Note on Terminology, Orthography, and Transliteration

All of the primary subjects of this book were classified by the tsarist state as members of a single, legally defined social estate (sosloυie): the ‘state peasantry.’ Theywere not, however, socially or culturally heterogeneous, and because this book is largely concerned with comparing their differ­ences, it has been necessary to devise a means to label, and thus distin­guish, the separate groups.

I identify the largest group of setders by their Russian Orthodox religion, calling them ‘Orthodox state peasants,’ or ‘Orthodox peas­ants.’ These settlers came to Molochna from many different regions of the Russian Empire, and it has proved impossible to usefully distinguish them further as Russians, Ukrainians, or members of other ethnic, lin­guistic, or cultural groups.

Molochna was also home to two significant groups of sectarian Slavic peasants, whom I identify by the names of their sects as Doukhobors and Molokans. I use the commonly accepted English spelling ¹Doukhobor,’ rather than the Library of Congress transliteration ‘Dukhobor.’

The Nogai Tatar Horde, who were Muslim, Turkic-speaking, semi- nomadic pastoralists, I simply call ‘Nogai.’ I have abjured the awkward Russian plural ‘ Nogaitsy,' and the equally awkward anglicized plural ‘Nogais,’ opting instead to use ‘Nogai’ as both the singular and plural form.

The German-speaking Mennonites who immigrated to Molochna from Prussia, and the Lutherans, Catholics, and other Protestants who immi­grated to Molochna from various German states, present a special diffi­culty. The Russian administration called them all ‘colonists’ (Kolonisti), and I correspondingly use this appellation to refer to German-speaking settlers. I label the Lutherans, Catholics, and others collectively as ‘Ger­man colonists,’ or Occasionallyjust as ‘Germans.’ The Mennonites I call 'Mennonites,’ or 'Mennonite colonists.’

Ambiguity arises from the colonist habit of calling both their multivillage settlements, and their individual villages, ‘colonies.’ I avoid this problem by calling the multivillage settlements ‘settlements,’ and the villages ‘villages.’

German-Ianguage documents written by Mennonite colonists provide a vital source of information for this book.

In transliterating Russian into English I have followed standard Library of Congress guidelines. I have, however, first converted the nineteenth-century Russian-language text into modem standard Rus­sian spelling. The process of abbreviating lengthy Russian-language docu­ment titles has sometimes necessitated minor changes in grammatical Stmctures.