MINORITY REPORT Mennonite Identities in Imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine Reconsidered, 1789–1945 Minority Report Mennonite Identities in Imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine Reconsidered, 1789–1945 EDITED BY LEONARD G. FRIESEN UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London www.utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0194-5 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable- based inks. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies __________________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Minority report Minority report : Mennonite identities in imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine reconsidered, 1789−1945 / edited by Leonard G. Friesen. (Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0194-5 (cloth) 1. Mennonites − Soviet Union − History. 2. Ukrainians − Soviet Union − History. I. Friesen, Leonard George, 1956−, editor II. Title. III. Series: Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite studies DK34.M39M56 2018 289.7'47 C2017-904296-3 __________________________________________________________________________ University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada To Harvey Dyck Contents Acknowledgments ix A Note on Transliteration and Nomenclature xi Introduction 3 leonard g. friesen Part One: Overviews: New Approaches to Mennonite History 1 “Land of Opportunity, Sites of Devastation”: Notes on the History of the Borozenko Daughter Colony 25 svetlana bobyleva 2 Afforestation as Performance Art: Johann Cornies’ Aesthetics of Civilization 61 john r. staples Part Two: Imperial Mennonite Isolationism Revisited 3 Mennonite Schools and the Russian Empire: The Transformation of Church-State Relations in Education, 1789–1917 85 irina (janzen) cherkazianova 4 A Foreign Faith but of What Sort? The Mennonite Church and the Russian Empire, 1789–1917 110 oksana beznosova viii Contents 5 Mennonite Entrepreneurs and Russian Nationalists in the Russian Empire, 1830–1917 142 nataliya venger Part Three: Mennonite Identities in Diaspora 6 Mennonite Identities in a New Land: Abraham A. Friesen and the Russian Mennonite Migration of the 1920s 181 john b. toews Part Four: Mennonite Identities in the Soviet Cauldron 7 Collectivizing the Mutter Ansiedlungen: The Role of Mennonites in Organizing Kolkhozy in the Khortytsia and Molochansk German National Districts in Ukraine in the Late 1920s and Early 1930s 211 colin p. neufeldt 8 Kulak, Christian, and German: Ukrainian Mennonite Identities in a Time of Famine, 1932–1935 260 alexander beznosov 9 Caught between Two Poles: Ukrainian Mennonites and the Trauma of the Second World War 287 viktor k. klets Appendix: Dnipropetrovsk State University, Khortitsa ’99, and the Renaissance of Public (Mennonite) History in Ukraine 319 leonard g. friesen List of Contributors 333 Index 335 Acknowledgments I have been privileged to work on this manuscript with a cohort of fine historians from Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Canada. I wish in particular to thank John Staples and Nataliya Venger for their wise counsel and steadfast encouragement throughout this project. Richard Ratzlaff, Acquisitions Editor extraordinaire, warrants special mention for his strong support from the outset, and for being gently but steadfastly demanding as the manuscript went through various revisions. I thank him and the many others at the press who helped prepare Minority Report for publication. In the end, it is all the stronger for their efforts, and all of contributors are honoured to have this col- lection published by the University of Toronto Press. Jane Buckingham provided a first translation for versions of several chapters that were originally submitted in the Russian language, and I thank her. I, however, take full responsibility for the final shape of all translations, especially given the manner in which I worked with the respective historians on how best to communicate their findings to English-language readers. Chapters 1, 3–5, 8, and 9 were all submitted in Russian and subsequently translated. Thanks also to Serhii Plokhy. The Appendix of this volume lays out the vital role that he played in cultivating the rigorous academic engagement of Ukraine’s minorities by Ukrainian historians. What must be said about Serhii however, is that as prodigious as his scholar- ship has been, even it is no match for the warmth of his personality and the generosity of his person. I first came across Harvey Dyck’s name when I read a beautifully evocative article he had written for Mennonite Life. I was finishing my fourth undergraduate year of study at the time and had set my sights x Acknowledgments on graduate studies in Russian history. I eventually chose the Univer- sity of Toronto for that next chapter – or rather it accepted me into its ranks in the fall of 1980. Harvey was the first academic to welcome me there, and he later served as my doctoral nauchnii rukovoditel’. I learned a great deal about the art of teaching from Harvey in addition to what he taught me about research and writing, though his influence in time extended well beyond merely academic achievements. Even so, noth- ing quite prepared me for the way that colleagues and “ordinary citi- zens” in Ukraine spoke about him during my visit to Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia in 2011. He was, quite simply, highly esteemed in their memories. I could say more, but to do so would take away from the work itself and its concluding Appendix. In short, then, and on behalf of all contributors, this work is dedicated to you, Harvey, for a life well lived and a job well done. A Note on Transliteration and Nomenclature Questions of translation and transliteration bedevil any work writ- ten in English that uses Ukrainian, Russian, English, and German lan- guage sources; especially one that is focused on a corner of the world known over the years as New Russia, southern Ukraine, Ukraine, and simply Russland. What is the best way to proceed in a setting where Dutch, Low German, High German, Ukrainian, and Russian have all played a role and where there are also forms that could best be described as “common practice” in English, such as “Alexander” over the more accurate “Aleksandr”? The following will inform this publication. In general, place names will follow the Russian forms for the imperial era and the Ukrainian form after 1917. This means that the mother Mennonite settlement will switch from Khortitsa to Khortytsia in 1917; Ekaterinoslav will become Katerynoslav, and so on. Some names (for example Alexander and Nicholas) will follow norms of common usage in English. I have also opted for the Russian transliteration of Molochna and Khortitsa over the Germanized ver- sions of Molotschna and Chortitsa favoured by Mennonite memoir- ists, and Mennonites themselves. Even so, there will inevitably be an eclectic nature to such matters and I fear that some politicized sensi- tivities may be strained. I ask the reader’s forbearance. Indeed, this very complexity reflects the richly diverse and dynamic socio-political and cultural milieu into which “Russian” Mennonites entered south- ern Ukraine in 1789 and after. It has been a particular challenge to know how to refer to the uni- versity in Ukraine which generated many of the chapters in this xii A Note on Transliteration and Nomenclature collection. Its short form in the 1990s and earlier could best be trans- lated as “Dnipropetrovsk State University.” In 2000 it was renamed “Dnipropetrovsk National University,” and as this publication moved to press it was anticipated that the name would soon change to “Dnipro National University” (the city of Dnipropetrovsk was offi- cially renamed Dnipro in May, 2016). I have attempted to be histori- cally accurate in all instances, and not to anticipate future likelihoods. MINORITY REPORT Introduction leonard g. friesen This volume offers a bold and timely reassessment of Mennonites in Imperial Russia and the former Soviet Ukraine. It significantly enriches our understanding of minority relations in the history of the Black Sea littoral, an area of long-standing interest to Russia, while provid- ing important insight into the history of Ukraine as a contemporary state. The historians included here debate how Mennonites interacted with the larger world around them, how those relations changed over time, and how those interactions in turn influenced Mennonites’ self- perception and representation. As the contributors themselves acknowledge, both Mennonites and non-Mennonites began to debate these very issues as the first Mennonite colonists settled on the banks of the Dnipro River in 1789. Perhaps not surprisingly, opinions varied dramatically from the start. Some maintained that Mennonites were a pilgrim people remarkably unengaged with the larger society. Others declared that these Mennonites, themselves Dutch and German Chris- tians who had emerged out of the Reformation as religious pacifists, were an integral part of that larger Slavic world despite their relatively discrete settlements. The revolutionary upheavals of 1917 and after intensified the impor- tance of this discussion. Many now concluded that Mennonites were largely