Different Peoples, Different Policies

Ultimately, the paternalistic Russian state saw all its peasants as wards. However, it had different policies towards different ethnocultural groups of Molochna settlers. These policies depended upon the state’s percep­tion of the settlers’ ability to be self-sufficient, their potential to contrib­ute to the state’s welfare, and the threat they posed to the state’s security.

Orthodox State Peasants

Most Orthodox state peasant settlers came to the Molochna region from interior guberniias officially classified as land poor (malozemeΓnaia). The state’s decision to relocate them to Molochna was motivated from the outset by wardship policies aimed at relieving demographic pres­sures in the guberniias that the settlers were leaving and ensuring that they were provided with sufficient land to feed themselves. The state had neither positive expectations about the role such settiers would play in Molochna, nor positive intentions to alter their agricultural practices.

The first Orthodox state peasant village in the Molochna River Basin was Bolshoi Tokmak, established in 1784.⁴⁶ In die following twenty years, three other villages sprang up, but the first major wave of Orthodox state peasant settlement began only in 1805. The 1805 settiers, from Smolensk guberniia, were ‘economic peasants,’ tenants of churches and monasteries prior to secularization in 1764, when they came under the administration of the College of the Economy.⁴⁷ In Smolensk in 1785 they had an average of just 3.7 desiatinas of land per male soul, and the state planned to move them to the land-rich Caucasus. However, in 1788 tensions between Russia and the Ottomon Empire interfered, and for the next fifteen years the future of the Smolensk peasants remained in limbo. In 1803 the state finally decided to relocate them to New Russia.⁴⁸

That year Richelieu, who was governor general of New Russia, ad­vised the internal affairs minister about administrative requirements for the move. Orthodox state peasants, Richelieu wrote, ‘must be treated by the government with precisely the same care as are foreign immi­grants.’⁴⁹ Richelieu recommended that they receive (1) assistance in relocating to their new land, (2) food supplies during the trip and until the first crops were harvested from their new land, (3) undisputed tenure of their new land, (4) exemption from the soul tax and all other exactions for five years, (5) loans from the state treasury subject to repayment beginning after five years and extending over a period of a further fifteen years, and (6) a land allotment of fifteen desiatinas per male soul. Richelieu further recommended that those peasants who wished to relocate to New Russia should send an advance party of trusted elders to select their land and choose a village site.⁵⁰

In 1806 the state used Richelieu’s program, initially formulated with specific reference to the Smolensk peasants, as a guideline for a broader program for all Orthodox state peasant resettlement to New Russia.

The guidelines formulated by Richelieu were a distinct departure from the plan of 1764, which had focused on foreign and military settlers.⁵⁴ In 1764 the focus had been on the positive development of the empire’s newest territory. However, the Smolensk peasants and other Orthodox state peasants who followed them to New Russia from Poltava,

TABLE 2.1

Average village size in Melitopol uezd, 1821

Source: GAKO, f.

Chernigov, and other, primarily Ukrainian guberniias, were moved first and foremost as a matter of wardship to alleviate overcrowding in the guberniias they left, rather than to populate the guberniias that were their destination.⁵⁵ The change in attitude implicit in the new policy was spelled out explicitly in a 20 October 1805 decree which required authorities in regions from whence state peasants wished to emigrate to ensure that such peasants were ‘truly in need’ of relocation before granting them permission to leave.⁵⁶

The state granted Orthodox state peasants in Molochna land allot­ments of fifteen desiatinas per male soul. In practice, average landhold­ings most of the time would have been lower than this, because the peasants received their allotment upon arrival in the region, and it was then increased after each subsequent census to account for natural population growth. Consequently, between censuses, as natural popula­tion growth drove the population higher, the average landholding fell lower.

The best land in the Molochna region, along the river flood plain, had already been designated for Nogai, colonist, and Doukhobor settle­ment, and as a result Orthodox peasants were assigned land on the upper reaches of the Molochna watershed on secondary streams. Such streams supplied year-round water in only a few places, and this placed a limit on possible settlement sites and led to the establishment of extraordinarily large villages at the tenable sites (see Table 2.1).⁵⁷

The profusion of independent farmsteads (khutors) in New Russia is sometimes offered as evidence that a significant proportion of the total population was unaccounted for in the censuses and, indeed, that most immigrants came to the region illegally. Bolotenko goes so far as to say that khutors were the ‘fundamental form of peasant landholding’ in New Russia.⁹⁸ However, this likely reverses the actual process of settle­ment.

Nogai Tatars

After the Russian state brought the Orthodox state peasants to Molochna it seemed to lose interest in them, leaving them to fend for themselves from their arrival until the Great Drought of 1832-4 (see Chapter 4). In sharp contrast the state directed its strongest administrative efforts at Nogai, whom it actively sought to bring into conformity with other state peasants - an objective bluntly described by Johann Cornies as ‘civiliz­ing’ the Nogai.⁶² The state never precisely defined what it regarded as Nogai ‘uncivility,’ at least in positive terms, but official correspondence is full of allusions to what the Nogai were understood to be - nomads - and what they ought, in the eyes of Russian officials, to have become - sedentary peasant agriculturists.⁶³

The Nogai splintered off the Golden Horde in the early fourteenth century, breaking into smaller groups that scattered across the steppe from the lower Trans-Volga to Bessarabia. In the 1770s and 1780s Catherine the Great resettled approximately 120,000 Nogai from Bessarabia and areas northeast of the Sea of Azov to the Kuban and the Caucasus.⁶⁴ In 1790 during the second Russo-Turkish war, Prince Gre­gory Potemkin again ordered the resettlement of some 1,000 Nogai families from the Caucasus, where he feared they might defect to the Turks, to the north shore of the Sea of Azov.⁶⁵ Arriving in 1792 this group was eventually joined by three others: a group from the Caucasus in 1796, one from Bessarabia in 1807, and another from the Caucasus in 1810.⁶⁶ This brought the total Nogai population in Melitopol uezd to about 30,000 persons.

The land allotted to Nogai was bounded by the Sea of Azov to the south, the Iushanlee River to the north, the Molochna River to the west, and the Berda River to the east, encompassing 352,776 desiatinas. The state officially classified 285,000 desiatinas of this as ‘useful’ land and 67,776 desiatinas as ‘not useful.’ These vague terms reflected the vagueness of the Russian state’s understanding of the region, for the Nogai land grant was on the Azov Lowlands and, with the exception of the shorelines of the Molochna and Iushanlee rivers and a few areas along the Obytochna River, the bulk of it was only suited to be used as rangeland. This was not a serious drawback from the Nogai perspective, for the Nogai were nomadic pastoralists, accustomed to eking out a living on the arid steppe.

Still, with just nineteen desiatinas of land per male soul, and this of the lowest quality, in 1810 Nogai landholdings were probably already insufficient for their pastoral economy. For the time being this was not a serious problem because much of the land to the north of their holdings along the upper reaches of the Kurushan and Tokmak rivers remained unoccupied. Consequently, Nogai could wander at will be­yond the borders of their official allotment. However, as discussed be­low, the situation posed serious problems for the future.

The state made no attempt to apportion the Nogai land by house­hold, instead leaving its distribution and use up to the Nogai them­selves. This unusual exception to the normal practice of assigning fif­teen desiatinas per male soul reflected the state’s primary concern with security rather than wardship when the grant was first made, but it was also a tacit acknowledgment that the Nogai had distinct ethnocultural and economic traditions and were not amenable to conventional Rus­sian peasant agricultural practices.

P.S. Pallas travelled through the Nogai lands in October 1794 and provides the earliest glimpse of the Melitopol Nogais. Pallas met with three Nogai clans: the Yedichkul Horde that ranged along the Berda River, the Dchambuiluk Horde that ranged along the Kaisak River, and the Yedissan Horde that ranged along the Molochna River. The first state-appointed nachal’nik of all Nogai in the region, Baiazet Bey, was drawn from the latter.⁶⁸

The Nogai whom Pallas met lived in round wooden-framed felt-cov­ered nomadic tents (yurta) typical of Central.Asian nomads. Pallas de­scribes how ‘in the summer, these people, with their flocks, travel north­ward along the banks of the rivulets, where they sow wheat and millet in remote places, and neglect all further cultivation till the time of har­vest. At the return of winter, they again approach the Sea of Azov.’⁶⁹ Nogai are a good example of what anthropologist A.M. Khazanov calls ‘semi-nomadic pastoralism, characterised by extensive pastoralism and the periodic changing of pastures during the course of the entire, or the greater part of the year; but although pastoralism is the predomi­nant activity, there is also agriculture in a secondary, supplementary capacity.’⁷⁰ Khazanov describes how Central Asian Seminomadic pastoralists follow a seasonal migratory pattern, moving north in sum­mer to take advantage of richer pastures in less arid regions, then returning south in winter where weather is warmer and snow cover not as deep or long-lasting.”

The Nogai whom Pallas saw had only recendy arrived in the Molochna region, and it is not surprising that they retained Seminomadic prac­tices. Nevertheless, conditions in Molochna were not identical to those in the Caucasus, for the range of Nogai migration was limited by state peasant setdements to the immediate north on the Tokmak and Konskaia rivers. The first detailed map of the Molochna region, drawn in 1797 in the unrealized expectation of setding French peasants in the area, shows ten Nogai villages scattered along the banks of the Molochna and Iushanlee rivers.⁷² There are grounds for believing that the villages were not simply temporary encampments; indeed, five of them, located north of the Iushanlee River beyond the borders of the Nogai land grant, were still in place in 1803 when the state ordered their occupants off the land to make way for Mennonites who had been ceded the area for colonization. In a petition to the civil governor of Tavria, Nogai nachal^,nik Baiazet Bey asked: ‘Who will pay for the houses they have built?... Who will pay for the... grain that stands in the fields of the places they have left?’⁷³ This is clearly not a description of temporary encampments. Still, Baiazet Bey describes the villages as ‘winter homes’ (zimoυniki), suggesting that, while the Nogai had established perma­nent homes and fields, they still spent part of the year as migratory pastoralists.

In 1808 the state sharply changed its policy towards the Nogai, shift­ing its focus to wardship and away from the concern with security that had originally prompted relocation of the horde. It signalled the change by appointing Graf (Count) Demaison as Nogai nachaΓnik. Demaison was a French nobleman of indeterminate background who had entered Russian service in 1802 as a state factory inspector.⁷⁴ After Baiazet Bey’s death in 1805 the position of Nogai nachaΓnik was filled by temporary appointees until Demaison took over in 1808; he would hold the posi­tion until 1825. Johann Cornies, who lived in the village of Ohrloff near the Nogai land grant, has left a glowing portrait of Demaison’s tenure: ‘Under the rule of that wise and unselfish nachaΓnik, the Nogai made clear progress toward enlightenment and morality. Finding them dwell­ing in portable felt tents, which were highly deleterious to their health, he built them good izbas, ending their nomadic way of life, and arous­ing them to the work of agriculture with great zeal and profit. The philanthropic graf governed with fatherly patience and love, and only when all measures of indulgence proved ineffective did he turn to strong measures.’⁷⁵

When the Due de Richelieu, governor general of New Russia, ap­pointed Demaison, he issued clear instructions to the count to move the Nogai from their tents to permanent settlements without delay.⁷⁶ A.I. Borozdin, civil governor of Tavria, in turn, ordered that sites be selected for permanent villages. However, as Demaison soon reported, the Nogai had a ‘strong desire to settle their households in those build­ings that they have already constructed for themselves,’ and at his rec­ommendation the district land surveyor simply approved the location of already-established villages.⁷⁷ Two years later Alexander I rewarded Demaison for this feat of legerdemain by making him a knight of the Order of the Apostle Prince Vladimir, fourth class.⁷⁸ The permanent setde­ment of the Nogai, then, apparendy involved nothing more than desig­nating as villages the permanent structures that Ifiey already occupied.

Although Cornies was effusive in his praise of Demaison, the count was less liked by the Nogai themselves. In 1815 they threatened a whole­sale exodus from Molochna to Turkey. According to Cornies, the threat was prompted by ‘one Sultan Moratkeres,' who ‘arrived fleeing punish­ment for a crime committed in Constantinople. Claiming to have been sent by the Great Sultan, Moratkeres spread the story that the Molochna Nogai were to join their kinsmen in Turkey, and that the move only awaited orders from St Petersburg. Things went so far that many sold or bartered away their livestock and equipment... Everyone once again looked to obtain a yurt and a two-wheeled wagon, and they were ready to depart when at last the groundlessness of the rumour became known. '⁷⁹ The unrest did not abate quickly. It was only in February 1817 that Demaison could report to Richelieu that things in the Nogai villages had ‘returned to normal.’⁸⁰

Cornies credited the threatened exodus to ‘wicked rumours,’ but for rumours to have had such an extreme effect there must have been widespread discontent among the Nogai. This discontent would rear its head again in 1820 when Nogai representatives petitioned the governor of Tavria, accusing Demaison of illegally selling salt from Nogai salt flats.⁸¹ The terms of the Nogai land grant assigned proceeds of all salt trade to the Nogai public treasury, but according to the complaint, Demaison was ignoring the monopoly and selling salt rights to a Rus­sian merchant. Allegedly the merchant, in turn, sold salt in coastal towns on the Sea of Azov at well below state-mandated monopoly prices. When a Nogai salt merchant named Sarsakaev protested, Demaison allegedly had him arrested in an effort to force him to recant. Sarsakaev refused and was released, but the complainants alleged that Demaison then sent four Cossacks to intimidate him. The Cossacks went to Sarsakaev’s home and destroyed his salt supply, food, and clothing. Subsequent investigations proved that Nogai salt had indeed been illegally exported, but Demaison pleaded ignorance and suffered no repercussions.⁸²

Before departing the Nogai lands for his retirement home in the Crimea, Demaison reflected on his accomplishments as Nogai nachal’nik, recounting his successes in settling the Nogai and forcing them to grow grain but acknowledging that there was still much to do. The problem, he wrote, was that the ‘Nogai have, in every village, extra land amount­ing to more than fifteen desiatinas per soul, and this is to be lamented, for if they continue to be allowed to herd livestock like steppe nomads, then their transition to a sedentary status will remain in doubt.’⁸³ In other words, according to Demaison, the Nogai simply had too much land. The implied solution was to deprive them of the excess.

At the heart of Demaison’s criticism was continued Nogai pastoral- ism. Nogai agricultural practices are examined more thoroughly in Chap­ter 3, but for the moment it must be noted that, while it is certainly true that arable husbandry played only a small role in the Nogai agricultural economy by 1825, it is also true that neighbouring Orthodox state peasants were no more inclined to produce crops than were the Nogai. Even setting aside the extraordinary (and questionable) harvest reports of 1816 to 1819, net Nogai harvests between 1808 and 1825 averaged 2.80 chetverts per male soul, marginally higher than the 2.78 chetverts per male soul in Orthodox state peasant villages (see Chapter 3).⁸⁴ Meanwhile, for all the rhetoric about excess Nogai lands, by 1825 the amount of good land per Nogai male soul had fallen to 17.47 desiatinas, only slightly higher than the fifteen desiatina Orthodox state peasant norm. Yet Orthodox state peasants did not attract the same criticism as the Nogai. At the root of this double standard was the Russian state’s understanding of what constituted civil society. The Nogai, regardless of their economic practices, did not conform in their social arrange­ments to the regulated, orderly agricultural villages that the state deemed ‘civil.’

Doukhobor and Molokan Sectarians

Doukhobor and Molokan sectarians were the flip side of the Nogai coin. While the state perceived the Nogai as a threat to Russia’s exter­nal security and therefore moved them away from an unstable border, it perceived sectarians, with their dissident religious beliefs, as a threat to internal security and moved them to an unsettled frontier to quaran­tine them from Orthodox state peasants.

A pacifist Russian Christian sect, the Doukhobors are thought to have come into existence in the mid-eighteenth century in the southern regions of the Russian Empire. Competing theories link their beliefs to the Bogomils, a tenth-century Bulgarian heretic group; the Cathars, a thirteenth-century French heretic group; and, more plausibly, the teach­ings of the Ukrainian philosopher Georgii Skovoroda (1722-1794).⁸⁵ Archbishop Amvrosii Serebrennikov of Ekaterinoslav apparently coined the name Doukhobor - Spirit Wrestler - in 1785 as a derogatory epi­thet, implying that Doukhobors wrestled against the Holy Ghost, but the sectarians soon embraced the name, claiming to wrestle on behalf of the Holy Ghost.⁸⁶ George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic describe the main tenets of Doukhobor faith in their standard history:

There is a central, constant element in Doukhobor Christianity from which the peculiar structure and behavior pattern of the sect naturally follow. It is the belief in the immanence of God, in the presence within each man of the Christ spirit, which not only renders priesthood unnecessary, since each man is his own priest in direct contact with the divine, but also makes the Bible obsolete, since every man can be guided, if he will only listen to it, by the voice within... Since the direction of their behavior must come from within, they naturally deny the right of the state or other external authority to dictate their actions. And, since all men are vessels for the divine essence, they regard it as sinful to kill other men, even in war.⁸⁷

By rejecting the authority of the state, the Russian Orthodox church, and the Bible, the Doukhobors also rejected the principal sources of education in Russia. They even rejected literacy, taking Paul’s injunc­tion to the Corinthians that ‘the letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ as a religious tenet.⁸⁸ Consequently, Doukhobors have left few written docu­ments. Because such defiance of authority invited state persecution, the Doukhobors became a highly secretive group, intentionally deceiving the state about the size and beliefs of the sect. This makes their history equally difficult to trace from official records. Finally, what records survive are often unreliable because accounts of state and church offi­cials are frequendy coloured by religious prejudice.

It is nonetheless possible to reconstruct the outlines of Doukhobor immigration to the Molochna region. They were permitted to immi­grate by Tsar Alexander Γs decree of January 1802, which Woodcock and Avakumovic characterize as a ‘Charter of the Doukhobors.'⁸⁹ Ear­lier the Doukhobors, like all Russian sects, had been subject to official persecution, and over the last third of the eighteenth century the state dispersed many of them to peripheral regions of the empire.⁹⁰ On 17 March 1801, just one week after his ascension, Alexander decreed that such exiles could return to the south from places as far-flung as Finland and Siberia. InJanuary 1802, reacting to reports of persecution of the newly returned sectarians, Alexander granted a request from New Rus­sian Doukhobors that they be allowed to settle in Molochna.⁹¹ Eventu­ally approximately one-quarter of all Doukhobors did settle there.⁹² This decree, a turn for the better in Doukhobor-State relations, demon­strated Alexander’s religious tolerance and held out the hope that the wardship policies the tsar extended to his other peasants might be applied to the Doukhobors, too. Still, the decree must also be recog­nized as a cautious, security-conscious measure of an autocratic, Ortho­dox ruler. Although Alexander permitted the Doukhobors to group together as a community, he isolated them on the unsettled southern borderlands, far from Orthodox peasants whom he feared they might contaminate with their sectarian beliefs.⁹³

The first Doukhobors arrived in Molochna in 1802. By 1811, 2,273 Doukhobor men, women, and children had setded in nine villages along the lower west bank of the river and the west bank of the Molochna estuary. Their numbers would grow to an estimated 4,100 by 1824. With Alexander’s death and Nicholas Γs ascension in 1825, increasing re­strictions on Doukhobor migration slowed the influx, and a decree of October 1830 ended it.⁹⁴ On the eve of the Doukhobor exodus to the Caucasus in 1841 their population was about 5,000.⁹⁵

Alexander originally chose Molochna for Doukhobor settlement be­cause it was unsettled frontier while, as will be shown in Chapter 4, in the 1840s Nicholas exiled the Doukhobors in part to confiscate their disproportionately large landholdings. All of this makes understanding Doukhobor land allotment and tenure practices vitally important.

The economic success the Doukhobors achieved owed much to the exceptionally generous land grants the state allotted them. In the ap­parent expectation of far more Doukhobor immigrants than actually arrived, between 1802 and 1816 the state granted them 48,673 desiatinas of land, roughly thirty-four desiatinas per male soul based on the 1817 census.⁹⁶ It was a particularly rich land grant encompassing an extensive stretch of the fertile Molochna River flood plain.

In 1818 the size of Doukhobor land grants came under Scrutinywhen the state permitted the establishment of three new German villages on the west bank of the Molochna River.⁹⁷ There was still unoccupied land in the region, but east-bank land was largely reserved for Mennonite villages and because the west bank lacked the feeder streams that ex­tended eastward from the Molochna and provided vital direct access to water, new setdements on the west bank could only be situated along the banks of the Molochna River itself. The Doukhobors controlled a disproportionately large share of this vital land.

Between 1817 and 1820 a series of contradictory reports between guberniia officials and their counterparts in St Petersburg argued that the Doukhobors needed more land for new immigration, or, alterna­tively, had too much land as a result of errors in assessments.⁹⁸ In 1820 Alexander I approved a Council of Ministers’ decision that confirmed the land grant,⁹⁹ but in 1821 the land survey department reopened the question, finding ‘no justification for granting [the Doukhobors] such a large amount,’ and proposing a reduction of the allotment to the standard fifteen desiatinas per male soul.¹⁰⁰ The Doukhobors protested that their community had grown dramatically, their own count reveal­ing an increase to 2,055 male souls.¹⁰¹ Even if this figure had been accepted, the Doukhobors still faced a reduction of 17,848 desiatinas, and this was a best-case scenario.

In a remarkable 1824 petition the Doukhobors threatened to gather their belongings and flee if the state followed through with the land reduction.¹⁰² Such defiance reflects a new-found unity among Doukhobors. Before coming to Molochna they had never constituted a single, united community. Although sharing common religious beliefs, they had dwelt in small communities across southern Russia and Ukraine. Now, gathered in the unfamiliar environment of Molochna, surrounded by Turkic-speaking Nogai Tatars and German-speaking colonists, the Doukhobors saw ‘otherness’ on all sides. Small wonder, then, that by 1824 they identified themselves as one, common community, commit­ted to defending their beliefs even at the expense of defying the Rus­sian state. The assembly of the Doukhobor faithful in Molochna had led to the growth of a 'Doukhobor Commonwealth’ much like the assembly of the Mennonites in the same region had engendered a 'Mennonite Commonwealth.’¹⁰³ Doukhobors would require every bit of their new­found unity to face the challenges that loomed in the 1830s and 1840s.

In 1824 the Doukhobors reached a compromise with the state that reduced their land to the 21,795 desiatinas indicated by the 1817 cen­sus, but the state permitted them to lease the remaining 26,878 desiatinas ‘in perpetuity’ for twenty kopecks per desiatina per year.¹⁰⁴ At first this price was well above market rates - Cornies leased land for one kopeck per desiatina in the same period¹⁰⁵ - yet much of it was prime, river­front land, and by the time the Doukhobors left the region twenty years later the fixed lease payments were a real bargain; prime land in Molochna leased for as much as a ruble per desiatina in 1837.¹⁰⁶

The ‘perpetual’ designation of the lease was figurative, for while the lease payment of twenty kopecks per desiatina was fixed, the arrange­ment called for new Doukhobor immigrants to be granted allotments from the leased area, so it would be gradually converted from leased to allotment land. The model for this arrangement was the colonist land grant system, which gave colonists reserve lands designated for settle­ment by future immigrants (see below).¹⁰⁷ The extension of the system to the Doukhobors is an important example of Alexander’s continued liberal treatment of sectarians even late in his reign. Unfortunately for Doukhobors, when Nicholas I cut off Doukhobor immigration to the Molochna region in 1830 Ihejustification for the surplus land was re­moved and the land became the focus of controversy (see Chapter 4).

If the early history of Doukhobors is vague, that of Molokans is all but non-existent. They seem to have originated in the eighteenth century in Tambov guberniia, probably as an off-shoot of Doukhobors. They were labelled Molokans or ‘milk drinkers,’ because they drank milk during Lent in defiance of Orthodox practice.¹⁰⁸ In most official Rus­sian correspondence they were closely associated with Doukhobors, and indeed in 1837 P. Koppen found that a small splinter group of Molokans in the Molochna region called themselves 'Doukhobor Molokans.’¹⁰⁹ Although they shared the Doukhobors' pacifism and their rejection of worldly authority they broke sharply from the Doukhobors in their acceptance of the authority of the Bible.¹¹⁰

By the time Molokans arrived in Molochna the period of capricious land grants that had seen the Doukhobors acquire such huge tracts was over. Molokans received standard allotments of fifteen desiatinas per male soul on the east bank of the Molochna River, shoe-horned in among other settlers and with no provision for future expansion. Be­tween 1822 and 1830 the state allotted the Molokans 12,705 desiatinas of land, a figure calculated using the 1817 census population of 847 male souls. However, by 1835 their number had grown to 1,352 male souls, reducing landholdings to less than ten desiatinas each.¹¹¹ Much of their land was of very poor quality, described by the Tavria office of the Ministry of State Domains as ‘wild, dry and stony.’¹¹²

The settlement of Molokans in the Molochna region points to the state’s continued perception of the region as frontier in the 1820s. Molochna provided a place for Alexander I to quarantine the Molokans just as he had the Doukhobors. However, if the destination was chosen for its supposed isolation, the reason for the departure of the Molokans from their previous homes was quite different from that of the Doukhobors. Like most Orthodox state peasant immigrants to Molochna, the Molokans were from land-poor interior guberniias where they had no longer held enough land to support themselves.¹¹³ The state relo­cated them as a matter of wardship, as much for economic as religious reasons, and Molokans avoided much of the persecution the Doukhobors experienced. Administratively, Molokans were treated much like Ortho­dox state peasants.

German-Speaking Foreign Colonists

The state brought foreign colonists to the Molochna region with the expectation that they would play a positive role in economic develop­ment. This expectation was rooted in Catherine ITs populationist poli­cies and in the state’s belief that the colonists were innately superior agriculturists to Orthodox state peasants and would serve as a model to their neighbours.¹¹⁴ Their immigration to Molochna was governed by the 1764 ‘Plan concerning the distribution of state lands in the New Russian province for their settlement,’ although Mennonites were sub­ject to a special Charter of Privileges, granted in 1800, that modified the plan.¹¹⁵ This charter specifically enjoined Mennonites to act as mod­els to other settlers in New Russia, emphasizing the state’s positive expectations for them. Russia actively recruited immigrants from West­ern Europe, offering inducements that included a ten-year tax exemp­tion, freedom from military conscription, and financial subsidies to pay for the construction of homes and farm buildings and the purchase of livestock and agricultural implements.¹¹⁶

Foreign colonists are conventionally divided into two groups: Ger­man colonists - roughly one-quarter Lutherans and three-quarters Ro­man Catholics - and Mennonites. Mennonites came to Molochna from the Vistula-Nogat Delta, primarily from the regions of Danzig and Elbing. At the time of immigration about 38 per cent identified themselves as craftsmen, while nearly all came from rural areas where they had tradi­tionally practised mixed farming with an emphasis on dairying.¹¹⁷ Ger­man colonists came from all over the German states; an 1836 account lists immigrants from places as diverse as Wfirttemburg, Nassau, Pomerania, Prussia, and Mecklenburg.¹¹⁸ Only 10 per cent came from cities, while about 65 per cent identified themselves as craftsmen.¹¹⁹

Mennonites setded on the east bank of the Molochna River and its tributaries in villages of between sixteen and twenty-two households. Each family received a sixty-five desiatina land allotment. German colo­nist villages were larger, some containing as many as fifty households, each with a sixty desiatina allotment. Most German colonist villages were on the west bank, but a group of immigrants from Wfirttemburg, arriving in 1819, settled in four villages to the east on the Berda River. They were not really in the Molochna River Basin at all, although they are grouped with the Molochna German colonists in state records. In­cluded in all colonists’ allotments were 1.5 desiatina home plots and a proportional share of the village’s pasture, hay, and arable land. Fami­lies not intending to farm received only home plots, and one-sixth of each village’s land was set aside for such families.¹²⁰

Villages owned their land collectively, and individual allotments could not be subdivided, mortgaged, or sold outside the settlement. German colonists, abiding by the 1764 plan, practised ultimogeniture, the indi­visible allotment passing to a single heir. Mennonite allotments, too, were indivisible, but their charter permitted Mennonites to follow their own inheritance customs. The heir who received the allotment bought it from the deceased’s estate, the assets of which were liquidated and distributed equally to all heirs. If a man died without heirs or his heirs did not want to farm, the allotment could be sold to another settlement member, subject to approval by the village assembly and the state.¹²¹

To allow for natural population growth the state gave each village surplus land, equal to one-sixth its allotment land, for future distribu­tion.¹²² This gave village and district administrative organs in the colo-

TABLE 2.2

Mennonite land allocation in 1808

^a 65 desiatinas per household, ^b One-sixth of allocated land. Source: Unruh, Die niederlandisch-niederdeutschen Hintergrunde der mennonitischen Ostwanderungen im 16., 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, 304-29.

nies an important area of autonomous authority, for it allowed them to respond to population growth by assigning new allotments, and it let them lease the unassigned portion of the surplus to village members. Orthodox peasants, by comparison, had to wait for the state to grant more land after the next census. This made voting rights in colonist villages, which were limited to the owners of land allotments, vitally important and lent far more prestige to office-holders in such villages than in Orthodox state peasant villages.

Colonists also had a large area of reserve land set aside for future settlement by new immigrants. As new colonists arrived, new villages were carved out of this reserve.¹²³ The state originally designated 123,240 desiatinas for Mennonite settlement and 73,433 desiatinas for German colonist setdement.¹²⁴ German colonist data are not available, but the initial allocation OfMennonite land was as shown in Table 2.2.

Mennonite communities were traditionally co-terminous with church congregations, and all members of a congregation were subject to its ethical rules. These were enforced by an elected Elder (Altester), as­sisted by ministers (Lehrer) and deacons (Diakonen) In Russia the state required Mennonites to conform to the administrative system that had been introduced in state peasant villages in 1797. Because the structure of the civil system closely resembled the traditional Menno- nite congregational system, in the early years of settlement it provoked little controversy. Some later settlers even thought that it had been imported from Prussia by Mennonites.¹²⁶ The German colonists likewise were expected to conform to the Russian system.

The most important difference between the administration of for­eign colonists and other Molochna settlers was the Guardianship Com­mittee, a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs until 1838 when it passed to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Domains. The Guard­ianship Committee provided a remarkably progressive and efficient ad­ministrative organ that encouraged and financially supported agricul­tural innovation. Its activities are described in more detail in Chapters 3 and 5, but the person most important in its early administration, Samuel Contenius, deserves special mention. Not only was Contenius an ener­getic proponent of agricultural innovation, but his wide contacts with senior officials in St Petersburg allowed him to bypass much of the bureaucratic red tape that hindered administration on the Russian pe­riphery. His assistant, Alexander Fadeev, who supervised the Ekaterino- slav office of the Guardianship Committee from Contenius’s retirement in 1818 until 1836, was an equally gifted administrator. As a result of the activities of the Guardianship Committee, state-colonist relations were a rare exception to the general experience of other Molochna settlers.¹²⁷

Because the state expected foreign colonists to play a positive role in the development of New Russia it placed many demands on them dur­ing their early years in the Molochna region. However, as often as not it was the colonists themselves and not the state who seized the reins and guided innovations in Molochna, and so a detailed examination of the interplay between state and colonists will be left for Chapter 3.