Vaccinations in Chortitza and Molotschna, beginning in 1804

Vaccination lists for Chortitza Mennonite children in 1809 and 1814 were published prior to the COVID-19 pandemic with little curiosity (note 1). However during the 2020-22 pandemic and in a context in which some refused to vaccinate for religious belief, the historic data took on new significance. Ancestors of some of the more conservative Russian Mennonite groups—like the Reinländer or the Bergthalers or the adult children of land delegate Jacob Höppner—were in fact vaccinating their infants and toddlers against small pox over two hundred years ago (note 2).

Also before the current pandemic Ukrainian historian Dmytro Myeshkov brought to light other archival materials on Mennonites and vaccination. The material below is my summary and translation of the relevant pages of Myeshkov’s massive 2008 volume on Black Sea German and their Worlds, 1781 to 1871 (German only; note 3).

Myeshkov confirms that Chortitza was already immunizing its children in 1804 when their District Office “reported an epidemic rampant among its children.” A nearby non-Mennonite German settlement (Joseftal) had 20 children die of smallpox that year. The newly arrived settlers in Molotschna in 1804 were also plagued by the same children’s disease, Myeshkov notes. Chortitza Mennonites in fact “begged” their government liaison, State Counsellor Contenius, for the cowpox vaccines. Smallpox is an acute, highly infectious often fatal disease; those exposed to cowpox are immune from smallpox.

Chortitza not only requested the vaccine, “but also instructions on how to vaccinate their children independently.” Both Chortitza and Molotschna settlers may have received information about the vaccines from officials at the Ekaterinoslav Medical Office, “who in 1804 often visited the resettlers housed in the town, and at the same time began to carry out vaccinations in the settlements of the governorate [e.g., Chortitza], beginning spring 1805. In March 1805, an official of the Medical Office named Becker was sent to Chortitza to carry out vaccinations and teach them how to administer the vaccinations.”

A few years later in 1808—on Contenius’ instructions—cowpox vaccines were administered in the German and Mennonite settlements along the Molotschna River. Some of it “had been obtained locally and some had been sent from Moscow.” An official by the name of Wannovius administered the vaccines. Soon thereafter a committee “for the dissemination of cowpox vaccination” was established in Ekaterinoslav, and the vaccination work among the colonists was done more systematically.

“Lists of children who had not yet received vaccinations had to be compiled in advance. Great importance was attached to education among the colonists, which was to highlight the benefits of the planned campaign.” Myeshkov cites one official who was convinced that "this saving remedy ... may be suitable not only to protect susceptible persons for all time from the mischief and cruelty of natural smallpox, but in time may also put a stop to its ravages altogether and to its most fatal traces among the people." The committee, Myeshkov shows, then thought it necessary and expedient to train colonists locally how to inoculate their own people with their own “inoculators".

Most interesting is a chart that Myeshkov inserts showing the progress of inoculation in the Molotschna Mennonite Colony in 1817. At the start of April 1817, 211 Molotschna Mennonite children were unvaccinated. Another 100 children were born between April 1 and December 31. Of these 311 children, 197 were vaccinated during this time. Twelve unvaccinated children died, and 102 children still remained unvaccinated.

This indicates some vaccine hesitancy in the colony though—as Myeshkov notes—“the available data indicate that the vaccination situation in the other [German, Swedish and Bulgarian] colonies was even worse than in the Molotschna.” If vaccinations were undertaken in an unsystematic way, it was “probably related to the availability of vaccine” he suggests, which had to be produced first.

“The hopes of the committee in Ekaterinoslav that the vaccine could be obtained locally from already vaccinated children were not fulfilled, because in the Molotschna colony, as in other colonies, the parents did not allow it.” That said, Colonial Physician Schulze “succeeded in keeping the number of unvaccinated children under control, partly because the vaccinations he administered were very rarely unsuccessful.”

Myeshkov’s footnotes direct the reader to the relevant primary documents that can help to reconstruct the life and times of Mennonites in a pandemic.

A Molotschna vaccination list from 1831 was also found in the twentieth century, recorded and subsequently lost (note 4). In the context of that 1831 cholera epidemic, Mennonite leader Johann Cornies wrote to his friend in Prussia, Johann Wiebe, on health measures and Mennonite attitudes towards fighting the epidemic: “We must … plead with [God] to turn this scourge away from our empire and our villages. With complete faith in the wisdom of our government, we await the Almighty’s ordinances without fear … whatever comes from God will serve our well-being.” (Note 5)

Myeshkov also has one reference to Jacob D. Epp’s diary, A Mennonite in Russia (note 6) which also has a number of personal references to vaccinations in Epp’s family in the 1850s.

In short, Russian Mennonites were gratefully vaccinating their children 217 years ago and most continued to ask the state for vaccines in the decades that followed.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: See 1809 immunization list for the Chortitza Settlement, https://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/1809.htm, as well as the 1814 list: https://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/1814c.htm.

Note 2: For example, Reinländer Elder Johann J. Friesen (b.1869, #134092)--who took his people from Canada to Mexico in 1923, and his wife--both had ancestors who vaccinated their children in Chortitza in 1809 and 1814. See Friesen’s ancestors--Abraham Friesen (#158055) and Peter Dyck as well as his wife’s ancestors--Peter Martens (GRanDMA #486885) and Johann Harms (#107755). The same for Bergthal Elder Johann Funk’s mother—vaccinated by her parents (#196100), or landscout Jacob Höppner’s granddaughter, Maria Hildebrandt (#197316). On Johann Friesen, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Friesen%2C_Johann_J._(1869-1935).

Note 3: Dmytro Myeshkov, Die Schawarzmeerdeutschen und ihre Welten: 1781–1871 (Essen: Klartext, 2008). This is the source of the translated material above (pp. 168-171).

Note 4: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/a-mennonite-pandemic-spirituality-1830.html.

Note 5: No. 202, “Johann Cornies to Johann Wiebe, Tiege, West Prussia, December 30, 1830,” in Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies, vol. 1: 1812–1835, translated by Ingrid I. Epp; edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 205.

Note 6: A Mennonite in Russia: The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp, 1851–1880, translated and edited by Harvey L. Dyck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Vaccinations in Chortitza and Molotschna, beginning 1804," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 29, 2023,

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