History of the Russian Mennonites

In the past few years, two volumes of the extensive John Cornies' correspondence discovered 1990 have been transcribed and published in English ( note 1 ). A third and final volume is forthcoming. No single Russian Mennonite has been as revered historically—or also despised or feared by his own!—as Johann Cornies (1789-1848). He was a larger-than-life figure who ruled over the Molotschna like a benevolent Mennonite Tsar and father of all, as some remember him, and for others as a despot with the demands and ideas of a devil! With some historical distance, David G. Rempel aptly refers to him as an “enlightened despot” ( note 2 ). Cornies was never elected to a Mennonite civic or religious post. But he would acquire a real power over all of those offices—de facto more than de jure—and over the manner in which all landholders in the Molotschna would farm, plant, build and develop. How did this happen? The Russian state required Mennonites and other foreign colonies to adopt a lo...

The landless crisis in the mid-1800s in the Molotschna Colony is the context for most other matters of importance to its Mennonites, 1840s to 1860s. When discussing landlessness, historian David G. Rempel has claimed that the “seemingly endemic wranglings and splits” of the Mennonite church in South Russia were only seldom or superficially related to doctrine, and “almost invariably and intimately bound up with some of the most serious social and economic issues” that afflicted one or more of the congregations in the settlement ( note 1 ). It is important from the start to recognize that these Mennonites were not citizens,  but foreign colonists with obligations and privileges that governed their sojourn in New Russia. For Mennonites the privileges, e.g. of land and freedom from military conscription, were connected to the obligation of model farming. Mennonites were given one, and then later two districts of land for this purpose. Within their districts or colonies , villages w...