Repression thwarts flight from Ukraine to Moscow, Fall 1929

Adina (Neufeld) Bräul has an early childhood memory of the flight to Moscow in Fall 1929 and her first train ride; she was only three years old. Her family started the journey from Sparrau, Molotschna to Moscow in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to emigrate. The family however was turned back with hopes dashed (note 1). Memoirs from nearby Marienthal also note that they had departed for Moscow only to be turned back en route. The cost was high; they returned “not only poor but couldn’t get work and were punished for trying to leave the country” (note 2). A relative from Paulsheim told me that they were preparing to leave for Moscow as well, but told by returning families that no exit visas were being granted (note 3).

Most of the Mennonites who successfully fled the USSR in 1929 via Moscow with the assistance of the German embassy came from western Siberia, the settlements near the Ural Mountains, and also from Crimea (note 4). Noticeably only few were from the largest Mennonite settlements in Ukraine. Why? Evidence suggests that policies and practices of state repression were more intense and severe in Ukraine than elsewhere in 1929.

Already in 1928 high taxes and unrealistic grain requisitions with threats of heavy punishments had made another famine imminent in Ukraine and elsewhere. In July 1929 Mennonite Central Committee in North America was informed that some Mennonites in Ukraine were already starving (note 5). According to a 1928 letter from Halbstadt Elder Abram Klassen, conditions are “very critical in every respect, and … totally without any prospect of improvement” (note 6). In the historic Molotschna Settlement area, for example, as many as twenty farms per village had been sold off because people simply “could not pay the disbursements and are tossed with their families on the straw heap.” In the village of Rudnerweide one family “handed-over the entire harvest and was still required to deliver another 500 Pud (8,191 kilograms); because this was impossible, all of their possessions were sold” (note 7).

In September and October 1929, as many Mennonites were fleeing to Moscow, authorities in Ukraine moved quickly to take out emigration agitators and to make examples of certain villages (note 8).

In the Molotschna village of Münsterberg on October 17, Jakob D. Neumann was arrested for “campaigning among Germans for emigration to Canada and America;” in the next weeks his neighbours Peter A. Nickel, Abram K. Reimer, Peter P. Janzen, and Wilhelm W. Löwen were arrested under similar charges (note 9). The pattern of intimidation and arrest was repeated in the larger Chortitza region. On October 29, 1929, twelve men from the village of Nikolaipol (Jasykowo Colony) were arrested and each charged with “resistance to grain procurement and collectivization” (note 10). The men were sentenced and eventually deported to the “northern territories;” four received a three-year sentence; one a five-year sentence; three an eight-year sentence; and five a ten-year sentence. Their families were dispossessed and, in the longer Russian penal tradition, spouses and children were typically banished with the male head. Those sentenced to a correctional labour camp were normally transported in unheated freight cars; many died en route or in the first year of their sentence (note 11). “Agitation” for mass emigration, “campaigning against sowing” (note 12), non-compliance with the state’s grain procurement policies and collectivization plans, and the on-going preaching and teaching ministry of Mennonite ministers and elders were among the charges laid (note 13). The arrests fell under the elastic terms of Article 54-10 (1927) of the Ukrainian Criminal Code: “propaganda or agitation involving a call for the overthrow, subversion, or weakening of Soviet authority or for the carrying out of other counter-revolutionary crimes” (note 14). It provided punishments of deprivation of liberty, including execution, as “measures of social defence” against “socially harmful elements” (note 15).

The wave of Molotschna-area applications for visas was triggered in part by the April 8, 1929 Decree on Religious Associations and its new restrictions on religious life and expression, including the prohibition on ministers from speaking outside of their own congregations—“a widespread custom among Mennonites” (note 16). In one case a church elder known to do “much to counteract the revolutionary work of the communists” through choir and song-leading refused an order to cease—because choirs were not illegal. Soon after the church was attacked for giving aid to the congregation’s poor—something which was illegal—and the church was ordered closed (note 17). In another district disenfranchised farmers with no means left to earn a living could join the village commune only “if they publish a denial of faith and church in a newspaper” (note 18).

In addition to concerns about religious freedom and some control over their local schools, Mennonites in Ukraine had renewed economic fears in 1929: “bread is limited and expensive … . Sugar has become a big luxury item as well… and thread too has become very hard to find” (note 19). The motto in Mennonite and other German settlements was, according to one letter writer, “‘Better to die than to lose our freedom,’ … and as a result whole families, whole villages leave house and farm behind and travel to Moscow to force the central government to issue exit passes, which they have not done for years” (note 20). In early November 1929 arrests occurred in the Molotschna villages of Alexanderkrone, Alexandertal, Blumstein, Fabrikerweise, Fischau, Gnadenheim, Landskrone, Lichtfelde, Liebenau, Neukirch, Ohrloff, Schönau, Sparrau, Tiege, and Tiegerweide (note 21).

With thousands already in Moscow, a brutal turn of events triggered more arrests of Mennonites in Ukraine in order to stop the flight. On November 19, Dietrich J. Pauls, a 43-year-old minister from Hochfeld (Yazykovo Settlement) was charged with “leading counter-revolutionary agitation” and sentenced to three years in prison. With him 21-year-old Bernhard B. Dyck was arrested for “conducting anti-Soviet agitation” and sentenced to three years (note 22). In Molotschna, 63-year-old Cornelius H. Wiens of Muntau was arrested on November 21 for “attempting to leave the USSR for Canada,” and sentenced to a three-year deportation to Kazakhstan (note 23). The next day, 29- year old Jacob D. Penner of Lindenau was arrested for “conducting anti-Soviet agitation” (note 24). On November 23, 31-year-old Franz F. Ediger of Franztal was arrested under the same charge (note 25). The next day in Lichtenau, preacher Johann A. Koop was arrested for “engaging in anti-Soviet agitation and attempting to emigrate from the USSR” (note 26). Peter C. Heidebrecht of Gnadental was arrested on November 29 on the charge of anti-Soviet propaganda and was exiled to Archangelsk where he landed five months later (note 27). In the Donetsk Settlement on November 23, three Mennonites were arrested including the minister Johann J. Driedger with similar charges (note 28). Another letter from early 1930 details the severe repression and dispossession and deportation in multiple Molotschna villages in 1929: Waldheim, Lichtenau, Friedensdorf, Hierschau, Rückenau, Neukirch, Alexandertal, Pordenau, Rudnerweide, Großweide, Pastwa, Franztal, Gnadenfeld, Mariawohl, Landskrone, Schönsee, Liebenau, Wernersdorf, Muntau, Gnadental, Marienthal, and Elisabethtal. The letter writer notes: “They were treated worse than the way murderers were handled under the previous regime” (note 29).

Why were so few of those who gathered in Moscow in Fall 1929 from Mennonite communities in Ukraine? The vast majority would have left if the real and threatened repression at the local level had not been so severe. This vignette attempts to confirm this thesis with a reconstruction of the context and a documentation of the levels and types of threat and repression they faced as they attempted to flee.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Photo source: http://old.memorialholodomor.org.ua/eng/holodomor/archive/foto-arkhiv/golodomor-na-donnechini-foto-m-zheliznyaka/.

Note 1: Adina Neufeld Bräul, Interview with author, 2019.

Note 2: Selma Kornelsen Hooge and Anna Goossen Kornelsen, Life Before Canada (Abbotsford, BC: Self-published, 2018), 40; reference to Heinrich and Agatha (Goossen) Rempel and family.

Note 3: Nellie Bräul Epp, Interview with author (2017); also A. Bräul, Interview (2019).

Note 4: See previous posts on the flight:

Note 5: David Toews to Maxwell Kratz, July 13, 1928, letter, from Mennonite Central Committee-Akron, IX-3, box 7, file 2, 0003.

Note 6: Abram Klassen, letter July 1, 1928, translated in David Toews to Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, August 15, 1928, from MCC-Akron, IX, box 3, file 7.

Note 7: Mennonitische Rundschau 53, no. 46 (November 19, 1930), 5, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1930-11-19_53_47/page/n3/mode/2up.

Note 8: Otto Auhagen, Die Schicksalswende des Russlanddeutschen Bauerntum in den Jahren 1927–1930 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1942), 58, https://chortitza.org/Pis/Auhag.pdf.

Note 9: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia Region, Books I–VI (Zaporizhia: Dniprovskij Metalurg, 2004–2013) [РЕАБІЛІТОВАНІ ІСТОРІЄЮ: Запорізька область], http://www.reabit.org.ua/books/zp/. Book II, 471; 480; 560; 764; 390f.

Note 10: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia IV, 40, 144; 198; 221; 241; 459; 495; 607; 609.

Note 11: Peter Letkemann, “Mennonites in the Soviet Inferno, 1917–1956,” Preservings 13 (1998), 11, https://www.plettfoundation.org/files/preservings/Preservings13.pdf. Cf. also Alexander Rempel, Alexander, and Amalie Enns, eds., Hope is our Deliverance: Aeltester Jakob Aaron Rempel (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2005), ch. 6. Cf. Susanna Toews, Trek to Freedom: The Escape of Two Sisters from South Russia during World War II, translated by Helen Megli (Winkler, MB: Heritage Valley, 1976), 15.

Note 12: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia, V, 277.

Note 13: Cf. the well-researched and narrated story of Neu Chortitza Elder Jakob Rempel’s ministry, arrest and deportation in 1929, in Hermann Heidebrecht, Auf dem Gipfel des Lebens. Das Leben des Ältesten Jakob Rempel (Bielefeld: Christlicher Missions-Verlag, 2004), 179-200.

Note 14: Article 54 is almost identical to the Russian SSR Criminal Code Article 58; for a history of its application, cf. Sarah Davies, “The Crime of Anti-Soviet Agitation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” Cahiers du monde russe 9, 1–2 (1998), 149–167.

Note 15: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia, V, 337, 498.

Note 16: Der Auslanddeutsche 12, no. 12 (1929), 410.

Note 17: David Toews to Maxwell Kratz, April 23, 1929, from MCC-Akron, IX-2, box 3, file 10, 0002. Name of congregation and elder anonymous.

Note 18: Benjamin H. Unruh, “Bericht über meine Verhandlungen in Sachen der Flüchtlinge bei Moskau, vom 24.10 to 23.11,” November 13, 1929, p. 1. Report to Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization, from MCC-Akron, IX-01-01, box 10, file 21.

Note 19: “Wirtschaftslage in der Ukraine,” Der Auslanddeutsche 12, no. 13 (1929), 445, citing letter received.

Note 20: As reported by Benjamin Unruh to the American MCC executive: “Bericht über die katastrophale Lage der menn. Ansiedlungen in Russland und die Massenflucht der Kolonisten,” October 29, 1929, p. 1. From MCC-Akron, IX-02, box 4, file 4.

Note 21: Cf. Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia, IV, 286; II, 242; IV, 496; II, 391; II, 635; II, 761; II, 213; II, 520; II, 558; II, 765; II, 471; II, 763; IV, 589 and II, 41; II, 216, 115 and 429; II, 212; II, 453 and V, 277; II, 645.

Note 22: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia III, 541; 369. Both were later retried and not released from prison until 1956.

Note 23: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia II, 121.

Note 24: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia II, 513.

Note 25: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia II, 237

Note 26: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia II, 344.

Note 27: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia II, 148; for his story, cf. Aron A. Toews, Mennonite Martyrs: People who suffered for their faith 1920–1940, translated by John B. Toews (Winnipeg, MB: Kindred, 1990), 100-107, https://archive.org/details/MennoniteMartyrs19201940ocr1.

Note 28: Rehabilitated History: Donetsk Region, Book XI (Donetsk: KP Region, 2012), 526. [РЕАБІЛІТОВАНІ ІСТОРІЄЮ: Донецька область], http://www.reabit.org.ua/books/dn/, arrested with Driedger were Jakob J. Dyck (III, 402) and Abram J. Isaak (IX, 544).

Note 29: "Brief aus Süd-Rußland," Mennonitische Rundschau 43, no 24 (June 11, 1930), 7, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1930-06-11_53_24/page/n5/.