Stalin’s Purge (1937-38) and Mennonite Suffering: 8 theses

1. Millions died under Stalin

One of the more recent studies on the Stalin-era estimates that more than 28.7 million people suffered in the northern prisons and slave camps of the Gulag and 2.75 million people died there during Stalin’s reign (note 1). To this number must be added the “close to a million political executions, the millions who died in transit to the Gulag, and some six to seven million who died of starvation during the early 1930s” (note 2). The mass deportation of workers and peasants provided millions of forced labourers in the Arctic and Siberia.

George K. Epp calculated that approximately one-third of Mennonites in the Soviet Union—at least 30,000—died due to exposure, beatings, overwork, disease, starvation or shootings (note 3).

2. Mennonites in Ukraine suffered together with their Ukrainian neighbours

Moscow was fearful of “losing Ukraine” (note 4) and specifically targeted it with a “lengthy schooling” designed to ruthlessly break the threat of Ukrainian nationalism and resistance. Southern Ukraine—where most Mennonites lived—was arguably the worst affected region of the Famine of 1932–33. 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 5).

3. Mennonites were not targeted as Mennonites, but as Germans.

From 1929 (and especially after 1933) until after the conclusion of World War II, Mennonites suffered not because of their class (as in the 1920s), wealth or their faith, but primarily because they were Germans. In the purge years, Lutheran, Catholic and Mennonite villages adjacent to the Molotschna also suffered (note 6) under ethnically-based arrest quotas (note 7).

4. Not all Germans were targeted, but predominantly those in border regions

Few Volga Germans were impacted by the purge 1937-38 (note 8). The Volga Republic had the largest community of Soviet Germans with arguably stronger ties to Berlin, but was located east of Ukraine. Ingeborg Fleischhauer has argued that Germans in the Soviet Union “were not so much the direct victims of the unpredictable nationalities policy of Stalin … as the indirect victims of the Third Reich’s eastern expansionism” (note 9).

5. Germans were one of multiple border-region ethnic groups targeted by Stalin.

Soviet Poles, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Koreans, Chinese and others in border regions were also victims of Stalin’s ethnic-based purges (note 10). Each region was given a quota for the number of men to be arrested or liquidated; the initial goal was to exterminate the “bourgeoisie class” as a whole.

6. Mennonite religiosity made Mennonites a special target.

From the Soviet perspective, Mennonites were amongst the most radical in their attachments to anti-Soviet values, most unresponsive or opposed to the new worldview—despite many exceptions. The Soviets equated the high religiosity of Mennonites and strict adherence to Christian precepts generally with their cultural Teutonic background (note 11). For Russian Mennonites, however, those counter-revolutionary aspects were central to their spirituality—not their “Germanness.” I agree with Harry Loewen that the majority of these individuals and the group as a whole were targeted because they “clung to their religious faith and values in opposition to the atheistic ideology of the state. Soviet attempts to re-educate Mennonites to think and act in line with communistic values met with little success” (note 12).

7. Mennonites suffered with particular severity under the suppression of religion

Men especially—as heads of traditional families, of church and community—were seen to embody the old regime and thus represented the greatest security threat for Stalin (note 13). For the villages in the Chortitza district in 1942, the male “head” was missing in 47% of all family units. The village of Neu-Chortitza was typical: it had only 77 men over eighteen years of age, compared with 143 women (note 14). A similar case might also be made for the German Lutheran and Catholic villages in Ukraine as well, even if they were all singularly targeted as Germans. But at least for Mennonites, who did not understand themselves primarily as a civil community, cultural and physical repression by an explicitly anti-Christian regime which closed its churches and banished its ministers was framed and experienced in large part as religious repression. When compared with Lutheran and Catholic Russian Germans, “the Mennonites suffer with particular severity under the suppression of religion,” in the keen assessment of one German consular official (note 15).

8. “Martyrs” cannot be verified historically or otherwise: it is a legitimate confession of faith

To employ the term “martyr” is to make a religious confession that God does something powerful with the death of believers—he brings life and grows the church from the blood of those who give witness. That is not verifiable in any empirical way but is a confession. Mennonites have used that language for sixteenth-century Anabaptism.

The stubborn insistence on the use of theological categories like “martyr” for meaning-making narratives—which survivors have not done flippantly—testifies not to historical revisionism, selective memory, a celebration of victimhood, hagiography or self-righteousness, but simply to the fact that for this community as a whole the biblical story remains the larger, more ultimate narrative framework for interpreting—not denying—the significance of all factors, including suffering “in Christ.” Of course it is a designation that cannot be verified historically, but perhaps it is acceptable to refer to many of these very normal, broken and less than perfect souls as "martyrs".

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

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For a larger reflection on these theses, see: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "A new examination of the 'Great Terror' in Molotschna, 1937-38," Mennonite Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (2021), 415-458, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/bitstream/handle/20.500.12730/1571/Neufeldt-Fast_Arnold_2022a.pdf. See also related posts: https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/purge-sampler-arrests-of-kliewer.html; https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-executioner-of-dnepropetrovsk-1937.html.

Note 1: Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor, 2004) 562, 580; also Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Note 2: Harry Loewen, Between Worlds: Reflections of a Soviet-born Canadian Mennonite (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2006) 42.

Note 3: Cited in Harvey Dyck, “Breaking the Silence: Aussiedler Images of the Soviet Mennonite Tragedy,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 16 (1998) 97–100; 97f. https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/535/535.

Note 4: J. V. Stalin, “Telegram of 28 December 1932,” in B. Klid and A. J. Motyl, eds., Holodomor Reader: Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2012) 5:2, https://holodomor.ca/the-holodomor-reader-a-sourcebook-on-the-famine-of-1932-1933-in-ukraine/.

Note 5: Cf. J. V. Stalin, “Resolution of the CC AUCP(B) and CPC USSR on Grain Procurement in Ukraine, 19 December 1932;” “From a memorandum of the CC CP(B)U to the CC AUCP(B) on progress in preparing spring sowing,” in Klid and Motyl, eds., Holodomor Reader: Sourcebook, ch. 5:25, 37. “From Operational Order No. 2, GPU Ukrainian SSR, on the Need to Liquidate the Insurgent Underground before Beginning Sowing, February 13, 1932,” in Klid and Motyl, eds., Holodomor Reader: Sourcebook, ch. 5:32f.

Note 6: Cf. the report of the Sonderkommando Russland, “German Affairs in the Area of Kriwoi-Rog, Saporoshje, Dnjepropetrowsk, in the District of Melitopol and in the District of Mariupol. Preliminary Statement, in particular the Mennonite Settlements,” November 1, 1941, p. 5, translated by Allen E. Konrad. DAI microfilm T-81/606/5396845-854 --http://www.blackseagr.org/pdfs/konrad/; “Alt-Nassau: … A large number of men are missing from among the German families, who, in 1933–1938, were banished,” in ibid., 2. Also, for example, cf. report on an unnamed German village of 562 individuals in “Raion Tsch.,” from which “43 family fathers” were abducted in 1937 (“Heimkehr in die Freiheit,” Ukraine Post no. 14 [April 10, 1943] 3).

Note 7: Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) 328; cf. also Terry Martin, “Terror, Forced Labor, and Internal Exile, 1935–1955,” Conrad Grebel Review 20, no. 1 (2001), 40, https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/sites/ca.grebel/files/uploads/files/CGR-20-1-W2002-1.pdf.

Note 8: Ingeborg Fleischhauer, “‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’ und die Zwangsumsiedlung der Deutschen in der UdSSR,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 30 (1982), 299–321; 301. Cf. also Nicholas Wert, “The Mechanism of a Mass Crime: The Great Terror in the Soviet Union, 1937–38,” in The Spector of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, 215–239 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 237.

Note 9: Fleischhauer, “‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’ und die Zwangsumsiedlung der Deutschen in der UdSSR,” 301.

Note 10: Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 328; cf. also Martin “Terror, Forced Labor, and Internal Exile,” 40. Cf. J. Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999).

Note 11: A. A. Herman, “Repression as an integral part of the Bolshevik policy regime in relation to the Russian Germans” (Репрессии как неотъемлемый элемент политики большевистского режима по отношению кроссийским немцам). Symposium on Repression against Russian Germans in the Soviet Union in the Context of the Soviet National Policy, Moscow, http://www.memo.ru/history/nem. Anecdotally, one young man whose father had just been arrested, was told by a high-ranking officer that there are two reasons for their persecution: “One, you are Germans. … You can’t help that. But two, you are Christians. That cannot be accepted by those above. They know that, even if you remain silent” (cited The Silence Echoes: Memoirs of Trauma and Tears, translated and edited by Sarah Dyck, 34–46 [Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 1997] 14).

Note 12: Harry Loewen, “Of Suffering, Forgiveness, and Closure. Reflections on Russian Mennonite Experience,” Vision. A Journal for Church and Theology 8, no. 2 (2007), 51.

Note 13: H. Dyck, “Breaking the Silence: Aussiedler Images,” 99.

Note 14: Cf. the “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp”: “Verzeichnis der Verschleppten … des Rayons Chortitza” in “Neu-Chortitza Dorfbericht,” 69, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, BArch R6 GSK, https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_622+Gebiet%3A+Zwischen%0D%0ARayon%3A+Chortizza%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Saporoshje%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropertrowsk+Dorf%3A+Chortitza%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Chortitza+&p=R_6_622%5C%D1%821_01-188%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=36;  also “Neu-Chortitza Dorfbericht,” https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_623+Rayon%3A+Sofijevka%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Pjatichatki%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk+Dorf%3A+Neu-Chortitza%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Nowo-Chortitza+&p=R_6_623%5C%D1%823_510-593%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=9. Files 620 to 633 and 702 to 709 (Mennonite related villages) prepared for the German Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1942.

Note 15: Otto Auhagen, Die Schicksalswende des Russlanddeutschen Bauerntum in den Jahren 1927–1930 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1942) 50, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Pis/Auhag.pdf.

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Stalin’s Purge (1937-38) and Mennonite Suffering: 8 theses," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 12, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/stalins-purge-1937-38-and-mennonite.html.