History of the Russian Mennonites

The following propaganda photos are of the Mennonites community in Chortitz, Ukraine during German occupation in World War II. German armies reached the Mennonite villages on the west bank of the Dnieper River on August 17, 1941. The photos below were taken almost two years later. However the war was already turning, and within two months the trek out of Ukraine would begin. The photographs are accompanied by an article about the Low-German speakers of Chortitza for a readership in the Reich ( note 1 ). The author repeatedly draws on the myth of one-sided German pioneer accomplishments abroad: “The first settlers found the land desolate and empty,” the reader is told, and were “left to fend for themselves in a foreign environment” where with German diligence, order and cleanliness they thrived. The article correctly recognizes the great losses of the ethnic Germans under Bolshevism--as if to convince readers that the war is a shared burden of all Germans, and which is now payin...

This weekend my daughter saw the new Hunger Games prequel , “Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” A few years ago she and I watched two of the Hunger Games movies; when debriefing I thought of the dystopian Stalin years in which millions led dehumanized, fearful lives in a totalitarian, post-apocalyptic world. Because she is in another province and I am shackled by long-haul COVID, I will need to watch and debrief with her at a later date. My thoughts begin, however, with two recently restored photos of my German-speaking Mennonite grandparents in Ukraine, 1923. They show a proud and ambitious young man hopeful for the possibility of emigration, as well as a young mother who with a sparkling eye and faint smile has dressed her first-born in fun baby clothing for the passport photo. Ten years later, in 1933, they were still in the same village, but located squarely in a world so distant from 1923 that it defied description for those involved. It requires a movie, perhaps, but here are a ...

To outsiders, the Mennonite reality in South Russia appeared almost utopian—with their “mild and peaceful ethos.” While it is easy to find examples of all the "holy virtues" of the Mennonite community, only when we are honest about both good deeds and misdemeanors does the Russian Mennonite tradition have something authentic to offer—or not. Rudnerweide was one of a few Molotschna villages with a Mennonite brewery and tavern , which in turn brought with it life-style lapses that would burden the local elder. For example, on January 21, 1835, the Rudnerweide Village Office reported that Johann Cornies’s sheep farm manager Heinrich Reimer, as well as Peter Friesen and an employed Russian shepherd, came into the village “under the influence of brandy,” and: "…at the tavern kept by Aron Wiens, they ordered half a quart of brandy and shouted loudly as they drank, banged their glasses on the table. The tavern keeper objected asking them to settle down, but they refused and...

Two evangelical Quaker missionaries and Bible distributors, Stephen Grellet and William Allen, visited the Mennonite colonies in 1819. They were invited to Russia by their “friend” Tsar Alexander I four years earlier ( note 1 ). The missionaries were advocates of prison reform, good hospitals and schools—including for girls—religious lessons and the broad distribution of Bibles. Their purpose was to teach, to “strengthen,” “comfort” and “give much counsel to Mennonite elders and ministers,” and to distribute Christian reading materials” ( note 2 ). The Quakers found kindred spirits. Allen wrote his daughter that “the whole subject of these [Mennonite] colonies is so interesting, that I hardly know how to keep my letter in moderate compass” ( note 3 ). Two years later the Molotschna was visited by a delegation from the non-denominational British and Foreign Bible Society and the Russian Bible Society—the latter headed by the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs and Education in the gov...

With basic physical needs addressed, in 1805 Chortitza pioneers were ready to recover their religious roots and to pass on a faith identity. They requested a copy of Menno Simons’ writings from the Danzig mother-church especially for the young adults, “who know only what they hear,” and because “occasionally we are asked about the founder whose name our religion bears” ( note 1 ). The Anabaptist identity of this generation—despite the strong Mennonite publications in Prussia in the late eighteenth century—was uninformed and very thin. Settlers first arrived in Russia 1788-89 without ministers or elders. Settlers had to be content with sharing Bible reflections in Low German dialect or a “service that consisted of singing one song and a sermon that was read from a book of sermons” written by the recently deceased East Prussian Mennonite elder Isaac Kroeker ( note 2 ). In the first months of settlement, Chortitza Mennonites wrote church leaders in Prussia:  “We cordially plead ...

When the first Mennonites arrived at Chortitza in 1789, they landed in the immediate vicinity of Fortress Alexandrovsk , today Zaporizhzhia. March 23, 1788 : The first organized Mennonite group to leave Danzig for Russia was led by land scout Jakob Höppner; they were advised to leave on smaller ships docked near the village of Bohnsack to avoid attention, and not from Danzig itself ( note 1 ). After a short early-morning farewell near the Lutheran parish church in Bohnsack on Easter morning, Höppner family plus seven others totaling fifty individuals embarked on their journey to Russia ( note 2 ). Because official permission for visas was granted only with pressure from St. Petersburg, the first groups of families—much smaller than originally expected, “mostly people without property such as milkmen, carpenters and labourers”—prepared to leave quietly in March 1788. But membership in this group too was not automatic with a visa; for example, “Arendt Fast and Jakob Willms … were lef...