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BACKGROUND GENEALOGY

South Russia

http://www.cgrr.com/history.htm

The Anabaptists were a group of Swiss, German, and Dutch  reformers starting in the early 1500s. Some Anabaptists were  followers of Menno Simons (1496–1561) who was an Anabaptist  reformer from Friesland (today a province of The Netherlands). His followers were called Mennonites. Mennonites rejected infant baptism, violence toward others, and stressed the separation of  church and state.

During the Spanish rule of the Netherlands, Mennonites like other reformers were severely persecuted by the inquisition.

Some Mennonites went west while others went east. Those who escaped persecution by immigrating to North America, helped to found Germantown in the English colony of Pennsylvania in the 1680s. The Pennsylvania Mennonites became what are now known as the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Those who went east, immigrated to the delta of the Vistula River in Prussia/Poland, south and east of the city of Danzig in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The Vistula delta has lowlands below sea level, very much like the Netherlands and the Mennonite’s skill in building wind water pumps and dike management was in demand.

In 1772 Frederick II (the Great of Prussia) annexed north Poland, creating east and west Prussia. Mennonites worried that their sons would be conscripted into the Prussian army. Also, a growing Mennonite population made land scarce on the reservations Mennonites were alloted.

In 1788 the Prussian Mennonites emigrated to New South Russia (later eastern Ukraine) as part of a program by Czarina Katherine II  (the Great of Russia) (reign: 1762-1796) to introduce north central Europeans, to lands then recently taken from the Turks/Cossacks.

The original Mennonite immigration to Russia took place from 1788 to 1802. In 1788 a first group of 228 Mennonite families left East Prussia for Russia. They were soon followed by another group of  234 families for a total of 462 original colonists. The first Mennonite settlement in Russia was called Chortitza. Chortitza was founded in 1789. Later, more villages were built in new settlements, the Molotschna, and Bergthal to name two.

The Russian government located the Mennonites in an area then called New Russia or South Russia, that had been occupied by unruly Zaporozh'ye Cossacks who's loyalties were often with the Turks. The area assigned to Mennonites was near the modern city of Zaporozh'ye, in an area called Chortitza on the Dnieper River, in what is now south central Ukraine. At the same time the Zaporozh'ye Cossacks were displaced. The Cossacks never forgot this and when the last of the Romanovs was overthrown in 1917, they exacted terrible revenge on those Mennonites still living in the region.

Czarina Katherine II and later her son, Czar Paul I, gave the Mennonites a charter that granted them certain liberties, especially that they could be semi-self governing, have their own schools, and  practice their own religion including exemption from military service and certain taxes.

During the next hundred years the Mennonites turned the  southern steppes into the bread basket of Russia. They became model farmers. They built villages and towns planted orchards
and wood lots. They started industries that ranged from clock making to heavy farm equipment. They built hospitals, and schools and orphanages.

[http://www.hillsboro-museums.com/Who-were-the-Mennonites.html ]

South Russia: 1920 - 1921

... But the White Army was defeated by the Red Army in November 1920, after the Red Army returned forces from its war in Poland. The White Army escaped across the Black Sea to Constantinople.

The first years of the new Red rule were disastrous. Famine and pestilence on an unprecedented scale struck southern Russia, killing hundreds of thousands of Russian peasants and German colonists. Agriculture had been badly disrupted in the region during the civil war. The war itself, the absence of law and order, the land seizures from the most competent producers, the shortage of horse power resulting from constant requisitioning of horses, and the destruction of initiative by the hopelessness of the outlook brought a drastic decline in agricultural production. The yield had been good in 1919 and average in 1920. But the new Red government shipped grain out of the region and then disaster struck with the drought of the spring of 1921, causing a complete crop failure. A general food shortage rapidly developed. By the spring of 1922 famine afflicted the whole population, accompanied by typhus and other diseases, all contributing to the death rate.

Thus, shortly after the civil war of Revolution, famine and pestilence struck southern Russia, killing hundreds of thousands of Russian peasants and German colonists. Yet the government continued to ship grain out of the area to other parts of the country. The American Relief Administration, an organization which established offices in Odessa in the spring of 1922, soon had stations all over the Black Sea. By July 1922 the Americans were feeding 120,000 children in the Odessa area alone. By the middle of the summer they were feeding ten million adults and children in the famine regions of Russia. Church organizations in North America responded as has been written in numerous publications. This forced starvation was the first form of repression by the new Communist government ...

[ Source: The Lutheran Church in Russia, with special emphasis on Ukraine: Intertwined with the history of Russia By R. Reuben Drefs - http://www.grhs.org/heritage/lutheran-churches_drefs.pdf