Mennonite Dystopia and Hunger Games Prequel

This weekend my daughter saw the new Hunger Games prequel, “Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” A few years ago she and I watched two of the Hunger Games movies; when debriefing I thought of the dystopian Stalin years in which millions led dehumanized, fearful lives in a totalitarian, post-apocalyptic world. Because she is in another province and I am shackled by long-haul COVID, I will need to watch and debrief with her at a later date.

My thoughts begin, however, with two recently restored photos of my German-speaking Mennonite grandparents in Ukraine, 1923. They show a proud and ambitious young man hopeful for the possibility of emigration, as well as a young mother who with a sparkling eye and faint smile has dressed her first-born in fun baby clothing for the passport photo.

Ten years later, in 1933, they were still in the same village, but located squarely in a world so distant from 1923 that it defied description for those involved. It requires a movie, perhaps, but here are a few descriptors:

• Forced collectivization of land, barns, animals with fines designed to break individuals;
• Impossible production quotas with fines designed to break communities;
• Targeted famine designed to quell rebellion and break a whole region (Ukraine);
• Interrogations and torture (that made western, medieval torture look humane) to break the person;
• Surveillance culture, rewarding denunciations and fabrications to break trust;
• Disenfranchisement: no vote, loss of home, no opportunity to work, forced to wander; punishment of charity activities;
• Crushing poverty in the country-side: no shoes, no material for clothing and bedding, no consumer items;
• Cyclical, random arrests at night in every village to keep fear high (esp. 1937-38);
• Distant, forced-labour prison camps for former leaders or advocates of pre-revolutionary values, ways or ideas;
• Relentless propaganda: state-control of paper, radio, school materials, reading rooms; burning of books; news embargo; controlled mail;
• State-sponsored devotion of authoritarian leader;
• New liturgies and celebrations (of the Revolution, of the worker), with new holy texts (Marx; Lenin, etc.), and with new parades and feasts, flag, oaths, church (=Party), new paradise (world-wide communist revolution);
• New Calendars (5-day, 6-day/week experiments) to confuse and break patterns of old secular or church calendars;
• Isolation of children from parents; limit opportunities to transmit memories, values, teaching in order to shape the new Soviet person;
• Celebrated mega-projects (Dnipro dam) as symbol of new world with crushing poverty in the country-side;
• Control of movement internally and no opportunity for emigration;
• Limit higher education to Party members;
• Constant reminder of enemies abroad and fear of infiltration within.

Perhaps the world needs a dystopian movie to capture that. But for some 50,000 Mennonites in Ukraine generally—despite outliers, “spots and wrinkles,” and variations in piety—the bizarre and terrifying features of that confusing world came into sharp focus in the 1930s with the repression of church life. Here are a few examples:

• expropriation of church buildings (Gebetshaus =house of prayer) and conversion to theatres, dance halls (with organ in Gnadenfeld), Red Reading rooms, Komsomol clubhouses with icons of “Goddess of Beauty” in red (Schönsee) and paintings of the disciples of the Bolshevik revolution; many were dismantled for bricks or used for grain storage;
• imposition of suffocating taxation and ultimately arrest and deportation of preachers and deacons;
• arrest or disenfranchisement of those who might preach, read scripture or lead a hymn at funeral or bless a wedding;
• prohibition of faith instruction for children. In school dormitories, praying before meals or at night strictly forbidden. Hard work and prayer to Comrade Stalin was more effective than prayer to a god above the clouds, they were told;
• interrogation of children at school: "Do you pray, read Bible at home?" (with repercussions):
• end of all holy-day festivals (Advent, Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Thanksgiving);
• requirement to work on Sundays and holy-days like Pentecost; worship made impossible (=class enemy);
• end of choir festivals and compulsion to celebrate and sing for foreign feasts;
• prohibition of mutual aid (hallmark of Mennonite community) for those in need;
• loss of faith-inspired institutions: orphanage in Großweide, school for the deaf in Tiege; Bethania Mental Hospital;
• undermining of the faith community’s highest values: truthfulness, trustworthiness, sanctity of family, conflict resolution (role of elder; minister); conviction that every person is made in God’s image with intrinsic value;
• supplanting of sources of faith, hope, joy and love with constant fear and suspicion;
• punishment for the practice of connecting to faith community abroad;
• inability to contribute sacrificially to country in alternative, tradition-compatible service activities (e.g., Forestry, Red Cross);
• silencing of faith-inspired reflection on freedom and justice locally or nationally;
• accusation that Protestant-type faith innately connected to Hitler’s [!] Germany as early as 1933, “conspiring against Soviet power;”

The Mennonite faith lens, vision and memory, kept many from thinking they had “taken leave of your senses” in those completely bizarre, disorienting, and terrifying times.

One justification for state measures against the church and its ministers was published and distributed in 1931 by a researcher of the Central Council member of the League of Militant Atheists. His booklet, Enslaving Brotherhood of the Sectarians (note 1), was designed to turn Mennonite readers against their church leaders who “scream of persecution” to a “rabid” Mennonite press in North America and Germany. The author reminded readers that Mennonites are free to pray at designated times, but that the preachers want uncontrolled counter-revolutionary agitation “anywhere, anytime, to anyone.” The preachers demand religious neutrality in schools, which they interpret however as anti-evolution, anti-Leninist instruction. With their “Mennonite fabrications,” preachers “bloat and twist things around,” incite fanaticism and with their “frenzied campaigning for Canada” stir up “ordinary” sectarians. But most importantly they “thwart collectivization” in the name of religion to save kulak property [the formerly wealthy] he argued. The force of his argument is that Soviet measures are in fact liberating for Mennonites, and that preachers must be treated as kulaks (note 2). Faith leaders are no longer simply ideological hindrances to progress; but there is now “a direct threat to Bolshevik rule from enemies within and abroad” (note 3).

If the early anti-religious propaganda sought to show the pagan or anti-scientific origins of religion, into the 1930s the League emphasized “the military threat represented by Christmas” in particular the “hypocrisy of Christmas’s ‘peace on earth’ message while the West armed for an attack on the Soviet Union” (note 4). This would not bode well for German-speaking Christians.

The chairman of the powerful League of the Militant Godless declared that the role of the schools was to “cultivate in the children a hatred for those ties which religion imposes. ... We demand of the child to be a fighter against religion anywhere, at the school and in the family” (note 5).

The League’s highest profile campaigns were around Christmas and Easter, with events arranged to disrupt their observance. One Molotschna woman recalled the “anti-Christmas” evenings with “anti-religious” songs, poems, and speeches offered by the students—each marked by scorn and contempt for all religion. “All students and parents were required to attend these evenings. Whoever was absent was viewed as an enemy of the people, ridiculed and bullied. Absent students would be strapped with a metal ruler until their hands would swell. The whole school would mock them and their piety” (note 6).

“The parents were not permitted to be an example to their children. At school these children were instructed in atheism, and the values of their parents ridiculed. Parents were forbidden to teach religion to their children and the children were encouraged to report their parents to the Communist authorities if they did.” (Note 7)

The lens of dystopian movies with all of their night-mare qualities often functions as a radical political commentary in toxic and confusing times.

The lens of Mennonite faith and memory did the same in the 1930s. It is no wonder that many survivors of that era were simply left speechless about those years. But they spoke of the repression of church which gave them some ability to bring everything else into focus in those toxic and confusing times. Maybe there is a lesson here; maybe even a movie waiting to be made!

(Like thousands of other Mennonite men in Ukraine, my grandfather was arrested and executed in 1937; note 8).

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

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First image from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) Official Trailer, https://youtu.be/RDE6Uz73A7g?si=DvDaafsgVNJxiG2D.

Note 1: For this paragraph, cf. Fedor M. Putintsev, Enslaving Brotherhood of the Sectarians [Кабальное братство сектантов]. Central Council of the Union of the Militant Atheists of the USSR (Moscow: OGIZ, 1931), https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/pdf/vpetk265.pdf. See also Boris P. Kandidov, Religious Counter-Revolution of 1918–20 and Intervention [Религиозная контрреволюция 1918–20 гг. и интервенция] (Moscow: “Atheist,” 1930), https://rusneb.ru/catalog/000199_000009_008685391/.

Note 2: M. Kryvokhatsky, M. “Mennonites and Counterrevolution [Меноніти и контр-революція],” Bezvirnyk, no. 1 (1930), 5–11, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/vpetk386.pdf; idem, Churches and Sects: Agents of World Imperialism [Церковники та сектанти - агентура світового імперіялізму”] (Kharkov: Ukrainian Worker, 1931), https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/vpetk385.pdf.

Note 3: Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 75.

Note 4: Peris, Storming the Heavens, 87.

Note 5: Cited in Vladimir Gsovski, “Legal Status of the Church in Soviet Russia,” Fordham Law Review 8, no. 1 (1939), 21.

Note 6: Cited in A. A. Töws, ed., Mennonitische Märtyrer der jüngsten Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart, vol. 2: Der große Leidensweg (North Clearbrook, BC: Self-published, 1954), 426.

Note 7: Eduard Allert (pseud., Abram Reimer), “The Lost Generation,” in The Lost Generation and other Stories, edited by Gerhard Lohrenz (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1982), 6.

Note 8: See previous posts, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-executioner-of-dnepropetrovsk-1937.html; and https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/stalins-purge-1937-38-and-mennonite.html; and https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/03/mennonite-dystopia-socializing-in-era.html, etc.

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To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Mennonite Dystopia and Hunger Games Prequel," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), November 21, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/11/mennonite-dystopia-and-hunger-games.html.