A morning worship meeting at Chortitza, the "Old Colony" in Russia, in 1910, as remembered by Henry Pauls, Blytheswood, Ontario, Canada.

 
Flat fields of tomatoes and asparagus, set among greenhouses and lovely farms around Leamington, Ontario, always impressed me as a young person. I knew that area had been settled by Mennonite refugees from Russia, and I passed the Henry Pauls farm at Blytheswood (just north of Leamington) many times. What I did not know, growing up in Ontario, was that Henry Pauls painted pictures as well as raise tomatoes for the Toronto market. 

Born in the Old Colony village of Khortitsa, along the Dniepr River in what is now the republic of Ukraine, Heinrich Pauls was thirteen when the Bolsheviks shot the Tsar (in 1917) and life as he knew it turned upside down. War, anarchy, and mass starvation followed. Only when things settled down under Lenin's rule in the early 1920s could Heinrich think of getting married to Sara Hildebrand, a young believer he had come to admire during those dark years, and begin a family of his own. But their peace was short-lived. Lenin died, new laws came out, and the Pauls joined thousands in flight to Western Europe and eventually to Canada.

Many of those refugees lived the rest of their lives with terrible dreams of Russia, jerking wide awake at any sound during the night, cringing when they heard the drone of an airplane overhead. Henry also remembered the Bolshevik Revolution well -- only too well -- but he remembered the joy of growing up in an Old Colony village even better. With ever increasing fascination, as he grew older, he remembered the neighbours, the school, the worship meetings, everything he knew before he turned fourteen.
 
He wished he could tell his children and grandchildren about it and bring something of that life into their fast-paced, ever more individualistic, experience in modern Canada. But when he began to write down what he remembered it took a long time. He could not type and he had no use for computers. So, to everyone's surprise and growing amazement, he began to paint what he remembered seeing as a child.
 
With the farm in the hands of others and time on his hands, Henry painted more and more. He never sold any paintings, but gave them to his grandchildren, his friends, and whoever liked them or appreciated the story they told. That was the story of . . .

Russian Mennonite Community

Not macht erfinderisch (necessity is the mother of invention) proved true among the German colonists of Russia in more ways than one. Not only did the crushing poverty and isolation of their first years in that country force them to discover new ways of farming and building, how to make their own implements, and where to market their products. It also forced them to overcome the divisions that had separated them in the countries of their origin, and to apply the principles of Christian community, all being members of one body, brothers and sisters in Christ, in brilliant new ways.

Responding to Catherine the Great’s invitation, Mennonites settled in Russia—actually the southern Ukraine—on vast tracts of farmland along both sides of the Dniepr River. These tracts they subdivided, as they had earlier in the Vistula Delta, into so many village blocks. Every family got a modest Huiskjauel (house lot) in the village, enough on which to build a house and barn, to make a garden and to keep their livestock. Then, further from the village, every family got another 65 dessiatines (176 acres) of land, parcelled out so they all had some fields nearby and some at a greater distance.

While every family “owned” the land they farmed and the houses they lived in (with permission to buy or sell one from another as they pleased), legal ownership of all colony property stayed in the hands of the Gemeinde (church community) itself. The Gemeinde decided where to build new villages, how the farms should be laid out, and what types of activities, both economic or spiritual, would serve the good of the whole. Every village had its Daarpschult (overseer), chosen by the Gemeinde, who could call a Schultenbat (brotherhood meeting) when necessary to decide on material things. The coordinator of all the Daarpschulten in the colony was the Ewaschult (“Oberschulz” in High German) who, with the leaders of the Gemeinde, stood responsible for the order and wellbeing of all.

Every Thursday the entire Liadeenst (“teaching service” of the Gemeinde, that is, the elders and the ministers of the Word) met in the meetinghouses of the colony to decide on spiritual matters. They made decisions by consensus and confirmed them through prayer. After the founding of more colonies in Russia, all the elders from all the Gemeinden, the Flemish, the Old Flemish, the Frisian, and eventually even the Hutterites that had settled nearby, met in periodical ministers’ meetings to discuss issues that faced them all.  

In the centre of every village stood a schoolhouse. The church elected one or more suitable brothers (always brothers) to educate the children. In some villages a larger building served as a meetinghouse. But church meetings often took place in the schoolhouses as well.

School children skating at Tiegerweide, Molochna Colony. After the second generation of Mennonites in Russia many efforts to enhance and improve the education of children bore good fruit.

In the beginning food was scarce. In some years the Mennonites could not harvest enough, or make enough money to put bread on all tables in the colony. So, following Joseph’s example, they built collection places in the villages—Magazinen they called them—where during good years they could stockpile extra grain, and where people could bring unneeded clothing, shoes or supplies to be distributed by the Gemeinde as needs arose.

Beyond this, the Gemeinden in Russia developed a Waisenamt (orphans’ office) to care for widows, orphans, and the poor. Brothers chosen from every village collected funds and managed them as a charitable trust for the good of the needy. Along with this, anyone that made more money than what his family needed, could deposit it with the Waisenamt, at a small advantage, for a set period of time. When a married man died, leaving a widow and children behind, the Waisenamt, with this money, took charge of his estate until his dependants grew up, or as long as his widow lived. Not only that, because the Waisenamt soon collected a significant store of funds, anyone that needed money could ask to use them, also for a small fee. Many young farmers started out with these funds, paying back as they were able, and after a period of years entire colonies were purchased for the Gemeinde with Waisenamt money.[1] Those that administered this money met once a week to evaluate needs, make fair distribution, and give advice as needed. For all widows and fatherless children growing up in the colonies, the Waisenmänner (men of the Waisenamt) assumed a fatherly role.  

Not only did the orphaned and needy get taken care of in Mennonite colonies. Whenever disaster struck—within the colonies or without—Mennonite villagers came to the rescue in another way. With entire villages under straw-thatch roofs, fires brought quick devastation, as in the Old Colony village of Osterwick, where 62 houses with barns attached, two Magazinen and a school burned down on 8 August 1853, after one woman’s frying pan overheated.[2] To have quick funds available to rebuild, the Gemeinde collected a yearly fee from all households, so much for every building on the place. The Brandordnung (fire order), they called it, and once again it operated as a charitable trust for the good of all.

The village of Rosenthal, right next to Chortitza, on a winter day. A number of my wife's Krahn family members lived here.

All buildings on the colony—hundreds and eventually thousands of houses, barns, workshops and meetinghouses—got built with co-operative labour, entire families helping one another without thought of pay. Crops got harvested together, gifted men surveyed the roads and built the first bridges. Villages recruited work gangs to plant trees, fence communal pastures, and drain the fields.

No servants of the Gemeinde, no matter whether they preached the Word, counselled the weak, cared for the sick, or handled money and dealt with the Tsarist government, got paid for what they did. Living among brothers and sisters, those that loved the Lord expected to serve him through serving the rest and considered it a privilege to do so.

But, not everything on the Mennonite colonies in Russia turned out like the first settlers had hoped. The Russian government, not understanding what kept Anabaptist communities functioning and together, interfered in strange ways.

First, the Russian Ministry of the Interior, in St. Petersburg, set up a Fürsorge-Komitee (Committee of Guardians) to oversee all Mennonite settlements in the country. German-speaking, well educated, the officers of this committee began, almost from the beginning, to make regular visits to the colonies, giving out advice and passing legislation as they saw best.

The Tsarist government liked what they saw in the colonies and wanted them to serve as showpieces, examples to all of Russia and the rest of the world, what could be done with hard work and good management.[3] But the officers of the Fürsorge-Komitee thought only of worldly progress and wealth, not of the spiritual well-being of the colonists themselves. This led to prolonged and very serious conflict.

One unusual Mennonite, Johann Cornies, saw an opportunity in what the Tsarist officers proposed and began to work closely with them to bring “progress” into the villages. With their help he passed statutes ordering villagers to paint their houses, plant flowers, and over a million mulberry trees with which he hoped to produce silk. Johann Cornies promoted higher education (central high schools built in both the Molochna and Old Colonies) and thought Mennonite boys should study in Russian universities. But a large number of Mennonite villagers, particularly those of the Old Colony and its branch settlements, did not want painted and fancy houses, surrounded with showpiece gardens. They did not want to produce silk or make much money. They saw no blessing in higher education as promoted by the world, and wanted nothing other than to stick to the straight and narrow way, to a simple walk like that of Jesus and his first disciples.

It did not help these serious-minded Mennonites to know that Johann Cornies and those that supported him lived on huge estates outside the colony, doing as they pleased while paying little attention to the Gemeinde’s counsel. But Tsarist officials, even Tsar Nikolai himself, thought Johann Cornies a wonderfully successful man—the person that knew how to do it, and that everyone should follow.

To keep the Mennonite colonies the showpiece of prosperity they wanted them to be, Tsarist officials—with the full support of Johann Cornies and his friends—forbade the Gemeinden to subdivide original farms into smaller plots, or to turn vast grazing lands over to the landless poor. Those without land should move together and build towns, these planners decided, so they could become the labour force of fast-growing industrial works at Chortitza and Halbstadt (the colony centres)—everything geared to the bold new word, Kapitalismus (capitalism), they had just learned from reading the German papers. But they faced a difficulty. Those without land did not want to work in factories or live in town. They wanted to farm in quiet villages where songbirds twittered in the cherry trees and cows shuffled in the wide street from communal pastures before the sun went down.

   
Setting up manure bricks to dry as fuel, Mariental, Molochna Colony. When farmers worked together even the more onerous jobs became pleasant -- great times to talk while getting to know one another inside and out.  

As if this struggle were not enough, a third influence stirred up the second generation of Russian Mennonites. This one came from their Württemberger Pietist neighbours, and from Baptist and Brethren missionaries beginning to spend nights at the colonies whenever they passed through the area. While such visitors, without fail, accepted the colonies as “wonderful places to see,” and loved the support and fellowship they found there, they did not see them in light of the Kingdom of God. To the contrary, if asked, most of them would have believed the colony (Gemeinde) idea to be a spurious one, a strange side-light to the Gospel message that one might tolerate but certainly not promote, or expect to reproduce.

With so many conflicting influences bearing upon them, the Mennonites of Russia, almost before they knew it, found themselves pulling in three directions at once.

The first direction continued to be that of the Gemeinden with their elders and servants, seeking to please Christ through a humble collective way of life. A “packaged life” that included all aspects of human experience from birth to death—and beyond. Life here on earth and life to come, the physical, the social, the economic, the legal, the spiritual, all brought together within the enlightened order of the Kingdom of God. “Your will being done on earth as it is in heaven.”

The second direction became that of Johann Cornies and his friends, only too ready for worldly progress, to make money and live well in a Russia that was fast becoming the “bread basket of Europe.” For these people, the out-dated utopian ideas, the restrictions and communal order of the Gemeinden did little more than get in their way. The Gemeinden, they believed, should busy themselves with nothing but the spiritual aspect of colony life. All the rest, all educational, legal, and economic activities should be managed by the volost (Gebietsamt), that is, by the civil authority set up with Tsarist help and the Fürsorge-Komitee, in the colonies.

The third direction, that of the born-again revivalists and missionary groups, saw the existence of the colonies only as an inconsequential circumstance, a historical (and often hindering) phenomenon, in the light of a much larger and more exciting picture: that of Evangelical Christianity bringing Jesus’ Gospel to the world. These “converted Mennonites” sent their young people to Reval (now Tallin, in Estonia) and Berlin to study in Evangelical Bible Schools. They co-operated fully with Baptist and Brethren missionaries working among the Russians. And, consequently, they ran into trouble with everyone else on the colonies. The Gemeinden disapproved of them because of their readiness to innovate and abandon Anabaptist principles. (The born-again soon accepted people into their communion that took no clear stand on non-resistance or separation from the world.) Educated, wealthy and progressive Mennonites, like Johann Cornies, also disliked these “religious fanatics,” “rabble-rousers” as they called them, because they threatened to bring Tsarist disapproval upon the colonies and hinder the material progress of all.

As if this three-way divide would not have been enough of a challenge, the Mennonite colonies in Russia had never fully overcome a nagging problem built right into their constitution. Settling as cultural enclaves (Germans among nomadic tribal and Russian people) the colonists, even without planning for it, became almost like little “states within the state,” a Volkskirche (state church) on a small scale. That might not have caused much of a problem, if all Mennonites arriving from the Vistula Delta had been spiritually-minded, fully supportive, united-at-heart members of the old Gemeinden. But they weren’t.

A certain fringe of careless lukewarm people, taking part in the Russian venture only for what they got out of it, or because they had no other place to be, made life difficult for the colony leaders. What should one do with them? Send them out among the Russians? They wouldn’t have gone. Set the police on them if they made trouble? Perhaps. But one can make a lot of trouble before catching police attention. And surely the social and moral problems of these people demanded a better solution than the arm of civil law.

Crowded conditions on the oldest Russian Mennonite colonies provided the first, albeit temporary, respite from perplexing challenges at hand. All three directions, previously described, kept moving out into new daughter colonies they could shape and manage as they thought best.

Anabaptist-style Gemeinden (from the Old Colony) started the Bergthal and Fürstenland daughter colonies. A similarly conservative movement from Molochna resulted in Kleingemeinde settlements at Borosenko and in the Crimea.

Progressive Mennonites, eager to increase their land holdings, started a long train of new colonies through European and Asiatic Russia, into western Siberia and beyond. Co-operating closely with Tsarist authorities their economy and numbers boomed. Mills, factories, vast acreages under wheat and barley set the trend wherever they settled. For some progressives, all colony and village life became too restrictive and they bought estates of many thousands of dessiatines, employing ever increasing numbers of Russian workers to bring them into production.

While all this happened the “born-agains” moved east into the Caucasus, and some headed ever further into Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and eventually south through Turkey into Palestine, following the lead of apocalyptic prophets and dreams of Jewish restoration in a soon-to-come millennial age.

How did all this look from within the Russian Mennonite community itself? I will let Gerhard Wiebe, a second-generation Old Colony leader (minister and later Gemeinden Aeltester at Bergthal, near Mariupol, Yekaterinoslav District, from 1854 to 1875), say it in his own words:

Strive after the wisdom of God and you will stay small and lowly in your own estimation. Flee everything and everyone that claims to serve God but does so in hypocrisy. Perhaps you may ask, “Who are those hypocrites?” Let me tell you who they are. They can easily be picked out. They are the people that preach repentance but live in vanity and worldly pride. They are the people that come around in a really spiritual manner, but who, under the cloak of their vaunted piety, go along with everything the world is and does. They say it does not matter as long as one’s heart is right. But what does Jesus say about our hearts? He says lies, slander, murders, adultery, pride and immorality come from the heart, and what the heart is full of comes out of the mouth. So, pride comes out of the heart, and if we doll up this Madensack (human body, literally “maggot sack”) of ours, we prove to all the world what our hearts are full of.

At the time of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, everything was dark on the earth, and the people lived in a great night of ignorance. This because the priests had gotten proud. They posed as great spiritual experts but inwardly they were full of deceit. In Jerusalem they had already set up a high school (the school of Gamaliel) but all that came out of it were so wrapped up in pride and self-righteousness that Jesus could not pick a single one of them to be his disciple except Paul. And even Paul he first had to knock flat on his face with a thunderbolt from heaven.

Jesus did many wonders among the Jews but because of their blinding pride they did not catch on who he was. They missed his message because they never humbled themselves enough to listen. Jesus was too lowly and common a man for them. On top of that he picked simple people, fishermen and tradesmen to be his disciples. The worldly-wise made fun of him for that too. But if Jesus had come as a wealthy man, a scholar, nicely dressed, fitting into respectable society, what would they have done? You know they would have hastened to receive him. And so it goes in our day.

With their impressive teaching and worship services, the priests and Levites held the attention of the masses in Jesus’ time. Everyone thought something wonderful was happening, but their hearts remained unchanged. That is the story of our time. People get all caught up with sensational religion but their hearts stay fastened on worldly possessions and monetary gain.

On the mountain at Sinai God gave the Israelites the pure and simple truth by which he expected them to live until Jesus came. Then, when Jesus came, he lived out that truth in a simple way before them. Everything the prophets had predicted about him he fulfilled. So, in Jesus’ life and example, we have all we need to live by until he comes to judge the world. All he said and did came together in his Sermon on the Mount, and after a long period of darkness, the true Light began to shine in his day again.

This was the Light of the Gospel his followers, the early Christians, carried into all the world. Many got converted because they went out in love, humility and in a gentle way. They lived simply, because that is how Jesus, their Lord and Master, had gone before them. They lived by nothing but the example of Christ. And that is what they wrote down as a guideline for all of us to live by as well.

For three hundred years Jesus’ followers lived by his example. Even though they suffered great persecution they stood as true witnesses for him. But in the fourth century it all began to fall apart again. . . . The biggest mistake the Christians made at that time was to set up a high school to train their leaders. Once again they started to mix the Word of God with human wisdom and pure simplicity was lost. Yes, some faithful souls kept on doing what was right, here and there, but few paid them attention. So, after four hundred years, the humility and simplicity of Christ was traded off on a haughty clerical system. Caesar and the people began to support the leaders of the church who could do nothing but to preach what the people wanted to hear.

So, you see how it goes. For around five hundred and twenty years after Mount Sinai the Israelites, even with all their failures, kept the words of the Lord with them. Then worldly wisdom and false teachings took over and they lost everything. Under Nehemiah and Ezra they enjoyed a brief revival but the same thing happened again. Worldly wisdom and pride became the downfall of the priesthood. For three hundred years after Jesus the Church made out all right. Then, it happened again. After a hundred year struggle, worldly wisdom, false teachings and pride took the overhand and all Christian simplicity went underground or disappeared.

From there on it kept happening over and over. In southern France the Light began to shine with a man named Waldus and kept on shining through the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In Bohemia it shone in the fourteenth century. In Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany it began to shine in the sixteenth century, with the Anabaptist people, but every time, pride and worldly wisdom brought about the downfall of the children of God. Every time, after it happened, they drifted from the Kingdom of God back into the terrible kingdom of the beast.

In 1789 our Anabaptist people began to move into Russia. They kept coming from Germany (Prussia) until the early 1860s. Never before had we been able to live out what we believed in such peace and liberty. But pride and dissension brought about our fall, and we lost our simplicity more and more until the beast dared to take up the struggle with us again.

First came presumption. We thought we were what we were not. Then came pride, vanity, worldliness and a haughty spirit. Very soon some of our people were driving about in fancy carriages with springs, displaying such finery that when the children of the land (the Russians) saw them coming they could not tell German farmers apart from the nobility. So much had changed, and this is what brought us to our fall. For God resists the proud and gives grace only to the humble. So the spirit of the times swept us along, but we kept thinking we were still the same people that had come to Russia eighty years earlier. Yes, we were still of the same families, but our hearts and our mentality had changed. We had become high-minded and God needed to bring us back down to our level.[4]

As you can tell from what the elder Gerhard Wiebe wrote, he saw the progressive secular and the progressive revivalist movements as equally dangerous to the cause of Jesus Christ in Russia. He saw both these directions lead away from Christ and his peaceable Kingdom, straight into mainstream society and the world. And, were he to see how things stood today, he would need to conclude his predictions were right.

In 1875 Gerhard and Elisabeth (Dyck) Wiebe, moved with their ten children and around five hundred other families from the Bergthal Colony, three thousand people all told, to Manitoba, Canada. Under his leadership, his Gemeinde was the only one to move intact from Russia to a new land, half way around the world. But the reasons for that astonishing mass migration, and the outcome of it, will need to be told in the next article (the third one of four) of this series.

Barn raising at Tiegerweide, in the Molochna Colony, 1910. After the most conservative Gemeinden had left Russia, the Mennonites prosperity rapidly increased, but only God knew how soon it would all come to an end.

* * * * *

Henry Pauls died at Leamington, Ontario, in 1995. Very quickly the pictures he had painted became treasured keepsakes, a rare glimpse into the past through the eyes of a child. Far more than that, they provide us with yet another perspective on the story of hundreds of thousands of believers. Those that moved east, instead of west, after the revivals in Europe during the sixteenth century. And that story -- as the story of all believers, everywhere -- is part of our story too.

Peter

P.S. Twenty-six of Heinrich Pauls's paintings now hang in the National Gallery at the Canadian capital, Ottawa. Many others have been collected by Conrad Grebel College in Ontario, and the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba. A collection of them has been published in book form: A Sunday Afternoon, Waterloo, Ontario, 1991.

Click here to read the next article in this series.

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Notes:

[1] When the Bergthal colony, around 500 families, three thousand people, moved to Canada in the 1870s, the Waisenamt made it possible for everyone to go, leaving no-one behind for lack of funds, and for everyone to get started in a new home overseas.  

[2] The pan caught fire while the unfortunate woman, Mrs. Johann Teichroeb, had gone up to the attic to get some spices with which to flavour her food. The fire so affected her that she lost her senses and never regained them. But the Gemeinde rebuilt the village and cared for her and her family as long as she lived.

[3] When the Russian government, for instance, settled a large group of Jewish refugees in six villages near Kherson, in the 1850s, they put an Old Colony Mennonite, Diedrich Epp, in charge of the plan. Both the Russian government and Jewish leaders repeatedly expressed their thanks for his untiring selfless service. The renowned Jewish author Alexander Zinov spoke at Diedrich Epp’s funeral.

[4] Translated and abridged from Ursachen und Geschichte der Auswanderung der Mennoniten aus Russland nach Amerika, first published in Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1900..