Mennonite Rebel Leader Executed: Katharina Siemens, July 1930

In news (2022) from Ukraine we see some women active in the resistance against Russia.Is there any record of Mennonite women “rebels” against Moscow-based repression?

In 1930 there were more than 3,700 recorded anti-Soviet, anti-collective farm, anti-kulakization “mass disturbances” in the USSR undertaken almost exclusively by women. “Vigrous action” … “some armed with pitchforks, sticks, stakes, and knives” with disturbances that would last several days (note 1).

Did Mennonites participate or lead in any such “rebellions”? Thousands had been turned back home after hoping to flee via Moscow in Fall 1929 and immigrate to Canada. Many of these refused to plant crops in 1930 and were intent on trying again to leave.

There is a record of one Mennonite rebellion in 1930—and with a woman leader (note 2). There may have been others. The following fascinating account is based on the work of Abram A. Fast, written in Russian (note 3).

Johann Martin Winter, a “kulak” emigration leader from the village of Alexandrovsk, Barnaul, who had been sent back from Moscow in December with hundreds of others unable to emigrate, was arrested locally on July 2, 1930.

That night, David Giesbrecht notified all the other villages in the German District to come to the district centre in Halbstadt (Barnaul) to help secure Winter’s release. Some villages in the Slavgorod and Khabarsky Districts were also informed.

A large and “excited” crowd gathered at the building of the District Executive Committee, demanding the release of Winter. They were addressed by the secretary and chairman, as well as by the representative of the OGPU (secret police). The speech by the secretary was interrupted by shouts from the crowd, and the secretary himself was “insulted, threatened and, in the end, dragged from the porch from where he was speaking.”

The OGPU representative who arrested Winter gave reasons for the arrest, which the crowd refused to accept. Some from the crowd entered from the rear of the district building seized the weapons and forced the OGPU commissioner and his assistant onto the street.

The commissioner said that Winter was now in Slavgorod, and so he could not possibly release him. The loud crowd demanded that the commissioner go directly to the post office and talk [telegraph?] with OGPU police in Slavgorod and secure the immediately release Winter.

The leaders of the uprising gave the police commissioner three hours, or they would arrest him and lock him up in their local prison. The post-master however refused the open the door to the crowd.

One of the rebel leaders was a woman, Katharina Jakovlevna Siemens, and she called for the door to the post office to be broken down. Then the local police commissioner was forced to negotiate with the Slavgorod OGPU and communicate the demands of the rebels. The commissioner and his assistant were then detained as hostages. With control over the post office and the district offices, the rebels controlled all means of communication with the outside world.

After two to three hours had passed and the rebels had received no response regarding the release of Winter, their anger began to grow.

Threats and insults were directed at the commissioner. “Why are you arresting our people at night?” “We demand that Winter be released immediately, or we will show you a thing or two.” “You want to destroy religion, but not knowing how you gather false information and judge people on that basis. Well, how do you feel now, when you are the one arrested?” “The time for the release of Winter has now expired (3 hours), which means that we will take you away and put you in a cell as you do to our brothers, and we will keep and feed you in the same manner that you keep and feed our arrested people.”

After 3 or 3.5 hours, after the two officers of the OGPU had been “arrested” by the rebels, new demands were made of them: they were told to call the OGPU District Department and demand the release of others arrested. The commissioner categorically refused.

Then Katharina J. Siemens addressed the crowd: “Well, then we are forced to arrest the secretary and chair of the district committee executive, and the chair of the district farm union as well," and all of those present voted unanimously in support.” Forty to fifty people separated themselves from the crowd and headed to the district building to carry out the decision.

Then four armed local communist party members got on a truck to intersect this group, and two shots were fired in the air. Soon a car with an armed detachment of Chekists from Slavgorod arrived which changed the mood immediately. The Chekists surrounded the post office which had been in the hands of rebels for 6 hours. They demanded that the rebels immediately release the two OGPU officers, return the officers's weapons, and surrender the mail and telegraph office.

The OGPU then arrested nine of the most active rebel leaders: Katharina Jak. Siemens, I. P. Penner, K. Jak. Krahn, P. G. Koop, J. J. Driedger, Jak. Jak. Derksen, P. G. Enns, and G. K. Reimer. There was no resistance. The crowd had no choice but to disperse and go home.

David Isaakovich Giesbrecht, Aron Aronovich Peters, Johann Martinovich Winter, Ivan Alex. Plohotnikov, Jacob Petrovich Peters, David Franzovich Neufeldt, and Mikhail Sergeyevich Kirichenko were sentenced to death (J. M. Winter: August 31, 1930) and executed by shooting (J. M. Winter: October 22, 1930). The others were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. "That was the end of the emigration movement of the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s."

Katharina Jak. Siemens was sentenced on July 30 to be executed.

… the participants in the uprising in Halbstadt/Barnaul suffered a terrible fate. Of the 500 active participants, only 20 remained alive [by 1938?? Unclear]

–Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: “Document 78, Report from the OGPU Secret Political Department on the forms and dynamics of the class struggle in the countryside in 1930, 15 March 1931,” in Steven Shabad, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, Volume One (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 350.

Note 2: I am aware of only one brief English reference to this rebellion, by Russian scholar P. P. Wiebe, “The Mennonite Colonies of Siberia: From the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 30 (2012), 23-35; 33. https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/144.

Note 3: The above is pieced together from Abram A. Fast's research supported by archival materials from the Centre for Preservation of Archival collections of Altai kra. His book's title: V setyakh OGPU-NKVD: Nemetskiy rayon Altyskogo kraya v 1927-1938 (Slavgorod: Slavgorod Publishing, 2002). https://chortitza.org/Dok/FastR.pdf. The section on the "Halbstadt (Barnaul) Rebellion" begins on p. 57, and is very well documented by A. A. Fast.

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