In 1763, at the very end of the Seven Years War in Europe, Tsarina Catherine the Second releases a manifesto, inviting foreigners to immigrate to Russia. As a German herself, Catherine hoped the immigration of foreigners would mitigate the lack of cultural progress in her country. Additionally, she’d hoped to stable her rule – as Germans immigrated in, they would side with the tsarina, while some of Russia’s nobility were against her. She also hoped to make use of the nearly empty land in the Western parts of Russia, below Moscow and to the west of the Volga River.
The immigrants all but ran to Russia. They left behind the repercussions of the Seven Years War, and some fled oppression and discrimination in the war-torn countries of Europe. In this short story, we will follow a young German girl as her family leaves behind all that is familiar only to discover the trials and tribulations of living in the great Russian steppes.
I was fortunate enough to receive 2nd place in the High School Division in the Germans from 2016 Russia Youth Essay Contest! My thanks to the Germans from Russia society for this award.
The Path to Repose
At first, the war is a mist, shrouded over our heads. There, but barely noticeable.
I remember small talk in the kitchen, Mother gossiping about the Prussians in Saxony as if the war is an illusory tale, entertainment and nothing more. As she spoke, I sat on the kitchen floor, papier-mâché dolls limp in my palms. The war had brewed over the years, gathering into a cloud of bloody battles and humiliating defeats. Father began talking about Prussians fighting Austrians and the battle of Prague. A letter comes, calling Lucas to war. William VIII, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, had rallied all young men to arms, to join Prussian and British forces. I remember Father and Mother standing in the doorway, watching Lucas wave farewell. I stood between them, hands tucked into the folds of Mother’s skirts. Mother did not cry until Lucas left, her firstborn son lost to the clutches of the Seven Years’ War. That was the first loss.
Then comes the weeping rain and the Seven Years’ War storms into the midst of our lives.
The year is 1762. Tsarina Elizabeth has died and word goes around that the war won’t last much longer after this. Father works in the fields, comes home with rough, cracked hands and blistering skin. Mother murmurs about the landlord under her breath while she knits me a pair of wool gloves for my eleventh birthday. Lucas has been gone for three years and not a day goes by when our home doesn’t sigh around the space of his absence.
I remember Heiliger Abend[1] comes and goes in a flurry of decorations hanging on the Christbaum[2]. Our closest neighbors, the Dietrich family, come to share a platter of kase knoephla[3]. Their youngest daughter, Isana, brings her own papier-mâché dolls and I play quietly with her in the sitting room, the adults’ conversation drifting over us in a cloud.
New Years comes and goes in what feels like a heartbeat, and soon it is 1763. “Sofie!” Mother calls from inside the house, her voice high and lilting. Wind rushes into the house as I run inside; my mother scoops me up in her arms and mumbles into my ear. I catch phrases about the signing of the treaties of Hubertusburg and Paris, about the war ending. Isana’s father, Matthaüs Dietrich, stands in the kitchen next to Father.
“France lost all of their claims to Canada,” Father murmurs.
“They gave Louisiana to Spain as well,” Matthaüs says but all I hear is Mother murmuring in my ear, whispering, “Lucas can come home now.” I remember the relief that erupted in my chest, hot and fierce and loving.
Even though Lucas returns home safely, his hands are rough and his hair cropped short. His eyes are weary with the horrors of battle and I cannot imagine what he has gone through.
War has devastated Europe. The land is stiff and landlords stiffer still. Wilhelm VIII demands taxes so the landlords are exacting more than ever. Lucas helps Father in the dry fields, working long hours and coming home with blisters and aching bones as payment. In the safety of our home, the Dietrich Family comes often to visit and pray. Sometimes, late at night, I lie tucked into bed and words drift down the hallway into my room. Matthaüs and Father sit in the kitchen, by the wooden table and I hear them speaking urgently. There are words like war, religious strife, poverty and land shortage. The corners of Mother’s eyes droop and the house is somber, but I am just grateful that everyone is safe at night.
I spend long hours sewing up the rips in my father and my brother’s clothes, hoping that the earth will yield ripe crops soon. All the while, Father brings home news of the world, hot gossip from the workers in the fields. Most days I do not listen, but strangely enough, one day he comes home with a glint in his eye and hope in the straight line of his back. He tells us that the Tsarina of Russian has presented a manifesto, an invitation cordially inviting the rich and the poor of Europe to come live in Russia. This is when the winds begin to blow in our favor. “It might be worth it,” he says.
-----
We, Catharina the Second, by God's Grace Czarina and ruler of all the Russians… shall allow all foreigners to come into Our Empire, in order to take up residence in all provinces wherever it is agreeable to each of them.
The storm has changed direction and we are fighting a different kind of war now. There is less and less bread for dinner every day; I sneak bits of my sausage into the folds of my skirt and put them on Lucas’s plate when no one looks. Matthaüs is relentless in his attempt to persuade Father to leave. He is the tidal wave and Father’s willpower is a dam. “Matthaüs is too rash,” Father tells Lucas. “You must be careful in making your decisions, Lucas.”
Over the next few weeks, Matthaüs Dietrich comes by often, relaying news of families leaving, fleeing from Hesse to Russia. “Leon, life will be good there,” Matthaüs insists and the sureness in his voice has me wondering why we haven’t left already. “We’re safe here,” Lucas answers me, his fingers callused from war and rough from work brushing hair from my face. His voice is strained as he tries to explain. “It could be much better in Russia, but it could also be much worse. We have to be careful.”
-----
“Sofie! That hurts!” Isana winces.
Her hair is soft and supple in my fingers. “Sorry,” I say lightly. I’m plaiting her hair but the road is bumpy underneath our donkey-drawn cart, and every so often, a sharp jolt will tug on Isana’s hair. Isana’s papa, Lucas, and Father walk alongside the wooden cart. Isana’s mother, Isana, Mother and I remain inside of it. It is winter of 1765 and the night digs her cold teeth into our skin, leaving goosebumps in her wake. Father had not wanted to leave Hesse until he was absolutely sure there would be nothing left for us. The road has been bumpy ever since we left, and it is still a long ways until the city of Lübeck. Days blur into nights blur into weeks until the seaside city of Lübeck looms on the horizon.
We arrive late at night, and Father ushers us to the port. He sells the donkey and the cart, pocketing the money, but Isana and I are too captivated by the sight of the ocean to care. After boarding the brigantine[4], we watch the ocean’s waves crash onto the sides of the ships. The shore blurs into the skyline, making it seem as though the world curves past the horizon, extending forever. Eventually though, the novelty of the sea wears down to a bout of seasickness, bile rising in the back of my throat.
Father holds onto me tightly, as my head throbs with discomfort, whispers, “This will be worth it, Sofie. It will be worth it.”
We sail from Lübeck to Kronstadt, an island off the coast of Russia, Lucas tells me. Isana gets seasick and huddles in the warmth of the cabins, but I stand on the windswept deck, cold air filling my lungs. From the island of Kronstadt, we can see the Great Palace of Oranienbaum as we sail to the mainland. “That’s where Catherine the Great lives,” Mother tells us. It feels odd to be on land again, but just as soon as we are settled, Matthaüs has bought another cart and donkey. The ground feels no different from the ground at Hesse, and it is hard to believe that we are in Russia now. It has been a long and harsh winter; Isana’s cheeks are hollow and my mother’s once ample arms are as thin as twigs. It will be worth it, I tell myself.
-----
The weeks have blurred into months. From Oranienbaum we travel by donkey-drawn cart to the Volga River. Here, a xebec[5] waits for us. Tall pine trees grow straight on either side of the river, and snow-capped peaks dig their cliffs into the belly of the sky. An old man with a white beard tells us in broken German that the taiga[6] is full of foxes and grey wolves. He swears that he’s seen caribou and moose before, although Isana and I agree that those animals sound illusory. We listen to his stories to pass the time and stave our minds off the cold. We pass Yaroslavl, a city full of buildings with onion domes that puncture clouds, and stop at many other cities whose names I cannot remember.
The months have blurred into over a year. It is the spring of 1767 and both the Dietrich family and my family have been worn down to the bone. Their hands tremble and their cheeks are hollow, but we’ve arrived close to our final destination. Here, the land is almost as flat as the calm sea. Tall grass ripples in the wind, undulating waves that roll into the horizon and beyond. The sky is pale pink and blue; there is neither hill nor bump as far as the eye can see. We have arrived at the steppes near Saratov, but not without cost. In our conjoined family, everyone wears their bones like medals. Isana’s skin has turned sickly pale and I hope the colonists will be able to help. The last leg of our journey we shall complete on foot. At last, there will soon be rest. It will all be worth it.
------
At the time, I had thought the Seven Years’ War was a horrible storm. When it was over, I had thought the year-long exodus from Hesse surely was the worst of it all. In retrospect, the war and the journey was nothing but the lightning before the thunder. What waits at the Volga colony is far worst. The captain of the xebec gives us directions to the colony, waving in a solemn farewell.
A man with sunken eyes and a gaunt expression greets us as we walk into what I assume is the colony. I do not know what I expected, but it was not this.
“On the bergseite[7] is primarily the Lutheran colonies,” the man explains. His voice is raspy and one gnarled finger points across the river. “Native Russian farms live along there as well.” He raises both arms, seemingly with difficulty as his muscles tremble under his shirt, “Welcome to Volga.”
There are no houses in the colony of Rosenheim, just smooth dirt, packed together to resemble a road. The man, who introduces himself as Karl Hofer, walks alongside Father, Lucas and Matthaüs as he leads us into the colony. Isana clings onto my arm and I follow Mother, feet dragging in the tall grass. As we walk, Karl explains that the winters have been harsh on Rosenheim, a colony of less than 300 people. To endure the relentless cold, they carved zemlyanka[8] from the earth. Isana shivers as she walks with me, and I hold onto her hand a little tighter. Now more than ever, I am grateful Father chose to wait to leave Hesse. Had he left when the Dietrichs wanted him to, we would’ve been huddled in those zemlyanka throughout the cold winter, instead of snuggled in the warm xebec, enjoying the food from port cities.
Karl curses in front of us and I am jolted back to the present.
“The Russians gave us nothing.”
When Lucas speaks, I can hear the frown in his voice. “But they promised us materials for construction.”
Karl spits onto the dirt. “Their government promised us fertile land as well, but here the soil is full of nothing but sand and salt. Fresh water is hard to find. They promised us materials as well, but their excuse was that there is no lumber.” I glance around, at the vast expanse of prairie and dry grass. Of course there is no lumber; there is not a tree in sight! “Lumber has been ordered, but it takes a while for it to be floated down the river,” Karl continues. We pass a gaping hole in the earth, the first we’ve seen. In the mouth of the zemlyanka stands a girl with her dirty blonde hair haphazardly tangled in braids.
“Mama,” she calls, “Come greet the new settlers!”
We soon learn that the girl’s name is Liesel. Her mother greets our family, but she is deathly pale. Rose-colored spots dot her neck and Liesel escorts her mother back into the zemlyanka soon after the first introductions have been made. Mother offers to help, and the two of them disappear into the dugout. I bite my lip. What if Mother becomes sick as well?
“Your wife and the girls can go with Liesel,” Karl says to Matthaüs. “I can show you where we’ve begun to till the land. It is just by the chutor[9] and the cow pasture.” Isana’s mother nods, but Father hesitates. “Come Leon,” Matthaüs says, touching his shoulder amicably. “They’ll be fine.” Father looks at me, then nods.
Liesel has a smattering of freckles across her nose and a tendency to tug on her braids when she talks. She’s a few years older than Isana and I, but Isana likes her immediately because Liesel has fashioned dolls from tall grass and stained their bodies with woad[10]. The dolls remind me of home.
Both of Liesel’s brothers and her father died in the first winter, so she lives with just her mother in the zemlyanka now. They’ve offered to let the Dietrichs and our family stay with them until we’ve built a home of our own, as the zemlyanka is big enough to house three or four families.
Liesel speaks freely and runs barefoot in the grass sometimes, away from her mother and toward the Volga River. She shows Isana and me a spot right by the river, where we can sit and dip our feet in the icy water. She picks wildflowers and braids them into her dolls’ tall grass hair and introduces us to the children of Rosenheim. There is Günther, the boy with a gap in his teeth, and Ida, who is always sneezing. In total, there are about three dozen children living with their families.
The men of Rosenheim have begun to construct houses, real houses, with logs floated down the Volga River. Lucas says the wood comes from Viatka, a place over 300 miles away. They are constantly working, and every night Liesel puts salve on Lucas’s blistered hands, a remedy she’d learned from her mother.
“We are working for ourselves now,” Lucas tells me, when I fret over his worn hands. “There is no landlord to pay and no government watching our actions.”
Father lets out a murmur of agreement. “Rosenheim is directly responsible to the crown. We are free people now. It will soon be worth it,” he says, two years of pain and hardship laced in his voice.
-----
A burlap bag full of millet seeds sits limply in my palm, dirt crumbling underneath my bare feet. Someone has just tilled the earth, probably with a sokha[11], leaving the upturned dirt soft and tender.
I am out past the chutor with the other women, some tending the cows in the pasture and some sowing the fields. My belly grumbles with hunger but I ignore it. Karl says the past harvests have been poor, but they must keep trying. Today, I am in the fields.
“It’s this dirt,” Liesel exclaims from somewhere behind me. “Tschernosjom[12] would be nice, wouldn’t you think Sofie? We could plant anything we want.”
Isana laughs. She kneels, dirt sticking to her knees and her skirt. “We don’t have it though, Liesel, and your complaining won’t give us any. We will stick to millet and wheat for now.” She brushes soil over white millet seeds, the dirt starkly black against her milky fingers.
“Good thing we have enough land to spare,” I chuckle.
“One point four million desjatin[13] from the Tsarina herself,” Liesel says smugly. She laughs, and the sound carries on the wind, tinkling in the air. Her laughter echoes in my chest and a smile comes across my face. It is easy to forget the pangs of hunger when surrounded by my friends.
Today is like the days that came before it and the days that will come after. If I look over my shoulder, across the flat plains, I can see figures erecting houses and fixing zemlyanka. Further still, there are the outlines of figures leading horses dragging lumber into Rosenheim. The flat expanse of the steppes has become a familiar sight. When the sun begins to slip from its place in the sky, Liesel, Isana and I head to the chutor, help carrying buckets of milk back to the aggregation of zemlyanka.
The smaller children are seated around Ludwig Helm, the pastor of Rosenheim. Günther stands by a zemlyanka, making rushlights[14] by soaking reeds in a bucket of grease.
“Don’t spill those Liesel,” Mother warns her half-jokingly. Liesel has one bucket of cow’s milk in each hand, and the stuff threatens to spill over the sides of her pail. Lucas comes over quickly. “Let me get one,” he says quickly. Liesel smiles. I place the buckets inside our zemlyanka, in a room where they’ll cool before curd and cream would separate. There’s already pails of thick, separated milk. Liesel’s mother skims off cream with a wooden ladle, putting into yet another bucket.
“Hello Sofie,” she murmurs warmly. Liesel’s mother is confined to the zemlyanka on Liesel’s orders.
“Hello,” I say, and reach over to place the back of my hand on her head. Her skin is flushed, and overly warm to the touch. A tendril of dread begins to uncurl in my gut. “Do you still have the headaches?”
“A bit,” she rasps. A dull red rash covers her chest and creeps onto the skin of her neck. “I’ll be fine, Sofie, everyone gets the cough during the springtime.”
The uneasiness in my stomach curdles into something sour. “If you say so.”
-----
The young boy Günther and Karl’s brother Albrecht fall victim to the sickness next.
The same rose-colored spots appear on their chests and bloom outwards, staining their skin with the same sickly, dull red. Rosenheim has no less than a dozen colonists with the same symptoms by the end of the month, and Isana is one of them. Hunger and illness have preyed on the young and the weak.
“Emilie,” Matthaüs tells his wife, “She needs her rest. Let her sleep.”
Isana lies on her bed, cotton blankets pushed to the foot of her bed. Sweat glistens on her skin, and when she coughs, it is a dry, hacking sound. My chest tightens with the sound.
“It’s the air,” Liesel says lowly one night. She sits next to Lucas and across from me, light from the tallow candle throwing shadows across her face. Lucas is eating hirsche[15] and I have a tall grass doll in my hand. We are sitting at the wooden table in the center room of the zemlyanka, after everyone else has retired for the evening. Briefly, I remember hearing Matthaüs and Father talking in a setting similar to this, in our old home in Hesse. It seems surreal, how much things have changed. “We’re too close to the riverbank, and the air is damp and moldy.”
Lucas drops his spoon into his now-empty bowl with a clatter. “The homes will be done soon. We’ll move into them before the winter, and the air will be cleaner there.” He places a placating hand on Liesel’s shoulder.
“I hope that’s soon enough,” I mutter under my breath.
-----
It isn’t soon enough. Isana succumbs to the sickness and to the hunger and the damp and the cold just two weeks later. Her death is quiet but sharp, hurts like a knife in my chest every time I try to breathe. Liesel’s mother passes away not even a week after that, and Liesel’s expression is determined when she takes me into her arms, whispers, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.”
The words ring in my ear like a mantra, over and over again. It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, as tears run down my cheeks. The losses bring Rosenheim together, and the colony grieves as a family. The houses will soon be finished, and there is still much more to hope for. It’ll be okay, I tell myself.
-----
The year is 1776. It’s been a long nine years since my family arrived at the small German colony of Rosenheim. The houses have been completed, and it seems as though the storm has finally winded to an end. Our families have fought through the hardships – of the war, of poverty in Hesse. We have overcome the deadly Russian winter, perhaps underfed and chilled to the bone, but we have survived.
There is still life, love, and happiness in our lives. In the colony that we’ve built, Lucas has found a wife in Liesel. Ludwig Helm marries the two of them in the middle of the village, and their wedding is as bright as the first rays of sunshine after a long tempest. Father stands beaming the whole time and Liesel wears wildflowers in her hair. I’ve never seen Lucas happier.
And after many years of poor harvests, comes the weeping rain. Karl replaces the sokha with iron-tipped ploughs and for the first time, grain is plentiful. The earth is moist and rich with rain and the crops spring from the dirt, reaching for the sky. Father’s chest swells with pride, like so many other colonists in Rosenheim, when our tables creak under the weight of full dinner plates.
“This is what we’ve made with our own bare hands,” he tells me, voice heavy with emotion, “This is why we left and this is why we are here now.”
As I walk through Rosenheim, the ground is damp under my bare feet. Heiliger Abend approaches, and Mother is ensconced our home. She toys with the amount of pork and beef she puts into her sausage mixture, adding salt and garlic to taste. My mind flits back to the Heiliger Abend I spent with the Dietrichs, so very long ago, and something in my chest twinges when I think of Isana. Her dolls are still in my room, and every so often I take them out to re-braid their hair. Her death shook me to the core, but life goes on. There is no Christbaum in Rosenheim, but perhaps I will ask Mother to make kase knoephla. Children run from house to house, oblivious to the dilapidated zemlyanka that we had spent too many winters in.
Across the flat plains of the steppes, I see people in the fields, harvesting wheat. Cattle graze even farther off, pinpricks of black on the horizon. The storm has ended, and although it has left our lives ravaged, we’ve healed. And everything left in the storm’s wake is calm.
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Smith, Robert Ernest Frederick. Peasant Farming in Muscovy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.
[1] Christmas Eve
[2] Christmas Tree
[3] Cheese buttons (food)
[4] Large sailing ship
[5] Mediterranean sailing ship
[6] Russian word for forest
[7] German word for hillside, used by Volga settlers to refer to the steep bank to the west of the Volga River
[8] Dugout homes
[9] Farmstead located some distance from the colony
[10] Blue dye produced from leaves of a woad plant
[11] Crude cultivating implement used by Russians to scratch soil
[12] German for ‘black earth,’ used to refer to dark soil rich in humus
[13] Older Russian unit of measurement for land; 1.4 desjatin is approximately 3.78 million acres
[14] Type of candle made by burning fat-soaked reeds
[15] Coarse porridge made from millet
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