History of the Russian Mennonites

In 1843 the Russian Mennonite colonies received a visitation from the London Bible Society. It was the same year that Charles Dickens published "A Christmas Carol" about the miser Ebenezer Scrooge and his conversion after the visitation of three Christmas ghosts! Dickens was not happy that the Church’s overseas mission budget was so large, while in his view they neglected the poor on their own doorsteps in London. Ebenezer was in fact a common British name of the era. A few years earlier the Molotschna was visited by a delegation from the British and Foreign Bible Society. The British agent, Reverend Ebeneezer Henderson, convinced Molotschna elders and Johann Cornies to establish their own Bible Society. "As they live on habits of friendship and intimacy with their Tatar neighbours, and one of their principal men [Cornies] speaks the Tatar with fluency, we furnished him with a good supply of New Testaments, and other portions of Scripture, in that language, that they m...

After four decades in Russia, the president of the Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists, Andrei Fadeev, considered only eight of 116 Mennonite teachers in the two larger regions of Katerynoslav and Tauria—which included the Molotschna—fit to teach ( note 1 ). Jakob Bräul’s Rudnerweide schoolhouse was given the same status as Heinrich Heese’s Ohrloff Agricultural Society School with regard to policies and “especially for the teaching of Russian” ( note 2 ). Fadeev triggered great angst when by “imperial decree” he distributed a book to church elders written by German Mennonite Abraham Hunzinger on the modernization of Mennonite schools and church. It was a friendly gesture and poke. The Molotschna was already a tinderbox, and this spark introduced by a state official to strengthen the community ignited a fire in the colony. Fadeev wrote to Johann Cornies on January 12, 1832: “Most valued Cornies ... I advise you to acquire and read a booklet sent to your church leaders f...