Publicado por Jorge Bohn

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY


German colonies

Note:  Volga Germans Colonies described in a not usual historical way






In 1763, capturing the Russian throne by force and ending the Seven Years' War, Catherine II published a new manifesto that called on foreigners to move to Russia and promised them substantial benefits: free land, exemption from military service , subsidies for resettlement, interest-free loans and tax exemptions for 30 years (Bartlett 1979: 3).
The "settlers", as they officially arrived, were called, guaranteed freedom of religion. Those who decide to establish factories (the Manifesto called them "capitalists") were also promised the right to acquire servants. A long list of lands proposed for colonization, from western Russia to Siberia, was attached to the Manifesto: the new colonies had to dominate these "vacant lands," displacing or assimilating the natives. Now here, in the interior lands and in the outskirts, the empire will carry out a civilizing mission. The project of foreign colonies was associated with Catalina's vague hopes of abolishing serfdom.According to the plan, foreign or Russian settlers were to replace the serfs on the ranches of the landlords over time. In fact, such an experiment was carried out only on a few farms, belonging to the imperial family (Bartlett 1979: 92). For the reception of the settlers, Catherine created a special Office, which was directed by her favorite Grigory Orlov, the hero of the Seven Years' War. As Orlov explained in his report to the Senate in 1764, as a result of his successful work, "Russia will no longer appear as strange and savage as it has done so far, and the important prejudice against it will go unnoticed" (Code 1818: 5 / 128).
After the peace of Westphalia, the Germans became a kind of colonial product; They were bought, hired or relocated around the world. England hired German soldiers to quell a rebellion in America; Catherine refused to provide Russian soldiers, despite the lucrative British proposal (Startsev 1995). By inviting the French Calvinists to Berlin, Prussia resettled the German settlers on the lands drained on the Rhine, and Catherine tried to overcome these successes of Frederick. Invited or not, the foreign advisors came to Russia to help Empress Amazon in her work to educate an unknown country.The French adventurer, later the famous writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, came to Russia in 1762 with plans to create a "European colony" east of the Caspian Sea. It was supposed that this colony would pacify the indigenous peoples "by force of example or weapons" and, cultivating the "vacant lands", would begin the trade with India; However, India was far beyond the mountains. Bernardin asked Catherine II a loan of 150 thousand rubles, but did not receive the money. Later he became famous for the novel "Paul and Virginia", which takes place in French Mauritius. Before his death in 1814, the writer began to work on a great novel about Siberia. Its action takes place in 1762,The coup d'état that brought Catherine to power calls it "revolution" (Cook, 1994, 2006). Another entrepreneurial Frenchman, Abbot Raynal, explained in The History of the Two Indies: Later he became famous for the novel "Paul and Virginia", which takes place in French Mauritius. Before his death in 1814, the writer began to work on a great novel about Siberia. His action takes place in 1762, just when Bernardin was in Russia. The coup d'état that brought Catherine to power calls it "revolution" (Cook, 1994, 2006). Another entrepreneurial Frenchman, Abbot Raynal, explained in The History of the Two Indies: Later he became famous for the novel "Paul and Virginia", which takes place in French Mauritius.Before his death in 1814, the writer began to work on a great novel about Siberia. His action takes place in 1762, just when Bernardin was in Russia. The coup d'état that brought Catherine to power calls it "revolution" (Cook, 1994, 2006). Another French entrepreneur, Abbot Raynal, explained in The History of Both Indies:
It would be better [for Russia] to choose a fertile province and ... invite free people from civilized countries there. ... From there, the germs of freedom would have spread throughout the empire. ... We can not order the Russians to become free, but we must link them to the sweet fruits of freedom (Raynal 1777: 248).
Subsequently, Raynal visited St. Petersburg and met with Catherine, but "Both of India" did not find an answer from her. In 1765, the Empress invited the reliable German shepherd, Pastor Johann Reingold Forster, to Russia to tell Europe about the new colonies in the Lower Volga. Arriving in Russia with his young son George, Forster put the colonies on the map and helped work on his legal documents (Bartlett 1979: 100). It was rumored in St. Petersburg that he sought to establish his own colony (Dettelbach, 1996: 28). He was never paid for his work in Russia, but the Royal Society of London published maps of the Volga colonies he published, which was Forster's first scientific achievement (Forster 1768).For his son George, the first work was a translation of Lomonosov, made at the age of 11 years. Both Forster later became famous.



Richesm the Great (Blackbourne 2007). With his successes, Orlov could have become a couple of years earlier in the war with Prussia. Competing with Frederick for the settlers, Catherine offered them the best conditions. Having received money, many settlers disappeared in the steppe. He was probably one of the strangest people in European history. It has been found to have been the case in the United States of America. Sectarian communities organized better than individual adventurers. It was founded by the Moravian brothers, the largest and most successful colonies; It is where the town of Gerngut is located, where the count has settled. Gerngut gave him a land of Moravian brothers. Being the missionaries of the empire. It was a time when he was survived. Alexander Golovnin, the Minister of Education (1861-1666), wrote in his memoirs: "I have many things left over from my childhood, from Quakers, from Hernguesters" (2004: 53). Mention was often made of the Moravian brothers, who valued his teaching, and in childhood he called them, in consonance and irony, "brothers of ants."
The immigrants arrived at the ship to Kronstadt and there swore allegiance to the Empress. Then Petersburg was distributed Under the escort, Gottlieb Beratz, parish priest of the Volga, "Norwegian German blood", "Beratz 1991: 2, shot by the Bolsheviks near Saratov in 1921). Volga and floated downstream.
The trip from St. Petersburg to the Lower Volga took many months; Many had to spend the winter on the road. However, Catherine's plan was so successful that in 1766 the rulers of several German lands prohibited emigration to their subjects. But it continued, and after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 1774, another strange and large religious group, the Mennonites, moved out of Prussia. Around 1818, a kind of special pietist arrived from Germany, who wanted to know the end of the world they were waiting for where Noah had brought his ark, in the Caucasus mountains. Separate groups of German settlers drained swamps near St. Petersburg; They were assisted in this work by the English Quakers.In Saratov and Ekaterinoslav imperial administrations were created "for the affairs of the settlers". The subsidiary colonies settled in different places, from the Caucasus to the Altai.

The unexpected alliance between the war empire and the pacifist testers requires an explanation. The empire was beneficial for its internal colonies that were built on the principle of a closed community. With the consent of the state, the members of the colony were attributed to it legally and economically; It was difficult to leave such a community, the outgoing ones did not receive a part of the property nor the inheritance rights. The commune was autonomous and the main contact of the state was taxation, which was more effective when its unit was a community, rather than individual "souls".In the virgin lands and in a hostile environment, people were united by strong non-economic relationships, as well as by an extraordinary work ethic and very unusual shelter standards. The Moravian brothers did not have personal assets. Land, livestock and income belonged to the whole community and no one individually. The settlers lived in dormitories, separated by sex: men separately, women separately; The couple met at a time approved by the elders. The children also lived separately under special supervision, and their parents visited them on the appointed days.In obedience to the elders in everything, including the choice of a spouse (which in some communities was decided by lottery), these people took their meals together, rested in the choral reading of the Holy Scriptures and cultivated the land with surprising effectiveness. On the Volga, its cities, gardens and fields looked like islands of prosperity and order. As Catherine wanted, they influenced their neighbors: Orthodox Russians, Muslim Tatars and Buddhist Kalmukas. Some Russian sects of the Volga and Crimea region borrowed the radical beliefs of the Hernguter. But the dissatisfaction among the individual settlers was also high.
One hundred years later, the population of the interior German colonies in the Russian Empire reached half a million. As exemplary contributors, the Germans did not mingle with their neighbors, but adopted their language, skills and technology, and sometimes their beliefs. In some German families, the children grew up bilingual; His contribution to Russian culture was immense and remains undervalued. The Moravian brothers built Sarepta, which became a city better known as Tsaritsyn, Stalingrad and Volgograd. Edward Huber (1814-1947), who was born in a small colony on the Volga, was the first to translate Goethe's Faust into Russian.Working in Sarepta, Isaac Jacob Schmidt translated the New Testament into Kalmyk and Mongolian languages ​​(Benes 2004). Born in Sarepta in the family of a Gernguter police officer, Jacob Hamel became a famous traveler and pioneer of photography in Russia.
The knowledge of another life within Russia influenced the Russian radicals of the 19th century. One of its leaders, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, grew up in Saratov, the capital of the German colonies in the Volga. In the gymnasium of his youth, his friends were Pavel Bakhmetev, son of a local landowner, and Alexander Klaus, son of a German organist (Eidelman, 1965). Chernyshevsky was arrested, wrote his utopian novel "What to do?" In prison and was exiled to Yakutia. Bakhmetev moved to New Zealand to establish a utopian commune there. Klaus became the head of the administration of Saratov's colonies, and in 1869 he wrote a book with the provocative title "Our Colonies".Not less radically than Chernyshevsky, Klaus made his people, the German settlers in Russia, an example for the Russian peasants. Klaus proposed to regulate the life of the peasants after the abolition of serfdom in the model of German sectarian communities in the Volga region. Denying the liberal idea of ​​individual rights, Klaus contrasted it with the land tenure system of Mennonites and other sectarians. Upon arrival in Russia, they received land on collective property, rather than on individual property. They could leave the colony, but not take their share of collective property.Therefore, few abandoned the German colonies, and certainly much less than the peasants who had fled their communities after liberation. Klaus (1869), a leading Russian official, proposed to the legislator to transfer this collective property structure from German settlers' communities to Russian terrestrial communities15. His book was a continuation of an unusual tradition, in which the social utopianism of the eighteenth century was combined with the legacy of the radical Reformation of the sixteenth century. In fact, this Mennonite recipe for Russia was not far from the revolutionary Gospel of Chernyshevsky.As a classmate of Klaus, he predicted a great leap from the Russian community directly to socialism, based on the enormously exaggerated peculiarities of the peasant community, which he perceived by analogy with the better-known German sectarian communities. The Russians were impressed by the unique life of these internal colonies, and for a long time they found a practical example of a better life. Both Lenin and Trotsky grew up in these colonized lands, one among the German colonies on the Volga and the other among the Jewish colonies in Ukraine. he predicted a leap from the Russian community directly to socialism, based on the exaggerated peculiarities of the peasant community, which he perceived, by analogy with the better-known communities of the German sectarians.The Russians were impressed by the unique life of these internal colonies, and for a long time they found a practical example of a better life. Both Lenin and Trotsky grew up in these colonized lands, one among the German colonies on the Volga and the other among the Jewish colonies in Ukraine. he predicted a leap from the Russian community directly to socialism, based on the exaggerated peculiarities of the peasant community, which he perceived, by analogy with the better-known communities of the German sectarians. The Russians were impressed by the unique life of these internal colonies, and for a long time they found a practical example of a better life.Both Lenin and Trotsky grew up in these colonized lands, one among the German colonies on the Volga and the other among the Jewish colonies in Ukraine.
In the 1870s, the imperial government broke long-standing promises by calling the settlers for military service and introducing compulsory study of the Russian language in schools. In response, many communities, tens of thousands of sectarians, collectively sold their land and migrated to North America. Ethnographic studies show that even decades later, American Mennonites perceived their coreligionists who had emigrated from Russia as "Russians" (Kloberdanz 1975).
Approximately one million descendants of German settlers remained in Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus. They suffered terribly during the Civil War of 1917-1919, the famine in the Volga in 1921-1922 and 1932-1933, and the mass deportations of 1937-1938. At the beginning of the Second World War, Alfred Rosenberg made claims of the Reich to all the Soviet lands that had previously belonged to the German settlers; according to him, that was the territory more than all the cultivable lands of England (Yampolsky 1994: 165). Baltic German, Rosenberg studied engineering in Moscow and liked to quote Dostoevsky. Rosenberg became Minister for the Eastern Territories during the Second World War (Kellogg 2005).The memory of the German colonies can explain some of Hitler's most eccentric claims, such as: "The Volga should be our Mississippi" (Blackbourn 2009: 152). It happened that the Battle of Stalingrad, the historical limit of the German offensive to the East, developed in the same place where Saphta once prospered, a flourishing colony created in Russia by peaceful and industrious Germans.
Google translated from https://knigi.link/russia-history/nemetskie-kolonii-32527.html

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