The German catholic community of Marienburg from the end of the 19th till the beginning of the 20th century: some aspects of the local history

The agrarian crisis in the main agricultural provinces of European Russia made peasants migrate beyond the Urals where there was a lot of unoccupied land. At the end of the 19th - early 20th century about 3.77 million people migrated to Asian Russia. Most of the migrants moved to the South of Western Siberia (Tomsk province), including Germans, whose ancestors had moved to Russia in the second half of the 18th - early 19th centuries. New monoconfessional settlements appeared in the Altai district. They were founded by Catholics, Lutherans and Mennonites from the Volga region, Novorossiya, territories near the Visla and other regions. One of the largest settlements founded by Catholic Germans was Marienburg. Living in a foreign ethnic and confessional surrounding, Germans had to build their own community providing for its economic and spiritual flourishing. They adapted to new conditions in the course of the 1900s. Marienburg became the centre of economic and religious life of Catholics (Germans, Poles, Lithuanians) in the South of Western Siberia. The article discusses some aspects of the local history of German Catholic community: resettlement, relationships with local Russian peasants, local authorities, economic and spiritual adaptation. The article is based on materials found in St. Petersburg, Barnaul and Tomsk archives.

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