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Collectivization and Dekulakization, 1930-33

Throughout 1930, Mennonite defiance and hope for another mass emigration was morphing into deep disappointment and growing apathy as they contemplated a permanent future under communist rule (note 1).

Together with rapid industrialization—including the Dnieper hydro dam—Stalin’s new focus on the collectivization of agricultural units in 1930 was both an economic strategy and the critical means for reconfiguring society and for the creation of the new “Soviet man,” with the liberation of women too from “exploitation and social isolation” (note 2).

This massive project of social engineering had profound effects on Mennonite faith, community and family life. Economic restructuring brought famine and profound poverty to the countryside. Women were increasingly removed from their children and subjected to impossible labour demands. Newly educated youth and children were the future of the socialist state, but their memoirs mostly speak of a lost childhood clouded by memories of poverty and of an atmosphere of fear.

Stalin’s first Five Year Plan in December 1929 called for the socialist enlargement of agricultural units and decreed the “complete” collectivization of all agricultural land including the confiscation of farm animals and implements. Counter-revolutionary opponents or kulaks favouring “capitalist” enlargements of private farms instead were to be eliminated. On the heels of the internationally embarrassing flight of Mennonite farmers to the suburbs of Moscow, Stalin spoke at a conference of Marxist students on the agrarian question, on December 27, 1929:

“Today, we have an adequate material base which enables us to strike at the kulaks, to break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class, and to substitute for their output the output of the collective farms and state farms. ... There is another question which seems no less ridiculous: whether the kulak should be permitted to join the collective farms. Of course not, for he is a sworn enemy of the collective-farm movement.” (Note 3)

Desperate to raise the level of enthusiasm for state-set production goals and to mobilize peasants, authorities responded with ideological education, including materials in German-language journals, newspapers and radio that emphasized the final liquidation of kulaks as a class in the countryside, the removal of all counter-revolutionary agitators, the complete collectivization of all farms, and a more focused battle to end religious belief in the village. Village councils were pressured to meet or exceed all procurement quotas especially by exposing and disciplining "kulak hoarders and shirkers."

Quotas for dekulakization in the German-speaking Ukrainian villages were higher than policies required; altogether Peter Letkemann estimates that at least 2,000 Mennonite families or 10,000 people were “dekulakized” in the years 1929 to 1932 (note 4).

In March 1930, Stalin celebrated progress made on the Collective Farm Movement with the broadly published article “Dizzy with Success.” Where there were violent excesses, he blamed it on overzealous local officials and suggested that some private land ownership going forward would be tolerated; collectivization would remain voluntary and only occur where it made sense (note 5). This was a temporary reprieve at best, and arrests continued.

In April and June 1930 the village of Neuendorf (Rayon Chortitza) offered some resistance to forced collectivization and a program dekulakization. The response against the village was severe and designed to make them into an example for surrounding Mennonite villages.

“Those affected were loaded with their families onto a wagon each and taken away to an unknown destination. But the population opposed this and did not let them go. The GPU came to arrest the heads of the families, but they were warned and went into hiding. Then, night after night, a number of people and trucks with GPU and police arrived and a great hunt began. The men were arrested and the other members of the families were later sent after them.” (Note 6)

Jakob Siemens, age 47, Franz Ens, age 43, Peter Wiebe, age 42 (and possibly others) of Neuendorf were arrested on April 18, and each charged with “agitating farmers to oppose / not to submit to Soviet rule” (note 7). Another larger sweep occurred on June 23, where at least five Mennonite men were charged with “agitating against the Soviet government.” Most were deported to serve five or eight years in a forced labour camp in “northern Russia;” one was sentenced to death (note 8). In total, twenty-four men were arrested in the village in 1930—and as per custom, family members followed, including 18 women and 11 children (total 53) (note 9).

In 1930, thirty individuals from the Chortitza village of Osterwick were also disenfranchised and exiled (note 10), and fifty-nine from Franzfeld. “We ethnic Germans had a hard time agreeing to collectivization,” the Franzfeld teacher K. Epp wrote in 1942. “But in the end … in order not to make closer acquaintance with the NKVD [secret police], we complied” (note 11).

A shift was occurring in the state’s anti-clerical propaganda from attacking religious beliefs and the clergy as obstacles to social and economic progress, to an explicitly politicized attack, painting faith leaders as “a direct threat to Bolshevik rule from enemies within and abroad” (note 12). In the Barnaul District (Altai), for example, thirty-six Mennonite ministers were disenfranchised in April 1930 (note 13). No longer were “preachers” smeared by state propaganda simply as exploiters of the peasantry, but now—“closely linked to developments in the general political arena”—they were shown “actively conspiring against Soviet power” (note 14). After the “mistakes” of rapid collectivization were admitted by the state in 1930, “kulak-preachers, priests and other anti-Soviet elements” were nonetheless blamed for “exploiting these mistakes” that were producing “dissatisfaction in the German villages, thereby reducing the intensity of their labour and their desire to improve and raise the level of agriculture” (note 15).

Accounts of dispossessed Mennonite families—especially as food shortages increased—left an indelible mark on the survivors of this era, and are recalled repeatedly in the memoir literature. 

Notably, Mennonites were not only the victims of dekulakization, but some were also its agents (that is another story). Moreover, the story of dispossession was shared by Mennonites and many Ukrainians together.

The remarkable photos (1932-33) by Mark Zaliznyak below are likely the best we will find of those terrible events. They are not from a Mennonite village, but from Udachne in Donetsk (Bakhmut District). The village had at least one Mennonite family, and the Mennonite Memrik Colony and estates were not far away.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Photos: "Donetsk village Udachne and Holodomor of 1932-33 in photos by Mark Zaliznyak," https://translate.google.ca/translate?hl=en&sl=uk&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.radiosvoboda.org%2Fa%2Fholodomor-photo-zaliznyaka-1932-1933%2F28874991.html; also http://old.memorialholodomor.org.ua/eng/holodomor/archive/foto-arkhiv/golodomor-na-donnechini-foto-m-zheliznyaka/?fbclid=IwAR27xlF3nmJXptAP5M642s3LviqKTWy5sP__lrNSv0fjRY5RDUFvEedn2eM. NB: the fourth picture is from the Odessa region; https://flashbak.com/the-great-break-the-russian-peasant-becomes-the-collective-farmer-1920-1931-363372/?fbclid=IwAR0w3J5Hbeyw7OCu4tBLM4NySJq69fbFpgklddnhX5qb7qswTeUdq2M9QrM.

Note 1: The German government made arrangements with the Soviet Union to allow a few “splitter” families (some 20 families / 70 individuals) who were separated in Moscow in 1929 to leave in 1931; Benjamin H. Unruh played a key role; cf. Levi Mumaw to C.F. Klassen, August 10, 1931, from MCC-Akron, IX-03-01, box 3, file 70018.

Note 2: Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 81.

Note 3: Josef V. Stalin, “Problems of Agrarian Policy in the U.S.S.R.,” in Stalin, Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1945), 317-319, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.14532/page/n315/mode/2up/.

Note 4: Estimate by Peter Letkemann, “Mennonites in the Soviet Inferno, 1929–1941,” Mennonite Historian 24, no. 4 (1998), 6, http://www.mennonitehistorian.ca/.

Note 5: Stalin, “Dizzy with Success: Concerning Questions of the Collective-Farm Movement [March 3, 1930],” Works 12, 197–205. For Siberian Germans, see report in Auslanddeutsche 13, no. 12 (1930), 429f., https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/pdf/vpetk324.pdf; and Detlef Brandes and Andrej I. Savin, Die Sibiriendeutschen im Sowjetstaat 1919–1938 (Essen: Klartext, 2001), ch. 8. For Ukraine, see Colin P. Neufeldt, “Collectivizing the Mutter Ansiedlungen: The role of Mennonites in Organizing Kolkhozy in the Khortytsia and Molochansk German National Districts in Ukraine in the Late 1920s and Early 1930s,” in Minority Report: Mennonite Identities in Imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine Reconsidered, 1789–1945, edited by Leonard G. Friesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 216.

Note 6: In “Neuendorf (Rayon Chortitza) Dorfbericht,” May 1942, Fragebogen XI.5 (Addendum), “Schilderung der Verhaftungen usw.,” in Village Reports Special Command Dr. Stump, Bundesarchiv R6/622, 96 (TSDEA; Bundesarchiv).

Note 7: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia Region (Zaporizhia: Dniprovskij Metalurg, 2004–2013) [РЕАБІЛІТОВАНІ ІСТОРІЄЮ: Запорізька область], Book V, 275 (Wiebe); 315 (Ens); 325 (Siemens), http://www.reabit.org.ua/books/zp/.

Note 8: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia, Book IV, 69 (Braun); 133 (Heinrichs); cf. also 496 (Peter Redekop); 459 (Abram Peters); 145 (Dietrich Hildebrandt).

Note 9: “Neuendorf (Rayon Chortitza) Dorfbericht,” May 1942, “Fragebogen,” XI.2, in Village Reports Special Command Dr. Stump, Bundesarchiv R6/622, 94; “Liste der verbannten Bürger,” 133 (TSDEA; Bundesarchiv).

Note 10: “Osterwick, (Rayon Chortitza) Dorfbericht,” July 1942, “Fragebogen,” XI.2, in Village Reports Special Command Dr. Stump, Bundesarchiv R6/621, 9, 194 (TSDEA; Bundesarchiv).

Note 11: “Franzfeld, (Rayon Chortitza) Dorfbericht,” April 1942, “Fragebogen,” XI.2 and XI.5,  Village Reports Special Command Dr. Stump, Bundesarchiv R6/621, 384; “Schulisches Leben: Bericht,” 386b (TSDEA; Bundesarchiv).

Note 12: Peris, Storming the Heavens, 75.

Note 13: Abram Abram Fast, In the networks of the OGPU-NKVD, German District Altai Territory in 1927–1938 (V setyakh OGPU-NKVD: Nemetskiy rayon Altyskogo kraya v 1927–1938 gg unrh) (Barnaul, 2002), 31–34, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Dok/FastR.pdf.

Note 14: Peris, Storming the Heavens, 75.

Note 15: Auslanddeutsche 12, no. 13 (1930), 429f.

--

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Collectivization and Dekulakization, 1930-1933," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), August 14, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/08/collectivization-and-dekulakization.html. 

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