Emigration from Russia

Emigration from Russia in the early 20^th century was not an easy task.  Europeans had been leaving their homelands for America since the 17^th century.  The ease of train and ship travel had increased greatly and immigrant routes through Germany, aided by travel brokers, were well established by the 1900s.  Still, leaving one’s homeland in Russia and undertaking a journey of thousands of miles across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to America was a monumental task. 

Marie (Ratzlaff) Penner indicates that her father, Andreas, considered moving his family to Argentina and that the adults sat up many nights by the light of the oil lamp debating how they would make their way out of Russia.  Many bureaucratic obstacles stood in their way not to mention the prohibitive total pricetag the journey would carry.  My father, Norman Ratzlaff, has told me in the past that members of the Lone Tree Holdeman Congregation near Moundridge, Kansas, assisted the family with their travel expenses.  I don’t have any was to confirm that suggestion, nor do I know how much assistance was needed, but it seems to be plausible.  Peter and Katarina Wedel are both buried in the Lone Tree cemetery and many of the Karolswalders joined the Lone Tree Congregation after reaching Kansas.  If help was needed, it makes sense that the Lone Tree Congregation would have been the first place the Ratzlaffs would have turned for help.  Perhaps for this reason, as well as the fact that his father, Jacob, and his other brothers and sisters already resided in Kansas, Andreas was persuaded to set Kansas as the family’s destination.

By the first decade of the 1900s, a complete immigrant network had spread throughout Russia, Eastern Europe, and Germany.  German shipping and rail lines had established routes and stations along the immigrant trail and agents of the shipping lines had offices throughout Europe.  Andreas Ratzlaff used Friedrich Missler as his agent for the journey.  Missler was based in Bremen, Germany, and was associated with the shipping line Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd).  Missler was a well-established agent used by countless numbers of immigrants during this time period.  http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Missler

Associates of Missler’s agency distributed fliers on calendars and in newspapers throughout Eastern Europe and Western Russia and Andreas could have seen a flier something like this hanging in a public place somewhere in the Leeleva area.  This particular flyer is in Czech and was posted in Prague:

A master marketer, Missler provided his clients with canvas wallets in which to carry their travel documents.  Andreas used this wallet, emblazoned with Missler’s address, to carry the family’s paperwork:

Pictures of other wallets can be found on the internet in Polish or other Eastern European languages.  Andreas' wallet was in German just like this one. 
Today, many descendants of immigrants have made the mistake of thinking Missler was the name of the ship their ancestors took to America when in fact he was just the travel agent.

Missler would have taken care of the ship tickets for the Ratzlaffs.  The list price in 1912 for an adult ticket from Bremen, Germany, to Baltimore, Maryland, was about 75 rubles.  Maybe this would have been slightly lower in 1907.  Either way, this was the equivalent to about $750 today.  Children under a year cost about 5 rubles and children between 1 and 12 years old were half-price.  The passage by train from Russia to Bremen would have been an additional cost of about 15 rubles for an adult.  Further expenses would have included medical exams, food, accommodations, and other administrative fees.  The total price for an adult to travel to America would have been over 160 rubles (over $1600 in today’s dollars) (http://israel-stu.haifa.ac.il/staff/alroey/out-of-shtetl.pdf)  The Ratzlaffs numbered 8 people (Andreas, Susanna, Marie, Karoline, John, Katherine, Florentine and baby Susanna) and their total bill for the voyage would have been in the neighborhood of $7500 in today’s money.  This was certainly no small sum for a family from a very poor Volhynian village.

Andreas Ratzlaff had an internal Russian passport, but I doubt he had an international one that would have allowed him or his family to travel outside Russia.  19^th and early 20^th Century Russia required its citizens to carry internal passports as identification.  If a citizen was travelling in the country and was stopped without a passport, a fine would be levied (http://www.doukhobor.org/Passports.htm).  The purpose of an internal passport was for increased security.  The early 20^th Century in Russia saw an increase in nationalism, economic class tension, and revolutionary thought development.  Overwhelmed bureaucratic systems, out of touch ruling class and gentry as well as political disasters such as the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, increased the severity of the general dissatisfaction of the populace and spurred the government to try to keep closer tabs on its citizens.  For more information regarding Russian international passports at the time, see http://books.google.com/books?id=cU0NAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA56&ots=4aY4iF3vrO&dq=russian%20passport%201900&pg=PA55#v=onepage&q=russian%20passport%201900&f=false and http://books.google.com/books?id=gYt6Kf7DtwgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA76#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Like I said, Andreas had an official internal Russian passport that allowed him to travel within Russia.  He may have had one since the days when he travelled to his forestry service camp in Kherson Province in the 1890s.  One of the first tasks the typical Russian peasant considering emigration would face would have been to visit a local police station and begin the paperwork to receive an international passport.  Andreas probably never began this process since he intended to escape across the Russian border illegally into Austro-Hungary.