1871: "Mennonite Tough Luck"

In 1868, a delegation of Prussian Mennonite elders met with Prussian Crown Prince Frederick in Berlin. The topic was universal conscription--now also for Mennonites. They were informed that “what has happened here is coming soon to Russia as well” (note 1). In Berlin the secret was already out.

Three years later this political cartoon appeared in a satirical Berlin newspaper. It captures the predicament of Russian Mennonites (some enticed in recent decades from Prussia), with the announcement of a new policy of compulsory, universal military service.

“‘Out of the frying pan and into the fire—or: Mennonite tough luck.’ The Mennonites, who immigrated to Russia in order to avoid becoming soldiers in Prussia, are now subject to newly introduced compulsory military service.” (Note 2)

The man caught in between looks more like a Prussian than Russian Mennonite—but that’s beside the point.

With the “Great Reforms” of the 1860s (including emancipation of serfs) the fundamentals were changing for Russia’s minority religious and ethnic groups. The Russian imperial model of statehood had had many unique and unequal laws and charters for its diversity of minority religious and ethnic groups. Mennonites had their Privilegium, as did other groups, and each had a role within Russia’s larger sense of mission to serve and rule nobly over many people. All that was changing.

After the humiliation of the Crimean War, Nicholas I initiated a transition to a modern nation-state model, characterized by an increased assimilation, Russification and centralization of power.

On New Years 1871 a number of sweeping reforms, including the elimination of the legal status of “foreign colonists”—Mennonite, German, Bulgarian, and the like were announced. This meant the loss of the unique privileges and favourable tax conditions designed to enable them to rapidly develop and fully master their separated economic zones.

“Settler-landholders” were to become full Russian citizens, and be incorporated into the unified Russian county (uezd) and township (volost) administrative system. The protective Guardianship Committee structure was to be abolished, though Mennonites would be able to keep their insurance system, banks, medical services and (initially) school systems, which assured that future economic growth would not be hindered (note 3).

The classification of minorities like Mennonites also changed from a religious category—“those of other belief”—to one based on language and ethnicity, or “those of other origin” (note 4).

Advance notice of these changes put the Mennonite colonies on alert. Together these changes signaled an imminent end to the broad local autonomy that Mennonites enjoyed within the imperial state. A diary entry by minister Jacob D. Epp on November 18, 1870 has the following reflection: “Is the Charter of Privileges, exempting us from military service for all time, of no value? … God’s judgement is drawing near; and I fear our church faces a difficult future” (note 5).

The rumours of a new conscription policy that would include “all classes of the empire” were floating about for some time. Even before the new direction was reported in newspapers in November 1870 (note 6), Mennonite leaders were corresponding with their American counterparts on the possibility of mass migration (note 7).

As soon as the new direction was pronounced, elders from the Molotschna, Chortitza, and Bergthal Colonies organized multiple emergency meetings, the first hosted by the Molotschna District Chairman Peter Ewert in Rudnerweide on January 5, 1871. After a second meeting, a Mennonite delegation was sent to St. Petersburg to assure the government of their gratefulness and devotion to the crown, and to explain why the proposal was so “deeply distressing and worrisome” to the historically non-resistant community (note 8).

Delegates also composed a fresh and definitive confessional statement on Mennonites and non-resistance which would give guidance for decades (note 9).

While the delegation was well received and some options could be discussed with ministers of the crown, a total exemption from individual service to the state was not an option for debate.

Military service as sin? One government minister offered his own quasi-theological argument, telling a Mennonite delegate and elder that it is surely a sin that he cannot speak Russian though Mennonites had been in Russia for seventy years—a line worthy of another of political cartoon (note 10)!

While the new policy did not result in the wholescale emigration of Mennonites, about one-third would leave for North America as a result. The first hundred Russian Mennonite agriculturalists arrived in the United States in September 1873.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Peter Bartel, “Beschreibung der persönlichen Bemühung der fünf Aeltesten bei den Hohen und Allerhöchsten Staatsmännern in Berlin um Wiederheraushelfung aus dem Reichsgesetz, worin der Reichstag uns Mennoniten am 9. November 1867 versetzt hat,” Christlicher Gemeinde-Kalender 29 (1920), 70–79; 78, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Christlicher%20Gemeinde-Kalender/1918-1932/DSCF6404.JPG. See also Josh Sanborn, “Military Reform, Moral Reform and the End of the Old Regime,” in The Military and Society in Russia: 1450–1917, edited by Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe, 507–524 (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 507f.

Note 2 /Pic: “Aus dem Regen in die Traufe, oder: Mennonitenpech,” Beiblatt zum Kladderadatsch (Berlin) 24, no. 24 & 25 (May 28, 1871), 1, https://books.google.ca/books?id=GkkOAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (thanks to Brent Wiebe for sharing a snipped version of this cartoon found in a Samara museum, https://goskatalog.ru/portal/?fbclid=IwAR1KR_Up-NaURSNIsBqHcDJb5XcMJr28_kO1YiPnHkn-FSav-v9_blbHvMk#/collections?id=31698664).

Note 3: Cf. Nataliya Ostasheva Venger, “Mennonite Privileges and Russian Modernization: Communities on a Path Leading to Legal and Social Integration (1789–1900), in European Mennonites and the Challenge of Modernity over Five Centuries. Contributors, Detractors, and Adaptors, edited by Mark Jantzen, Mary Sprunger, and John D. Thiesen (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2016), Kindle edition, oc. 2782. Also: Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 88.

Note 4: Paul Werth, “Changing Conceptions of Difference, Assimilation, and Faith in the Volga-Kama Region, 1740–1870,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, edited by A. V. Remnev, Mark Von Hagen, and Jane Burbank, 169–195 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 169.

Note 5: Jacob D. Epp, A Mennonite in Russia: The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp, 1851–1880, translated and edited by Harvey L. Dyck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 304.

Note 6: Cf. Paul Toews, “Mennonites and the Search for Military Exemption: State Concessions and Conflicts in the 1870’s,” in Вопросы германской истории [Voprosii Germanskoi Istorii], 81–105 (Dnepropetrovsk: Porogi, 2007), 10.

Note 7: Cf. Cornelius Janzen, Sammlung von Notizen über Amerika (Danzig: Thieme, 1872), https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1872/.

Note 8: Franz Isaac, Die Molotschnaer Mennoniten. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte derselben (Halbstadt, Taurien: H. J. Braun, 1908), 295f., https://archive.org/details/die-molotschnaer-mennoniten-editablea.

Note 9: In Isaac, Molotschnaer Mennoniten, 304–306; reprinted in Mennonitische Rundschau 39, no. 20 (May 17, 1916) 3f., https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1916-05-17_39_20/page/n1/mode/2up.

Note 10: Isaac, Molotschnaer Mennoniten, 303n.

Comments

The Executioner of Dnepropetrovsk, 1937-38

Naum Turbovsky likely killed more Mennonites than anyone in the longer history of the Anabaptist-Mennonite movement. This is an emotionally difficult post to write because one of those men was my grandfather, Franz Bräul, born 1896. In 2019, I received the translation of his 30-page arrest, trial and execution file. To this point my mother never knew her father's fate. Naum Turbovsky's signature is on Bräul's execution order. Bräul was shot on December 11, 1937. Together with my grandfather's NKVD/ KGB file, I have the files of eight others arrested with him. Turbovsky's file is available online. Days before he signed the execution papers for those in this group, Turbovsky was given an award for the security of his prison and for his method of isolating and transferring prisoners to their interrogation—all of which “greatly contributed to the success of the investigations over the enemies of the people,” namely “military-fascist conspirators, spies and saboteurs.” T

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans

Prof. Benjamin Unruh as a Public Figure in the Nazi Era

Professor Benjamin H. Unruh (1881-1959) was a relief and immigration leader, educator, leading churchman, and official representative of Russian Mennonites outside of the Soviet Union throughout the National Socialism era in Germany. Unruh’s biography is connected to the very beginnings of Mennonite Central Committee in 1920-1922 when he served as a key spokesperson in Germany for the famine-stricken Mennonites in South Russia. Some years later he again played the central role in the rescue of thousands of Mennonites from Moscow in 1929 and, along with MCC, their resettlement in Paraguay, Brazil, and Canada. Because of Unruh’s influence and deep connections with key German government agencies in Berlin, his home office in Karlsruhe, Germany, became a relief hub for Mennonites internationally. Unruh facilitated large-scale debt forgiveness for Mennonites in Paraguay and Brazil, and negotiated preferential consideration for Mennonite relief work to the Soviet Union during the Great Famin

"Women Talking" -- and Canadian Mennonites

In March 2023 the film "Women Talking" won an Oscar for "Best adapted Screenplay." It was based on the novel of the same name by Mennonite Miriam Toews. The conservative Mennonites portrayed in the film are from the "Manitoba Colony" in Bolivia--with obvious Canadian connections. Now that many Canadians have seen the the film, Mennonites like me are being asked, "So how are you [in Markham-Stouffville, Waterloo or in St. Catharines] connected to that group?" Most would say, "We're not that type of Mennonite." And mostly that is a true answer, though unnuanced. Others will say, "Well, it is complex," but they can't quite unfold the complexity. Below is my attempt to do just that. At the heart of the story are things that happened in Ukraine (at the time "New" or "South" Russia) over 200 years ago. It is not easy to rebuild the influence and contribution of "Russian Mennonite" women and th

The Shift from Dutch to German, 1700s

Already in 1671, Mennonite Flemish Elder Georg Hansen in Danzig published his German-language catechism ( Glaubens-Bericht für die Jugend ) as preparation for youth seeking baptism. Though educational competencies varied, Hansen’s Glaubens-Bericht assumed that youth preparing for baptism had a stronger ability to read complex German than Dutch ( note 1 ). Popular Mennonite preacher Jacob Denner (1659–1746), originally from the Hamburg-Altona Mennonite Church, lived in Danzig for four years in the early 1700s. A first volume of his Dutch sermons was published in 1706 in Danzig and Amsterdam, and then in 1730 and 1751 he published two German collections. Untrained preachers would often read Denner’s sermons: “Those who preached German—which all Prussian preachers around 1750 did, with the exception of the Danzig preachers—had no sermons books from their co-religionists other than this one by Jacob Denner” ( note 2 ). In Danzig and the Vistula Delta region there were some differences

Invitation to the Russian Consulate, Danzig, January 19, 1788

B elow is one of the most important original Mennonite artifacts I have seen. It concerns January 19. The two land scouts Jacob Höppner and Johann Bartsch had returned to Danzig from Russia on November 10, 1787 with the Russian Immigration Agent, Georg von Trappe. Soon thereafter, Trappe had copies of the royal decree and agreement (Gnadenbrief) printed for distribution in the Flemish and Frisian Mennonite congregations in Danzig and other locations, dated December 29, 1787 ( see pic ; note 1 ). After the flyer was handed out to congregants in Danzig after worship on January 13, 1788, city councilors made the most bitter accusations against church elders for allowing Trappe and the Russian Consulate to do this; something similar had happened before ( note 2 ). In the flyer Trappe boasted that land scouts Höppner and Bartsch met not only with Gregory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s vice-regent and administrator of New Russia, but also with “the Most Gracious Russian Monarch” herse

Plague and Pestilence in Danzig, 1709

Russian and Prussian Mennonites trace at least 200 years of their story through Danzig and Royal Prussia, where episodes of plague and pestilence were not unfamiliar ( note 1 ). Mennonites arrived primarily from the Low Countries and in large numbers in the middle of the 16th century—approximately 750 families or 3,000 refugees and settlers between 1527 and 1578 to Danzig and Royal Prussia ( note 2 ). At this time Danzig was undergoing tremendous demographic, cultural and economic transformation, almost tripling in population in less than 100 years. With 80% of Poland’s foreign trade handled through this port city ( note 3 ), Danzig saw the arrival of new people from across Europe, many looking to find work in the crammed and bustling city ( note 4 ). Maria Bogucka’s research on Danzig in this era brings the streets of the maritime city to life: “Sanitation facilities were inadequate … The level of personal hygiene was low. Most people lived close together: five or six to a room, sle

The Tinkelstein Family of Chortitza-Rosenthal (Ukraine)

Chortitza was the first Mennonite settlement in "New Russia" (later Ukraine), est. 1789. The last Mennonites left in 1943 ( note 1 ). During the Stalin years in Ukraine (after 1928), marriage with Jewish neighbours—especially among better educated Mennonites in cities—had become somewhat more common. When the Germans arrived mid-August 1941, however, it meant certain death for the Jewish partner and usually for the children of those marriages. A family friend, Peter Harder, died in 2022 at age 96. Peter was born in Osterwick to a teacher and grew up in Chortitza. As a 16-year-old in 1942, Peter was compelled by occupying German forces to participate in the war effort. Ukrainians and Russians (prisoners of war?) were used by the Germans to rebuild the massive dam at Einlage near Zaporizhzhia, and Peter was engaged as a translator. In the next year he changed focus and started teachers college, which included significant Nazi indoctrination. In 2017 I interviewed Peter Ha

“First Arrival of German Troops in Halbstadt” (Volksfreund, April 20, 1918)

“ April 19, 1918 will always remain significant in the history of the Molotschna German Colony. That which until recently could hardly be imagined has occurred: the German military has arrived to free us from the despotism, rape and pillaging of barbarous people and to reestablish the order and security of life and property--something desperately necessary for our land. For this we give thanks above all to the One in whose hands the peoples and nations and also individuals rest. ...” ( Note 1 ) Mennonites greeted their “guests and liberators” with festivities that included baked goods (Zwieback), meats and even the German anthem “ Deutschland, Deutschland über alles "—all before the watchful eyes of their Russian /Ukrainian neighbours. The troops arrived by train; and to the shock of most present, three bound prisoners—all well-known bandits and terrorists—“were brought out of one of the railway cars without any prior notice, lined up and shot right in front of us” as an exampl

“The way is finally open”—Russian Mennonite Immigration, 1922-23

In a highly secretive meeting in Ohrloff, Molotschna on February 7, 1922, leaders took a decision to work to remove the entire Mennonite population of some 100,000 people out of the USSR—if at all possible ( note 1 ). B.B. Janz (Ohrloff) and Bishop David Toews (Rosthern, SK) are remembered as the immigration leaders who made it possible to bring some 20,000 Mennonites from the Soviet Union to Canada in the 1920s ( note 2 ). But behind those final numbers were multiple problems. In August 1922, an appeal was made by leaders to churches in Canada and the USA: “The way is finally open, for at least 3,000 persons who have received permission to leave Russia … Two ships of the Canadian Pacific Railway are ready to sail from England to Odessa as soon as the cholera quarantine is lifted. These Russian [Mennonite] refugees are practically without clothing … .” ( Note 3 ) Notably at this point B. B. Janz was also writing Toews, saying that he was utterly exhausted and was preparing to

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog