History of the Russian Mennonites

A deadly epidemic broke out in MCC’s new settlement in Fernheim, Paraguay in 1930. Settlers had been present for less than a year, and had recorded 20 births and 88 deaths by December 31 ( note 1 ). Health care remained a significant concern in Fernheim even after the epidemic was halted with the emergency medical intervention of Paraguayan military doctors. Mennonites were wholly responsible for their own health care. In 1933 and 1934 there was a malaria outbreak with 31 deaths and 30 deaths respectively, compared to 11 deaths in 1932 ( note 2 ). My father born in 1932 almost did not survive 1933: "He is very thin. It often seems to me that we will not be able to keep him by our side. He was such a happy and lively boy, but the illness has gone so far," my grandmother wrote family in Canada ( note 3 ). Early in 1934 the Fernheim Colony reported in the Germany Mennonite denominational paper that “the state of health leaves much to be desired. Malaria still hits the villages b...

One way of explaining well who a certain group of people is, is by looking at the unique set of questions they kept on asking, generation after generation. What peculiar issues did Russian Mennonites (or earlier in Prussia) keep struggling with in each new context? What were their experiments as community? Of course the answers differed in each place and time, and the arguments were divisive. Some experiments failed. Utterly. Below are two basic sets of questions that Mennonites asked over and again in each generation in Russia/Ukraine. The questions, I would suggest, were unique to their experience; that is, the other Christian communities in their context--Lutheran, Pietist, Catholic and Orthodox--were asking different sets questions First, and perhaps least surprising, Mennonites in Russia/Ukraine kept asking / being concerned about non-resistance, about being a people who took those New Testament admonitions of peace seriously, and did not return evil for evil, seek revenge o...