Gamalsvenskby (OldSwedishWillage)English Version

Gammalsvenskby (Old Swedish Village) – constantly on the run

The inhabitants of Gammalsvenskby arrive in Trelleborg in 1929.

Text —Joakim Radstrom 9 june 2018 Being in Gammalsvenskby in Ukraine is a unique experience. In the insignificant, partially dilapidated houses along the muddy main street live old descendants of emigrated and displaced Dagö Swedes who settled here in the 1780s.

Inside some of the houses, a very archaic Swedish is still spoken. The Swedish king and queen look down from awe-inspiring photos on the walls, Christmas cards say "God Jul" and a midsummer pole in porcelain stands out all year round. But why? Why is it that a historic shard of Sweden is wedged in here, 1600 km from our coast?

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Sweden lost Estonia including Dagö

To get the answer, you need to go back almost 300 years. In 1721, Sweden's time as a European superpower passed. At the Peace of Uusimaa this year, the Swedish King Fredrik I had to give up parts of Vyborg and Kexholm counties, all Ingermanland, Estonia (with the islands Ösel and Dagö) and Livonia to Russia.

Large groups of Swedish crofters, fishermen, pilots, and others had lived on Dagö since the 13th century. The Dagö Swedes – in the middle of the 18th century, it was at most about 2,000 people – could stay under the new Russian sovereignty. But towards the end of the century, conflicts arose, and the situation began to become increasingly difficult, mainly due to Swedish, rather than Russian, influence.

Ruling Swedish countess on the island held the crofters in a stranglehold, collected taxes and treated them like serfs. Karl Magnus Stenbock was the worst.

As the Swedish village descendant Andreas Pettersson Annas (1901–78) wrote in his handwritten book Livet i Gammalsvenskby (it is available on the internet in an edited version): " he sold the displeasing as cattle or exchanged for horses and hunting dogs."" And "when the peasants did not give up the struggle, he fired them to deportation."

The Russian Empress Catherine the Great issued an “ukas” that forced Swedish Dagö residents to move to Ukraine.

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Catherine the Great forced the Swedes away

Stenbock complained about the rowdy peasants before the new Russian ruler Catherine the Great (Catherine II), and she soon presented a solution for the dispute.

On March 8, 1781, the fate of the Dagö Swedes was sealed when Catherine had an “uka”s (regulation) issued that they should be transferred to an area in today's southern Ukraine, next to the western side of the River Dnjeprs near the Black Sea. It was a fertile area that had just been conquered from the Turks and thus needed to be colonized. The order was in excerpts as follows: We have announced as Our will and given permission for Hohenholm's Swedish farmers to move to the New Russian governorate. These Swedes have had their freedoms enjoyed by age approved by both the old Masters and the Kings of Sweden, and since these rights, according to the certificate of their current owner Count Stenbock, expire in February this year and they must leave his land, We command that these Swedes, whose number amount to one thousand souls, men and women b etransferred to the crown territory in New Russia, and that they are included in the list of colonists of the Crown under the current regulation.

(Reproduced by Arvid Norberg who was born in Gammalsvenskby in 1925.)

Nine months of travel to Ukraine

Upon the transfer, the Swedish farmers would have a fertile land area of about 65 hectares per family, four years of tax exemption and their own church and priest, according to contemporary affidavit from the priest on Ormsö (according to Gammalsvenskby historian Arvid Norberg).

According to the same source, on August 20, 1781, 1,207 emigrants arrived on the fate of the new land area, first by boat to the port city of Hapsal on the Estonian mainland, and thereafter by ox and horse and carriage to Moscow.

Then south, also on foot and with towing animals, via Tula, Kursk and Resjetilovka, before finally reaching Gammalsvenskby.

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During the long and hard march from Dagö to Gammalsvenskby in the 1780s, almost half of the emigrants died.

550 died on the way.

But even before the group arrived in Moscow in October 1781, 200 of the Dagö Swedes – mainly children and the elderly – had succumbed to cold, starvation and other hardship along the way. Not least, many children had been affected by smallpox.

Nine months later, on May 1, 1782, the migrants arrived at their new home in Ukraine. By then, another 350 of the Swedes had died, mainly due to the harsh Russian winter cold. The expedition leader, Captain Makaretov, was also, according to Gammalsvenskby historian Andreas Pettersson Annas, a hard-nosed person who let his subordinate Cossacks whip slow moving people.

Hard life in Ukraine

Once in the "promised land", life was not much easier. The promised land was not ready to to be farmed, severe food shortages prevailed and diseases P a g e 4 | 10

ravaged. The Dagö Swedes died one by one in the new village and at a time the group consisted of only 150 people.

Slowly but surely, however, a recovery took place, the villagers got farming going and learned to live in the new foreign environment. The population grew and shortly after the turn of the century 1900 Gammalsvenskby had 710 inhabitants.

New groups of emigrants from Germany settled next door, and today Gammalsvenskby is one of several villages in a cluster, where the other villages are mainly inhabited by German descendants.

Trotsky visited Gammalsvenskby

But as soon as the situation stabilized the new century brought with it a series of subversive events for the people of Sweden. The First World War broke out in 1914 and several of the villagers had to go out to defend Russia.

Soon after, in 1917, the Russian Revolution started, and Bolsheviks were given free passes to ravage and kill arbitrarily selected representatives of the burgen class in cities and in the countryside. One of the young Swedish villagers, a man named Andreas Hoas, was shot by the agitated Revolutionary Guards.

The waves of battle soon ran high between revolutionaries and tsarists, and among others communist leader Lev Trotsky visited the village during this turbulent time. As the civil war raged, soldiers requisitioned and robbed as much grain and animals as they could from the already embattled population.

Swedish villagers to Sweden

When the Communists resigned with the victory in the early 1920s, the pverty was great in Gammalsvenskby. Ideas had long existed among the Swedish descendants to return to the ancestral soil on the other side of the Baltic Sea, and in 1929 the plans materialized. By then, the villagers had already written to Archbishop Nathan Söderblom for help, and Stalin's oppression had become worse.

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On July 20 of the same year, the church bells in the village were taken down and the village's population set off od barges on a long trip to Sweden.

Jan Utas, one of the returning Swedish villagers, wrote about this in the book Svenskbybornen (1959): If it was hard to see the old, worn things being dragged away from the cottage, it was even more difficult to witness the white church being deprived of its last hallowed objects as they were packed into rough wooden boxes for the long journey to unknown destinies. Gravlik became still over the village only when the church bells, after once again thundering, for over an hour, fell silent forever and were gently lowered from the church tower.

Departure from Gammalsvenskby on July 22, 1929. The villagers are ready on the shores of Dnjepr for boarding the riverbanks "October 25" and "Voroshilov".

Kristoffer Hoas pleaded for Canada

This trip, however, was a “lisa” compared to the one that the Swedish villagers' ancestors had embarked on 148 years earlier. On the morning of August 1, 1929, after only ten days of travel, nearly 900 villagers arrived in Sweden. Prince Carl welcomed them to Trelleborg.

Once back in Sweden, however, life was not as paradisiacal as many of the migrants had hoped for. Although life here was easier, the previously so tight-knit group was dispersed and the villagers were placed on different farms.

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The village's former pastor, Kristoffer Hoas, began to plead for the villagers to accompany him to the famous emigration country of Canada. As a result, three fractions crystallized – the Swedish villagers who wanted to stay in Sweden, those who wanted to travel to Canada, and those who wanted to return to the Soviet Union.

Some of the Swedish villagers returned to Ukraine in 1931.

Back to Gammalsvenskby and the Soviet Union

Already in the spring of 1930, four families returned to the Soviet Union, followed by another group in the fall of the same year. Convinced Swedish communists saw their chance and tried to influence even more to return. In August 1931, around 200 more people returned to Gammalsvenskby. In parallel, a similar group travelled to Canada – but not Pastor Hoas, who stayed in Sweden.

Traveling to the Soviet Union at this time was a risky business. The forced collectivization of agriculture had begun, and Stalin's security police carried out bloody purges among apostates and opponents.

Returning Swedish villagers who fell out began to report each other to the police, who tortured the suspects and took them away to labor camps and a P a g e 7 | 10

certain death. The Swedes were mocked by the locals for coming back and "the grass apparently wasn't greener on the other side".

Hardship continued, and during the Great Famine in Ukraine of 1932-33, an estimated three million people died of starvation through Stalin's agricultural policy. The harvests had been poor – yet large volumes of grain were confiscated by the state to be redistributed. Soon the next World War was at the door.

Affected by The Second World War

With these 300 years of dramatic history in the background, it is fascinating to visit today's Gammalsvenskby in southern Ukraine. Here we meet, among others, Maria Malmas, almost 80 years old. She has bright eyes but a slightly broken body after all the hard years, not least during the Stalin era.

Her grandfather and grandfather were both abducted in 1937, the same year she was born, during one of the purges that the security police did at the time.

Then came World War II, and on August 25, 1941, the Germans marched into Gammalsvenskby. Maria and her family were taken to Germany as Ostarbeiter but were later allowed to return home.

Maria Malmas, soon to be 80, remembers the hard times around The Second World War. P a g e 8 | 10

Deported to the White Sea coast

When the war was over and the Red Army "liberated" the village, Mary and her relatives were once again thrown into the ping pong of world history of ideological conflicts and reprisals. Stalin believed that everyone who had been in Germany was a traitor – whether forced there or gone voluntarily.

"And then the war ended," says Mary, "and they told us to come home. But they brought us on trains and drove us up to Siberia! [actually, the White Sea Coast] My mother worked in the forests. Two weeks after we arrived, my three sisters died."

During Siberia, Maria and her family lived in a small cottage made by dirt.

For the most part, they had only a bark bread to eat. Mary saw several younger siblings die of starvation and cold, and the mother buried them on her own: "It was 50 degrees cold when we got to Siberia. It was hard," Maria said.

Maria Malma's story is a historical testimony, and she delivers it in an unmistakable variant of Swedish – Old Swedish, with unusual but beautiful language dialect.

"And the forty-seventh year was the starvation year, and we ate grass," she says, referring to 1947.

Gammalsvenskby Today

Despite the deep seriousness of the story, Maria Malmas is in a happy mood during our visit. Swedes are popular in Gammalsvenskby. Many Swedes support the activities in the village and have, among other things, paid for the village school's rooms and teaching materials for Swedish education. A blessing, according to, among others, the teacher Larissa Belei.

Today, only a handful of very old people speak gamlasvenskby's unique dialect. 86-year-old Maria Norberg is one of them but she suffered a stroke last year which means that today she cannot relate to the outside world as well as before.

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During our visit, a feast has been set up in Maria Norberg's honor, since she recently had her birthday. Pickled vegetable inlays, herring in jugs, homemade pancakes, caviar and sour cream are on the table. And then vodka.

Already hundreds of years ago, Swedish priests were horrified by how the expatriate Swedish villagers had embraced the new country's drinking habits.

Published in Popular History 12/2017

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