|  The
Germans by the Black Sea Between the Bug and Dnjerst Rivers
Book review by Edna Boardman, Bismarck, North Dakota
Philipps, John Johannes. The Germans by the Black Sea Between the Bug and Dniestr Rivers. North Dakota State University Libraries, Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, Fargo, North Dakota, 2000.
Drawing on his first hand experiences and knowledge, Landau native
John Philipps begins with a once-over-lightly history of the area
above the Black Sea in which the German colonists settled. He recounts
this history from memory, mixing major historical movements with lesser
details. He includes the full text of “The Memorandum of the
Secretary of the Interior Ratified by Alexander I,” the February
20, 1804 document under which the Black Sea Germans entered Russia.
It is interesting to see how this differs from Catherine the Great’s
manifesto which set the guidelines for the first Germans who settled
along the Volga. (Catherine’s manifesto does not appear in this
book but will be known to many readers and is readily available elsewhere.)
About the first half of the book is made up of thumbnail histories
of individual mother colonies. A difference from brief histories
that one might find in other books is that Philipps brings the story
of their development into the time of the Bolshevik revolution.
He tells of the deterioration of the villages and what became of
the village and/or villagers. Brief essays in the book bear titles
such as “Expansion and Founding of Daughter Colonies,”
“The Barges of Ulm (Ulmer Schachtel),” “The 100th
anniversary of the Beresan colonists in Landau,” “The
College for Girls, During the Soviet Period ‘Agrotechnikum,”
“The Educational system,” “The St. Raphael Church
Built in 1863,” “The Immigration of the Beresan Colonies,”
and “The Development of Agriculture.”
On page 110, about the middle of the book, essays titled “Phases
of the Deprivation of Rights,” and “World War I and Its
Results,” move the reader into the era when things begin to
deteriorate for the German colonists. A law passed on July 4, 1871,
“revoked the privileges given upon settlement to the German
colonies.” The administration of the villages was put under
Russian provincial governors, keepers of records had to do their
work in the Russian language, and Russian patriotism was given primacy.
Many colonists voted with their feet. They migrated to farms in
Siberia (where laws were more loosely enforced), Canada, the U.S.,
and South America. Philipps then guides the reader through the sequence
of accelerating degradation and destruction--the Civil War of 1917-1921,
the famine of 1921-1922, the New Economic Policy of 1021-1929, the
collectivization of agriculture, 1928-1933, and the terrible famine
of 1932-1933. Of this period he says, “There was no end to
this brutality, mass arrests, and deportations.”
His accounts, though told in straightforward narrative, are powerful
because Philipps, as a young man, became an agronomist at the Machine
Tractor Station in Speyer. The MTS units provided
machines to collective farms in the area and served as political
centers. He tells of one chilling incident when army officers stopped
at the station. “One of the officers asked ironically, ‘Can
you tell me the name of this place?’ The accountant, Rafael
Bleile, gave the answer, ‘This is Speyer.’ The officer,
‘O, yes, Speyerburg.’ the accountant, ‘No, just Speyer.”
The officer asked, ‘Why are you still here? Waiting for your
friend Gitter (Hitler)? But don’t rejoice too soon; we will
return again and settle with you fascists.’ And we asked ourselves,
‘What will become of us when the Germans really come into our
villages and the Soviets come back again.’” He had the
opportunity to find out.
Philipps suffered deeply in the years that followed his departure
from Russia but before he was able to emigrate to the United States.
His mother and son died on the train back into the Soviet
Union.
Philipps includes black and white photographs of major buildings
and of a few homes. Many of the photographs were taken in recent
years by visitors to the Ukraine; others, which show steeples missing
from churches and ruined homes, reflect the earlier communist period.
He adds
maps and the dorfplans which also appear in the books by Joseph
S. Height (Paradise on the Steppe and Homesteaders on the Steppe).
The book ends with the German occupation of the
Ukraine, the dissolution of the colonies, the trek to the Warthegau
in Poland with the German army, and a brief mention of the enforced
repatriation of many ethnic Germans from Russia after the war. Philipps
reviews the scope of the Gulag, gives present-day population figures
in the former Soviet Union, and closes with 36 pages of names of
men executed during the time the communists consolidated their power,
1932-1938. The list, he says, is not nearly complete. Subject and
name indexes are so useful for researchers. His work does not have
the precision a scholar would bring to a history, but he was a keen
observer who felt the era in his bones, and that has great value
too.
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