Hermann A. Bergmann was a wealthy Mennonite landlord in southern Russia. Born in West Prussia, he had come to the Ukraine with his parents when he was 12 years old. The father bought a large estate near the village of Solyonoye in the province of Ekaterinoslav. Subsequent purchases by Hermann enlarged the estate to approximately 30,000 acres. Having now joined the ranks of the landed gentry, which class had a virtual monopoly of all important positions in the rural (zemstvo) agencies of government, local political offices of one sort or another fell almost automatically to Hermann Bergmann. For a number of years he was, first, a member of the Ekaterinoslav county governing committee and subsequently a member of this county's assembly. In addition to the above positions, he held other offices at one time or another. Among these the notable ones were that of director of a small-loans society, overseer of the Ekaterinoslav orphanage, and member of the board of directors of the Mennonite high school at Nikolaipol. In 1905 the Bergmann family moved from its estate Bergmannstal, to take up residence in the city of Ekaterinoslav.

Politically Bergmann belonged to the Octobrist Party, which was virtually the only party satisfied with the Manifesto "On the Perfecting of the Order of the State," issued by Nicholas II on 30 October 1905. As implemented by subsequent decrees, this Manifesto established a bicameral legislature—the Council of State and the Duma, the upper and lower legislative chambers respectively. Members of the Duma were elected by a council of electors composed of two colleges of electors chosen respectively by the peasants and by the gentry. When despite this indirect mode of election, the First and Second Dumas (sessions opened on 10 May 1906, and 5 March 1907) manifested a degree of independence, the government decided to reduce to insignificance the voting power of the broad masses of the Russian people. By a most brazen method of gerrymandering and a peculiar "curial" system of representation, the percentage of peasant representation in subsequent Dumas was reduced from 39 to 19 per cent and that of the gentry increased from 25 to 51 per cent, i.e., where one peasant deputy in 1906 represented about 800,000 peasants, in 1912 he represented 1,700,000 peasants, while a gentry deputy, having in the former year represented 28,000 voters, represented 15,000 voters in 1912. It was to these last two Dumas (Third, 1907-1912; Fourth, 1912-1917), from which "the people's face" was virtually banned, that Hermann Bergmann and another Mennonite large landowner, Peter Schroeder, were elected. During the winter of 1918-1919, when anarchy reigned supreme throughout most of southern Russia, Bergmann, with several close relatives, was brutally murdered by bandits toward the end of January.

Bibliography

Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and Waterloo, Ontario, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, p. 280. All rights reserved. For information on ordering the encyclopedia visit the Herald Press website.

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