Skip to main content

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

---Notes---

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.

---

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Between Monarchs" a lot can happen (like revolt). A Mennonite "Accession" Prayer for the Monarch

It is surprising for many to learn that Russian Mennonites sang the Russian national anthem "God save the Tsar" in special worship services ... frequently! We have a "Mennonite prayer" and sermon sample for the accession of the monarch ( Thronbesteigung ) or its anniversary, with closing prayer-- and another Mennonite sampler of a coronation ( Krönung ) prayer, sermon and closing prayer ( note 1 ). After 70 years with one monarch, the manual is made for a time like this--try sharing it with your Canadian Mennonite pastor ;) Technically there is no “between” monarchs: “The Queen is Dead. Long live the King!” But there is much that happens or can happen before the coronation of the new monarch. Including revolt. Mennonites in Molotschna had hosted Tsar Alexander I shortly before his death in 1825. Upon his death in December, Alexander's brother and heir Constantine declined succession, and prior to the coronation of the next brother Nicholas, some 3,000 rebel (mos...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Four-Part Singing in Mennonite Schools and Church in Russia

The significance of singing instruction may seem trite, but it became a key vehicle in the Mennonite school curriculum for fostering a basic appreciation of the arts and for faith formation. In Johann Cornies’ circulated guidelines for teachers, singing was recommended as a means “to stimulate and enliven pious feelings” in the children—a guideline he copied directly from a German Catholic pedagogue and circulated freely under his own name ( note 1 ).  On January 26, 1846 Cornies distributed a curriculum regulation to all schools that mandated “singing by numbers ( Zahlen ) from the church hymnal” ( note 2 ). Attention to singing instruction in the schools precipitated significant and controversial changes in Mennonite liturgy. An 1854 visiting observer to the Bergthal Colony—a Chortitza daughter colony outside of Cornies’ purview—wrote: “Endlessly long hymns from the Gesangbuch (hymnal) were begun by the Vorsänger (song leader) of the congregation, and sung with so many flo...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flight from Flanders to Friesland

In the latter half of the sixteenth century Protestantism gradually spread throughout the northern Netherlands in the form of Calvinism—which had a direct impact on Anabaptists. When the Northern Provinces of the Netherlands led by the exiled Protestant Prince William of Orange went to war against Spain in 1568, persecution of Anabaptists in Catholic Flanders increased again. Long before the Protestant Northern Provinces would declare independence in 1581, the inquisition against Anabaptists in Bruges, for example, had achieved its goal. With the last two Anabaptist executions in the city in 1573, the once large and thriving Mennonite congregation was extinguished. Subsequently Mennonites lived in Bruges only on rare occasions, and when present, for only a short time, as for example the well-known art historian Karel van Mander in 1582 ( note 1 ). In the Northern Provinces Calvinism had become attractive theologically and politically. Not only was Christian resistance to tyrannical gov...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor), 1932-1933

In 2008 the Canadian Parliament passed an act declaring the fourth Saturday in November as “Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (‘Holodomor’) Memorial Day” ( note 1 ). Southern Ukraine was arguably the worst affected region of the famine of 1932–33, where 30,000 to 40,000 Mennonites lived ( note 2 ). The number of famine-related deaths in Ukraine during this period are conservatively estimated at 3.5 million ( note 3 ). In the early 1930s Stalin feared growing “Ukrainian nationalism” and the possibility of “losing Ukraine” ( note 4 ). He was also suspicious of ethnic Poles and Germans—like Mennonites—in Ukraine, convinced of the “existence of an organized counter-revolutionary insurgent underground” in support of Ukrainian national independence ( note 5 ). Ukraine was targeted with a “lengthy schooling” designed to ruthlessly break the threat of Ukrainian nationalism and resistance, and this included Ukraine’s Mennonites (viewed simply as “Germans”). Various causes combined to bring on w...
Post a Comment
Read more