In 1891, a group of Volga German families moved to Kazakhstan and founded the settlement of Konstantinovka about 30 miles north of Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The name was later changed to Tobolino, and today the settlement is known as Derbisek. In 2018, the name of the area in which Konstantinovka is located was changed from South Kazakhstan to Turkestan.
Bertram Schmidt had a mill in Konstantinovka.
On 17 November 1925, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Elder H. J. Löbsack, together with Johann Friedrich Ginter, paid a visit to the colony of Konstantinovka). At that time there were some eighty SDA members in Tobolino and some thirty members in the village of Stepnoy. As remembered by H. J. Löbsack, “the prayer house, built by the community in Tobolino for 250 people, turned out to be too small on the very first evening.” Unfortunately, after 1928 the prayer house was closed, turned into a club-house, and later demolished.
- Yunak, Dmitry O. "Kazakhstan." Encyclopedia of Seventh-Day Adventists [Online]
- Derbisek (Wikipedia) [in Russian]