THE MENNONITE BROTHERHOOD IN RUSSIA (1789 - 1910), P. M. Friesen, 1911

e of Russian stock are seldom found here because they produce less milk than the German ones, and allow themselves to be milked only when the calf is 188 IN RUSSIA 1789-1860 present. Attempts have been made to deceive the tender instincts of these animals with a stuffed calf-hide [!?], though not always successfully. Since the Molotschna is not navigable and flows into a swampy land-locked sea [the Molotschna Liman], all products are sent to the Sea of Azov or to the Crimean peninsula. However, most of the butter and cheese is sold to buyers who come to the very homes of the settlers. d) The villages of this colony are laid out in a regular pattern, with wide streets and ditches 100 on either side that run through it, and no more than twenty farmers. [Later some villages were founded with as many as forty farmers: this depended upon the nature of the plan and the situation of the village in it.] The buildings are uniformly patterned after those here [in Prussia], and already one can find some good homes. The earlier buildings of the Old Colony were built in an irregular manner, but now everything is strictly regulated: at first the buildings were erected fifteen rods apart, then twenty, and finally, in 1818-1820, twenty-three rods in order to leave sufficient space for gardens and provide a degree of safety against fires. [Later the yard allotments became larger and the streets much wider.] Next to each home there is an orchard with a promising stand of new trees, while industry and love of order are everywhere apparent. Like the Old Colony, this one also has two churches: in Ohrloff 101 and Petershagen. e) The “New Colony,” in spite of its much later beginnings, is far ahead of the “old” one in its location, equipment, and even in its standard of living; indeed, the later immigrants, because they were generally well-off or even rich, had all lived there for one or two years, paying well for everything they received, raised the standard of the Old Colony. In return, the settlers of the Old Colony helped those of Molotschna with advice and help, enabling them to progress more rapidly [H31 and 53]. There is a considerable vinegar brewery in Halbstadt, and its wealthy owner [Johann Klaassen, the second colony administrator of the Molotschna District] has now also started a cloth factory. f) While the surrounding neighbors of the Chortitza Colony are exclusively Russian, especially many of noble descent, who live in a friendly relationship with them, the Molotschna Colony is surrounded by the “Nogai” or “Nogaizy,” an originally nomadic and very warlike, i.e., robbing Tatar race of some 5,000 persons descended from a Crimean Khan. They hate the newcomers who have limited their pasture-lands, and earlier expressed their displeasure against them in various ways. About ten years ago four Mennonite settlers were killed one night not far from a Mennonite village by these Tatars in a most lamentable fa