Figure 10: The first publication of Johann Reinhold Forster, who would later circumnavigate the world with Captain Cook. Source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 58 (1768), pp. 214-16
Competing with Frederick for a steady supply of colonists, Catherine made them a better offer; exemption from conscription was particularly important for the radical sectarians. Their organized communities survived the new life much better than the individual adventurists. The largest and the most successful group of colonies was established by the Moravian Brothers. They created booming towns on the Volga and daughter colonies in the south. Active missionaries, they converted thousands of Estonian peasants and played conspicuous roles in the imperial capital. In Russia they became known as Herrnhuters, from the Saxonian village, Herrnhut, where Count von Zinzendorf settled the Moravian refuges in the 1720s. Alexander I particularly favored them, visited Herrnhut, and gave the Brothers highly unusual privileges in the Baltics, which were soon withdrawn. Having had their best moment in the early nineteenth century, the Brothers remained influential for a long period. Aleksandr
Golovnin (2004: 53), the Empire's Minister of Enlightenment (1861- 6), wrote in his memoirs: "In my mind there is much from my childhood, from the Quakers, from the Herrnhuters." Lev Tolstoy mentioned the Herrnhuters surprisingly often; he was influenced by their non-violence and by how hard they worked.
Immigrants came by ship to Kronstadt near St. Petersburg - the Ellis Island of Imperial Russia - and swore an oath to the Empress. They were then assigned to vast, practically unknown lands thousands of miles away. Accompanied by army officers, they traveled up the Neva, across the lake of Ladoga and further to Novgorod, repeating the ancient route of Rurik, whose story they might have known. Much later, Gottlieb Beratz (1871-1921), a parish priest on the Volga who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in Saratov, began his history of the German Colonies by mentioning Rurik, "the Norseman of German blood," as proof that Russia always welcomed foreigners (Beratz 1991: 2). From Novgorod, the colonists traveled overland to the Volga and floated downstream. The trip from St. Petersburg to the lower Volga took many months; many had to spend a winter on the way. Catherine's plan was such a success that, in 1766, some German rulers and princes collectively prohibited emigration from Germany. Nevertheless, it continued. After the Russian occupation of the Crimea in 1774, another religious group, the Mennonites, resettled from Prussia to contemporary Ukraine. Around 1818, still another wave of immigrants came from Germany. This time they were Pietists, who wanted to meet the coming end of the world, which they believed would happen where Noah had embarked on his ark, in the Caucasus. Some German colonists cultivated the lands around St. Petersburg, a difficult job in which the English Quakers, specialists in drying marshes, also participated.
Two colonial administrations, in Odessa and Saratov, were created. The new daughter colonies were organized in various places, from the Caucasus to the Altai. The Empire encouraged the communal character of these settlements. Leaving them was hard; a defector would have no property or rights whatsoever. With the consent of the state, members of the community were bonded to it, spiritually and economically. It was an example of success in indirect rule, which created stable and prosperous, albeit illiberal, proto-socialist communities. The Moravian Brothers did not own individual property. Land, cattle, and income belonged to the communities. They lived in dormitories that were segregated along gender lines and had their children raised in separate houses. They used no arms, obeyed their elders in everything including marital choice (which in some communities was entrusted to a lottery), ate meals collectively, entertained themselves by reading the scriptures, and worked the land with amazing efficiency. On the Volga, their towns, gardens, and fields looked like islands of prosperity and high culture. They influenced the Orthodox Russians, Muslim Tartars, and Buddhist Kalmyks who lived around them; some of the Russian sects on the Volga copied the radical beliefs of the Herrnhutters. But discontent among the colonists was also high. Reportedly, about 100 Germans joined the rebels of Pugachev when they massacred the Volga colonies in 1774 (Beratz 1991).
One hundred years later, the population of German colonists in the Russian Empire reached half a million. Exemplary tax-payers, they did not mix with their neighbors but they influenced them. Some of their children grew up bilingual; their contribution to Russian culture was immense and non-appreciated. The Moravian Brothers built Sarepta, which became a part of the city that would turn out to be best known as Stalingrad. Eduard Huber (1814 - 47), born in a little colony on the Volga, produced the first translation of Goethe's Faust into Russian. Working in Sarepta, Isaak Jacob Schmidt translated the New Testament into Kalmyk and Mongolian (Benes 2004). The colonies gave employment to some first-class Russian intellectuals, including Alexander Pushkin, who served in the administration of the southern colonies during his exile in the early 1820s.
The leader of the mid-nineteenth-century radicals, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, grew up in Saratov, the center of the Volga colonies. In his youth, Chernyshevsky befriended Pavel Bakhmetev, a son of the local seignior, and Alexander Klaus, a son of the German organist (Eidelman 1965). Bakhmetev later went to New Zealand to establish a utopian community there. Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862, wrote his radical novel, What is to be Done? in prison, and was exiled to Yakutia. Klaus became head of the Saratov colonial administration. In 1869, he published his own book, which was provocatively called Our Colonies. In a move that was no less radical than Chernyshevsky's, Klaus presented his people, the German colonists in Russia, as the model for Russian peasants after Emancipation. Objecting to the liberal idea of individual rights, he contrasted it to the land arrangement of the Mennonites and other "sectarians." When they came to Russia, land was granted to them collectively, not individually. They could leave their colony but could not take with them their share of the collective property. As a result, a few of them left, definitely a lower proportion than that of the peasants who fled their fields after Emancipation. Klaus argued that this collective arrangement should be replicated in the legislation on the Russian peasant commune (Klaus 1869). His book continued the unusual tradition in which nineteenth-century social utopianism converged with the legacy of the sixteenth-century's radical Reformation. His recipe for Russian development was similar to the revolutionary gospel of Chernyshevsky, a trained historian who prophesized a leap from the peasant commune straight to socialism. The unique social arrangement of these internal colonies impressed many Russians, who found there a template for the good life before Marxism and independently of it. It was probably no accident that both Lenin and Trotsky had grown up in the colonized areas, the former among German colonists on the Volga and the latter among Jewish colonists in Ukraine.