"Russian Empire Building" and the Mennonite Experience in Russia/Ukraine

Recently a friend asked: “Based on their long historical sojourn in Russia / Ukraine, what light can Mennonites shed on Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine today?” (February 2022).

The story of so-called Russian Mennonites began in the 1780s, was defined by Greater Russia’s imperial expansion, and was almost extinguished under Stalin and his fear of rising Ukraine nationalism and minority ethnic resistance in the 1930s.

Below are a few historical learnings based on that lived experience in Ukraine, formerly known as “New Russia” or “South Russia.” A short history of Russian “empire building” from the Mennonite experience might best begin with a brief reference to German Prussia in the 18th century, where Mennonites were at home. By the 1780s, further land acquisitions or economic expansion in West Prussia (today northern Poland) and Gdansk (Danzig) had become increasingly impossible for Mennonites—largely because they refused military service for religious reasons.

Prussia was a largely tolerant state, but Jews and Mennonites were problems—for different reasons. Prussian historians Reiswitz and Wadzek wrote: “Though the doctrine [of non-resistance] of the Mennonites is not exactly anti-biblical, it is most certainly anti-Prussian. We Prussians, because we are born soldiers, must rule these teachings to be incompatible with our state system; … we are not intolerant, but just” (note 1).

In contrast to the German nationalism of Prussia and other western European states like France, Russia’s Empress Catherine the Great was pursuing a different vision of empire. Her policy of expansion included the vast open short-grass steppes of present-day Ukraine, and stretched southwards towards the Black Sea and the Crimean Peninsula. Before the Russian defeat of the Ottoman Turks in 1774, this large, rich, and sparsely populated territory was home to mixed groups of fiercely independent Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, Turkic Tatar tribes (Muslim), a variety of Orthodox agrarian peasants with differing Eastern Slav dialects, Doukhobors and Molokans (“milk-drinkers”). Catherine and her predecessor had had many of these peoples removed and sought to settle these newly depopulated and under-governed frontier lands with a permanent population.

Again, in contrast to western nationalism, Catherine’s modernizing vision made no national claims on behalf of Russians; rather the Romanov Dynasty ruled with imperial, “millenarian” claims of Greater Russia as the bearer of a higher, universal law—a type of redeemer nation to benefit the empire’s smaller nationalities. This is important to understand for today’s events.

Obviously the Russian Empire of the Tsars was not a democracy in which all were citizens with identical rights and responsibilities. German-speaking, non-resistant Mennonites were welcomed into this bigger vision to live in “colonies” (as did other smaller ethnic groups) with their own specific language, church, schools--all governed by their specific charter (Privilegium). On-going Mennonite presence in Russia as “foreign colonists” was wholly contingent on fulfilling their charter-defined role as “model farmers”.

In a period of western European national awakening, Russia’s expansions were defined—in contrast to neighbours—by the logic of empire: not the self-interest of one national group (e.g., “Russians”) and its founding myths, culture, and laws, but self-sacrifice of the leading national group on behalf of smaller nationalities (note 2). The Tsarist family—the Romanov Dynasty—justified expansion, e.g., of “New Russia,” now Ukraine, not with national claims. Rather “they ruled on behalf of God—or their own dynasty—but never on behalf of the Russian people,” as David Rowley has argued. It is an imperial Christendom tradition, with a notion of a special people called to serve a historical destiny that has universal significance (note 3).

The generous Mennonite Privilegium and its terms are best understood under Greater Russia’s sense of imperial, messianic mission to serve and rule nobly over many peoples. Like other ethnic groups within Greater Russia in this era, Mennonites also began to confess Russia and its emperor as the great protector of Christendom Europe from anti-Christian forces—later typically identified with France and its democratic revolutions. This was consistent with Alexander I’s self-understanding as well (he reigned from 1801 to 1826), for example.

German-speaking “Russian” Mennonites developed their own sense of call as one smaller, patriotic, contributing nation (Völklein) within that vision of the larger Russian Empire. And they flourished. The most influential and thoughtful Mennonite leader, Johann Cornies (d. 1848), articulated this best in a letter to a Swiss missionary Daniel Schlatter about “New Russia” (today Ukraine) peopled with Molokans, Cossacks, Nogais, Doukhobors, Zaporozhians, Germans, Jews and many more:

“It is very interesting to find so many peoples living closely together. They associate calmly and quietly with one another. As they go about their business, we observe varied customs, languages, costumes, and ways of life. I do not believe that this sort of thing can be found anywhere else in the world. Our wise Imperial government has managed to bring all of us together and provide leadership that makes all of us happy. For this we give God the glory.” (Note 4)

The strong patriotic Mennonite support for the Tsar in the Crimean War in the 1850s—which appears confusing or counter-intuitive 150 years later—gives evidence for how fully they had accepted the larger framework of Russia’s sense of empire and role as divinely chosen nation, i.e., as “a special people called to serve a historical destiny of universal significance” (note 5).

If Mennonites thrived as one ethnic group among many in Russia’s greater empire, in the last decades of the nineteenth century the monarchy began to identify more explicitly with the Russian people, i.e., more with Moscow than Europe-leaning St. Petersburg. National belonging was gradually perceived as part of one’s essence, and increasingly being e.g., German-Lutheran or German-Mennonite in Russia was seen to be “invested with political significance” and “abiding political loyalties and … allegiances” (note 6). The place for Mennonites within this new national construct, including their Privilegium—so central to Mennonite identity and sense of call—would be sorely tested.

There are some similarities between the earlier imperial Christendom vision of the Tsars and the later “secular millennialism” of the communism of the Soviet Union.

The hammer and sickle symbolism adopted by the Soviet Union in 1922 represented the smashing of previous foundations, and the glorious future harvest of a better world to be gathered in, cleansed of all gods and made wholly human. With the Communist Revolution Ukraine was granted its own cultural and political identity and quasi-independence as a Soviet Republic and under the Moscow-centred leadership of the USSR. By the 1930s, however, what Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin feared most was “losing Ukraine” (note 7).

In response to the threat of Ukrainian nationalism and resistance, Stalin specifically targeted Ukraine with a “lengthy schooling" designed to ruthlessly break that movement. Southern Ukraine—where most Mennonites lived—was arguably the worst affected region of the Holodomor, i.e., the man-made famine of 1932–33 which killed millions of Ukrainians (note 8). This too is important for understanding events of today.

Moreover, in the 1930s, Moscow was increasingly convinced of the “existence of an organized counter-revolutionary insurgent underground in Ukraine associated with foreign powers and foreign intelligence services,” specifically the “imperialist” interventionism of Poles and Germans in support of Ukrainian national independence (note 9).

As Rowley has argued, both “millennial” Russian empires—Tsarist and Soviet—were “destroyed by the same forces that have brought all modern empires to an end—the desire of their component peoples for national self-determination (note 10). Ukrainian sovereignty is that example, and German-speaking Mennonites in Russia/Ukraine were part of that story together with Ukrainians.

Is Russia’s old imperialism rising again? I think so, and it is pushing against strong Ukrainian nationalism. Rowley argued in the late 1990s that Russian imperialism and tradition of empire building “still provides an important element in Russian identity” (note 11). But not as a Russian nation. Nations look back to some mythic beginnings; nations preach self-interest. Empires, so it goes, look forward and preach self-sacrifice. Empires “posit a special people whose mission is to sacrifice itself to hasten the day when all humanity will be blessed by the benefits of its law and civilization” (note 12). That may be background to Putin's actions.

I think it is too simple to say Putin is irrational. His rationalism is just very different than the rationality of western nationalism. Ironically there is a parallel to the American “manifest destiny” articulated in the US Senate in 1900 by Albert Beveridge: a “divine sense of mission,” to ensure that the world does not “relapse into barbarism,” and thus understanding the USA as divinely predestined as God’s “chosen nation.”

Again I lean on Rowley here: “The legitimizing appeal of Russia’s ruling ideology arose from its association with Christianity without explicitly appealing to any particular denomination or national form, and its intent was to justify the expansive policies of an imperial state. Russia, like the United States, has, since the seventeenth century, conquered and absorbed territories for which it had no historic, nationalist claim” (note 13). Rightfully that appears strange and unacceptable today.

The long sojourn of German-speaking Mennonites in Ukraine—earlier called New Russia or South Russia—has given this group of Mennonites, for better or for worse, a little insight into about the logic of Russian empire building, of imperialism vs. nationalism, including the former’s selective benefits. All of this was learnt at a terrifying human cost, for Mennonites in Ukraine in the 1930s as well.

In my estimation—which is obviously limited but rooted in this set of experiences—events of today are at least in some ways a continuation of that story.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Georg von Reiswitz and Friedrich Wadzeck, Beiträge zur Kenntniß der Mennoniten-Gemeinden in Europa und Amerika, Part I (Berlin, 1821), 159, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009717700.

Note 2: David G. Rowley, “‘Redeemer Empire’: Russian Millenarianism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999), 1582–1602; 1591.

Note 3: Rowley, “Redeemer Empire,” 1598; 1599.

Note 4: No. 350, Johann Cornies to Daniel Schlatter, 11 March 1833,” Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies, vol. 1: 1812–1835, edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 318.

Note 5: Rowley, “Redeemer Empire,” 1599.

Note 6: Paul Werth, The Tsar’s foreign faiths. Toleration and the fate of religious freedom in imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 151.

Note 7: Josef Stalin, “Telegram of 28 December 1932,” in Bohdan Klid and Alexander J. Motyl, eds., The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2012), 5:27, https://holodomor.ca/the-holodomor-reader-a-sourcebook-on-the-famine-of-1932-1933-in-ukraine/.

Note 8: Cf. Stalin, “Resolution on Grain Procurement in Ukraine, 19 December 1932;” “Memorandum on Progress in preparing Spring Sowing,” in Klid and Motyl, eds., Holodomor Reader, 5:25, 37.

Note 9: “On the Need to Liquidate the Insurgent Underground, February 13, 1932,” in Klid and Motyl, eds., Holodomor Reader, 5:32f.

Note 10: Rowley, “Redeemer Empire,” 1600.

Note 11: Rowley, “Redeemer Empire,” 1600.

Note 12: Rowley, “Redeemer Empire,” 1591.

Note 13: Rowley, “Redeemer Empire,” 1597.