The first Estonian resettlers from Viru County – Vinni Peeter, Kert Blumer, Aamer, Jürgenson and others – reached the Simbirsk Province in 1870, founding the Smorodino (Russian name: Смородино) settlement. Here they found favourable conditions to start a new life: picturesque nature and clean springwater. The village is believed to have gotten its name from the currant bushes growing in the area.
In the last decades of the 19th century settlers arriving from Northern Estonia also founded the villages of Svetloye Ozero (Russian name: Светлое Озеро, 1885) and Chistopolye (Russian name: Чистое Поле, 1877). Smorodino grew and became the settlement core with several smaller villages around it: Ogibnaya (Russian name: Огибная, 1872), Lapshanka (Russian name: Лапшанка, 1876), Lommy (Russian name: Ломы, 1896) and Shirokodolny or Shiroky (Russian name: Широкий, 1885). Some Estonians also lived in the Nikolsky (Russian name: Никольский) village.
People say that Juhan Laasberg, who first took his family to Shiroky, lost his horse and wife in the tall grass growing here and could not find them for a while.
The Estonian settlements in the Simbirsk Province were registered with Russian names but the Estonians modified them into something more palatable: the stress in the name Smorodino shifted to the first syllable, becoming Samarodina, Rodina; Ogibnaya was replaced with Gipnoy. The Shiroky village name was a more complicated case: the Estonians constantly call it Tuprova, after its earlier name of Dobrovo.
The industrious Estonians began working the fertile land and quickly improved their situation. For instance, the Koit collective farm, created in the 1930s from the Smorodino residents, was the wealthiest in the region until collective farm mergers. The local Estonians made a living not only in agriculture and cattle breeding, but on the Mother Volga as well (e.g. building bridges), and later at the new silicate and chalk industry enterprises.
The majority of the Estonians living in Russia were Lutherans. The larger settlements (Smorodino, Svetloye Ozero, Chistopolye) had schoolhouses doubling as churches or prayer houses.
Yet not only Lutherans made the journey to the “promised land” of the Simbirsk Province – there was also a group of Seventh-Day Adventists (subbotnik), some of them later joining sectarians. Such religious revival movements proliferated in Estonia in the late 19th century. People would relinquish the Lutheran Church and form separate and free congregations enjoying independent religious life. They ignored both church and worldly laws. These religious movements often became ecstatic, sometimes expecting the allegedly imminent end of the world or heading for the promised land.
The Seventh-Day Adventists celebrate Saturday as the Sabbath, the day of rest. All the urgent work must be done on Friday before sunset – even the food for the next day is to be placed in a heated oven in advance. On Saturday one cannot build a fire, even in the coldest winter. Those particular Seventh-Day Adventists did not have prayer houses and on Saturday they simply gathered for the prayer hour at someone’s house or went to a nearby coppice.
Despite certain religious differences, the residents of the Estonian villages always maintained mutually close contacts. When choosing a husband or a wife, one usually did not dwell on the denomination issue. A woman would often accept the different denomination of her new family as her own.
The map of the region of the former Simbirsk Province now still has several villages founded by Estonians – Smorodino, Lommy and Shiroky. The first two are now rapidly growing multinational and attractive residential locations while the third is a small village with a couple of dozen inhabitants. The far from numerous Estonian community is quickly diminishing in all of the villages and the people tend to increasingly communicate in the Russian language.
Yet even today we can observe religious differences between the villages: Smorodino is known as the Lutheran settlement while the older Estonians in Shiroky and Lommy are mostly free congregation members. The local people call them subbotniks, i.e. “Saturday keepers.” Some of the believers define themselves with the traditional term of Seventh-Day Adventists or Seventh-Day Baptists. As the village free congregation is nowadays small (about 15 members), it has joined the Baptist congregation in Ulyanovsk.