Skip to main content

Mennonite Dystopia: “Socializing” in the era of Collectivization

The 1942 village reports prepared for the German Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories document an almost complete breakdown of community life under Stalin in predominantly Mennonite communities.

To read them is to take a step into a dystopian world (note 1). Here is a small sample of responses to one of many questions; they are asked by the occupying German army to reflect on "socializing" (Geseligkeit)—having fun, meeting socially with others—as they experienced it during the recently ended communist period:

Adelsheim [Chortitza]: "Socializing during the period of collectivization came to a complete end. Because of the many frictions in the collective [farm], we became weary/wary (überdrüssig) of each other.”

Blumengart [Chortitza]: "Regarding our social life after collectivization, neighbour no longer wished to see neighbour.” Also: "A lack of clothing hinders social life amongst the youth in particular".

Chortitza [Town]: “Social life was extinguished in the Bolshevik period. If a few people got together, they became politically suspect. No one trusted the other anymore. That mutual distrust is now slowly fading.”

Franzfeld [Chortitza]: “Socializing ended completely during the Bolshevik period; slowly it is coming back to life, because people are beginning to trust each other more.”

Hochfeld [Chortitza]: “Social life ended completely under the Bolsheviks, especially with collectivization. We became weary /wary (überdrüssig) of each other. Earlier it was completely different. Farmers visited more and stuck together much more.”

Katharinovka [Borosenko]: “Socializing? That was unknown. From early till late, day in and day out, winter and summer (without a day of rest!) toiling on the collective farm without rhyme or reason … Life on the collective farm embittered the person; one hated the other, each lived for himself alone, in dreary brooding, without hope of a better future.”

Kronstal [Chortitza]: "Socializing disappeared almost completely with the collective system. Everyone is very happy if on a Sunday he can finally stay away from the community for a few hours and be alone to himself."

Neuhorst [Chortitza]: "Socializing was completely extinguished by the collective system; people had long become weary/wary (überdrüssig) of each other.”

Nikolaifeld [Chortitza]: “Socializing during the period of the collectivization stopped completely. Earlier, visiting with neighbours was very normal, but even that came to an end. On the collective farm and with the Bolshevistic assemblies people became wary/weary (überdrüssig) of each other. ... In 1929 a five-day week was introduced [i.e., no weekend], and then in 1932 the six-day week, and later again the seven-day week. From April to December there was no day of rest on the collective farm.”

Osterwick [Chortitza]: "Abject poverty and lack of clothing were also reasons for limited socializing at weddings, funerals and similar events. Earlier there was also a radio station that could be accessed from the loudspeakers in the homes.”

Rosenbach [Chortitza]: “With collectivization, socializing came to a complete stop. In the past years, wedding celebrations and other folk festivities also ceased.”

Rosengart [Chortitza]: "As is the case everywhere, socializing virtually stopped with collectivization; but it is also getting somewhat better in this regard compared to a year ago. Nonetheless, because of utter poverty, especially the lack of clothing, people hardly come together even at festive occasions.”

Schönhorst [Chortitza]: “In the past years, the beautiful German wedding celebrations were fewer and fewer. Earlier the churches too had organized children’s festivals together with neighbouring villages. Slowly social gatherings are coming back to life, but it is still in its early stage.”

While these reports were written under the Nazi-occupation regime, the claims are supported even by the extant literature in the villages in the 1930s and by the files of those arrested in the purge, 1937-38 (note 2).

With parents largely absent on the collective farm (or arrested), childrearing and formational instruction in the 1930s was largely out of their hands (note 3). Some German-language reading materials for the local Young Pioneer groups encouraged children and youth to turn against parents and neighbours to help with the problem of “German espionage.” Columns in the Pioneer Pravda (Truth) youth paper and “spy booklets”—with titles like “Be on alert!,” “Stranger with a Bundle,” etc.—taught young people that their own “watchful and attentive eyes” made them “good helpers” of the NKVD secret police. They too may be able “to discover traces of the enemy,” and perhaps even “detain and expose the vile intentions of spies” (note 4).

This message mirrored the adult literature in each village “Red Corner” reading room and in the mandatory subscription materials for Komsomol and Party members (note 5). A popular booklet translated into German, for example, was N. Abusow’s 1937 booklet Gestapo. “In recruiting spies and other vermin the German spy service tries to exploit the German population concentrated in certain districts. The Gestapo directs its focus to places of significant German population ... including the German villages in the Ukraine.” Abusow called for “honest citizens” to join the work of Soviet counter-intelligence services.

The support that the women sought to preserve among themselves after the purge (1937-38), for example, was also infiltrated and shattered by the planting of Soviet-friendly activists in the community. Each file of the thousands arrested includes testimonies of local informants. Stalin successfully manufactured and transmitted paranoia and fear from above, generating terror at the regional and village levels below tearing the fabric—almost completely—of Mennonite life in Ukraine. Every Mennonite village was impacted as the village reports suggest. Socializing ended, and no one had courage left to say, wish, or hope anything.

Nazi German occupation forces in Ukraine found Mennonites depleted and broken—physically, mentally, socially and spiritually—from Stalinist repression. “Every individual initiative in them has been killed or stifled, because to be an individual is to be suspect, in danger of being reported. They hesitate to express any private opinions, fearing … spies are still at work” (note 6).

Decades later Eduard Reimer summed up the experience and its life-long impact:

“It is practically impossible to imagine how afraid everybody was in the villages at that time. Already as children and especially as teens, we learned to put on a false face and were compelled to hide our true thoughts and feelings. I believe that this forced two-facedness left many of my generation with life-long inhibitions. . . . I was compelled—like most in the village and in school—always to have two faces, one that was shown outwardly, and one that was turned inward. Nothing in my life has been more repulsive to me." (Note 7)

Katie Friesen recalled : “We lived in fear of those who would take what little we had left. … not even neighbours and friends could be trusted. One never knew when one would become a scapegoat for the purposes of the state” (note 8). Similarly Victor Janzen: “[Y]ou did not know anymore whom you could trust. …Many a wound, inflicted in those days, is not quite healed even today” (note 9).

Helene Dueck’s memories are most direct: “Honesty, diligence, brotherly love and willingness to help disappeared more and more. Everyone tried to get by in a selfish way, especially in the famine years when everything edible was scarce and thousands died of hunger. Many collaborated with the godless regime. They even betrayed their friends and relatives to save their lives. ... no one could be trusted. A wife often did not know what her husband was thinking, and the husband did not trust his own wife. Children would inform on their parents, and were praised for it at school. One did not know what was right and what was wrong, what was legal and what was illegal.” (Note 10)

I think of my grandmother's church women's group in the 1970s--all individuals who had endured this era. However I cannot imagine them in this context. In my children memory they were generally happy, sociable, somewhat stoic, and in hindsight clearly resilient.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp.” Prepared for the German Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1942. In Bundesarchiv Koblenz, BArch, Special Unit Stumpp, R6 GSK, files 620 to 633; 702 to 709. From State Electronic Archive of Ukraine, https://tsdea.aewrchives.gov.ua/deutsch/. NB: better copies with no watermarks, https://invenio.bundesarchiv.de  (search e.g., by file: “R 6/620”).

Note 2: For a fuller treatment see my essay: “A new Examination of the ‘Great Terror’ in Molotschna, 1937–38,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (October 2021), 415–458, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/handle/20.500.12730/1031.

Note 3: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-day-in-her-shoes-women-on-collective.html.

Note 4: Vanya Kuznetsova and Anya Kuznetsova, “Stranger with a Bundle” (Незнакомец со свертком), Pinerskaya Pravda (December 20, 1937), https://www.oldgazette.ru/pionerka/20121937/text3.html; V. Varmuzh, “Young helpers of glorious NKVD officers” (Юные помощники славных чекистов), Pionerskaya Pravda (Dec. 20,  1937), https://www.oldgazette.ru/pionerka/20121937/index1.html; Lev Zilver, Be on alert! (Быть на-чеку!) (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1938), https://libking.ru/books/det-/det-espionage/445434-lev-zilver-byt-na-cheku.html.

Note 5: Cf. Andrej Kotljarchuk, “Propaganda of Hatred and the Great Terror: A Nordic Approach,” in Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research, edited by Andrej Kotljarchuk and Olle Sundström (Huddinge: Södertörns, 2017), 95, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1166306/FULLTEXT01.pdf.

Note 6: Anonymous, “Zwischen Odessa and Perekop in den ersten Monaten des deutsch-russischen Krieges,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch 1949, cited in Anne Konrad, Red Quarter Moon: A Search for Family in the Shadow of Stalin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 151.

Note 7: Eduard (Abram) Reimer, “Memoir.” Unpublished (n.d.), 22, 17, 26. From Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB., Gerhard Lohrenz Fonds, 60, no. 63, vol. 3333. See partial English translation under pseudonym Eduard Allert (Lost Generation, edited by Gerhard Lohrenz [Steinbach, MB, 1982]).

Note 8: Katie Friesen, Into the Unknown (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1986), 29.

Note 9: Victor Janzen, From the Dniepr to the Paraguay River (Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1995), 27.

Note 10: Helene Dueck, Durch Trübsal und Not (Winnipeg, MB: Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 1995), 16f., https://archive.org/details/durch-truebsal-und-not/mode/2up.

Print Friendly and PDF

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1923 Mennonite immigrants "kept behind": Lechfeld (Bavaria) transit camp

An important part of the larger 1923 immigration story includes the chapter of the hundreds who were held back at Riga and Southampton and taken to the Lechfeld (Bavaria) transit camp for medical care. “Germany generously and magnanimously helped our organizations, on my intercession, to overcome the manifold difficulties connected with such a ( Volksbewegung ) movement of people in such critical times,” Benjamin H. Unruh wrote some years later ( note 1 ). Just as the first group of Russländer Mennonites set foot in Canada 100 years ago this month, the North American relief effort in the USSR was also winding down (August 1923). The famine relief work in 1921 and 1922 had found broad support in the North American Mennonite community. However excitement about a larger immigration of Russian Mennonites to North America was muted, and a new call to action could not forge the same level of cooperation across Mennonite groups. The plan required huge money guarantees. In USSR B.B. Janz h...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws.  It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1920s: Those who left and those who stayed behind

The picture below is my grandmother's family in 1928. Some could leave but most stayed behind. In 1928 a small group of some 511 Soviet Mennonites were unexpectedly approved for emigration ( note 1 ). None of the circa 21,000 Mennonites who emigrated from Russia in the 1920s “simply” left. And for everyone who left, at least three more hoped to leave but couldn’t. It is a complex story. Canada only wanted a certain type—young healthy farmers—and not all were transparent about their skills and intentions The Soviet Union wanted to rid itself of a specifically-defined “excess,” and Mennonite leadership knew how to leverage that Estate owners, and Selbstschutz /White Army militia were the first to be helped to leave, because they were deemed as most threatened community members; What role did money play? Thousands paid cash for their tickets; Who made the final decision on group lists, and for which regions? This was not transparent. Exit visa applications were also regularly reje...
Post a Comment
Read more

School Reports, 1890s

Mennonite memoirs typically paint a golden picture of schools in the so-called “golden era” of Mennonite life in Russia. The official “Reports on Molotschna Schools: 1895/96 and 1897/98,” however, give us a more lackluster and realistic picture ( note 1 ). What do we learn from these reports? Many schools had minor infractions—the furniture did not correspond to requirements, there were insufficient book cabinets, or the desks and benches were too old and in need of repair. The Mennonite schoolhouses in Halbstadt and Rudnerweide—once recognized as leading and exceptional—together with schools in Friedensruh, Fürstenwerder, Franzthal, and Blumstein were deemed to be “in an unsatisfactory state.” In other cases a new roof and new steps were needed, or the rooms too were too small, too dark, too cramped, or with moist walls. More seriously in some villages—Waldheim, Schönsee, Fabrikerwiese, and even Gnadenfeld, well-known for its educational past—inspectors recorded that pupils “do not ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Queen Elizabeth II and Aunt Adina Neufeld Bräul

This month (April 2023) we celebrated my aunt’s 97th birthday—Adina Neufeld Bräul. Queen Elizabeth II and Aunt Adina were born within hours of each other, April 20-21, 1926. She once told me—in somewhat different words—that this makes her wonder about God’s providence … In 1944 in German-annexed Poland, my 16-year-old uncle Walter Bräul was required to report for military service. His first thought: no good soldier should be without a girlfriend! Before leaving for training, he asked one of the girls from "the trek" on a date to see a movie in Exin. Seven years later they would marry in Paraguay. Adina and her mother and sister were on the same trek or group (Gnadenfeld/ Molotschna) out of Ukraine as Walter and my mother (in the 2023 photo). Adina’s most terrible memory of the trek was when their wagon almost tipped over into a deep ravine. She was 17—a year older than Walter—and it was Walter’s 17-year-old brother Peter who literally jumped from his wagon to physically stop ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Traveler's Impressions of the Molotschna, 1927

In November 1927, Susanna Toews of Ohrloff, Molotschna wrote to her brother Gerhard in Canada, "Father is sleeping and the sisters are reading, even though they have read the stuff ten times. . .. Twice a week we get Das Neue Dorf . We read the most important material the first evening and then father reads the rest of it the next day" ( note 1 ). A youth in Friedensruh, Molotschna reported to the communist youth paper Die Saat in 1928, that their village receives 13 copies of Das Neue Dorf , 6 copies of Die Saat , one of the Moscow-based Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung , 16 copies of Die Trompete, 2 copies of Neuland , and some Russian papers as well. On average, 2 papers per household--all communist papers. A Mennonite-based monthly agricultural journal, “The Practical Agriculturalist” ( Der praktische Landwirt ) had been approved for publication in Ukraine in 1924 but was shut down in December 1926. Government authorities in Ukraine were exasperated to see a “significant a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Warthegau, Nazism and two 15-year-old Mennonites, 1944

Katharina Esau offered me a home away from home when I was a student in Germany in the 1980s. The Soviet Union released her and her family in 1972. Käthe Heinrichs—her maiden name (b. Aug. 18, 1928)—and my Uncle Walter Bräul were classmates in Gnadenfeld during Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and experienced the Gnadenfeld group “trek” as 15-year-olds together. Before she passed, she wrote her story ( note 1 )—and I had opportunity to interview my uncle. Käthe and Walter both arrived in Warthegau—German annexed Poland—in March 1944 ( note 2 ), and the Reich had a plan for their lives. In February 1944, the Governor of Warthegau ordered the Hitler Youth (HJ) organization to “care for Black Sea German youth” ( note 3 ). Youth were examined for the Hitler Youth, but also for suitability for elite tracks like the one-year Landjahr (farm year and service) program. The highly politicized training of the Landjahr was available for young people in Hitler Youth and its counterpart the League of G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flemish Anabaptists and Witch Hunts

Political leaders have long used the term "witch hunt"--and there is an historical connection to Mennonites. Anabaptists and so-called “witches” were arrested and tried for related reasons in the Low Countries in the 1500s: namely, as a means to divert God’s wrath. The late-Medievals feared that heresy—in this case ana-baptism and the challenge to other sacraments—invited the wrath of God, and was an instrument for the devil’s own hellish apocalyptic assault. The assumption: the devil's tactics to destroy Christendom included the use of both heretics and sorcerers. Gary Waite writes convincingly that both were seen as “polluting” the community and thus both had to be "excised." "This fear of pollution, or scandalizing God or the saints, also explains why small numbers of peaceable Mennonites were so harshly treated during the second half of the sixteenth century. Plagues, fires, and economic and social crises were often blamed on the presence of even a smal...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mennonites and the Crimean War (1853-56)

Martin Klaassen was traveling through the Molotschna Mennonite Colony when the Crimean War broke out in 1853 ( note 1 ). His diary notes that the following hymn was sung before the sermon: December 1853 . With regards to the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey, the song, No: 723 “O Lord, the clouds of war are threatening now, above our heads we see them roll” was sung before the sermon” ( note 2 ). As the war effort grew, thousands of troops came through Molotschna: January 14, 1854 . Today our colony has received billets: in Halbstadt about 1,000 soldiers. It is said that Joh. Neufelds have offered liquor ( Branntwein ), naturally without charge. The soldiers are supposed to have marched in with jubilant singing and much hilarity. They had been very happy for the wonderful reception they got, and promised to accomplish great things. In March, England and France also declared war on Russia. March 26, 1854 . At noon today there was suddenly a military transport at ...
Post a Comment
Read more