Part 4.

Canadian Press, part 4.

Kherson, September 28, 1930. A second party, consisting of 39 colonists have returned from Sweden. The colonists explain that they had become victims of pastors Hoas’s and Kulakova’s propaganda. These men convinced them to emigrate to Sweden. When the colonists arrived in Sweden, they were placed out as tenant workers on the farms of Swedish landowners. The landowners exploited them in many ways; they did not pay them for the hours worked, explained to them that they were only there “to learn how to work”, fed them disgustingly, etc. After that, the colonists decided to return to Soviet Ukraine. A second group sent a delegation to Canada in order to find out whether it would be possible to settle there. These delegates returned after three months, bringing the message that the same kind of exploitation exists in Canada as in Sweden. The colonists explained that another 250 colonists want to return from Sweden. From Kherson the colonists left for their village Staroshvedskoe, which they have decided to rename Novoe Krosnoshvedskoe. "Prozreli: Shvedskie kolonisty vernulis’ obratno v SSSR [They Saw it Through: Swedish Colonists have Returned to the USSR], Krasnaia Gazeta, Vechernii Vypusk, No. 230 (2588), September 28, 1930. By late November, 1930, 23 families, with over one hundred individuals had signed petitions that they wanted to "return to Russia."

The ambivalent attitude toward immigration on part of many of the Gammalsvenskby people puzzled the Swedish-Canadian press. In an article of November 27, 1930, Svenska Canada-Tidningen quoted K. Kyhlberg, the chair of Svenskbystiftelsen, The Gammalsvenskby Committee, to the effect that "The Gammalsvenskby people are very indecisive. Our experiences have shown, says president Kyhlberg, that the 150 or so Gammalsvenskby families can be divided into three groups.

One group of about 110 families consists of very hard-working and able people, who surely do not have any plans to emigrate.

A second group consists of some 25 families that are hard-working and clever but more ambivalent and influenced by propaganda.

Finally, there is a third group of about 15 families constituting the dissatisfied. They are dishonest and not fit for permanent settlement. This is the group that causes discord. They are a desirable and easy prey for communist propaganda." This last group would constitute the third, and largest wave of returnees.

The Swedish Communist Party actively encouraged this group and assisted them in their desire to return to Soviet Ukraine. They set up their own Gammalsvenskby Committee, Arbetarnas Svenskbykommitté, or the Workers’ Svenskby Committee, dedicated to assisting returning Gammalsvenskby people and even recruiting Swedish Swedes to New Red Svenskby.

In March, 1931, this group requested government funding from Prime Minister Carl Ekman to provide for the return of 198 Gammalsvenskby Swedes.

In July of 1931 the Swedish government decided to allocate government funds for the approximately 200 Gammal-svenskby people who wished to return. However, funds was made available only to the Gammalsvenskby people who were naturalized Swedish citizens.

Neither the pledges nor the prayers and tears of pastor Hoas could prevent this group from returning.

180 Gammalsvenskby people arrived in the Soviet Union on August 19, 1931.

A telegram from the Soviet News Agency in Leningrad of October 10, 1931, was published on the front page of Canada Posten under the headline The Gammalsvenskby People Complain about Sweden. "The Soviet Russian press is delighted over the fiasco of the Gammalsvenskby people. Sweden is not one of the worst capitalist countries in the world, but nevertheless, see how the poor Russian emigrants were treated there. Terrible!

Only listen to what they themselves have to say about this: According to a telegram from Leningrad of October 10, 1931. “180 Gammalsvenskby people, belonging to the group, which in 1929 departed for the land of their forefathers, Sweden, in order to settle and stay there for the rest of their lives, returned to Russia on August 19, exhausted by the conditions in Sweden and bitterly disappointed by everything in that land. They have now issued an open statement to all the people of Russia, particularly to the workers and peasants, about how thoroughly miserably they were treated by the large landholders of Sweden. How upsetting! Instead of receiving land and animals, as promised, they had to serve as farm servants and were subjected to lives of outright slavery. They expressed their heartfelt joy at returning to the care of the Soviet government."

All in all, by the fall of 1931 40 families, or 243 individuals, had returned to the village, accompanied by two dedicated Swedish communists.

Thus, including the handful of Gammalsvenskby Swedes who never left, the newly repopulated Gammalsvenskby had some 260 villagers of Swedish descent. Dissatisfaction with life in Sweden, in addition to the pull factor that the strong Gammalsvenskby community in Alberta exercised, led another group to seek settlement in Canada.

Initially the interest in immigration to Canada was enormous: 62 families had signed up to immigrate. Economic concerns severely diminished this group. In the end twenty Gammalsvenskby families, a total of 97 persons, settled in Canada between 1930 and 1932. Another reason why Canada appeared attractive seems to have been its geographical distance from the Soviet Union, a country some of the Gammalsvenskby people wanted to get as far away from as possible.

(Nels Buskas, interview February 21, 2005).

Despite being taken care of by their own people—Gammalsvenskby immigrants from a previous wave—many recent immigrants quickly became disillusioned with Canada and returned to Sweden. In the end, only about 70 people of the 1930’s wave of Gammalsvenskby immigrants stayed in Canada. There were also a few families that were interested in emigrating to Canada, but who were forced to stay in Sweden after a medical examination by a Canadian doctor found that they suffered from an unspecified eye disease. Canadian immigration law specified that if one member suffered from the disease, the whole family would be ineligible for immigration. This disease may have been trachoma, a disease some of the Gammalsvenskby people suffered from and which would prevent Andreas Buskas of the Gammalsvenskby study commission from traveling to Canada.

Much as in Sweden, where Nationalinsamlingen för Svenskbyborna provided assistance, the Swedes in Canada set up their own aid committee in order to assist the Gammalsvenskby immigrants. It was organized by the Swedish Lutheran Canadian Conference of the Augustana Synod in association with the Canadian Colonization Association. It adopted the name the Swedish Lutheran Aid Association. Winnipeg-based Svenska Canada-Posten quoted an unidentified Swedish paper commenting before the emigration on the benefits of having Swedes from the Black Sea basin resettled on the Canadian prairies: apparently, the climate was believed to be more beneficial for them! "The conditions for agriculture are entirely different [in Sweden] than where [the Gammalsvenskby People] live now. I am certain, that it will not be possible to transplant the Gammalsvenskby people to Swedish soil and have them acclimatized here. The winters, for instance, will cause them much hardship, since they are hardly accustomed to cold, snow, and ice down there in the land across from the mild Crimea …Their relatives in Canada are fully prepared to receive them. Over there, in Western Canada it seems as if the natural conditions for the Gammalsvenskby people to make it are good, at least if we were to judge by the successes of their previously emigrated relatives. Canada is—like Russia once was and can once more become—a wheat producing-country, and its climate appears more beneficial for the Gammalsvenskby People than those we can offer here in Sweden." In addition to the supposed mild climate in Alberta, there were also historical reasons to settle there:

"People [in Sweden] are not really aware that in Canada there is already a considerable group of emigrants from Gammalsvenskby, which has reached a good economic position. They have also longed for a larger number of their people to join them. These could also settle in adjacent areas… Ever since the late 1800s, when a number of inhabitants from Gammalsvenskby emigrated to Canada and were able to set up a good life there, and were able to attract even more people from their native village, the Gammalsvenskby issue has had a serious Canadian dimension…In Canada there already are the Buskas, Malmas, Utas, Hansas and other families from Gammalsvenskby. If the Buskases in Gammalsvenskby join the Buskas family in Canada, the Malmases in Gammalsvenskby join the Malmases in Canada, and so on, would this mean ending up as strangers in a strange land? If the Buskas, Malmas, Utas and Hansas families from Gammalsvenskby join the families with the same names in Canada, would that mean getting further away from “home” than being settled next to the Anderssons in Skåne, Petterssons in Småland and Svenssons in Östergötland? Do they have weaker blood bonds to the Buskas, Malmas, Utas, and Hansas families in Canada and stronger blood bonds to the Andersson, Pettersson, and Svensson families in Sweden?…And do we have any guarantees that the colonists from Gammalsvenskby, once they have worked the Swedish soil for a number of years and found it more meager and the conditions different from those they are used to from Southern Russia will not feel that the voice of the blood from the Canadian side will be impossible to resist?…The Swedes in Canada have an excellent chance to do something worthy of the Swedish name and character, something that coming generations should be able to describe as a cultural investment." It appears that in addition to an influx of linguistically conscious Swedish immigrants to beef up the Swedish presence on the prairies, the editor felt that this would give the Swedish-Canadians a chance to shine, and prove their Swedish spirit. The continuity of blood, culture, and linguistic kinship ought not to be broken, but should rather should be preserved and strengthened further. However, this hope suffered a blow when it became clear that most Gammalsvenskby people did not wish to go to Canada. In September, 1929, Canada Posten reported that rather than 38 of a total of 172 families, only 12 now claimed that they were interested in emigrating to Canada. Yet, later on that year, Canada Posten reported that the Swedish Lutheran Immigration Aid Society of Canada had been founded, and that it was about to assist 62 families interested in emigrating. By October of 1930, Canada Posten reported that some 60 people had emigrated to Canada, and 30 to Russia [sic], while 28 heads of families stayed on as landowning peasants in Sweden, 22 of them on the island of Gotland. “Svenskby utflyttningen var ej så misslyckad ändå” [The Gammalsvenskby Migration Was Not Such A Failure After All]. On March 14, 1931, another 28 Gammalsvenskby families received their own farms, purchased by the Gammalsvenskby committee, mainly in the northern part of the provinces of Småland and Skaraborg. (28 Svenskbyfamiljer få gårdar 28 Svensskby families receive farms , Canada Posten, April 7, 1931, 1).Svenska Canada-Tidningen strongly approved of the opportunities this created for the Lutheran congregations to expand their numbers. During the winter of 1929-1930 both papers reported that the CPR had sent an invitation and offered a loan of $150,000 to the Gammalsvenskby people, who in turn chose a committee of four people to travel to Canada on a fact-finding mission.

This committee was made up of pastor Kristopher Hoas, John Buskas, Andreas Buskas and Andreas Malmas.

Even before the arrival of the commission, a number of articles started to question some of the Swedish credentials of the Gammalsvenskby people. This change in attitude echoed a similar development in Sweden, where editorials on the communist left as well as the conservative right considered Hoas’s plans for emigration to Canada an act of disloyal ingratitude. The editor of Svenska Canada-Tidningen quoted the conservative Svenska Dagbladet of Stockholm, which claimed that "The racial type of these people is not clearly Swedish. It is likely that their forefathers left Sweden in the 1100s or 1200s, and it is also likely that they mixed with alien elements, particularly in the 1700s. Neither do [Swedish] traditions seem to have been particularly alive in Gammalsvenskby. Indicative of this is a letter, mailed from the village during the summer of 1849, which reads: “We do know that our forefathers are from dago [sic], but of the trek here we know nothing; the old are all dead.” It would be unreasonable of us a couple of generations later to demand that the Gammalsvenskby people would have an immediate feeling for Sweden as their only true home on earth. Other than that, it is indubitable that the Gammalsvenskby people historically, linguistically, and ethnographically made up an alien group in a foreign land. With admirable tenacity this small group of people has preserved its Swedish language and customs in a new land for 150 years." At this time, the discussion regarding the Gammalsvenskby people was intensifying in Sweden. The editorial in Svenska Dagbladet reflected the growing impatience with the Gammalsvenskby Swedes in Sweden, and Svenska Canada-Tidningen wondered whether the words of Svenska Dagbladet were sufficient to mute the discussion regarding the behavior of the Gammalsvenskby people.

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Continue part 5.