Finding more history

While my recent time has been preoccupied with sick children, I have had a few spare moments to read either late at night or early mornings. The book I have been researching is from Catherine to Krushchev by Adam Geisinger. Filled with statistics, some longer expository passages, and detailed explanations, it has taken some time to ingest the finer points of the text.

There had been very little mention of my ancestral village or family in most of the book, save a point on a map of the villages of the Volga area. However, more than midway through the book, I stopped in my literary tracks and found a small mention at last on page 244, where Giesinger explains that one of the major manufacturing centers in the volga region was in Grimm, and it was a joint stock company. What is thrilling is that I know the rest of the story. The factory was built by John Jacob Meier in 1900, and was then converted to a joint ownership or stock company. One of the stockholders was Jacob Meier, Sr., and the other was Jakob Held. From Jacob Jr's memoirs, he wrote that in the factory they built many things, including engines for flour mills. As the shadow of hatred and mistrust of the German colonists, who had been in Russia for well over a century, spread from Moscow, and the brutality of the Communists increased, Jacob Meier, Sr. decided it was time to sell the factory, and did so in 1916 to a man named Lautz from Bauer. Lautz owned it for several years, until the Communists took over the factory and made the workers managers. This went on for some time until there was an uprising in Grimm, which prompted two Communists to eneter the factory, and demand all the money. Having been stripped of his ownership and demoted to manager and afraid of repercussions from the government, Lautz refused. In anger at his refusal, they then removed him from the factory and murdered him. As I understand, this type of behavior was common until the 1930's, which by that time most of them had been exterminated systematically or sent to die in concentration or labor camps. This added to the motivation for the Meier family to leave Russia.