Nogai Encounters: Memories in the 1848 Village Reports

Biographies, memoirs, interviews, and diaries inevitably include and often exaggerate those parts of the life-story that support the claim of the storyteller, and omit or flatten other parts assumed to be irrelevant or in contradiction to the preferred storyline.

In 1848, the Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists President Eugen von Hahn tasked each village administration to work with the schoolteacher to produce an exact historical description of its settlement and key events in its history (note 1). Notably most village histories are silent or say very little about their engagements with their Nogai neighbours whom they had displaced.

Mennonites were fully aware that their colony on the Molotschna River was on lands of the nomadic Nogai, and that the Nogai had been forcibly displaced for Greater Russia’s colonizing program. This earlier history of the land is noted in a few village reports.

“In this location there used to be a large Nogai village. By order of authorities the Nogai moved away in 1805 and settled in a distance of 12 versts from here and further.” (Lindenau, 99)

“On the location of the present village of Altona there were once the tent dwellings of the Nogai, the traces of which can still be seen today [1848] in some raised earthen and dung walls.” (Altona, 115)

“Since the Nogai who lived here do not have houses, but only beehive-like tent huts made of sticks and felt blankets, so-called 'Koschen' [which they transported on their two-wheeled carts from place to place], the first [foreign] settlers found no shelter here, and for the first winter set up earthen huts.” [Before the arrival of Mennonites]“… the Nogai swarmed about with their herds on the open, treeless steppe.” (Muntau, 95; 94; Lindenau, 99)

“The nomadic Tatars who used this steppe had to evacuate the area by order of the authorities when the Germans [Mennonites] arrived, but they remained dangerous neighbours” (Rosenort, 126; 128).

“The village land was originally occupied by [Nogai cattle-herd owners] who vacated the settlement but remained neighbours.” (Blumenort, 128)

“There were no houses in the area, only nomadic Nogai moved from place to place with their felt huts (called Kibitki) to let their herds graze the best possible pasture.” (Ohrloff, 162)

“The village was founded in 1821 … The land was uninhabited at that time and was grazed by the cattle herds of the neighbouring Russians and Nogai people.” (Gnadenheim, 144)

Because the nomadic Nogai constructed no permanent buildings, even their “best” grazing lands and temporary village lands were considered “unoccupied” or “empty.” Their presence was like a “swarm” of unwelcome steppe creatures that come and go, and their “evacuation,” displacement and containment was remembered as part of the state’s civilizing agenda. Mennonites understood their role as a positive force for this vision of colonization.

The recollections of encounter with the Nogai were consistently negative and paternalistic in the Mennonite village histories.

“[Our] interactions were mostly around horses: the old and useless ones they bought for slaughter, and the best ones they stole.” (Blumenort, 128)

“At first the Nogai people were very obstructive to the newcomers in their economic endeavours; they not only disturbed the work in the fields, but also robbed the few horses that one already had. Whatever else the bandits could get their hands on from the herds also disappeared. Most thefts usually occurred in the sowing season.” (Ohrloff, 161; 162)

“Violence and theft were initially perpetrated by the Nogai neighbours. On April 23, 1811, Jakob Friesen, a farmer in this village, was attacked on the steppe and almost beaten to death with hammers. Colonists however rushed to save him from certain death. Horse thefts were particularly common, causing some colonists to lose fortunes in one night. In April 1813, ten of the best horses were taken by force in one night.” (Schönau, 97f.)

Typical was Altona—the Mennonite village closest to the Nogai lands south of Molotschna. Altona resident and District Mayor Klaas Wiens and Secretary Aron Warkentin changed the original name of the village from Altonau to Altona; they explained that it was a mix of Low German and High German words: “alto” (e.g., “all too”) and “nah” (or close), that is: “all too near” to “the still-feared indigenous Nogai herdsmen,” as the village history recalls (Altona, 114).

In 1808 the Nogai were “induced” to build villages, settle permanently and renounce robbery. An “advance in civilization” was slow, according to another (non-Mennonite) account in 1838. “In short, they are a people only emerging from barbarism, and have as yet made but the first step towards habitual industry” (note 2). While Mennonites were rightly worried about horse theft, it is not surprising that land surveyors were not welcomed by the Nogai.

“A particularly sad event hit this village [Rosenort] in 1811 in the night from April 19 to 20. The settler Jakob Berg, who was a district secretary, Jakob Wiens, son of Klaas Wiens, and a stranger named Dirk Reimer, rode across the steppe in the evening on colony business to advance the surveying of the land. They were attacked and murdered by Tartars. The next day their corpses were found on the steppe designated to the village of Tiege. When the stolen items were identified the murderers were discovered.” (Rosenort, 126)

A few villages established in the 1820s and ‘30s note that the still “empty” Molotschna colony lands were leased by leaders Johann Cornies or Klaas Wiens and then rented back to the Nogai for grazing “for a monthly payment” (Lichtfelde, 188; see also Schardau, Elisabethtal, etc.). While Cornies and colony coffers benefitted from this arrangement, the Nogai did not.

The graciousness of the “nation’s father” is remembered in village names (Gnadenheim, 144), but not the Nogai who shared land and labour with them.

By 1848 the wealth and prosperity of Mennonite villages was enabled by new markets available with the construction of the port of Berdyansk. That Nogai lands were also expropriated for the port city is not mentioned in the village histories, nor the fact that many Nogai wagonners were contracted to cart Mennonite grain to the port.

“Another extremely important event for this area is the establishment of the seaside town of Berdyansk, for which we feel deeply indebted to the high government” (Halbstadt, 91). A footnote added by a later German editor explains that “Berdyansk—a port city since 1837—was founded in 1827 on the site of the former Nogai settlement of Kotur Ogu, and offered colonists the opportunity to export grain abroad, which resulted in a transformation of their entire economy.”

The village reports were written a few months after Johann Cornies' unexpected and early death in 1848. Cornies' relationship with the Nogai was of a different scale and very complex. The survey above however offers a broader account of how Molotschna Mennonites as such remembered and spoke of their Nogai neighbours with whom they shared the land. The stories support the narrative of success and prosperity of Mennonites as model colonists on “empty” lands, and omit or flatten other parts as irrelevant—the Nogai encounters, their forced displacement, and labour.

Perhaps these histories are helpful for understanding later Mennonite engagements with Indigenous peoples in North and South America as well.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Drawings are from Jean de Baron Reuilly, Travels in the Crimea, and Along the Shores of the Black Sea, Performed During the Year 1803, translated from the French (London: R. Phillips, 1807), 55, https://archive.org/details/b29345340_0014/page/54/mode/2up. See other images in previous posts: https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/01/islamic-nogai-neighbours.html (and forthcoming).

Note 1: Evgenii von Hahn, “Zirkularaufforderung 43 an sämtliche Schulzenämter und Schullehrer (January 8, 1848),” in Josef A. Malinowsky, Die Planerkolonien am Asowschen Meere, Appendix IV, 85–86 (Stuttgart: Ausland und Heimat Verlag, 1928), 85-86, https://chortitza.org/kb/malinows.pdf. All of the village histories /quotes in this post come from the collection by Margarete Woltner, ed., Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1941), https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/kb/woltner.pdf.

Note 2: See the 1838 English summary and review of Daniel Schlatter’s “Life among the Tatars” (Bruchstücke aus einigen Reisen nach dem südlichen Rußland in den Jahren 1822 bis 1828) in The Athenaeum, no. 553 (June 2, 1838), 388, https://archive.org/details/sim_athenaeum-uk_1838-06-02_553/page/388/mode/2up. Schlatter’s volume: https://www.e-rara.ch/zuz/content/zoom/7881850.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Nogai Encounters: Memories in the 1848 Village Reports,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), July 12, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/07/nogai-encounters-memories-in-1848.html.

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