History of the Russian Mennonites

The Naked Anabaptist : this title recommended by the editors of Stuart Murray’s book certainly helped sales for a text certainly worth reading ( note 1 ). Early Anabaptist beginnings have resonated with many twenty-first century Christians in the global north who seek new post-Christendom expressions of church. Here is Murray’s summary of those sixteenth-century convictions: to follow Christ in life whatever the consequences; to regard the Bible as authoritative not only in debate, but also in living and with ethical issues; to hold to the separation of church and state; to live in mutual accountability with other baptized members of the community, which includes using church discipline to maintain distinctiveness; to share resources; to live non-violently and to tell the truth; and to expect that suffering is normal for faithful disciples and is a mark of the true church ( note 2 ). Indeed, most of those themes can be found clustered together in some early Anabaptist communiti...

Biographies, memoirs, interviews, and diaries inevitably include and often exaggerate those parts of the life-story that support the claim of the storyteller, and omit or flatten other parts assumed to be irrelevant or in contradiction to the preferred storyline. In 1848, the Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists President Eugen von Hahn tasked each village administration to work with the schoolteacher to produce an exact historical description of its settlement and key events in its history ( note 1 ). Notably most village histories are silent or say very little about their engagements with their Nogai neighbours whom they had displaced. Mennonites were fully aware that their colony on the Molotschna River was on lands of the nomadic Nogai, and that the Nogai had been forcibly displaced for Greater Russia’s colonizing program. This earlier history of the land is noted in a few village reports. “In this location there used to be a large Nogai village. By order of authorities...