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TBR HISTORY ARTICLE - THE FATE OF THE MENNONITES IN RUSSIA & THE USSR

INTRODUCTION

FOLLOWING THEIR DEFEAT in the Great Peasant War (1524-25), in which
the poor farmers of Germany fought against the injustices of the
ruling civil and clerical authorities, many of the peasants formed
into small communities of likeminded believers in a strictly literal
interpretation of the Bible, _sola scriptura, _without
intermediaries. One such religious community was the Mennonites.

Their core religious beliefs as “Anabaptists” forbade infant
baptism and military service; these two strictures alone evoked enmity
and persecution at the hands of both the established Catholic and
Protestant churches in Europe well into the 17th century, eventually
forcing the Mennonites to emigrate out of central Europe to Russia and
the New World, where they could practice their faith without fear of
discrimination or persecution by any established church or government.

In the end the Mennonites were compelled to flee Communist
Russia—not because of their religion but because of their race and
class. They were Germans, and they were successful in both agriculture
and industry, which is to say they were anathema to the Jewish
bolsheviks.

BY DANIEL W. MICHAELS

In 1768 Catherine the Great invited the Mennonites living in West
Prussia to come to Russia to farm the steppes north of the Black Sea
in Ukraine, granting them religious freedom and exemption from
military service. The first Mennonite settlement in Russia, Chortitza,
was founded in 1789, followed a few years later by Molotschna, which
eventually grew into a colony consisting of 57 satellite villages.
True to her word, Catherine ensured that the Germans enjoyed virtual
self-government, their own schools and exemption from military
service.

So successful were the newcomers in agricultural and industrial
enterprises over the years that by the 20th century, the Mennonites in
Russia had become major landholders and industrial entrepreneurs.
Unfortunately, World War I and the subsequent Austro-German
occupation, the October Revolution of 1917, and ultimately the Russian
Civil War brought total chaos to Ukraine, engulfing and shaking the
Mennonite settlements. 

In the course of the war and the immediate postwar period, for
example, Kiev, the capital, was first captured by the bolsheviks in
February 1918, then by the Germans in March 1918, by the bolsheviks
again in February 1919, by the White Army in August 1919, by the
bolsheviks for the third time in December 1919, by the Polish army in
May 1920, and finally by the bolsheviks for the fourth time in June of
1920.

In just a few years, the success and wealth achieved by the Mennonites
in 150 years of hard work and competence made them enemies of the
state. The bolsheviks labeled the German settlers “kulaks” and
exploiters and proceeded to expropriate their property and industries.
Many in the settlements were hounded, killed, or shipped off to the
gulag. All of Russia was in a state of turmoil. Bolsheviks, czarist
loyalists, Cossacks, nihilists, looters, the homeless, anarchists and
marauders of all sorts prowled the countryside, ravaging, raping,
arresting, stealing, killing, and confiscating whatever and whenever
they chose, destroying much of what the Mennonites had accomplished.
One particularly ruthless Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno,
especially targeted the Mennonites as privileged foreigners and
attacked their settlements.

Makhno, otherwise known as Batko (“Little Father”), rose from
extreme poverty in Ukraine to head a radical anarchist movement
eponymously called “Makhnovism” and to command its Revolutionary
Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, also known as the Anarchist Black
Army. This anarchist army battled, in turn, against the Ukrainian
nationalists, the Austro-German occupation, the White armies under
generals Denikin and Wrangel, and with particular relish, against the
Mennonites.

Makhno’s father died when Nestor was still an infant. The boy
attended primary school at age 8, but left school at age 12 to work as
a farmhand on the estates of nobles and the farms of wealthy kulaks,
among whom were local Mennonite communities. Makhno later wrote
bitterly of his early experiences:

At this time I began to experience anger, envy and even hatred toward
the landowner and especially toward his children—those young
slackers who often strolled past me sleek and healthy, well dressed,
well groomed and scented, while I was filthy, dressed in rags,
barefoot, and reeked of manure from cleaning the barn.

Makhno’s hatred blinded him to the fact that most of the Mennonites
themselves were also poor at first and oppressed by German government
and church authorities, but through decades of hard work and devotion
to their faith were able to build communities in Russia and elsewhere
with decent living standards that were often higher than the general
level. Not only do Mennonites not solicit government help, asking only
to be left alone, but they are often the first to aid neighbors in
need.

Makhno’s movement was based on five anarchistic principles:
rejection of all political parties; rejection of all forms of
dictatorship, including that of the bolsheviks; negation of any
concept of a central state; rejection of any “transitional period”
necessitating a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat; and
self-management of all workers through free local workers councils.
The Black Army consisted of about 15,000 troops. Followers of the
movement included mostly Ukrainian peasants, Jews,
anarchists, _naliotchki _(apolitical armed bandits) and recruits
from other countries.

Although Makhno and the Black Army have sometimes been accused of
“anti-Semitic” pogroms, quite the opposite was true. A
considerable number of Jews participated in the Makhnovist movement,
and one in particular, Vsevolod Eikhenbaum, aka “Voline,” was
friend and adviser to Makhno. Voline later, after he broke with
Makhno, wrote a book about his experiences with the movement,
criticizing his former friend and the behavior of the Black Army.

Commencing with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, recurrent raids
by the Black Army and other bandit groups, combined with Cheka (secret
police) arrests, severely threatened the continued existence of the
Mennonite communities. Cheka agents at that time were often Jews who
had the power to brutalize, shoot, or arrest family members if they
found a Bible or a few undeclared potatoes in the home. In 1919 alone
827 Mennonites were killed, and by 1923 the number would reach about
3,500.

In desperation some Mennonites collaborated with the Austro-German
occupation forces to establish _Selbstschutz _(self-defense) units
that were armed and trained under the supervision of German officers
to fight off the Black Army raids. In so doing, however, the
Mennonites broke with nearly four centuries of pacifism and
nonviolence. Faced with the horrific atrocities committed by
anarchists and Chekists alike, most Mennonites accepted
the _Selbstschutz _simply to survive.

Initially, the _Selbstschutz _was successful in warding off Makhno
and other raiders, but when the anarchists aligned themselves with the
Red Army, the Mennonites were overwhelmed and the Molotschna colony
fell under joint Machnovist-bolshevik occupation until temporarily
freed by the White Army. The anarchists and the bolsheviks then again
joined forces to defeat Wrangel’s White Army, which they did
conclusively in November 1920. Had Makhno’s Black Army not joined
the bolsheviks in this campaign, the White Army may well have taken
Moscow. Less than two weeks after their victory, Lenin ordered the Red
Army to arrest all members of Makhno’s organization, try them in
court as common criminals, and execute them. Makhno managed to escape
but was forced to flee the country.

In August 1921, Mikhail Frunze’s Ukrainian Red forces drove Makhno
and what remained of his anarchist followers into exile, first to
Romania and finally to Paris. Marxist writer Max Nomad later described
Paris at that time as a city of refuge:

Present-day Paris is the great political cemetery for shattered hopes
and broken ambitions. Liberal German professors and Spanish left-wing
anarchists, Russian “Whites” and Polish socialists, Chinese
followers of Trotsky and Armenian nationalists, Austrian monarchists
and Italian Fascist dissenters, sometimes sit at the same few tables
of a cheap restaurant unknown to each other. Paris is hospitable to
all of them provided they leave French affairs alone, and comply with
the police regulations.

One of those walking political corpses, the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno,
died late in 1934—almost forgotten by most of his contemporaries.
For years he had worn the unenviable halo of a bloodthirsty ruffian, a
leader of counterrevolutionary cutthroats and the most dreaded
organizer of anti-Semitic pogroms. Yet anyone who was anxious to see
him could meet him every Saturday night in the Russian-Jewish
Anarchist Workers Club of Paris. (Ref. 4)

Makhno’s widow and his daughter Yelena were later deported to
Germany for forced labor in World War II. After Germany’s defeat
they were arrested by the NKVD, put on trial in Kiev in 1946, and
sentenced to eight years of hard labor, after which they lived in
Kazakhstan.

After the bolsheviks secured total power in Russia, life for the
Mennonites was an unending misery, until, that is, Adolf Hitler rose
to power in Central Europe and with a resurgent Germany could
negotiate on equal terms with the Soviet Union. In the interwar period
Stalin had begun exiling “unreliable” minorities, including the
Volga Germans and the Mennonites, to Siberia and Kazakhstan. When the
Ribbentrop-Molotov Nonaggression Pact collapsed and German forces
plunged into Russia and Ukraine, the Mennonites, like many other
Ukrainians and threatened minorities, saw the Germans as liberators,
which indeed they were.

During World War II some of the younger Mennonite men actually joined
the German army when the opportunity presented itself, knowing that
this would be their last chance to save themselves and perhaps some of
their coreligionists from Communist extermination. In doing so,
however, they were later criticized by some Mennonite elders outside
Russia, who thought it was a “grave mistake.” The situation of
those in Russia very much resembled that of American Quakers forced to
make the same hard decision during the War Between the States, so ably
presented in the film _Friendly Persuasion _with Gary Cooper.

When, as the result of massive military aid from the United States,
the tide of war changed after Stalingrad, the residents of Molotschna
and Chortitza were evacuated first to the Nazi Reichsgau Wartheland
and then to Germany where, as _Volksdeutsche, _they were granted
German citizenship. Regrettably, after the war many of them were
turned over by the Allied occupation forces to the Red
Army—ostensibly for repatriation, but in reality for death, the
gulag or exile to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

After the collapse of Communism in 1990, the new Russian government
permitted the surviving Mennonites to immigrate to Germany, which of
course they did. Finding themselves in an overcrowded and highly
industrial Germany, many ironically chose to repeat the cycle. They
chose—as circumstances permitted—to move on to new destinations:
Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Belize, Bolivia, Mexico,
China, the United States and elsewhere where they were welcome and
where they could live according to their own beliefs and not those of
a domineering government or church.

To the dismay, if not the surprise, of Mennonites who found their way
to the United States, the Office of Special Investigations (OSS) of
the U.S. Justice Department was and continues to be in the process of
seeking out and prosecuting individuals thought to have collaborated
with the National Socialists in the commission of war crimes.

One such case was that of Jakob Reimer born in Friedensdorf, a
satellite village of the Molotschna community. Reimer had studied to
be a librarian before he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1940. In
July 1941 he was captured by German forces, who, upon finding he was
of German descent and fluent in the language, trained him to be a
guard in the Trawniki Camp. After the war he was evacuated to Germany
with the retreating German army, where he was granted German
citizenship. In 1952 he applied for a visa and entered the United
States; he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in April 1959. Almost 40
years later, in 1998, following a bench trial, he was prosecuted by
the OSS and denaturalized. In 2005 the Justice Department sought to
deport Reimer, but he died before the deportation procedure could be
concluded.

History has shown over and over again that individuals like Reimer in
no way govern the course of their own lives; they are caught up and
swept along by historical circumstances. For example, he was drafted
into the Soviet army; he was captured by the Germans; he was trained
to be a camp guard. He did not choose such happenings himself. When he
was a young man, his sole ambition was to be a librarian. Why does not
the Office of Special Investigations investigate and prosecute those
whose former lives were spent in the USSR and East Europe as
functionaries and enforcers of Communism before they became American
citizens—those individuals who persecuted people like Jakob Reimer?

The Cheka, the NKVD, the KGB, Smersh, the gulag system and the rest
existed decades before and decades after (until 1990) World War II.
The men and women who worked in those murderous agencies chose them of
their own volition as a profession. They met the requirements set for
that odious work by the Communist Party. Among the hundreds of
thousands of Soviet Jews and others welcomed in the United States from
former Communist countries in the past 40-50 years as refugees under
one guise or another, surely some must have been involved in Communist
criminal activities. Yet, they were not and are not vetted by American
security. The question, “Why not?” begs an answer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Nomad, Max (Maximillian Nacht), “The Warrior: Nestor Makhno, the
Bandit Who Saved Moscow,” [link removed].
 

Schrag, Alyssa, _Peace or Persecution_, Bethel College Research
Paper, 2012.

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