Fifty Transformative Years in the Russian Empire
Fifty Transformative Years in the Russian Empire[1]
The Russian Empire looms large in Mennonite memory, especially on the Great Plains, since the many Mennonite immigrants of Dutch/Polish/Prussian/Russian background who arrived in this region in the 1870s had spent 50 to 85 years there. The largest Low German community in south central Kansas traces its roots back to the Przechówko congregation in the Vistula River valley, which in 1821 migrated together to the Molotschna colony located in modern Ukraine. They were thus in the Russian Empire for the short end of this span of time.
The books written about this episode in Mennonite history could fill an entire section of a library. The University of Toronto Press even has its own book series dedicated to Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite studies. After the fall of the Soviet Union and before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Mennonites in North America with this background made the pilgrimage back to the ancestral villages in Ukraine and cruised the Dnipro River. A wide range of events to commemorate the emigration 150 years ago from there to North America have been planned, including a new documentary in Manitoba with a budget of tens of thousands of dollars. To mark the distinctive origins of the waves of this migration to Kansas, different Mennonite communities here are doing a range of independent activities instead of one centralized set of events, an approach that mirrors the cohesion of themes and the differences of approaches that marked Mennonite life in the Russian Empire as well.[2]
Next year will mark the 500th anniversary of the origins of the Anabaptist movement, and this group of Mennonites has roots going back almost that far. Sliding the scale of history out to encompass 500 years reveals that the families of many Mennonites in the Great Plains spent a few years or decades in the Netherlands or Flanders, then something like 250 years along the Vistula River – 200 of those in Poland, 50 years or less in Prussia after it partitioned and took over Poland – then some 50 years in the Russian Empire, and now 150 years in the United States. Recalling this longer version of local history might make the focus of these commemorations seem a bit skewed. Why does that 10 percent of the timeline – those 50 years in Ukraine – take up such a disproportionate amount of space in our hearts and minds?
This question obviously does not lend itself to a single or a simple answer. Nonetheless, posing it highlights the fact that obviously something significant and unusual happened for Mennonites in those 50 years that did not happen in Poland, Prussia, or the United States. How the community conceived of itself was transformed in that short time frame or, in other words, how those Mennonites thought about or experienced community identity. Major factors that changed this important area of self-perception were 1) new limits to community boundaries, which became more restrictive in terms of social relations; 2) expanded theological boundaries as Mennonites associated with outsiders to cooperate on new important Christian tasks; 3) education, which provided new intellectual tools for the task of envisioning and strengthening community identity; and 4) a bolstered sense of independence due to increasing wealth. All of this grew out of the political system the Russian Empire imposed on all foreign settlers, including Mennonites. Mennonites entered the Russian Empire as religious and economic refugees seeking tolerance that included access to economic opportunities, an aspect of toleration that had been taken away from them under Prussian rule. Those who arrived 50 years later in the United States had become a Mennonite community that thought of itself beyond congregational boundaries, but as still distinct from other Christians. They were now a community that had learned it needed to create, run, and fund new kinds of institutions so that it could follow Jesus faithfully. They had switched from a community built around replication of family and congregation to a community focused on making things happen out in the world.
Community boundaries in Poland
Mennonites in Poland lived in mixed villages with Lutherans, Catholics, and a few Jews, with mostly German and some Polish speakers. Their education was rudimentary for the most part, focused on basic literacy, and often acquired together with non-Mennonites in settings like village schools. Some Mennonites who lived in or close to cities, a small minority, would have gotten additional education. In this context, all religious formation happened in the congregation and in the family. The only institutions they ran were their own congregations including, importantly, their own poor relief. Starting in 1772 when the partitions of Poland brought most Mennonites under Prussian rule, regular contacts began between all the Mennonite congregations in Poland and the first Mennonite institutions that included all the Mennonites congregations were established to pay collective fees assessed by the Prussians. Out in the villages, Mennonites had previously taken a turn as mayor occasionally, but that was the exception, not the rule. Mennonites were clearly second- or third-class subjects of the Polish and Prussian crowns. Nonetheless, along the Vistula River, government regulations, custom, and survival all required that everyone living there cooperate with each other to maintain dikes and roads. Thus, Mennonites were integrated into important social structures along the Vistula while clearly separate in terms of religion.
Politically, Mennonites had well-honed systems of negotiation with political overlords in Poland to preserve religious tolerance that typically involved making payments. In addition, they sought and obtained Charters of Privileges from Polish and Prussia kings that would guarantee and enumerated their religious freedoms under separate Mennonite laws listed in these charters.
Before 1772, Mennonites would have mostly, but not exclusively, married other Mennonites, and such converts as there might have been came mostly from among their hired help. After 1789, both mixed marriages and any type of conversion from outside became incompatible with keeping their status as religiously tolerated individuals, an important shift that shut down social relations just as Mennonites began moving to the Russian Empire.[3]
New limits on community
While Mennonites negotiated some of the conditions of their settlement in the Russian Empire – which in 1801 were codified and guaranteed by Tsar Paul in a new charter – most of the legal framework under which they lived there was in fact set by laws that applied to all the foreign settlers coming into the state, starting in 1763 and continuing until the 1830s. These laws required colonists to settle in designated territory all as one group. In the case of the Molotschna colony, this involved settling adjacent to other groups being brought in to settle as well, such as German Lutherans and Catholics or Nogai nomads who were Muslims and expected by the Russian government to now settle down. Colonists were given the use of land for free and could buy and sell among themselves, but not leave the colony or allow non-Mennonites to settle there. Mennonites for the first time in their history lived just among Mennonite landowners in their villages and in a legal framework that initially planned for that circumstance to last.
The Russian government set up separate laws and a separate bureaucracy, called the Guardian’s Office for Foreign Colonists, to deal with these immigrants, of whom among the larger group of German-speakers Mennonites were roughly 10 percent, while additional groups came from Bulgaria, Greece, and elsewhere. These colonists were required to set up their own local government in which only landowners could vote. Offices included village mayors, a district office, and a district mayor as well as officials appointed by the government. This local government oversaw maintaining roads, recordkeeping, and basic functions of law and order, including the right to use corporal punishment as a penalty for minor crimes. There was a remarkable degree of freedom for self-government that was not available to any of the native Slavic populations under tsarist rule.
Mennonites were now faced with competing authorities between church leadership, elected political leadership, and appointed local government officials, all of whom were Mennonite. It was also possible for Mennonites who suffered from moral lapses or religious indifference to be banned from a local congregation, but they could not leave the colony as the government still classified them as Mennonite even if the local congregation no longer did. Taken together with the ban on marrying outside the church that had been implemented already in Prussia, these new conditions helped shift Mennonite identity to being a group created by common social circumstances instead of a group that shared common theological commitments. Because power resided with the government, Mennonites appointed by them to local government offices came to dominate and define Mennonite life by mid-century. Johann Cornies of Molotschna Colony is the most important example of this phenomenon.[4]
Johann Cornies; photo courtesy Mennonite Library & Archives
By mid-century a single word, “model,” in the Charter of Privileges had taken on a significance for Mennonites that was not there at the beginning. The charter itself declared that it had been granted, “…in response to a request…from the Mennonites…who according to their supervisors could serve as a model to our other colonists in the area on account of their excellent work ethic and proper moral conduct.” This prologue to the charter originally seemed merely a rhetorical flourish. By mid-century, it came to be seen as a justification for Mennonite wealth and difference as the high legal walls around Mennonite settlements began to be dismantled in favor of integrating colonists into the economic fabric of the empire. Mennonite political officials admonished Mennonites to serve as models initially to other colonists and then to all other inhabitants in order to justify their privileges and their separate social status. They used it as a secular stick to keep the Mennonite community in line, since religious authority had fractured when Mennonites split into different church groups, dropped church attendance altogether, or saw that political Mennonite leadership had more power over everyday life than the church leadership. Mennonites as a group now acted as instructors to others, instead of working with their neighbors on a common task, such as maintaining dikes together as they had in Poland. Ordinary Mennonites heard this charge to be a “model” as proof of their superiority over other groups, while locals resented being told to emulate Mennonites, planting the seeds of animosity that sprouted in the early twentieth century under more extreme conditions.[5]
Thus, by the time Mennonites left Russia, their community had added high political, economic, and social walls to the theological walls they brought with them to keep outsiders out. That their own leaders along with some Russian officials were telling Mennonites that they were a model for others to emulate meant that after 50 years they left with a much different self-image than when they arrived.
New communities of cooperation
At the same time as these new colonist laws reshaped Mennonite communal identity to be more exclusionary, a new openness to outside theological impulses and cooperation began to restructure Mennonite theological boundaries. The Mennonites’ experience in Poland and Prussia with other Christians was perhaps friendly in the villages, but Protestant and Catholic clergy often harassed Mennonites, called for their expulsion, or found new ways to place extraordinary taxes and fees on them. One particularly egregious example among many was the practice for decades of Lutheran pastors forcing Mennonites to pay them for funerals that Mennonite pastors conducted. Since Mennonites did their visitations in homes and then transported the bodies to their rural cemeteries by horse-drawn wagon, they were sometimes charged the much higher fees for funerals with full processions, as if they were rich city folks.
Yet also about the time Mennonites were leaving Prussia for the Russian Empire, a new type of contact with other Christians became possible, stirring controversy and division among Mennonites. The most important of these new contacts were with Pietists. Pietism was a 17th-century response to what some saw as an overly formal and rationalistic Protestant orthodoxy that only focused on proper doctrines and was seen to ignore both the Holy Spirit and holy living. Pietists instead promoted a living, personal connection to the risen Jesus, Bible study, prayer, and a life that demonstrated Jesus’ love for the lost and the poor. In one case, this new movement rejuvenated and took over an older, smaller denomination, the Moravian Brethren. In other cases, Pietists remained in their state churches but founded new organizations, such as Bible and mission societies, and invited all like-minded Christians to join them, explicitly wooing Mennonites with personal visits. These initiatives presented Mennonites with new opportunities and models to consider, meaning that in terms of lived discipleship and church life, they were the ones needing instruction even as in the economic sphere, they saw themselves as models for their neighbors.
In Prussia, one key avenue for these new connections was via the Brenkenhofswalde/Błotnica community, founded northeast of Frankfurt an der Oder in 1765. It was a daughter settlement of the Przechówko congregation. As a community that was quite some distance from other Mennonite settlements, they had more interaction with locals than was typical elsewhere. Especially changes during the Napoleonic Wars starting in the 1790s left a large impression here. At that time, a young Lutheran man, Wilhelm Lange, sought to avoid military service and joined the congregation, which under the terms of their 1765 Charter of Privileges kept him out of the military. He soon became their village schoolteacher. By 1802, he was a preacher there and in 1810 was elected elder. His sermons emphasized the need for salvation and a personal connection with God, typical Pietist themes that resonated well with Mennonite understandings and that attracted some local Lutherans to the church services as well.
As one of his first acts as elder, Lange arranged for a tour for himself and one of the regional travelling ministers of the Moravian Brethren, Pastor Gottlieb Jahr, to visit many of the Mennonite congregations in the Vistula valley and delta, where both were well received. In 1814, many of those congregations then voted to allow members to join either the London or Berlin Bible Societies, the first time these Mennonites approved working with other Christians on a common goal. Some, like the large Heubuden congregation, gave money as a congregation, while in other cases individuals donated on their own, a type of insipient Mennonite individualism in religious matters.
About a decade later, just as the Przechówko congregation was getting ready to move to the Russian Empire, an English Baptist, William Henry Angas, made the same rounds of Mennonite congregations asking for donations to Baptist missionary efforts in India. This kicked off long-standing arrangements for Mennonites to donate to a variety of mission societies, and more importantly, to start hosting large annual mission festivals that brought Mennonites and non-Mennonites together for days of prayer meetings, worship, and reports from the mission fields. Already in 1829 Mennonites contributed roughly 15 percent of the total annual income to the Protestant Danzig Mission Society. The change from being harassed by other Christians to being welcomed and even courted was a stunning reversal that lowered theological barriers to cooperation for Mennonites with a pietist bent. The change also deeply offended traditionalists.[6]
After 1812, government officials back in the Brenkenhofswalde area tightened restrictions on private meetings, fearing subversive political activities. They categorized Mennonite church services as such, since they argued incorrectly that Mennonites were not a tolerated church. While in other cases Mennonites would have appealed to officials in Berlin to instruct local officials to recognize their legal status, Elder Lange instead arranged for Mennonite church services to be conducted under the supervision of the Moravian Brethren denomination, bringing legal relief and regular visits from traveling Moravian preachers. At their suggestion, Mennonites introduced the practice of child dedication services. When in 1821 the Przechówko group settled in Molotschna, their elder, Peter Wedel, was instrumental in promoting the Russian Bible Society for the first time to the Mennonites already there, causing considerable consternation among the traditionalist church leaders who remained skeptical of any cooperation with non-Mennonites.[7]
In 1830 the Brenkenhofswalde group were faced with new restrictions from the Prussian government if they wished to maintain their military service exemption. In addition to now being restricted from buying real estate, they would also have to pay a new 3 percent income tax. Instead of complying, the group arranged to emigrate to Molotschna in 1834, staying at first with their kin in and around Alexanderwohl village before starting their own church and village at Gnadenfeld. The imperial government gave special permission for 40 families to immigrate. But the Brenkenhofswalde community only had a little more than 20 households. As word got out, a number of Lutheran families who had been attending the Mennonite church asked to join. Prussian law allowed converts to join the Mennonites but would not recognize any military service exemption for them or their children, which typically meant Mennonites would not accept converts, since they did not want to provoke conflict with the Prussian government. Since these Lutheran converts would be moving to the Russian Empire where they would be considered Mennonites and exempted, 14 Lutheran households were added to the congregation and made the move.[8]
This Gnadenfeld congregation brought important new Pietist practices and connections to Molotschna. In 1837, Elder Wilhelm Lange’s nephew, Friedrich Lange, was baptized on his way to Gnadenfeld. He was well known in the community and elected to be preacher the next year and elder in 1841 after Wilhelm’s death. He was a close friend and collaborator with Eduard Wüst, a Pietist Lutheran pastor at the Neu Hoffnung Lutheran congregation near Berdyans’k. All of these connections brought mission interest, wider cooperation with non-Mennonites, and renewed commitments to a personal relationship with Jesus into the Molotschna colony. It also in 1860 resulted in the schism that led to the division between the Mennonite Brethren and the “churchly-minded,” as the more traditional Mennonites were called at that time.
One strand of the Mennonite Brethren leadership sought ties to Baptists as they shared many common theological understandings. By the early 1870s, however, this new group came to understand they would have to reassert a Mennonite identity if they wished to remain in the Russian Empire and claim exemption from military service, something that did not interest the Baptists. Thus, over the course of developments spanning several decades a new Mennonite Brethren denomination came into being.[9]
In the realm of relations with other Christians, and in thinking about how to relate to the world as Christians, Mennonites saw, borrowed, and created significant new avenues of engagement from and with other Christians. Just as the practices of living into new social boundaries altered and strengthened a communal Mennonite identity, so too did the struggle to renew spiritual life within the community and efforts to mobilize the Mennonite community for joint work out in the world by supporting various missions.
Education
By the 1870s, Mennonites in the Russian Empire had acquired a new and deep interest in education. They created their own education system complete with staffing, resourcing, and training. The roots of this system go back to developments along the Vistula River.
Mennonites in Poland for the most part approached education like they did taking care of the dikes. It was a task best coordinated with the neighbors. There are a few sporadic mentions of exclusive Mennonite schools in the early period, but mostly Mennonites went to one-room village schools with their neighbors. Some education was important, and literacy would have been much more common than for the peasant population generally. Yet the idea of specifically Christian education came to Mennonites from Pietist influence.
In 1826, members of the Danzig and Heubuden congregations in the Vistula Delta started a school across the river from Marienburg/Malbork in the hamlet of Rodlofferhuben. The first teacher was the nephew of Wilhelm Lange, Friedrich Lange, who later became the elder in Gnadenfeld. He had been teaching in the village of Montau/Mątawy and then in a city school in Graudenz/Grudiądz. Yet at this time he was still a member of the Lutheran church. Common Pietist commitments made this kind of ecumenical engagement possible in a school setting. In a congregational setting among Mennonites at this time, it was not. Thus, schools also provided new ways for some Mennonites to reimagine the narrower scope of their community.
Friedrich Lange at the same time was a cofounder of the Danzig Mission Society and its active promoter. The school was the first location for Mennonite mission festivals. Lutheran clergy from Marienburg succeeded in getting the school closed in 1836 and it then moved a little north to Bröskerfelde. The mission festivals followed it there and continued for decades.[10]
The community in Brenkenhofswalde in the 1820s was influenced by the Moravian Brethren pastors to also create their own school with a specific focus on educating children in a school setting for a Christian life. This was seen as an important follow up to the idea behind child dedication and added a new component to Christian formation beyond the family and church. A local Mennonite farmer, Peter Jantz, began a school out of a room in his house. In 1831, the local school inspector shut the school down because Jantz did not have a teacher’s certificate. After that, students from there who wanted more than a basic education went to the Mennonite school first in Rodlofferhuben and then Bröskerfelde.
Another Brenkenhofswalde teacher in this time was Tobias Voth. He began teaching in various area schools in 1807 and eventually managed to pass the teacher certification test, which landed him a better paying job at a city school in Graudenz. After he married a Lutheran girl, they both were converted to a Pietist understanding of faith after reading a prominent Pietist author named Jung-Stilling. In 1820, Johann Cornies called Voth to Molotschna to teach at a newly opened more advanced school called the Ohrloff Central School. Although he only stayed here for six years because of conflicts with Cornies, in that time he introduced both a love for higher education to his students and brought the style of stressing missions, organizing mission festivals, a warm piety, and a new style of music to Molotschna. This school burned down in 1848 and was inactive until the 1860s.[11]
In the meantime, a new central school in Chortitza, the oldest Mennonite colony in the Russian Empire, rose to prominence. Heinrich Franz was born in 1812 near Schönsee across the river from Przechowka and was a member of one of the congregations in that village. He was an early student of Friedrich Lange at Rodlofferhuben, then taught at Brenkenshofwalde from where he joined the migration to Gnadenfeld and taught there in the new village school. From 1846 to 1858 he was the main teacher at the Chortitza Secondary School. He had teacher certificates from both Prussia and Russia. He wrote his own math curriculum for teaching arithmetic that was widely emulated in Mennonite village schools. He also introduced the system of using numbers instead of notes for musical notation, making it easier to copy out music and thereby promoting better singing. Some more conservative congregations use a version of his system to this day.[12]
“Holy God, We Praise Your Name,” Frankenthal MB Hymnal
In 1835 in Halbstadt, Molotschna, another secondary school was opened. The initiative here was from the government office responsible for foreign settlers. The purpose of the school was to provide teachers for the villages’ schools and Russian-speaking clerks for government offices. Except for the teacher of Russian language, Mennonites with teacher certifications staffed this school. But it was not until 1875 that Russian was slowly introduced as a language of instruction. This expectation that children should be taught to speak and write Russian in school was one motivation for some to migrate to North America in the 1870s.
What is the impact of building a Mennonite education system from the ground up that encompasses not only numerous village schools, but also a higher education system to train teachers and provide at least some of the system’s curriculum? All of this focus on education produced a highly literate peasant population involved in its own administration. One historian has called this the most literate periphery area in the entire Russian Empire with the densest collection of historical records. In addition, having records from farmers’ perspectives instead of just the nobility or state bureaucrats is another unique and important contribution.[13]
Beyond the boon to historians, education plays an important role is shaping how a community sees itself. An oral community might not reflect as much on change over time. A more traditional religious community might see itself as living in God’s time and kingdom and not account as much for innovations or influence from the outside. A community that builds its own education system that can obtain state certification has created the institutions and proclivity to record and to attempt to steer its own history. Some of these early prominent schoolteachers were also the first Mennonite historians. A community with a recorded history measures itself differently against the past or the present than a community that sees itself as always just directly linked to God and not the social environment.
Historians have noted how in the first half of the 19th century the rise of literacy, newspapers, and the connections thereby engendered created larger communities of belonging among people who spoke the same language. Thus, this period is the foundational era for the rise of modern nationalism. Perhaps these same developments among Mennonites contributed to a new communal identity that went beyond the local congregation to include all Mennonites, despite the differences in history and theological orientations.[14]
In any case, a community with the experience of and commitment to education is ready to hit the ground running in a new country and recreate its own educational system almost as soon as it arrives in a new world. And in this Mennonite educational history the Przechowka congregation, especially via its Gnadenfeld affiliate, had a role to play in events that led to the creation of both Bethel and Tabor Colleges. Bethel is 13.1 miles from the current Alexanderwohl church building, Tabor is 13.3 miles. Given that Bethel’s first president, C.H. Wedel, was from the Alexanderwohl congregation, perhaps it is fitting that their church building is ever so slightly closer to Bethel. In any case these dual educational institutions so close to each other on the Great Plains are certainly one of the more surprising legacies of the sojourn in Ukraine.
Wealth
Mennonites in Poland and Prussia would have enjoyed a higher standard of living than most of the population, who were serfs of the nobility, and therefore could not own their own land. But Mennonites were not that much different from their immediate neighbors who also owned their own farms in lowland areas. Economic equality with their neighbors changed for Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the distance to peasants there who were serfs only increased.
Most Mennonites arriving the Russian Empire through the 1830s were given control of 160 acres of land. They could pass it on to single heir, sell it to another person in the colony, or rent it out, but they did not hold the deed to it in the modern sense until after reforms in the 1870s. Other Mennonites received 80 acres – or for the few pursuing a trade or who arrived too late, a three-acre homestead. In addition, Mennonites got interest-free loans to help cover transportation and startup costs, plus an initial length of time without taxes. These options were only available to colonists, not to locals.[15]
Mennonites who had come from wet lowlands in Poland had depended on intensive livestock operations, typically dairy cows, for their livelihood. Perhaps almost a third came as craftsmen. Neither option would work in the steppes of Ukraine, as the climate was much drier and there were no towns to provide a market for anything craftsmen could produce. Environmental constraints forced them to alter their way of life, and a rapid rate of population growth, both from a high birth rate and continued migration, put real pressure on their ability to provide a livelihood for everyone.
After the initial years of getting established and then the early disruption of the Napoleonic wars, after 1815 Mennonites made their first shift from subsistence farming to market-based livestock production. For the next couple of decades, Merino sheep wool was the major cash crop. The idea came from the Russian Guardianship Committee, promoted and implemented by Johann Cornies’ administration of Mennonite affairs. Given the existing climate and steppe grass, keeping one sheep required about an acre of land. Merino wool would bring seven to ten times more on the market than native wool, although the Merino sheep were not well adapted to the climate and needed more care.
As is often the case in life, innovative resolution of one problem created a different problem. One issue was that imperial law did not allow for the division of farms, so that only one child could inherit a farm and other children would have to go elsewhere. Even though the Mennonite administration saw to it that widows and siblings were paid their fair share, there was still a growing need for new farms. Yet given the economics around sheep grazing, there was a lot of pressure to find and control additional grazing land. Molotschna Colony had some reserves that were held on government orders for new settlers. In the meantime, the current landowners, who were the only ones with votes in the colony elections, wrote themselves favorable grazing leases on this land and blocked access to it by the landless among them. Mennonites were successful in increasing both wool production and the percentage of their population who could not buy land. In 1839 in other German colonies, the landless, mostly young families waiting their turn, were 16% of households, while in Molotschna it was 47%. Soon landlessness was passed down to the second and third generations, causing a more permanent division of Mennonites into different economic classes than had been the case in Poland.[16]
When Mennonites from Brenkenhofswalde settled in Molotschna in 1834, they all got a farm, but the few wealthier families were able to build better houses more quickly, while most had to start with a sod house. Yet for some in the group, this land would have been a better opportunity than they would have ever found back in Prussia and this group did all start with the same land allotment.[17]
Despite this internal Mennonite differentiation, generally between those well off and those without land, Mennonites as a group nonetheless continued to outpace even other German colonists economically, much less Slavic peasants who had started with less land and fewer opportunities. Much of this was due to Mennonite efforts and initiatives, but not just in terms of hard work and mutual support. Mennonites were the most effective group at negotiating with the government as they were moving into the country. Not only did they obtain provisions securing religious freedom, but they also received lower tax rates than other colonists and paid at the same rate as the much poorer state peasants. In addition, in Chortitza the colony took until 1847 to pay back its loan, which had been given interest-free, while in Molotschna the government eventually forgave 20% of the loan.
Starting in 1836, Mennonite economic activity turned to grain production. The most important factor here was the introduction of a black fallow system of crop rotation, which left a quarter of the ground fallow each year, with explicit instructions from Johann Cornies to avoid cover crops, which depleted soil moisture, a major concern after a devastating drought in 1833. Leaving the fallow fields black for one year, instead of waiting for cover grass to sprout and then grazing it for several years, as had been the practice, doubled the yield per acre by 1848. On top of that, Molotschna Mennonites also doubled the acreage under cultivation in the same time span. This practice as it spread elsewhere eventually helped turn Ukraine into a major grain production region, first in the Russian empire and then on a global scale.
A second innovation in 1836 was the government’s establishment of a new port at Berdyans’k, just 40 miles east of Molotschna. This made access to markets much easier, which was vital for switching to grain production – heavier and harder to transport than wool. But now Mennonite farmers had relatively easy access to broad markets. Competition with cheaper wool now entering the global market from Australia sped along this transition. Grain production at scale was not possible in most parts of the world, giving Mennonites in Ukraine an important advantage.[18]
The growing gap between land-owning and landless Mennonites fed conflict from the 1840s on. One effort to address this problem, proposed in 1836 and implemented in 1841, was the founding of Neuhalbstadt in Molotschna Colony as a location to centralize craft production. This was a crucial first step away from relying exclusively on agriculture for Mennonite livelihoods. There were already a number of breweries, vinegar manufactures, and a cloth factory in the area. In 1846, the government lifted restrictions that limited Mennonites’ trade and movements to their own districts, so that some of these new enterprises started to take on a regional importance, creating a new class of wealthy Mennonite industrialists and providing basic employment for many landless. By the 1870s, when some Mennonites started to leave the Russian Empire for North America, Mennonite mills were producing a third of the flour for the three southern imperial provinces and roughly that percentage of all agricultural machinery for the area as well.[19]
Mennonites as a community had certainly grown much wealthier in their time in the Russian Empire, being at the leading edge of improvements in agriculture and industry at the start of the Industrial Age there. While many individuals did not share in this general prosperity, as a society Mennonites were now well integrated into the local, regional, and even imperial economy, having faced major transformations in the previous 50 years and emerging as much different economic actors as they left the Russian Empire than they had been when they arrived.
Conclusion
The recasting of Mennonites’ self-image in the Russian Empire might be one way to explain the prominence of this short time in our historical memory. The outside pressure applied by imperial law to foreign colonists to live separately reinforced externally for 50 years the internal theological preference to only marry and socialize with other Mennonites. This community was now a social construct overlaid on the theological foundation. Engaging in new churchly tasks outside of traditional boundaries, like mission and Bible societies, provided a new sense of Christian purpose reimagined with an external focus. Education was also given religious meaning, as it joined family and congregation as an important location of Christian formation. At the same time, education enabled Mennonites to conceive of themselves in a new collective way, giving meaning and direction as a new path to the Kingdom of God for a community on the move. Being at the forefront of the explosion of wealth that accompanied the industrial revolution provided Mennonites with the wherewithal and the habits of mind to build new institutions that would preserve Mennonite unity as they labored at the common task of equipping the next generation to take this new sense of a Mennonite community out into the world. From this perspective, nothing made more sense than to build a new school on the prairie, starting just a dozen years or so after arrival in a new homeland.
Bethel College Administration Building, ca. 1894; photo courtesy Mennonite Library & Archives
The community arrived newly formed. It knew what it wanted to do. It remembered with fondness the time and place it came to think of itself as a community in the world – not just passing through on the way to heaven – although perhaps at the risk of forgetting that important historical developments happened both before and after those key 50 years in the Russian Empire.
View this speech on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTpDzX0ITAk
NOTES
[1] The article is based on a presentation given at Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church, Goessel, Kan., Feb. 18, 2024, as part of the series organized by the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum there. It focuses particularly on this congregation’s connections to the Russian Empire, beginning in 1821 and ending with migration to Kansas in 1874. Thus, only a portion of the Mennonite experience in those lands is dealt with here. The article varies slightly from that presentation, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTpDzX0ITAk. My thanks to Nancy Stucky and others involved in the planning of this event for the opportunity to present this work to a broader public. Fern Bartel, museum director, played a role in encouraging this print version to go forward.
[2] The 11 books of the Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies series can be accessed here, https://utorontopress.com/search-results/?series=tsarist-and-soviet-mennonite-studies. The Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum in Goessel, Kan., organized a series of events throughout 2024, https://www.goesselmuseum.com/country-threshing-days-goessel, as did the Swiss Mennonite Cultural Historical Association of Moundridge, Kan., https://swissmennonite.org. The Hoffnungsau congregation in Inman, Kan., organized a weekend of events, https://www.hoffchurch.com/150th-celebration. Kauffman Museum on the campus of Bethel College, North Newton, Kan., will host a special exhibition, “Unlocking the Past: Immigrant Artifacts and The Stories They Tell,” with monthly related programming from Sept. 29, 2024, through May 25, 2025. The annual Menno Simons lectures at Bethel, to be given by Eric Schmaltz from Northwestern Oklahoma State University, will also focus on these events, Oct. 27-28, 2024.
[3] For an overview, see Peter J. Klassen, Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772-1880 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 1-77.
[4] For an overview, see Leonard G. Friesen, Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: Through Much Tribulation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), John R. Staples, Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppes: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783-1861 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), and James Urry, None but Saints: The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia 1789-1889 (Winnipeg: Windflower Communications, 1989).
[5] James Urry, Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood: Europe-Russia-Canada, 1525 to 1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2006), 85-97. Charter of Privileges quotation translated by the author from Franz Isaac, Die Molotschaer Mennoniten: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte derselben (Halbstadt: H.J. Braun, 1908), 5.
[6] Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers, 54-59, 115-17, 127-36, 157-59; [Heinrich Franz], “Aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik: Geschichte der Kolonie und Gemeinde Gnadenfeld,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch (Berdjansk), 6 (1908), 38-40, available in English translation at https://www.mharchives.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GnadenfeldChronicleCombined.pdf; Peter M. Friesen, The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia (1789-1910) (Fresno: General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, 1980), 101.
[7] [Franz], “Aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch (Berdjansk), 6 (1908), 38-40; Staples, 109.
[8] Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers, 115-17; [Franz], “Aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch (Berdjansk), 7 (1909), 106-10, available in English translation at https://www.mharchives.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GnadenfeldChronicleCombined.pdf
[9] Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood, 100-102; Urry, None but Saints, 167-95; Friesen, Mennonites in the Russian Empire, 124-28.
[10] Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers, 127-34; Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood, 97-99.
[11] [Franz], “Aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch (Berdjansk), 6 (1908), 39-44; Urry, None but Saints, 105-06; Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood, 96-97.
[12] [Franz], “Aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch (Berdjansk), 6 (1908), 44-46; Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood, 709-13; Urry, None but Saints, 160-68; Glaubenslieder (Mennoniten-Brüdergemeinde Frankenthal: Frankenthal, 1994).
[13] Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood, 724-45; Urry, Mennonite, Politics, and Peoplehood, 101-03; Irina (Janzen) Cherkazianova, “Mennonite Schools and the Russian Empire: The Transformation of Church-State Relations in Education, 1789-1917,” in Minority Report: Mennonite Identities in Imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine Reconsidered, 1789-1945, ed. Leonard G. Friesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 85-109; Staples, Cross-Cultural Encounters, 14-15.
[14] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2016).
[15] Staples, Cross-Cultural Encounters, 41-44.
[16] Staples, 54-86; Urry, None but Saints, 109-112.
[17] [Heinrich Franz], “Aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch (Berdjansk), 7 (1909), 113-16.
[18] Nataliya Venger, “Mennonite Privileges and Russian Modernization: Communities on a Path Leading from Separateness to Legal and Social Integration (1789-1900),” in European Mennonites and the Challenge of Modernity over Five Centuries: Contributors, Detractors, and Adapters, ed. Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (North Newton, Kan.: Bethel College, 2016), 143-59; Staples, Cross-Cultural Encounters, 118-23; David Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 242-78, and The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), xiii-xv, xxxiii, 129-87, 386-90.
[19] Staples, Cross-Cultural Encounters, 125-130; Urry, None but Saints, 138-152.