Malodolynske (Kleinliebental)

Kleinliebental (today Malodolynske) was a German colony on the shore of the Sukhyi Estuary, founded in 1804 by Catholic settlers from Alsace, the Palatinate, and Bavaria. Initially, it formed part of the Liebental Colonists’ District of Odesa Uyezd in the Kherson Governorate. Today, it lies within Odesa District.

The colonists’ economic activities were based on agriculture, livestock breeding, and horse breeding. Vegetable gardening was quite profitable. Viticulture and wine production generated substantial income, with wine sold beyond the uyezd and governorate.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Kleinliebental was considered a prosperous and well-developed village: it had 255 households, a church and a school, wind and steam mills, mud-therapy and hydrotherapy facilities with physicians, a pharmacy, shops, wine cellars, an inn, a grain store, and a saltworks.

At the outbreak of the First World War, the men were conscripted to the Western and Russian-Turkish fronts. At the same time, the state restricted the political, economic, and cultural rights of the German population. The school in Kleinliebental was closed.

The inhabitants of the colony experienced the fall of the autocracy, the disintegration of Russia, and the violent events of the Civil War. In March 1918, a Self-Defense Committee was established in Kleinliebental to protect the lives and property of residents from bandit raids. In the summer of 1919, the colonists joined the armed anti-Bolshevik Grossliebental Uprising.

The transformations introduced by Soviet power, finally established in February 1920, were met with hostility by the residents of Kleinliebental. Crop failures and grain requisitions in 1921–1922 led to famine. Forced collectivization began in 1929. By April 1930, twenty families had been dekulakized and deported. In 1937–1939, forty-four residents were subjected to repression, and sixty-five were executed.

During the war against Nazi Germany, the colony lay within the Romanian administrative zone of Transnistria, though it was under the authority of the SS Special Detachment R (Sonderkommando R). On 20 March 1944, as the Red Army advanced, the inhabitants of Kleinliebental were evacuated to the Reich province of Warthegau (Poland). After the war, many were repatriated and sent to special settlements in Kazakhstan.

Peasants from Western Ukraine were resettled in the former German colony.