From Amsterdam to Russia

Johan Klassen (1758-1812) was born in Holland and was a prosperous mechant and owner of a shipping vessel. Like his parents, he was a Mennonite. One of the basic tenets of the Mennonite belief is pacifism. This became a problem with Dutch authorities who did not excempt them from military service. Because Frederick the Great of Prussia offered a homeland to the Dutch Mennonites in Poland in 1782, many of them moved to that country. Johan settled in Danzig where he carried on with his shipping business. 

Johan and his partner had been appointed to be the legal guardians of two girls whose parents had died but haad left a trust for the girls. About this time, Johan and his partner were in the process of expanding their shipping business. They built a new and larger vessel and used their own capital as well as the money in trust for the girls to finance this project. When the vessel was built, they bought mechandise to fill both ships and set out to trade with other North Sea ports. However disaster struck and as soon as the new ship left the harbour it sank along with all of its cargo. Unfortunately, there was no insurance and Johan and his partner suffered a great financial loss. Johan felt that they should sell the original ship and its cargo in order to reimburse the money they had used from the girls' trust account. However, his partner disagreed. Johan sold all of his shares of the joint property and made good the money in the trust account But this left him financially paralyzed.

In 1788, Catherinne the Great, Empress of all the Russias, invited people including Mennonites, from West Prussia to come to the Ukraine and Volga areas as farmers and tradesmen. Because Frederick the Great had not lived up to his promise to give the Mennonites dispensation from military service, saying that that had applied only to the original settlers and not their offspring, a mass migration began. The first emigrees settled along the Dnieper River. Johan wanted to emigrate as well, but as he was neither farmer nor tradesmen he decided to learn the tailering business. He followed the first wave of immigrants by a few years. In 1803, he and his family moved to the Ukraine, where he set up his tailoring shop in Tiege, a small village on the Molotshna River.