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,” http://www.nestormakhno.info.
 

Schrag, Alyssa, Peace or Persecution, Bethel College Research Paper, 2012.