bishkek and the Goethe Institute, the Federal Republic of Germany financed a German teacher from Germany in the village from the mid-1990s.
With the help of the German Embassy, it was also possible to set up a small museum in the school building, which uses maps and photos to keep memories of the Germans' migrations to Central Asia alive and to illustrate life in the village. Since a smoldering fire in the school building, the small museum has been located in a building on the German teacher's property. Generous financial and material aid from the federal government for the local agricultural cooperative, however, for the most part perished in the sand or was misappropriated.
Today Rot-Front / Bergtal is one of the few villages in the successor states of the Soviet Union that still have a considerable proportion of the population of German origin. However, of the approximately 900 inhabitants of German descent in 1989, only fewer than 150 can be found there today.
On October 9, 2010, Michael Martens and photographer Marcus Kaufhold reported on the village in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
See also
literature
- Jörg Heuer: At Kellers in Kyrgyzstan . In: National Geographic / Germany . Vol. 8 (2006), issue 12, ISSN 1615-0872 .
- Robert Friesen: In the footsteps of the ancestors. 1882–1992; the prehistory and 110 years of the Germans in the Talas Valley in Central Asia . Self-published, Minden 2000, ISBN 3-98052-055-2 .
- Stephan Flechtner & Dagmar Schreiber: Kyrgyzstan - To the peaks of Tien Schan and Pamir. 5th edition, Trescher Verlag, Berlin, 2018, ISBN 978-3-89794-387-2 , p. 163
Web links
- Guest: Hans-Erich Viet - milk and honey from Rotfront. Deutsches Filminstitut, April 1, 2003, archived from the original on January 23, 2004 .
- Conny Schiemenz: Germans in Kyrgyzstan. In: ZDF-Auslandsjournal . March 21, 2010 (played on YouTube , 5:50 minutes).
- Wim Klerkx: Mennonites in Kyrgystan. In: wimklerkx.nl. 1996/1997 (photo documentation).