History of the Russian Mennonites

In March 2023 the film "Women Talking" won an Oscar for "Best adapted Screenplay." It was based on the novel of the same name by Mennonite Miriam Toews. The conservative Mennonites portrayed in the film are from the "Manitoba Colony" in Bolivia--with obvious Canadian connections. Now that many Canadians have seen the the film, Mennonites like me are being asked, "So how are you [in Markham-Stouffville, Waterloo or in St. Catharines] connected to that group?" Most would say, "We're not that type of Mennonite." And mostly that is a true answer, though unnuanced. Others will say, "Well, it is complex," but they can't quite unfold the complexity.  Below is my attempt to do just that. At the heart of the story are things that happened in Ukraine (at the time "New" or "South" Russia) over 200 years ago. It is not easy to rebuild the influence and contribution of "Russian Mennonite" women and th...

Fräulein Bräul left an indelible mark on two generations of high school students in the Mennonite Colony of Fernheim, Paraguay. Former students and acquaintances recall that Marga Bräul demanded the highest effort and achievements of her students, colleagues and of herself—the kind of teacher you either love or hate but will never forget! In March 1947, Marga was offered a position at the Fernheim Secondary School ( Zentralschule ). A recent refugee to Paraguay from war-torn Europe, she taught mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1952, she was the only female faculty member ( note 1 ). Marga wedded a strong commitment to academics with a passion for quality arts and crafts. She provided extensive extra-curricular instruction to students in handiwork and was especially renowned for her artwork—which included painting and woodworking— end of year art exhibits with students, theatre sets, and festival decorations. Marga’s pedagogical philosophy was holistic; she told Mennonite ed...

I am at a loss of what to say in the face of such terrifying video coming from Ukraine (March 4, 2022). The Ukrainian people are the historic friends, hosts and neighbours of the Mennonites since our arrival in 1789. It is a rich, unique relationship. For the first eight decades, relationships between Mennonites and their neighbours in Ukraine (or earlier South or New Russia) were largely prescribed by the colonial policies of Greater Russia. Each “foreign” people group was regulated by their unique privileges negotiated with the crown, each with mandated expectations and responsibilities (e.g., model farming), and required to live in closed, culturally specific colonies in order to “keep the peace.” It was a larger police state in which movement outside the colony was strictly regulated. That was the historic context of our neighbourliness, our mutual learnings, respect, love, but also inequalities, suspicions, prejudices, negotiations, barriers to language learning or intermarr...

Recently a friend asked: “Based on their long historical sojourn in Russia / Ukraine, what light can Mennonites shed on Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine today?” (February 2022). The story of so-called Russian Mennonites began in the 1780s, was defined by Greater Russia’s imperial expansion, and was almost extinguished under Stalin and his fear of rising Ukraine nationalism and minority ethnic resistance in the 1930s. Below are a few historical learnings based on that lived experience in Ukraine, formerly known as “New Russia” or “South Russia.” A short history of Russian “empire building” from the Mennonite experience might best begin with a brief reference to German Prussia in the 18th century, where Mennonites were at home. By the 1780s, further land acquisitions or economic expansion in West Prussia (today northern Poland) and Gdansk (Danzig) had become increasingly impossible for Mennonites—largely because they refused military service for religious reasons. Prussia was...

Usually it is better for me to say nothing on Remembrance Day ( =Armistice Day or Veterans Day), November 11. I have five uncles who fought in German uniform: Dad’s brother Jacob Fast returned to Germany from Friesland, Paraguay and died on the eastern front in 1944, age 25 ( note 1 ). Mom’s brother Peter Bräul died from wounds in Linz, Austria, 1945, age nineteen.  In the same weeks their brother Heinrich was killed in battle in Budapest, around his twenty-first birthday.  Another brother, Franz, was captured in Budapest and died a few years later from starvation in a gulag in Russia’s far north.  Their youngest brother Walter was captured by the British in Denmark at the end of the war—he had just turned 17 ( note 2 ).  Their 8-year-old sister Helene (Lenchen) died on the 1943 “trek” while being evacuated behind German army lines—another victim of the war ( note 3 ). My mother Käthe was the youngest; her sister Sara and my grandmother had fled as far as north-wes...

When Helene (Thiessen) Bräul and daughter Käthe arrived at the Malton-Toronto Airport from Paraguay on May 29, 1955, Helene was fifty-one years old. With many of her friends, she struggled with the inhospitable Paraguayan Chaco for eight years. Their husbands had all been shot in Ukraine seventeen years earlier. Käthe (my mother) was seventeen-and-a-half—robbed of a normal childhood, but ready and hopeful for new beginnings. Neither knew English and they arrived as poor as when they left war-torn Europe in 1947: one suitcase each, but now with a travel debt as well. Mennonites in Paraguay had survived the worst because of a rich global church network of support ( note 1 ). While Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization (CMBC) did not provide financial assistance for immigration to Canada from South America, they did assist with immigration procedures and travel arrangements. Canadian immigration officials did background checks of applicants bot...

Thirty-five thousand Mennonites were evacuated from Ukraine for resettlement in German-annexed Poland in 1943/44. Almost all of them came through Litzmannstadt (Łódź)--one of only two points of processing and reception in the new German Province of Wartheland. Here resettlers were thoroughly cleansed, disinfected, and deloused in a large steam bath. Later arrivals from the long trek were mostly full of lice, in their hair and up and down the seams of all their clothes, one resettler told me ( note 1 ).  Besides lice, rickets and scabies were common, as well as tuberculosis and trachoma. The larger concern however was racial purity and the health of the Volk-body as a whole, consistent with the official “Racial Policy” published by the Reichsführer S.S. Central Office for Racial Policy: "Since the rise and fall of a people’s culture depends above all on the maintenance, care, and purity of its valuable racial inheritance, responsible statesmanship must be concerned with racia...