Kalinindorf

Kalinindorf was a Jewish agricultural colony founded in 1807 under the name Sedemenukha (Hebrew for "Field of Rest") by settlers from Mogilev, Vitebsk, and Chernigov Provinces of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus and Ukraine). After the establishment of the new colony nearby, an older one began to be referred to as Bolshaya Sedemenukha and the new one as Malaya Sedemenukha. In 1897 1,284 Jews lived in Bolshaya Sedemenukha, comprising 81.8 percent of the total population. The majority of the Jewish inhabitants of Bolshaya Sedemenukha were agricultural workers. The Jewish population of Bolshaya Sedemenukha suffered greatly from the calamities of the revolutionary years and the civil war. A number of Jews were murdered in pogroms staged by various warring parties in 1919. More Jews died in Bolshaya Sedemenukha during the famine and epidemics that followed the civil war. In 1927 Bolshaya Sedemenukha was renamed Kalinindorf and became the seat of the first Jewish ethnic county in the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s the agricultural cooperative Veg tsum Sotsializm (The Way to Socialism) was established near Kalinindorf. At the beginning of Soviet rule the Russian-language Jewish school that had operated since 1912 adopted Yiddish as the language of instruction. In 1939 the language of instruction became Russian again. In the 1930s Kolvirt Emes, the Yiddish newspaper of Kalinindorf County, was published in Kalinindorf. 1,879 Jews lived in Kalinindorf in 1939, when they comprised 60.1 percent of the total population. Kalinindorf was occupied by German troops on August 27, 1941. Few Jews succeeded in leaving the village in time. Most of the local Jews were murdered in September 1941. Kalinindorf was liberated by the Red Army on March 14, 1944. After the war its name was changed to Kalininskoye, but the train station of the village retained the old name Kalinindorf.