History of the Russian Mennonites

Only a very small percentage of Mennonites were estate owners, and each employed a small team of male and female servants, "German" and "Russian." The following comes from the memoir by Gerhard Wiens, who grew up on his maternal Schroeder family estate some 20 miles west of the Molotschna Colony. Wiens was born in 1900 and died in Minnesota on his 100th birthday. His detailed reflections ( note 1 ) are of a boy coming of age in the decade before World War I: “My mother presided over the household chores. She had a Mennonite cook and housemaid Marie Derksen who was employed with us as long as I can remember. She was assisted by two German girls either from the Molotschna Mennonite villages or from Lutheran villages some 20 miles from us. We also had two Russian girls who weeded the vegetables, washed the dishes and did some other work. The German girls did the dusting, cleaning and bed-making. They also had to do the washing with a hand-operated washing machine. Al...

Stable political arrangements are rarely permanent and can unravel rapidly—and they did for tens of thousands of Mennonites a century ago in the Russian Empire. Not a few asked: “Why is this happening to us?” Russia was a multicultural colonial empire with sense of a manifest destiny, a long history of serfdom and displacement of non-settler populations, and a yawning disparity of wealth. A few hundred Mennonite owners of sprawling estates with extensive landholdings suffered most severely in the first period of lawlessness, chaos and revolution in Ukraine. During a period of civil war in 1919 when the villages in the Mennonite Molotschna colony were largely under White Army protection, Kornelius Bergmann, a teacher and Mennonite Brethren minister, addressed the question everyone was asking, “Why is this happening to us?” Bergmann wrote using the pseudonym "C. Orosander"—in order to speak freely ( note 1 ). He began by admonishing his fellow clergy for general failu...