History of the Russian Mennonites

In Fall 1929 some 10,000 Mennonites attempted to flea the Soviet countryside for Moscow in a last ditch attempt to leave. Ultimately Germany's intervention was salvation for 3,885 of that group, and Mennonite leader Benjamin Unruh—stationed in Germany--was their shepherd, with American aid through Mennonite Central Committee. Ultimately it was because of Unruh that the German government had put economic and diplomatic pressure on Stalin to open the gates out of Moscow to the west, if only for a short period. Germany in turn could only be a transit country, and Canada refused to take more than 1,000 (in the end it was 1,344). The remainder were assisted to migrate to Paraguay (1,572) or Brazil. Not surprisingly family clans were split. Some of the young people who had arrived in the Paraguayan Chaco “had attended communist schools in Russia,” leading to “undesirable” dynamics and “unpleasant occurrences” in some of the villages, in the estimation of the younger and charismatic teach...