Little Red Sweden in Ukraine – the 1930S Comintern Project in Gammalsvenskby
Little Red Sweden in Ukraine – the 1930s Comintern project in Gammalsvenskby Soon the brothers will see the East in the Gold Swedish Communist Party’s slogan May Day 1931 ANDREJ KOTLJARCHUK The history of Gammalsvenskby offers a unique opportunity to investigate totalitarian political techniques in the twentieth century. The Swedish agricultural colony on the bank of the river Dnipro, not far from its fall into the Black Sea, is the only Scandinavian settlement in Eurasia. The church of Gammalsvenskby was the first Lutheran parish in the Azov and Black Sea territories. It functioned from 1782 to 1929. They owned the plots they cultivated and as foreign colonists they had a considerable degree of self- government in the Russian Empire and Soviet Ukraine.1 Recent research shows that the colonists of Gammalsvenskby had a high degree of ethnic self-consciousness. They considered themselves Swedes and spoke Swedish fluently in its dialect and standard form.2 Since the middle of the nineteenth century the inhabitants of the village were in continuous contact with the Kingdom of Sweden and ethnic Swedes of the Grand Duchy of Finland. A number of Swedish cultural institutions (e.g., school, new church, library and choir) were erected or founded thanks to 1 Svetlana Bobyleva, “Shvedy i gosudarstvennaia vlast Ukrainy,” in Voprosy germanskoi istorii, ed. Svetlana Bobyleva (Dnepropetrovsk: Porogi, 2008), 247268. 2 Anton Karlgren, Gammalsvenskby: land och folk, serie: svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv (Uppsala, 1929); Alexander Mankov, “Selo Staroshvedskoe (Gammalsvenksby) i ego dialekt. Rezultaty issledovanii 2004–2006 gg.,” in Shvedy: sushchnost i metamorfozy identichnosti, ed. Tamara Torstendahl-Salycheva (Moskva: RGGU, 2008), 294–314.
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