[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] land ownership in Volhynia

[Richard Benert]

Others may have better answers to Gil's question about German and Polish 
land ownership than mine, but I'll offer what I can find in a few minutes of 
looking.  It's from a book by Theodore Weeks, "Nation and State in Late 
Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 
1863-1914" (1996).  He confirms (p. 225, n. 26) the 90% figure for 1861 and 
cites the archival source for it. It refers to the 3 Southwest Provinces 
(Kiev, Podolia and Volhynia).  But this is just before the 1863 Polish 
Rebellion.  The Tsarist reaction to this revolt was, among other forms of 
repression of Polish culture and dominance in the western provinces, to 
confiscate the estates of many rebellious Polish landowners (followed in 
some cases by deportation to inner Russia, a practice used on our Germans in 
1915) and, in 1865, to issue an edict forbidding the sale of land to Poles, 
an edict in force until 1905.  The results were partially effective, but 
were not what Russian nationalists desired.  According to a table on p. 87, 
Poles still owned 47.9% of the land in Volhynia in 1905 and 48.3% in 
Podolia.  If anyone is curious, they held 75% of the land in Kovno Province, 
73% in Vilna, 53.6% in Grodno, 49.7% in Minsk, 40.6% in Vitebsk and 33% in 
Mogilev. Most of the rest of the land was owned by Russians or Ukrainians.

I am not aware of any full-fledged treatment of German land ownership in 
English, except for an attempt I made a few years ago which one can find in 
the SGGEE JOURNAL, Sept. and Dec., 1999 and March, 2000.  I merely 
summarized the major work of Dietmar Neutatz in his "Die 'deutsche Frage' im 
Schwarzmeergebiet und in Wolhynien".  For those who can wait, La Vern 
Rippley is currently working on translating this book into English, as I 
think I've pointed out before.

Unfortunately, Neutatz's treatment deals only with the laws of land 
ownership, not with the realities of day-to-day living.  Michail Kostiuk 
gives a little insight into reality in his recent "Die deutschen Kolonien in 
Wolhynien" but only a little.  There is a crying need for some motivated 
scholar to scour the archives over there to try to piece together from 
actual land records the ins and outs of how German farmers coped with the 
restrictive laws, and perhaps got around them by fair means or foul, like 
buying through a proxy.

My guess, Gil, is that the names of individual landowners could be 
discovered, in some cases, by finding documents in the archives relating to 
land transactions with your family. I'd guess this would be difficult.  Of 
course some village histories are connected to known landowners on whose 
estates they were established.

Dick Benert
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gilbert A Stelter" <gstelter at uoguelph.ca>
To: "Volhynia" <ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org>
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 7:47 PM
Subject: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] land ownership in Volhynia


>I have been wondering about the difficulties my ancestors had in owning 
>land in Volhynia in the late 19th century. Michael Hamm's book, Kiev, 
>1800-1917, says that 90% of land was owned by Polish nobles in 1861. Is 
>there any study which deals with this question? CAn one find out who the 
>landlords were of specific families?
>
> Gil Stelter in Guelph, Ontario.
> My wife and I are going to Ukraine and Poland in September and we plan to 
> visit a number of villages in both countries that were the homes of my 
> ancestors.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ger-Poland-Volhynia Mailing List hosted by
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> Mailing list info at http://www.sggee.org/listserv
>


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