Estonia is a nation with a sizable Diaspora. In the early 20th century about a sixth of the Estonians lived outside their ethnic homeland. In the context of expatriation, Siberia has been a significant destination at various periods in history. In the present paper we do not deal with the massive repressions and deportations to Siberia in 1941 and 1949 but with the expatriation of Estonians to Siberia in other times and, in most cases, for other reasons.
Estonians are known to have lived on Siberian territory as early as in the 18th century. The first Estonian settlements there were founded by deportees and those released from penal servitude; the oldest ones reported are Rõžkovo [Ryzhkovo] (founded between 1802 and 1804) and Ülem-Suetuk [Verhniy Suetuk, Upper Suetuk] (f. ca 1850). Initially, both settlements were mixed villages of Lutheran peoples (Estonians, Finns, Finnish Swedes, Latvians, Germans), even though at that time settlements were primarily founded along ethnic lines. Consequently, the first purely Estonian villages founded in Siberia are Vana-Viru, or Revel (around 1861) in the Om settlement and Ülem-Bulanka [Verhnyaya Bulanka, Upper Bulanka] (1861) established near Ülem-Suetuk in the Minussinsk settlement.
The initiative for the establishment of colonies of peoples of Lutheran persuasion came from Lutheran pastors, who wanted to facilitate the planting and organising of churches. Pastors were responsible not only for religious and educational life of the colonies but also for other areas of life. Life in the colonies was hard and uneasy: there were many thefts and fights, even an occasional murder. The deportees had no desire and, in some instances, no skills to settle down as farmers. Furthermore, they needed start-up capital to establish their households, that is, to buy livestock and implements. Life improved when deportations decreased and free farmers born already in Siberia gained predominance in the villages.Religious life in the Estonian villages was arranged with the help of the Russian Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Siberian church parishes (6 at first, then 7) and pastors ministered to all the Lutherans in Siberia. A church organist-schoolmaster, remunerated from the local church’s aid funds, operated in most of the deportee colonies; as well, the expatriates erected schoolhouses and churches (Ülem-Suetuk, Ryzhkovo, Ülem-Bulanka, Bugene).
Initially, expatriate settlements sprang up right next to the territory of Estonia. It was not until the 1890s that the first expatriates from Estonia arrived in Siberia, initially occupying its westernmost areas. The greatest wave of expatriation, however, hit Siberia in the early 20th century, between 1906 and 1914, when approximately 9,000 Estonians migrated to Siberia, setting up a number of new settlements. There was also repatriation to the homeland and migration between the settlements: some Estonians that first settled in Northwest Russia, the Crimea and Samara moved on to found several new villages in Siberia. As well, there was migration within Siberia. Despite that, the differences between some villages of north and south Estonian extraction have persisted to date, for instance. Similarly, the Setus, who mostly settled in Krasnoyarsk Territory, have retained their ethnic distinctions.
The laws of the Tsarist state facilitated expatriation, as well as deportation, to Siberia. People from European Russia were encouraged to colonise Siberia. On the other hand, expatriation represented an agrarian resettlement movement, in which the peasantry saw an opportunity to obtain land to till and bread to live on. An obstacle to obtaining one’s own plot of land in the homeland was its high price and the farm inheritance procedure. Furthermore, the second half of the 19th century saw intensified population growth. Accordingly, the expatriation under study can be viewed as one that was not so much voluntary as driven by social and economical factors. There were strict rules for change of residence; the authorities of the Tsarist state tried to direct the resettlement process, even though unsuccessfully in every case and every period in history. As a reminder, let us note that in 1861–1914 expatriates to Siberia (incl. the Far East) totalled 3.8 million people. P. A. Stolypin’s agrarian reform (regulation issued on 9 November 1906, acts of law enforced in 1910 and 1911), which permitted Russia’s peasants to leave their village communities, further facilitated resettlement. Settlers were provided financial aid, exempted from rental and state taxes and granted loans for building mills, roads, schools, etc. However, the promised aid failed to come through to the new settlers on some occasions. The area for the settlers to move to was selected by the authorities. Before the settlers arrived, the area was to be “reserved” for them by a scout – khodok. On the spot, a tract of land, mostly 15 dessiatins (one dessiatin = 10 925 м2, or 1.09 hectares, or 2.7 acres), was measured out for each male to till.
Harsh were the first years in the new home; even the journey to Siberia itself had been tough. The expatriates were able to use the railway traversing Siberia (Trans-Siberian Railway, built in 1891-1900), which invigorated the economic life in Siberia, among other things. The journey often lasted several months, since the settlers took with them almost all their belongings.
After arrival in Siberia the first summer was spent in an earthen hut, a hillside cave or a shelter woven of tree branches. Farmhouses were sometimes built in a single line along a road; more often, however, they were scattered just like in Estonia, forming dispersed villages. Life started to get ahead in great strides. The settlers also had to start with land clearing to create farming fields. Most of the local nomadic peoples, who had been subjected to taxation already in the 17th century, after Russia’s conquest of Siberia, did not till land.
Although the new natural conditions needed to be adjusted to, farming and livestock continued to be the main sources of living. One of the best selling products of the Estonians was butter, which was made in a manner different from the Russians’. Additional income was earned from handicraft, fishing, hunting and beekeeping. As well, employment was found in gold and coal mines. Estonians introduced into the region a number of innovative methods and tools, such as crop rotation and flax growing. At the same time, they adopted from their neighbours some local traditions (cultivation of cedar nuts and water melons, some elements of the Russian dwelling, such as the stove, embellishments, etc.)
The social life was different from what the settlers had grown accustomed to in Livonia and Estonia. There were no landlords, and there were few Lutheran pastors who would have their say in the village life. The key to the great success of the settlements was cooperation. Life was grounded on communal principles. The village community elected the village elder and the village secretary. The settlements had their own village government, which was subordinate to the rural municipality government. The villages set up cooperatives to sell agricultural products, pooled their funds to purchase threshing machines, launched dairies, joined their finances to construct communal buildings (schools, offices, granaries) and established graveyards. In economic terms, the villages lying in the black-earth lands of the steppe and forest-steppe areas were more successful while the lands more to the north, by the taiga and by marshland, were less productive.
By as early as the 1910s wealthier, larger and better organised settlements were capable of building prayer houses and schoolhouses and employing a church organist-schoolteacher from Estonia (the village of Estonia in Altai Territory; Zolotaya Niva). The Setus, who were of Orthodox persuasion, belonged to the same congregations as the other neighbouring peoples, with the village of Haida developing into the centre of Orthodoxy. According to different sources, the villages of Rõžkovo, Ülem-Suetuk, Räpina (Krasnoyarsk Territory) and Haida had churches while Estonia, Vana-Viru, Ülem-Bulanka, Orava, Suur-Selimi, Lebedihha-Serosika, Vabaküla, Yuryev (near Mariinsk) and other villages had prayerhouses and schools-prayerhouses. Societies were launched. Among the oldest ones were a brass band society in Ülem-Suetuk, which was set up on the initiative of church organist Georg Vehm in 1901 and is performing still, and a temperance society in Vana-Viru, established in 1891. Part of the schools was later transformed into county elementary schools. Educational and cultural life was dampened down by reactionary educational reforms in the 1880s, which served the purposes of russifying national minorities and enforcing Russian-language instruction at schools, among other things. Estonian settlements in Russia, however, were places where the russification and Orthodox pressures were not overly strong as the schools came under the jurisdiction of the village community and the Lutheran church rather than the state. Despite the order from the authorities, Pietari Toikka, who was salaried by the Senate of Finland, continued operating in Finnish at the Finnish church and school in Ülem-Suetuk; in the village of Räpina, where they spoke the South-Estonian dialect, the villagers even demanded that teacher Karl Mühlbach, who arrived from Ülem-Bulanka, teach and preach in that dialect. Nevertheless, it was only the inhabitants of larger villages that were able to receive school and religious instruction in their mother tongue. The want was alleviated by spontaneous teaching and prayer meetings at homes; as well, children were sent to the nearest schools, where the instruction was in a language other than Russian.
At that period the settlers had close contacts with Estonia; as a matter of fact, the contacts had never broken after expatriation. Newspapers and school textbooks were subscribed to and, as was said above, schoolteachers were also from Estonia. Ties with the mother country were essential for the survival of the settlements.
Although the time of resettlement and establishing a new home was exhaustive for the expatriates and required much work, the settlers coped with that and laid the foundation to Estonian settlement in Siberia. In addition to progressive farming methods they took with them from Estonia and Livonia, which back then were at a high tide of national awakening, the strive for education and a high-principled world view. They knowingly considered themselves Estonians, and mother-tongue school education, the Lutheran church and societal activities were part and parcel of their everyday life. The pursuits of the Estonian settlers were supported by the then laws of the Tsarist Russia, since the government was interested in populating the region with settled farmers. Also important was the existence in Siberia of the deportee colonies with their already functional structures, particularly as regards the organisation of religious life. Thus, Estonian settlements in Siberia had a good “starting position”.
In 1918 Pastor August Nigol compiled an overview titled “Eesti asundused ja asupaigad Venemaal” [Estonian settlements and areas of habitation in Russia]. In it, he puts the number of Estonians in Siberia at 40,000 souls and lists more than 100 villages.