"Anti-Menno" Communist: David J. Penner (1904-1993)

The most outspoken early “Mennonite communist”—or better, “Anti-Menno” communist—was David Johann Penner, b. 1904.

Penner was the son of a Chortitza teacher and had grown up Mennonite Brethren in Millerovo, with five religious services per week (note 1)! In 1930 with Stalin firmly in power, Penner pseudonymously penned the booklet entitled Anti-Menno (note 2). While his attack was bitter, his criticisms offer a well-informed, plausible window on Mennonite life—albeit biased and with no intention for reform. He is a ethnic Mennonite writing to other Mennonites.

• Penner offers multiple examples of how the Mennonite clergy in particular—but also deacons, choir conductors, Sunday School teachers, leaders of youth or women’s circles—aligned themselves with the exploitative interests of industry and wealth.
• Extreme prosperity for Mennonite industrialists and large landowners was achieved with low wages and the poverty of their Russian /Ukrainian workers, according to Penner.
• Though they taught non-resistance, Mennonite industrialists employed Cossacks to keep order and put down strikes with whips and sable.
• Landless or land-poor Mennonites were also exploited; they paid taxes, but had no vote in village affairs and the distribution of land.
• In his experience Mennonite leadership did not speak against exploitation or give voice to the poor, and failed miserably to erect any safeguards to limit the influence of the wealthy upon the life of the church.
• Years of Sunday School and religious instruction in the schools and home, enhanced by Christian music and singing groups, gave youth eyes for overseas mission and charity work, but no tools to address social inequality in their own backyard or for political activism, he argued.
• In the villages all Mennonite thought and action was saturated by religion, which ultimately stifled critical intellectual and cultural life. Religion class dominated the schools at the expense of other academic subjects.
• Ministers and teachers were restrictive cultural gatekeepers; literature in the bookstores was largely German and religious.
• Contact with the larger world was controlled and limited through boards of clergy who spoke to government for Mennonites as a whole, and through elected administrators, industrialists and traders. Lower and middle-class Mennonites were wholly dependent: by and large they spoke little Russian, and the women almost none.
• The Mennonite commonwealth was achieved and reinforced by an attitude that looked down on Russians and Ukrainians as a lower type of people.
• Mennonite leadership displayed uncritical patriotism towards the Tsarist regime in church, school and the press, which served to uphold the system of privileges.
• For both the clergy and the capitalists, the Mennonite state-within-a-state was a “Mennonite heaven” even as the wealthy profited from grain speculation and the production of munitions for the Tsarist regime throughout World War I.
• In 1918 Mennonites aligned themselves with the German occupying force and instigated ten revenge executions, according to Penner.
• Support for the Mennonite Selbstschutz (self-defence units) preceded the Makhno anarchy and was particularly strong amongst the faculty (e.g., Benjamin Unruh) of the advanced, elite schools in Halbstadt and Ohrloff and its well-to-do students (see note 3).

Penner’s hostile critique of Mennonite life and culture delivered 13 years after the Russian Revolution was from a particular vantage point and commitment to reading history from a Marxist historical-materialist worldview. Penner expected the community to collapse because of its own internal contradictions, like capitalist systems on a macro level.

Penner’s attack is vitriolic, but important to understand from beginning to end. He offers more than a little correction to the dominant portrayal of a Mennonite “golden age” in Russia pre-1914, and helps in part to explain how it was that members of an historic peace church—the wealthy as well as the village-poor—could take up arms, and why some Mennonites chose to become communists.

Penner published another volume on Mennonites together with ethnic Mennonite Heinrich Friesen in 1930, and in 1931, translated as: Under the Yoke of Religion: German Colonists of the USSR and their Religious Organizations. Penner and Friesen justified the anarchist Makhno atrocities, claiming that they were provoked by the national agitation of religious leaders, above all the Mennonites. The authors warn of “left-wing sects” and charge the Mennonite ministerial as a whole of counter-revolutionary activity, for organizing desertion and sabotage in the Red Army and agricultural labour crews, and for leading a “peaceful” battle against Soviet powers through their cooperatives (note 4).

As a one-time insider, Penner affirmed that religious faith was more firmly anchored amongst the Mennonite masses than the Orthodox faith was amongst average Russians. He understood that because Mennonite life was a cohesive whole, Mennonite leadership in 1920s instinctively--if wrongly--sought to dominate the economic, cultural, religious and political life of their districts. As such, however, they created “innumerable obstacles” for the work of the party and for the labourer or poor to organize politically in the work of the soviet reconstruction (note 5). And consequently, as more recent Soviet archival documents show, Mennonites as Mennonites were singled out for harsher treatment by government agencies.

             ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Cf. Peter Letkemann, “David Johann Penner [A. Reinmarus]: A Mennonite Anti-Menno,” in Shepherds, Servants and Prophets: Leadership among the Russian Mennonites, 1880–1960, edited by Harry Loewen, 297–311 (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2003). See also Letkemann's German encyclopedia article: http://www.mennlex.de/doku.php?id=art:penner_david_johann.

Note 2: David J. Penner, Anti-Menno. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Mennoniten in Russland, by A. Reinmarus [pseud.] (Moscow: Zentral-Volker, 1930), https://chortitza.org/Buch/AMeno.pdf. 

Note 3: Penner, Anti-Menno: Beiträge, 29, 39–41; 42, 45–48; 50–54, 56–57, 63, 65f., 69, 72, 73f., 91. He makes special note of Benjamin H. Unruh; see my published essay, “Benjamin Unruh, MCC [Mennonite Central Committee] and National Socialism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 96, no. 2 (April 2022), 157–205, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/handle/20.500.12730/1571.

Note 4: Cf. Sergej G. Nelipovič, “Die Deutschen Rußlands in der sowjetischen Historiographie in der 20er, 30er und 40er Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Deutsche in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1914–1941, edited by A. Eisfeld, V. Herdt, and B. Meissner, 12–19 (Berlin: LIT, 2007), 16.

Note 5: Penner, Anti-Menno, 84.