Verhne Sujetuk

The Finnish Lutheran Curch has been active in Siberia since 1840's. At the moment rev. Juha Saari is the priest in the area, working from Irkutsk. He has provided us with information about the history of Transbaikalia, priests who have been active there and where the archives or correspondence may be stored.

The first clergyman sent from Finland in 1849 was the German Konstantin Butzke. He visited twice a year e.g. Nerchinsk. If his letters and reposrts are somewhere in the church archive, they are in German. In February 1864 the Lutheran Church sent another priest to Siberia. He was rev. Herman Wilhelm Roschier and would operate from a village actually outside of the Nercinsk forced labor fields, in Verhne Sujetuk, on the Western side of lake Baikal. At the time of his arrival, October 1864 there were 300 dwellers in half-collapsed shanties. Forty of them were women. Theft, fighting, drunkenness and vice were common. Only three women could be considered not to be a drunkard. The village exists still today with a population of 145 of Estonian origin.

Roschier made long inspection tours all over the area that is larger than Europe. In 1871 he visited Kara gold washing fields und met there a larger group of Finnish convicts than anywhere else, forty-one in total.
From the 1850's released convicts were concentrated mainly to Verhne Sujetuk, although they were not always welcomed. The dwellers of the village stated:

We don't consider ourselves to have any duty to take care and feed creeps from Finland. They have wandered the whole life around in Siberia and as they finally are no-goods for anything, they are sent to our burden here.

This was probably the reason for many of the released convicts chose a life as a vagobond and earning the living as a beggar because since 1849 a good-behaving convict could be released to probation. As a rule one could get rid of the irons and a lighter job after a service of four to eight years. Still three more years and he could move out from the camp and settle down, build a house or marry. This is why it is well possible that if Anton Henrik was lucky enough to avoid epidemic diseases and accidents, he could have begun a career as a roaming worker or beggar - or settle in Verhne Sujetuk around 1863 to 1865.

A student at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Kseniya Tarasova took the challenge to find tracks of Anton Henrik in Siberia, if possible. She had the idea to contact the National Archive in Chita because the city seemed to be the follower to Nerchinsk as the centre of the region. To our positive surprise they soon replied us telling there may be some information we're looking for.

Source: Rev. Juha Saari and Juntunen, Alpo, Suomalaisten karkottaminen Siperiaan autonomian aikana ja karkotetut Siperiassa, Siirtolaisinstituutti, Turku, 1983

An Estonian short film, Puhkus Siberis (Siberian vacation), 2011 shows how Verhne Sujetuk looks like today. The movie is directed by Liivo Niglas and it's about Estonian relatives coming to see the grandfather living in the village.