History Changes Volga Lives
IT SEEMED TO ALEXANDER as if life flowed slowly now, benignly, peacefully like the big river within a few miles of his house. However, severe changes were in the offing for even the most privileged Volga Germans.
History had been documenting political games in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and London without ever catching the attention of the Volga folk. So many things had happened in Russia and the world, of which neither the settlers nor the natives of the Volga region had become aware.
They had been informed of Tsar Paul’s death long after he was killed. Alexander I, his son, had assumed his reign. Yet they had known nothing about the man and cared little about his dictates, as long as they had not been adversely affected.
Russia’s war against Turkey (1812-1813), which had gained Russia the region of Bessarabia, had been hardly noticed on the Volga. If it had not been for their young conscripts leaving and returning, reporting on the wars, no on would have been the wiser.
What did they know of the Wiener Congress that had allocated Tsar Alexander I as King of Poland, the Warsaw area? The few reports always came late and were imprecise, and as they did not affect their lives, the settlers paid little attention.
The news of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 reached the Volga region after the enemy had been in the country for three weeks. The withdrawal of his troops from Moscow had happened well before the backcountry ever heard of the event.
Few marveled at Tsar Alexander’s superior statesmanship, ceding Moscow to the more powerful French forces and then allowing the horrible Russian winter to decimate Napoleon’s troops. No one shed tears when Alexander I died – and yet, they’d mourned his grandmother effusively.
They had heard soon enough of his successor Nicholas I. In retrospect it seemed that unfavorable, bad news traveled much faster than good news. Nicholas, for many reasons, was greatly disliked. He had, with bloody might, extinguished a revolution in favor of his older brother. This, an unforgettable event, later became known as the Decembrist revolution. Newspapers became more numerous in Russia, and some found their way regularly to the banks of the Volga. No matter how secluded, soon, even in the most remote villages, the tunes of Orthodoxy, autocracy and xenophobic nationalism could be heard, portending ill tidings for foreigners. Henceforth the Russ would be elevated far above all other ethnicities.
To enforce his edicts and cement his power, Nicholas had established the political arm of the police, which would later grow into the infamous KGB.
The settlers, however, paid attention and were becoming alarmed when, in 1842, the Russian government codified their freedoms, rights and obligations and bestowed citizenship on all colonists. Some, the more attuned to the problematics of Russian government, became deeply concerned, for Russian citizens had always been treated with harsher measures than the colonists. Therefore, citizenship, although it opened opportunities like education in universities, was not necessarily as desirable as the word citizenship made it appear.
Between the years of 1853 and 1856 war had devastated the Crimea, and Russia suffered sore setbacks, including the fall of Sevastopol. At this point Alexander and some of the large traders with offices all over Russia recognized that the colonists’ status could change overnight.
And yet, although land had become scarce, more and more Germans came to settle other desolate parts of Russia. Some, like the Mennonites from West Prussia, settled in colonies in the Samara District right in the midst of the Volga German colonies on the Wiesenseite.
In the year 1855 Alexander II had ascended the throne, proving himself to be a pragmatic ruler. He fully understood that Russia would never be a truly great nation if it continued to keep the bulk of its population enslaved. Undertaking the seemingly impossible, defying Russia’s nobility, Alexander II had proclaimed with the Emancipation Act of February 18, 1861, the freedom from bondage for Russia’s serfs.
This enormous event had occurred years before Victoria was born. In this act, designed to wreak monumental changes, yet proceed orderly and without turmoil, provisions had been made for a two-year period of grace. During these trial years serfs still had to labor for the estates they were attached to; however, they were to be paid wages.
Furthermore, serfs farming the soil were to be given parcels of land with the proviso that they had to pay for their holdings within a forty-nine-year period. Those serfs attached to the homes and enterprises of their overlords received no land or other compensations. Offered wages too low to live on, they often had to seek employment elsewhere, without means to subsist in the meantime.
The period following the Emancipation Act had been difficult, to say the least. The settlers in their tidy villages often saw bands of freed, landless serfs seeking new places to find work and a chance to taste their freedom.
Most of them, wretched, ragged, hungry-looking figures, touched the hearts of the Germans as they trudged by. Knowing hunger well, the settlers kindly dispensed many a loaf of bread and other victuals. For, as many a mother told her child, “God wants us to share with those who have nothing.”