Mennonite Labour Protests, 1905

It is rare that Mennonites make the news for their protests to pressure government or industry. Here is one example.

The agricultural machinery factories in in the Greater Zaporozhzhia-Alexandrovsk economic zone—including the villages of Chortitza, Einlage, Osterwick, and Schönwiese—were places of significant labour unrest in the early 1900s (note 1).

In February and March 1905 factory workers mobilized at the Mennonite factories of Schulz, and of Lepp and Wallmann in Alexandrovsk, where the following demands were made:

an 8-hour workday
a weekly or bi-weekly pay schedule
courteous treatment of employees
immunity from punishment for elected labour representatives
minimum wages
no child labour
appropriate equipment for moving heavy weights
free family medical care
free schooling for children
workmen’s compensation
regulation of overtime
factory hygiene including showers and proper air ventilation
lunch room facilities
conflict resolution mechanisms
the abolition of fines
accidental death benefits. (Note 2)

Most of the demands were not accepted by the industrial owners.

Elected labour representatives and negotiators at the Schulz plant in 1905 included Mennonites Peter B. Neufeld, Eduard Sawatzky, Heinrich Neufeld and Jacob A. Dick (note 3).

A small number of the Mennonite intelligentsia were sympathetic to these types of liberal reforms, and some were active in early revolutionary Bolshevik cells, including Cornelius Thiessen of Neuendorf, Johann Hildebrand of Neuendorf, and Peter Rempel of Nieder-Chortitza, the son of a prosperous farmer (note 4).

Mennonite factory owners initiated lockouts to break the labour uprisings and strikes of 1905 (note 5), while agitators organized at great personal risk. Cornelius Thiessen, for example, was exiled from Russia and moved with his Jewish wife to Buenos Aires, where he became a leader in the Socialist Party of Argentina. Some years later at their 1912 party congress, he reported that the party had formulated a “resolute protest against Tsarism, against Russian political [interference] in Finland and Persia, and also sent a brotherly greeting to the imprisoned Social Democratic faction of the second Duma, etc.” (note 6)—reflecting perhaps the reasons for his own activism in Russia a decade earlier. Thiessen’s published reports in the German socialist journal Die Neue Zeit reflect a nuanced understanding of Marxist theory, with significant historical knowledge and understanding of the roots of socialism—reaching back to the peasant uprisings of sixteenth-century Europe in which South German Anabaptists had their origins.

Similar labour strikes and bloody clashes were reported in Waldheim, Molotschna where Mennonite mill owners (J. J. Neufeld) suppressed strikers with the assistance of police. The workers were barred from returning to their employment and many resettled in large numbers in the Siberian village of Miloradovka in the Pavlograd District.

The ministerial had not yet grasped the gravity of the social issues of their time; few were alarmed by the resentment simmering in the country as a whole with respect to land ownership, industry, and labour-relations.

As late as 1903, the older and still influential Molotschna elder and former missionary Heinrich Dirks regarded the landless poor who complained as either impatient, lazy, or negligent. He expressed complete satisfaction with the wise Mennonite land acquisition and distribution policies, and considered loud disputes at the regional or village levels as an “evil” and a sign that some Mennonites are “not yet the quiet in the land … which does not correspond to their calling to be non-resistant” (note 7). Contemporary historian-minister P. M. Friesen noted that the Mennonite ...

“… social and economic condition was so good (if not excellent), that they could not expect anything positive for themselves from a possible, more or less radical, governmental change. To the contrary, as a genuine Christian-conservative and generally bourgeois group, ninety-nine out of one hundred Mennonites considered such words as ‘democrat,’ ‘democratic’ with suspicion, foreboding ill, and from a democracy only evil was expected.” (Note 8)

But there were clearly some Mennonite labourers in 1905 whose economic condition was not "so good," and who protested and pushed for labour rights and work-place health and safety regulations.

During this time, the soon-to-become de facto leader of Russian Mennonites for the next decades, Benjamin H. Unruh, was studying in Basel, Switzerland (1900-07). Here the “Religious Socialists” (esp. Leonhard Ragaz) were making a huge impact on “every thinking Swiss pastor”—even pointing to early Anabaptists for inspiration—but not on Unruh.

Unruh liked to tell of a meeting in those years in Basel with Lenin, who met with Russian German students. Lenin responded “warmly” to Benjamin Unruh’s speech—according to Unruh, at least!—on the economic contributions of the German colonists to Russian life but also their loyalty to the Russian people (note 9)!

Yet the visions for their respective new world foundations, and the means to achieve it, were diametrically opposed. Notably Unruh had received a large bursary for his studies from three wealthy Molotschna families.

Unruh missed the labour unrest in Russia, and the Christian socialism of Basel never shaped his account of Mennonite faith and life. For Unruh the large gap between rich and poor was not an urgent concern for Mennonite theological debate or activism—despite all the warning signs (note 10).

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Nataliya Ostasheva Venger, “The Mennonite Industrial Dynasties in Alexandrovsk,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 21 (2003), 89–108; 107, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/887/886.

Note 2: M. Lvovsky, ed., Na barrikadah, 1905 god v Aleksandrovske (On the barricades: 1905 in Alexandrovsk) (Zaporozhzhia, 1925),120-122, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/vpetk400.pdf.

Note 3: Lvovsky, Na barrikadah, 1905 god v Aleksandrovske, 124.

Note 4: David G. Rempel, “Mennonite Revolutionaries in the Khortitza Settlement under the Tsarist Regime as recollected by Johann G. Rempel,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 10 (1992), 70–86; 73-74. https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/589/589.

Note 5: Cf. D. Rempel, “Mennonite Revolutionaries in the Khortitza Settlement.”

Note 6: Cornelio Thiessen, “Der Sozialismus in Argentinien. Anläßlich des elften Kongresses der P.S.A. am 10., 11. und 12. November 1912,” Die Neue Zeit. Wochenschrift der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie 30, vol. 1, no. 24 (March 15, 1912), 688–693, http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/populo/nz.pl; also idem, “Der zehnte Kongreß der sozialistischen Partei Argentiniens,” Die Neue Zeit. Wochenschrift der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie 31, vol. 1, no. 19 (February 7, 1913), 856–860, http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/populo/nz.pl.

Note 7: Heinrich Dirks, “Die Mennoniten in Rußland,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch 1903 1 (1904) 5–18; 6f., https://chortitza.org/Buch/MJ/MJ03-18.htm.

Note 8: Peter M. Friesen, The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia 1789–1910 (Winnipeg, MB: Christian, 1978), 627, https://archive.org/details/TheMennoniteBrotherhoodInRussia17891910/.

Note 9: Benjamin H. Unruh, “Einige wichtige Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben und ein Vorschlag,” 2. From Mennonite Library and Archives-Bethel College, MS. 295, folder 13, https://mla.bethelks.edu/archives/ms_295/folder_13/.

Note 10: There has been some work on the Kansas Mennonite socialist J. G. Ewert who argued in 1909 that socialism is in harmony with the teachings of Jesus. Cf. James C. Juhnke, “J. G. Ewert: A Mennonite Socialist,” Mennonite Life 23, no. 1 (1968), 12–15, https://mla.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/pre2000/1968jan.pdf. A few decades earlier, a Kleine Gemeinde radical and son of a preacher, Abraham Thiessen (1838-'89) advocated insistently on behalf of the landless in Russia, and later found his way to Nebraska where he was excommunicated. Cf. Cornelius Krahn, “Abraham Thiessen: A Mennonite Revolutionary?,” Mennonite Life 24, no. 2 (April 1969) 73–77, https://ml.bethelks.edu/store/ml/files/1969apr.pdf; and GAMEO: https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Thiessen,_Abraham_(1838-1889). In 1909, the transatlantic Mennonite-based paper Mennonitische Rundschau republished, for example, an economic prognoses of capitalist, industrial farming from the Odessa Zeitung that signaled great changes ahead: Karl Hoffman, “Ein kleiner Beitrag zur Bauernfrage,” Mennonitische Rundschau 32, no. 32 (August 11, 1909), 15, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1909-08-11_32_32/page/14/mode/2up, based on an article by Jaroschewitsch in the Odessa Zeitung, no. 128 (1909), https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/lfrs143.pdf.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Mennonite Labour Protests, 1905," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 9, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/mennonite-labour-protests-1905.html.

Comments

Invitation to the Russian Consulate, Danzig, January 19, 1788

B elow is one of the most important original Mennonite artifacts I have seen. It concerns January 19. The two land scouts Jacob Höppner and Johann Bartsch had returned to Danzig from Russia on November 10, 1787 with the Russian Immigration Agent, Georg von Trappe. Soon thereafter, Trappe had copies of the royal decree and agreement (Gnadenbrief) printed for distribution in the Flemish and Frisian Mennonite congregations in Danzig and other locations, dated December 29, 1787 ( see pic ; note 1 ). After the flyer was handed out to congregants in Danzig after worship on January 13, 1788, city councilors made the most bitter accusations against church elders for allowing Trappe and the Russian Consulate to do this; something similar had happened before ( note 2 ). In the flyer Trappe boasted that land scouts Höppner and Bartsch met not only with Gregory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s vice-regent and administrator of New Russia, but also with “the Most Gracious Russian Monarch” herse...

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...

Why study and write about Russian Mennonite history?

David G. Rempel’s credentials as an historian of the Russian Mennonite story are impeccable—he was a mentor to James Urry in the 1980s, for example, which says it all. In 1974 Rempel wrote an article on Mennonite historical work for an issue of the Mennonite Quarterly Review commemorating the arrival of Russian Mennonites to North America 100 years earlier ( note 1). In one section of the essay Rempel reflected on Mennonites’ general “lack of interest in their history,” and why they were so “exceedingly slow” in reflecting on their historic development in Russia with so little scholarly rigour. Rempel noted that he was not alone in this observation; some prominent Mennonites of his generation who had noted the same pointed an “extreme spirit of individualism” among Mennonites in Russia; the absence of Mennonite “authoritative voices,” both in and outside the church; the “relative indifference” of Mennonites to the past; “intellectual laziness” among many who do not wish to be distu...

The Tinkelstein Family of Chortitza-Rosenthal (Ukraine)

Chortitza was the first Mennonite settlement in "New Russia" (later Ukraine), est. 1789. The last Mennonites left in 1943 ( note 1 ). During the Stalin years in Ukraine (after 1928), marriage with Jewish neighbours—especially among better educated Mennonites in cities—had become somewhat more common. When the Germans arrived mid-August 1941, however, it meant certain death for the Jewish partner and usually for the children of those marriages. A family friend, Peter Harder, died in 2022 at age 96. Peter was born in Osterwick to a teacher and grew up in Chortitza. As a 16-year-old in 1942, Peter was compelled by occupying German forces to participate in the war effort. Ukrainians and Russians (prisoners of war?) were used by the Germans to rebuild the massive dam at Einlage near Zaporizhzhia, and Peter was engaged as a translator. In the next year he changed focus and started teachers college, which included significant Nazi indoctrination. In 2017 I interviewed Peter Ha...

Mennonite Literacy in Polish-Prussia

At a Mennonite wedding in Deutsch Kazun in 1833 (pic), neither groom nor bride nor the witnesses could sign the wedding register. A Görtz, a Janzen, a Schröder—born a Görtzen – illiterate. “This act was read to the married couple and witnesses, but not signed because they were unable to write.” Similarly, with the certification of a Mennonite death in Culm (Chelmo), West Prussia, 1813-14: “This document was read and it was signed by us because the witnesses were illiterate.” Spouse and children were unable to read or write. Names like Gerz, Plenert, Kliewer, Kasper, Buller and others. 14 families of the 25 Mennonite deaths registered --or 56%--could not sign the paperwork ( note 1 ; pic ). This appears to be an anomaly. We know some pioneers to Russia were well educated. The letters of the land-scout to Russia, Johann Bartsch to his wife back home (1786-87) are eloquent, beautifully written and indicate a high level of literacy ( note 2 ). Even Klaas Reimer (b. 1770), the founder t...

1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...

1871: "Mennonite Tough Luck"

In 1868, a delegation of Prussian Mennonite elders met with Prussian Crown Prince Frederick in Berlin. The topic was universal conscription--now also for Mennonites. They were informed that “what has happened here is coming soon to Russia as well” ( note 1 ). In Berlin the secret was already out. Three years later this political cartoon appeared in a satirical Berlin newspaper. It captures the predicament of Russian Mennonites (some enticed in recent decades from Prussia), with the announcement of a new policy of compulsory, universal military service. “‘Out of the frying pan and into the fire—or: Mennonite tough luck.’ The Mennonites, who immigrated to Russia in order to avoid becoming soldiers in Prussia, are now subject to newly introduced compulsory military service.” ( Note 2 ) The man caught in between looks more like a Prussian than Russian Mennonite—but that’s beside the point. With the “Great Reforms” of the 1860s (including emancipation of serfs) the fundamentals were c...

Eduard Wüst: A “Second Menno”?

Arguably the most significant outside religious influence on Mennonite s in the 19th century was the revivalist preaching of Eduard Wüst, a university-trained Württemberg Pietist minister installed by the separatist Evangelical Brethren Church in New Russia in 1843 ( note 1 ). With the end-time prophesies of a previous generation of Pietists (and many Mennonites) coming to naught, Wüst introduced Germans in this area of New Russia to the “New Pietism” and its more individualistic, emotional conversion experience and sermons on the free grace of God centred on the cross of Christ ( note 2 ). Wüst’s 1851 Christmas sermon series give a good picture of what was changing ( note 3 ). His core agenda was to dispel gloom (which maybe could describe more traditional Mennonites) and induce Christian joy. This is the root impulse of the Mennonite Brethren beginnings years later in 1860. “Satan is not entitled to present his own as the most joyful.” His people “sing, jump, leap ( hüpfen ) ...

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 ...

Becoming German: Ludendorff Festivals in Molotschna, 1918

During the friendly German military occupation of Ukraine at the end of WWI, patriotic “Ludendorff Festivals” were encouraged by German forces to raise funds to support injured German soldiers. A first such festival in the Molotschna was held on June 25, 1918 in Ohrloff, and was attended by “a great many German officers, soldiers and colonists with music, [patriotic] speeches and social interaction” From the perspective of the German army press, the event was “extremely enjoyable;” it was accompanied with music by a 30-piece regiment orchestra, and beer, sausage, sandwiches, ice-cream, raspberries and cherries were sold. It closed with a “small dance,” raising 7,387 rubles or 9,850 German marks in donations ( note 1 ). Later that summer, a Ludendorff Festival in Halbstadt began with Sunday worship, followed by an early concert, games and performances by the Selbstschutz , as well as “entertainment and merriment of every kind,” with short plays and dancing into the morning ( note ...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog