Bergtal - History

History

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

With the Stalinization of the Soviet Union, in 1927 the village of Bergtal was renamed Rotfront and all religious practices were forbidden. During the time of 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 of Nazi Germany, referring to their distant Polish ancestry or relatives.

With the onset of Perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, the residents of Bergtal could again freely practice their religious faith. After the end of the Soviet Union, many ethnic Germans emigrated from Kyrgyzstan to Germany, as with the collapse of the collective farms and other state enterprises many jobs were lost. In 1990, there were about nine hundred people of German background living in the village; by 2012, that number was down to about 500.