Lejas Bulāna – Latvian Village in Siberia

5,327 km from Riga lies the small Siberian village known in Latvian as Lejas Bulāna (Nizhnyaya Bulanka in Russian). This tiny settlement, nestled in the rich, black soil of the Eurasian continent, is much closer to Mongolia than it is to Europe. Yet, this is where the world’s first Latvian diaspora was born.

In the early 19^th century, being exiled to Siberia became a common punishment for Baltic peoples living in the Russian Empire, mainly Latvians, Estonians & Finns. These people were sent to Siberia for a wide range of crimes, both big and small. In the 1840s, the Lutheran church in Moscow became increasingly concerned about the religious welfare of these people living so far away from the word of God. This population, that continued to increase, needed ministered to, but they were spread far and wide across the vast landmass. By the late 1850s, a settlement along a tributary of the Kebezh River known in Russian as the Bulanka, had been founded as the legal location for all future Latvian exiles. It became known as Lejas Bulāna, meaning ‘Lower Bulanka’ after the location along the river.

These deported men and women, who had arrived on foot, often taking more than a year to travel there, had to create new lives with new marriages and having new children. After a time, these families were actually thriving. They had their own land to work, no longer under the thumb of Baltic German landlords. Miraculously considering the distance, letters started arriving back in Latvia telling of the rich land and freedom to be found in eastern Siberia. This became a tantalizing prospect for many peasants back in the homeland. Yes, serfdom had been abolished in the early 19^th century, but for most this was a mere formality, life went on as normal, with no rights, no land and no prospects.

In the latter part of the 1800s, free settlers started making the long trek to Lejas Bulāna. According to the 1897 All Russia Census, the village had a population of 910 people with the majority Latvians. Most of these Latvians were from the westernmost Latvian region of Kurzeme.

This interactive map shows the location of the Zekants ancestral home in western Latvia as well as the location of the village of Lejas Bulāna and the town of Minusinsk, location of political executions in 1938.

A Zekants Goes East

When I was first doing my research several years ago, I came across a list of people from Lejas Bulāna that included the name “Яков Зейкант” or “Jekob Zeikant”. I had no idea if he was connected to my husband’s Zekants family. As time went by, I came to the realization that anyone with this surname or any version of it could be plotted onto the family tree. It was a unique surname. That meant most likely there was a connection here.

This Jekob Zeikant was born in Lejas Bulāna in 1883. His father’s name was Fritz and he was from the Kurzeme region of western Latvia. Jekob had been a ‘disenfranchised kulak’ since 1929 and was a veterinarian by trade. A ‘kulak’ was a term for a prosperous, land-owning peasant. In the Soviet-era this was a very dangerous label to have. Jekob was considered a ‘kulak’ because by 1929 he owned 3 horses, 3 cows, 5 sheep and 1 pig. His three-person household had a total income of 485 Rubles, and he employed several workers, making a profit every month. This kind of personal wealth did not sit well with Soviet authorities.

The reason he was on this online list (the Book of Memory of the Krasnoyarsk Territory) was because he was arrested on December 5, 1937 as part of Joseph Stalin’s infamous purges (see Resources below). He was executed on February 2, 1938 and was buried in the Russian town of Minusinsk, the nearest administrative centre.

Jekob was accused of being a participant in a counter-revolutionary fascist organization that was preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet government. Of course there is no way to know, so many years later, if those accusations were true or not. Interestingly, after Stalin’s death, many of these victims were posthumously ‘rehabilitated’. Jekob Zeikant was ‘rehabilitated’ on November 26, 1957.

Approximately one tenth of the population of the village, all men, were victims of Stalin’s repression in 1938. This was a huge blow to the village. A blow that the population would never truly recover from.

Most of the several thousand prisoners coming through the town of Minusinsk were held in the prison and then shot in the nearby pine forest, buried in specially dug trenches. There is a monument outside that forest today to remember all of those who lost their lives there in 1938.

So where does Jekob appear on my Zekants family tree? Well, the first man to have the ‘Zekants’ name was Indriks, my husband’s 4-great grandfather. Indriks had two sons, Fritz Karl and Karl (confusing huh!). Fritz Karl created our line. The second son, Karl, I don’t know much about. He was married in 1855 and had a son in 1856. That son, Fritz, cannot be traced after his birth. I have found no death record and no further evidence of him. In 1883, he would have been 27 years old. I believe this is the best (and only) candidate for the Zekants man who ended up in Lejas Bulāna.

Was he sent there as a punishment for a crime? Or was he tempted by the promise of free land and a new life? Unless there are court records out there in archives somewhere I will never know. Did those Siberian Zekants’s have any further contact with their Latvian family? There is also no way to know this. Perhaps for a time among family back home there were memories of a relative who had gone off to the far east, never to be seen again. When did the memory fade away? Now, so many generations later, I have reconnected Jekob’s story to the whole Zekants family story.

Living History

Generation after generation, these villagers retained the Latvian language, celebrated Latvian holidays, built Latvian-style houses and created clothing with Latvian symbols and patterns. It was truly a ‘Little Latvia’ in eastern Siberia. Being so isolated, their language and customs became fossilized. Ethnographers and folklorists were very interested in this community after the fall of Communism, when the country was opened up. Their dialect reflected 19th century speech patterns, their songs were unique compositions of an exiled people and they had retained customs that had long died out back in Latvia. For example, their celebration of the mid-summer festival was held two weeks later than in Latvia because they had kept the original date from the old Julian calendar that stopped being used in the rest of Russia in 1918. Lejas Bulāna was truly living history.

Searching on the Periodika website I found an article written in 1990 by one of these researchers, Vaira Strautniece, who went to the village to document its history and lifeways. In the article, she published a list of surnames of people living there at that time. That list included the name ‘Zeikants’. I was able to contact Vaira and get more information about Jekob and his family.

Jekob was married to Maria Tobiazs. Maria was still alive in 1990 and was the ‘Zeikants’ on the 1990 list of residents. The couple had a daughter named Emma. Emma married Roberts Runcis. (Several other members of Jekob’s wife’s and son-in-law’s family were also shot in Stalin’s purges in 1938.)

Emma and Roberts had four daughters, one of which named Anna, ended up moving to Riga. The other three still live in Siberia but no longer in the village of Lejas Bulāna. I have tried searching for Anna (with maiden name Runcis) with no success. I was then put in contact with a resident of the village who told me that she knew the name ‘Zeikants’ but that all remaining family members were long gone.

While continuing to search online, I came across an interview that was conducted back in 1991 with Emma Runcis, Jekob’s daughter. Emma said that her family lived in one of the oldest houses in the village, over 100 years old. She describes her farm, her old handmade furniture and the clothing that her mother, Maria, used to make by hand (see Resources below).

I also found a couple of articles by a Latvian-Australian researcher named Philip Birzulis. I got wonderful information from his published articles about the history of this village. I was also able to contact Philip to ask him questions about the village and he provided me with photos of the village for this post (see Resources below).

Lejas Bulāna Today

As is the case with many small towns and traditional villages around the world, Lejas Bulāna is on the brink. Young people have moved to bigger cities for education or better jobs. Traditional ways of life in the village are quickly dying out. When Vaira Strautniece visited the village in 1990 there were 200 people living there. According to official counts in 2012, there were only 92 people left. An expedition to study the village in 2015 reported that number had decreased to 42, with only 20 people left who still spoke their special Latvian dialect in everyday life. There is no school anymore and not a single shop.

One quote I found in a recent article about the village put it best:

“The geographical isolation that allowed the Latvian language and culture to survive in Lejas Bulāna for more than 150 years has today become the main reason for the village’s disappearance.” –Lejas Bulāna: Latvian village at the foot of the Sayan Mountains

Resources

There were several sources mentioned in this post so I thought it would be helpful for anyone who might want more information about Lejas Bulāna or resources to research people who were victims of Soviet repression.

1. The interview with Emma Runcis can be found on the website Latvian Village in Siberia. This website has extensive information, interviews and letters from the 200-year history of the village.

2. The website Bessmertny Barak is an ongoing project to collect the names and stories of every victim of Soviet repression between 1917 and 1991. Although there are several websites in which you can find these types of lists, this one has the most comprehensive information. You can search by name or by region.

3. This article by Philip Birzulis, is an interesting and concise account in English of the history of Lejas Bulāna: “Hell (and heaven) on Earth: Latvians in Lejas Bulāna”. Philip runs a popular tour company that runs a variety of English-language tours of Riga and the surrounding area: Rigasights.com and Philip also does tours in Sydney during the Australian summer: www.sydneyhistorywalks.com

4. „Iz Sibīrijas dzīlēm” by Tamāra Heidemane is a very well-researched account of Lejas Bulāna (in Latvian). I have not read the entire thing, but have mainly concentrated on the detailed information about the 1938 repressions (using Google Translate).

5. This is the film, “Lejas Bulānas Hronika”, made in 1987. I cannot understand it since I don’t speak Latvian, but I watched the whole thing and had to wonder if any of these old women was Marija Zeikants or her daughter Emma.