Bergtal

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Bergtal (renamed Rotfront in 1927) is a settlement 60 km east of Bishkek in the Chuy Province of Kyrgyzstan, near the border of Kazakhstan. Originally settled by Germans, a significant minority remains.

[edit] History

At the end of the 19th century, German settlers from the Russian Empire moved to Central Asia to obtain new land. The majority of these settlers were Mennonites. The village Bergtal, one of several originally German settlements in Kyrgyzstan, was established on very rich black soil in the Chui Valley at the foot of the Tian Shan mountains by Baptist and Mennonite families, who had emigrated from East Frisia 300 years earlier, to escape forced military service, and at the end of the 19th century moved to central Asia from the Volga and Crimea.

With the Stalinization of the Soviet Union the village was renamed Rotfront in 1927 and all religious practice was forbidden. During the Third Reich the ethnic Germans of Rotfront were subject to much suspicion and discrimination. They tried to explain that they did not identify with the Germans, referring to their distant Polish ancestry or relatives.^[1]

With the onset of Perestroika under Gorbachev the residents could again freely practice their religious faith. After the end of the Soviet Union many of the Germans emigrated from Kyrgyzstan to Germany, as the collapse of the collective farms and other state enterprises many employment opportunities were lost. In 1990 about 900 people of German background lived in the village; today their number is down to about 500. Rotfront/Bergtal is likely is the only village in central Asia with a substantial remaining German minority. As strict Mennonites, the residents continue to reject alcohol use, television, motion pictures and dancing.

[edit] Today

After Kyrgyzstan's independence in 1991, the remaining German residents received permission to have the original name, Bergtal, displayed on their village signs, underneath the official designation Rotfront. A small museum, established with financiaL support from the German government, in the school house displays letters and photographs recounting the migration of the ancestors to Kyrgyzstan and past life in the village. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the German government has also provided a German teacher for the community. Generous financial and material aid from the German government for the local agricultural cooperative has, however, for the most part been wasted or misused.

In 1995 a film entitled Milch und Honig aus Rotfront (Milk and Honey from Rotfront) depicting the life of the German residents of Bergtal.^[2]

Today Bergtal/Rotfront is the second largest community of German background in central Asia, although a majority of the population is of Kyrgyz descent.