TREK FROM SIBERIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20420, 23 November 1929, Page 15

TREK FROM SIBERIA.

DISSATISFIED GERMANS. DESIRE TO LEAVE RUSSIA. Several thousand German colonists in the Slavgorod district of Siberia, whose ancestors entered Russia, early in the nineteenth century recently arrived in Moscow and are temporarily occupying summer cottages in country places near by, while their representatives appeal to various State authorities for permission to leave Russia. The movement assumes the character of mass migration, the colonists having brought their families and sold their abandoned properly. New migrants have been arriving daily, notwithstanding the fact that no permission to emigrate has yet been grantod. Already considerable hardship has been caused to the poorer families.

The colonists declare that the forceful measure of grain collection tVhich authorities adopted in the Slavgorod region mado life economically impossible for peasants desiring to carry on their individual farms. Notwithstanding the fact that the harvest in this part of Siberia was poor, the authorities, according to the migrant's stories, demanded that tho peasants should sell at State-fixed prices more grain than they actually realised, besides imposing extremely heavy taxes, which forced them to sell their working animals and household furniture. Tho colonists did not wish to enter the collective farms where conditions are somewhat easier for tho peasants, first because they feared that their children would receive anti-religious instruction, and secondly because as thrifty and industrious farmers they wero less inclined to sink their possessions in a common pool than their poorer Russian neighbours.

The colonists are staunchly religious, the majority being Mennonites, Lutherans and Baptists. They refuse to entertain the idea o! returning to Slavgorod or settling anywhere else, and insist that they will remain in the Moscow cottages till they receive permission to go abroad. Tho majority express the desire to settle in Canada or tho United States.