Mennonites and Ukrainians: The Healing of Memories

I am at a loss of what to say in the face of such terrifying video coming from Ukraine (March 4, 2022).

The Ukrainian people are the historic friends, hosts and neighbours of the Mennonites since our arrival in 1789.

It is a rich, unique relationship. For the first eight decades, relationships between Mennonites and their neighbours in Ukraine (or earlier South or New Russia) were largely prescribed by the colonial policies of Greater Russia. Each “foreign” people group was regulated by their unique privileges negotiated with the crown, each with mandated expectations and responsibilities (e.g., model farming), and required to live in closed, culturally specific colonies in order to “keep the peace.” It was a larger police state in which movement outside the colony was strictly regulated.

That was the historic context of our neighbourliness, our mutual learnings, respect, love, but also inequalities, suspicions, prejudices, negotiations, barriers to language learning or intermarriage, and at times anger and acts of reprisals too. Being neighbours was complicated for our ancestors. Our inherited memories too are complicated three or more generations later.

Our desire to love the neighbour however is real; the desire to rebuild past, broken cultural bridges strong. Many Canadian Mennonites have travelled to Ukraine. All who have done so have rekindled a deep love and connection to that land and to the Ukrainian people.

For those of us whose parents or grandparents left Ukraine, our families shared in the famine of the 1920s with Ukrainians. For those families who stayed longer like my own, “we” shared in the injustices of collectivization, we shared the man-made famine (Holodomor) of the early 1930s. Ukrainians and Mennonites together suffered horrific repression under Stalin. Our grandfathers’ arrest and execution files sit together in vast archival collections in Zaporizhzhya and Dnipro. After 1938, Mennonites still in school learnt Ukrainian.

What clouded and hurt our relationship most was German occupation. At this point all our people and communities had been severely broken by Stalin—though that is no excuse. Mennonites were ethnic German, of course, a favourite target of Stalin and now one of favour and privilege and designated for new responsibilities under Nazi Germany. To escape their hardships, almost all Mennonites sided with the German occupiers, whose plans for oppression of Slavic peoples to a slave existence--and extermination of Jews in Ukraine was shocking for Mennonites as well. But we were complicit. And in retreat behind German lines we feared and then also protected ourselves with arms against "Ukrainian partisans”.

We are working through that complicated history in discussion groups, for example, with a strong commitment to rebuild friendship. In war now, the desire to help and love this “historic neighbour” is authentic.

We are all saddened by current events; MCC is the historic Mennonite relief agency that was in Ukraine in 1921-2 and is ramping up to help today. For most Mennonites in Canada, that will be our trusted partner to get the aid out, and our way to walk with this "old friend" in their time of need.

I want to point in closing to Germany. Their border is open to Ukrainians today. Train travel is free. Doors in homes are open to refugees. This makes me proud too (many of us have a complicated connection to Germany as well).

This blog represents in part the desire of many to piece together our Mennonite stories, but more: we have the opportunity to re-narrate events in such a way as to "heal memories.” History can be leveraged to help us walk better, and more authentically with our old friends and neighbours of Ukraine. And to this end, it can help us to be/ become a better people of peace –which of course was our original rationale for arriving in Ukraine en masse so many years ago.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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