Tatiana Filippova. The Exodus of Mennonites from the USSR in the Late 1920s

· Evangelical Christians, Mennonites, On Emigration, USSR

Tatiana Filippova

Candidate of Historical Sciences, Editor of the Department of the Journal “Rodina”

“Exodus of the Brothers!”

The Resettlement of Mennonites from the USSR in the Late 1920s

Rodina Magazine, 2002, No. 10.

In the spring of 1929, the residents of the traditional dacha areas near Moscow—Klyazma, Pushkino, Tarasovka, Losinoostrovskaya—witnessed a strange scene. A multitude of people dressed in black—men and women, old people and children—gathered at the railway stations, blocking the tracks, paralyzing train traffic. Originally from the Crimea and Ukraine, the Volga region and Siberia, the Orenburg region and Transcaucasia, Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus, they sat in silence, allowing no disorder, asking and demanding nothing from either the local residents or the local authorities…

The information that those gathered near Moscow were German Mennonites who had left their customary places of residence in Russia in order to emigrate abroad did little to clarify the situation at the time. After all, the emigration of Soviet Germans had continued for many years under Soviet rule and had therefore become a fairly familiar phenomenon. But the situation in the spring and summer of 1929 was different—in scale, in the mood of the participants, and in the methods of protest. The authorities encountered a phenomenon that left them at a loss.

Our Reference

The Mennonites were the first Protestant denomination to spread in Russia, the elders, as it were, of the German emigration. The founder of this movement in Protestantism was Menno Simons (1496–1561 or 1492–1559), a former Catholic parish priest in Friesland who broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1536. Over a quarter of a century, he recreated and reorganized Anabaptist communities that had been shattered in the religious wars in Holland and adjacent territories. He adhered to the principle of conscious baptism at an adult age, upheld the autonomy of individual communities, whose fundamental behavioral principle was to be non-resistance to the authorities by force and the refusal of believers to participate in state governance.

The main tenets of Mennonitism—personal faith, the imminent expectation of the Second Coming, the election of church ministers—were supplemented by a special spiritual climate in the communities, by the idea of a special spiritual brotherhood of co-religionists.

At the end of the 16th century Mennonites moved to Prussia, and from 1788—at the invitation of Empress Catherine the Great—they began to move to Russia, where they received socio-economic privileges and settled in the Taurida Governorate and the Asian part of the country.

The first exodus of Mennonites from Russia (1873–1882) was directly connected with the era of liberal reforms: the introduction of universal military conscription confronted members of this sect with the necessity of serving in the army, which was absolutely inadmissible from the standpoint of their religious morality. However, some Mennonites still remained in their former places.

After the surge of the emigration wave of the late 1920s and the departure of the most enterprising Mennonites from the USSR, complex processes began to take place surreptitiously in the remaining communities, caused by the interaction of the Russian soil, the foreign substratum, and the reality of “socialism, which had basically triumphed.” In the mid‑1940s, on Stalin’s initiative, the Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists was formed, which included many Protestant denominations. Most Mennonites joined the union in order to legalize their religious life with the state. Continuing to exist in Russia and Kazakhstan to this day, Mennonite organizations are just as closed to the outside world and, according to specialists, are experiencing decline.

Overall, at the beginning of the 1980s there were about 1.4 million Mennonites in the world (431,000 in the USA, 1,333,000 in Canada, 33,000 in the Netherlands, and 18,000 in Germany). It is not without interest that in the hierarchical self-awareness of Russian Germans, the designation “Mennonites” stands alongside “Swabians,” “Austrians,” and “Bavarians.” It seems that this underscores not so much the ethnic component as above all a certain “singularity,” “separateness” of this category of German settlers, who in their initial substratum represented a curious mixture of descendants of Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and Low Saxon people.

In May 1923, the Soviet government allowed Germans, like others who had suffered from “natural disasters,” to go abroad to join relatives. In this wave of German emigration, the core was already made up of representatives of the Protestant Mennonite sect. In 1925–1927, the emigration wave of Russian Germans began to subside. One of the most important reasons for this was the rapid restoration of their farms thanks to German efficiency and the temporary “connivance” of local authorities. As a result, the “microeconomic” indicators of German agricultural entrepreneurship in the late 1920s proved highly impressive.

One German farm produced over 422 rubles’ worth of marketable output, while in other farms this figure did not exceed 271 rubles. A cow of the “Red German” breed in the Orenburg District yielded up to 740 kg of salable milk per year, whereas the district average was 521 kg. A German family spent twice as much on social and cultural needs as other nationalities in the same regions.

In 1924, the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans came into existence. Soviet Germans acquired a semblance of statehood, which allowed them to develop national self-awareness to some extent.

In January 1925, the First All-Union Congress of Mennonite-Evangelical Communities took place in Moscow, which was attended by representatives of one hundred thousand Soviet Mennonites. In an appeal to the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, M. I. Kalinin, the congress put forward a number of demands that could potentially resolve the emigration problem for this category of Germans: land allocation for landless peasants, the right to self-government and religious instruction, and permission for alternative service. Most surprisingly, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and a special meeting on work among Mennonites under the Agitation and Press Department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) agreed to most of these requests. But the authorities were in no hurry to act.

On 4 November 1925, on the initiative of Lazar Kaganovich (then General Secretary of the Central Committee of Ukraine), the central board of the Union of Descendants of Dutch Emigrants in the Ukrainian SSR, which included ethnic German Mennonites, located in Kharkov, was abolished. The resolutions of the Mennonite congress also remained only on paper.

The course toward “accelerated collectivization” of peasant farms, adopted by the party at the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1927, rolled through the countryside like a steamroller of “emergency measures.” And what about the German peasantry? The level of social and property stratification there was quite high. Thus, in the Slavgorod and Orenburg districts of the Siberian Territory, wealthy German farms (mainly Mennonite) had 80–120 dessiatines of land, middle-peasant farms had 40–60, and poor farms 20 or less. It would seem that objective preconditions for the “intensification of the class struggle” were evident. However, subjective ones were lacking. Attempts by the authorities to split the German peasantry were unsuccessful. Soviet Germans showed no particular desire to display “class consciousness” by beating up their prosperous compatriots. The factor of religious-cultural tradition proved a powerful means of internal cohesion among Germans, especially Mennonites.

However, the inner mood and social orientations among this category of Soviet Germans had begun to change radically.

The year 1929 was marked by growing resistance to collectivization in all German colonies without exception. But the peculiarity of this opposition was an improbably low (compared to other regions) number of terrorist acts. Despite this outward calm, the authorities sensed the main thing: the firm desire of German colonists to leave the “country of workers and peasants.” The central authorities decided to use the period of the local Soviet election campaign to carry out “broad explanatory work among the German poor and middle peasants to expose the anti-Soviet essence of kulak-priest agitation for emigration.” The German peasants were promised: giant collective farms (but they were not effective for the well-organized farms of the colonists), Machine-Tractor Stations (but they were in no hurry to provide them with equipment), special types of rural cooperatives (but the Germans’ own forms of social organization were already quite well-adjusted).

Need it be said that the reaction of German peasants to such creativity by the authorities was rather cool. However, a number of German communities—Stundists, Baptists—reacted more actively to the pre-election agitation. Local intelligence reports mention with alarm and bewilderment that sectarians at their meetings passed resolutions: «Send a brother in Christ into the thick of the ungodly» or «send one of our own to the council of the unrighteous,» to raise the question of re-electing the Soviets. But those were Stundists. For Mennonites, any form of complicity and even contact with state power was inadmissible.

As long as the state did not force collective farm construction in German villages, Mennonites viewed the prospect of such organization rather calmly. But when the state began to implement its policy by violent methods, a significant part of the Mennonites responded by packing up and getting ready to leave…

When the flow of emigrants had already begun to leave their native places, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ordered a serious study of the situation in the German colonies. The task of conducting it was assigned to I. F. Gebgart, secretary of the Central Bureau of the German Section under the Agitation, Propaganda and Press Department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), an old German communist, an intelligent and experienced man, but naturally constrained by Marxist-Leninist dogma. From the information contained in Gebgart’s report, the authorities unexpectedly discovered that the rates of cooperation in the German colonies at the end of the 1920s were quite high. The incomes of the German population had also increased, as evidenced by the absolute growth of the middle-peasant group. In terms of “agrarian-cultural measures,” the Germans also did not need to be prodded: they willingly organized various circles and participated in amateur artistic activities.

Gebgart placed the main weight of blame for the emigration sentiments on the grassroots organs. An incorrect assessment of the economic situation of the German colonies (as entirely kulak) had led in a number of districts to impermissible excesses — excessive taxation of the colonies, disenfranchisement of up to 12 percent of the population, and also “violation of revolutionary legality.”

A separate point concerned the need to expose the “subversive activity” of the Mennonites themselves. Their characteristic religious ethics of spiritual brotherhood and equality—regardless of property status—aroused the suspicion of the authorities. «In order to consolidate their influence among the poor and middle peasants, the kulaks and clergy attract the poor into the councils of church communities, elect middle peasants as preachers among the Mennonites, saying, «we are all equal.»»

The top party leadership was satisfied by the moderation and non-abstractness of Gebgart’s assessments. It was resolved «to paralyze the segregation of the Germans,» «to intensify the struggle against attempts by the German kulaks and clergy to provoke an emigration movement among the German peasants of the USSR.»

The confrontational mood of the Central Committee was fueled by reports from the localities. Among the rumors transmitted in intelligence reports and circulating among the Germans were such as: «The German government and the League of Nations will force the Soviet government to let us out. The German Reichstag is interested in the Mennonites, and the Soviet government has begun sending them abroad; we will leave soon.»

They demanded facts of Mennonite oppositionality from Gebgart, and he quoted the slogans of “kulaks and clergy”: “Soviet power is ruining German farms…,” “Soviet power forces Mennonite youth to serve in the army…,” “Our preachers are being disenfranchised.” In his next memorandum Gebgart cited data on emigration movements: the “outright flight” of German peasants, including middle and poor peasants, from the Vannovsky District of Armavir Okrug across the Persian border, without passports, as well as the incipient emigration movement among the Germans in Volhynia.

The party leadership finally got what it wanted: a document with information about the subversive activities of class-hostile elements. Gebgart’s attempts to analyze the underlying reasons for the growth of emigration sentiments among the Germans went unheeded. It was precisely then, having lost time, initiative, and the opportunity to comprehend the German problem, that the authorities were confronted by crowds of Mennonites who blocked railway traffic near Moscow. On the northern direction alone, over the summer of 1929, more than four hundred families of German colonists gathered, numbering over one and a half thousand people. In October, a further hundred families joined them. According to reports, the overwhelming majority among them were “disenfranchised kulaks and well-to-do peasants led by Mennonite preachers.” Foreign correspondents visited them, and representatives of the German embassy distributed money to them. Some of them were later able to be sent via Riga to Germany, mainly to Hamburg. But that was only the beginning. By the spring of 1930, the emigration movement of German Mennonites had taken an unprecedented scale, and following the well-to-do families, people of modest means and even the poor began to emigrate. The situation continued to heat up, as reports came in from the localities about planned departures of German colonists to Canada, America, less frequently to Germany. The phenomenon of spontaneous mass “migration as disobedience to the ‘workers’ and peasants’ power,’” which also threatened an international scandal, provoked a barrage of inquiries addressed to the chairman of the OGPU, Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the OGPU counterintelligence department, L. Olsky, and Lazar Kaganovich, who since 1929 {worked as a secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

From a TASS bulletin “not for print” with a review of the German press for October 1929, the party authorities learned unpleasant things for themselves — about the indignation of virtually all political forces in Germany at the situation of the settlers and the attitude of the Soviet authorities toward German emigration. It was clarified that the German side’s discontent at that moment was caused not by obstacles to emigration, but by the Soviet government’s intention to “get rid of” them as quickly as possible and preferably not at its own expense. It seemed that the Mennonites, with their stubborn desire to avoid the horrors of collectivization, were not needed by anyone abroad either. The West’s outrage at the scandalous situation with the settlers worried the Kremlin and the Lubyanka.

On the text of one of the memos to the Central Committee, next to the report that the settlers’ camps were being visited by representatives of the German embassy and that about three hundred German Mennonites stranded near Moscow intended to “demonstratively go to Comrade Kalinin,” in the handwriting of Genrikh Yagoda was written in the margin: “Comrade Molotov: I propose sending them back to the localities.” And further, in the handwriting of Vyacheslav Molotov (secretary of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), from 1930 chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars) in response: “It seems the matter is serious; it must be discussed. V. Molotov.”

However, events outpaced any decisions. Over the autumn months, the number of settlers near Moscow grew from five to fifteen thousand. The unsanitary living conditions, the danger of fires due to poorly functioning stoves, the paralysis of the work of local Soviet and party bodies — all this threatened to escalate into a humanitarian catastrophe. Over the summer and autumn of 1929, only 800 people were able to be sent abroad, as the Canadian and then the German government refused to accept all the would-be German emigrants from the USSR. With particular alarm, the summaries reported that the German fascist press was actively discussing the question of “organizing aid to their racial brothers” through the German Red Cross and the Institute for Germans Abroad, and also that a number of political forces in Germany were developing a project to resettle Soviet Germans in East Prussia.

In these extreme conditions, the state organs limited themselves to the usual repressive measures. Sometimes up to five hundred families were arrested in a single night on the grounds of lacking a residence permit.

Meanwhile, the emigration wave was sweeping over ever new regions of German settlement: Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Urals, and Ukraine were faced with the problem of the German “exodus” — 20,000 people! Neither agitation raids by German communists, nor the dispatch of “shock brigades” of propagandists, nor explanatory publications in newspapers published in the USSR for Germans could change the emigration mood. What conclusions did the authorities draw? There were two:

“1) to organize the dispatch of the families located near Moscow back to their places (given their mood, this could only be carried out forcibly); 2) not to permit the arrival in the USSR of a special commission of Canadian doctors for the purpose of selecting emigrants, since it would undoubtedly (!) select only the healthy and leave the sick and disabled in the USSR.” It seemed the country of “liberated labor” actively did not want to lose a healthy, capable workforce and at the same time support the social “ballast”…

From now on, the main enemy was declared not to be the “kulak-priest” bloc of Mennonites, but “foreign agents.” In numerous secret memos addressed to Yagoda, Kaganovich, and Molotov, arrests of “persons connected with foreign organizations engaged in recruiting for emigration of German colonists from the USSR” were reported. Did the repressions against real and alleged initiators of emigration have any effect? Judging by data from the localities — no. But the authorities were resolute: on one document reporting the readiness of fifty German families to leave, Yagoda laconically wrote in the margin: “Arrests have been made.”

The German peasants stubbornly sought to leave the USSR, and the authorities just as stubbornly sought to keep them. Evidently, even the vigilant Chekists realized the problem was not limited to the subversive activities of emissaries from abroad. In late 1929 and early 1930, representatives of the Center were dispatched to several districts with German settlements to clarify the situation.

The most informative report was compiled by G. Kozlov, a responsible instructor of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), who inspected the Slavgorod and Orenburg districts of the Siberian Krai. The emigration statistics he presented spoke for themselves, refuting all class theories along with the party’s strategy of “unfolding the class struggle.” The departing population was predominantly composed of poor and middle peasants. Moreover, the emigration had drawn in some farm laborers, workers, members and chairmen of village soviets, cooperative employees, twelve agricultural artels in their entirety, and even four party members! The economic consequences were swift: half of all farms in the Slavgorod district and thirty percent in the Orenburg district were completely ruined.

We should note: by February 1930, the resettlement movement had indeed been curtailed. The authorities had no shortage of experience when it came to coercive measures. But the observant Kozlov urged the Central Committee not to rest easy. Rumors of the first eight hundred Mennonite families sent from near Moscow to Germany quickly spread among Soviet Germans, beckoning them on the road.

It is telling that among German Catholics and Protestants, the authorities managed to win over the majority of the poor. The situation with these denominations was clear: the prosperous settlers resolutely opposed collectivization in forms understandable to the Bolsheviks, thus clearly falling under the repressive roller of Soviet law. The poor, on the other hand, displayed less social solidarity with their upper strata and therefore became easier targets for manipulation by the authorities.

With the Mennonites, matters were far more complicated. They simply wanted to leave, and only to leave. Latching onto the constant refrain of Mennonite demands – freedom of religious upbringing – the party inspection reached its principal conclusion: the Mennonites, as the ideological link of the “kulak-priest bloc,” were the chief culprits of the resettlement surge.

At the same time (and almost in passing), the central authorities learned from their inspectors that by the end of the 1920s, local initiatives had led to the conscription of Mennonites into the army and labor duties. The number of those stripped of electoral rights had doubled. Teachers in Mennonite villages were being dismissed “for raising children in a religious spirit.” Since 1927, Mennonites had been persistently pressured to join the party and the Komsomol! The “excesses and distortions during grain procurement” also did nothing to improve the Germans’ optimism regarding the prospects of Soviet power.

Nevertheless, even then, a cautious attempt was made in the inspectors’ reports to convey two ideas to the authorities. First: the social behavior patterns of the Mennonites are directly linked to their religious distinctiveness; therefore, the psychological unity of the community reinforces a non-class solidarity: “a blow against the kulak rouses the poor peasant in his defense – ‘since everyone is going, I will go too, I cannot stay here,’ declares the poor peasant.” And second: “The German middle peasant as an economic type is somewhat different from the Russian middle peasant. He is more robust, stronger, infected with private-property interest, and gravitates more toward the kulak than toward the middle peasant.”

After five days of discussing the inspection results and numerous amendments to the text of the resolution, the main point of the approved measures read: “Instruct the OGPU to take a series of measures against the malicious leaders of counter-revolutionary work in the German districts.” It is clear that no inspection of the settlements was actually required for such a conclusion. The “enemy” had long been known to the party leadership.

Meanwhile, behind the veil of talk about the intrigues of “global capital,” a real threat of sowing campaign failure loomed. Yet by the spring of 1930, it became apparent that the resettlement movement had gradually subsided. After the most active segment of German Mennonites had left for Germany, those who remained near Moscow suffered sufficiently and, failing to receive assistance from abroad, returned to the places they had abandoned. The purely earthly problem of the sowing season was significant in its own way for the Mennonites as well. For them, having lost hope of leaving the “land of the ungodly,” a vital task – ethical as well – remained: concern for the community’s survival, responsibility toward the land as a blessing bestowed by the Lord. Thus, they had to sow grain and grow the harvest, finding the strength to inwardly oppose the godless authorities only within their own souls and the support of fellow community members…

In the case of the Mennonite exodus, the depth of the conflict between two types of consciousness is striking – the religious cosmos of a community of like-minded believers, closed to the outside world and open only to serving God, and the communist cosmos, subjugating earthly space at any cost. Unlike Jews, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Protestants, who are able to bracket their spiritual problems outside of everyday life, Mennonites do not separate earthly and spiritual life, striving to embody their religious ideal of conduct “here and now.” To some extent, this makes the Mennonites akin to the traditional Orthodox consciousness of Russian Old Believers. Both, when resolving the community’s most important problems, incorporate into this process the interpretation of concepts of justice and the rightness of life’s meaning; therefore, in everyday life they manifest themselves as more mystical than Catholics, more romantic than Protestants, and – most importantly – far less amenable to external control. The peculiarities of the Mennonites’ social order were perceived by the Kremlin authorities as dangerous oddities, for they unwittingly challenged the “holiest of holies” for a communist – Marx-Engels-Lenin class theory. The government, by futilely linking the overcoming of resettlement sentiments to the provocation of class battles in German settlements, was driving itself into a trap. The unusual situation demanded non-standard solutions, but the regime proved incapable of delivering them.

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