A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

ror came to an end, the colonies continued to suffer from the ravages of the Civil War. The Molotschna lay in the 110 HISTORY OF THE MENNONITE BRETHREN CHURCH direct path of the "Red" and "White" armies. For weeks the line of battle seesawed back and forth over the region, some villages changing hands as many as twenty times. 13 It is estimated that between 1914 and 1921 more than two thousand two hundred Mennonites met death by violence or disease. 14 The loss of property ran into millions of rubles. By the end of 1920, the Bolsheviks had gained control of all the Ukraine and peace came finally to the devastated Mennonite colonies, where blood and tears had saturated the soil for more than three years. The Great Famine and American Relief As in the apocalyptic judgments described in Revelation chapter six, so also in the experience of the Mennonites of Russia the red horse of war was followed by the black horse of famine and the pale horse of pestilence and death. The unsanitary conditions produced by the armed forces and the robber bands quartered in Mennonite homes for protracted periods, led to the spread of disease on a frightening scale. Such dreaded diseases as spotted typhus, cholera, syphilis, and even malaria made their appearance everywhere. The typhus epidemic claimed more lives than either war or anarchy. In the Old Colony, which was hardest hit by this plague, three hundred Mennonites had perished from typhus in the villages of Chortitza and Rosenthal alone by June 1, 1920. ,s At least one hundred women and girls who had suffered violence at the hands of the anarchists were under treatment for venereal disease. The combination of malnutrition and disease resulted in a heavy loss of life. The population of the Chortitza colony declined from eighteen thousand in the fall of 1917, to approximately thirteen thousand in the fall of 1920. Statistics from the Molotschna and Zagradowka settlements tell a similar story. Under such distressing conditions it is understandable that economic activities and social functions were reduced to a minimum, and all organized religious life was nearly paralyzed. As if the terrors of civil war, the ravages of the Makhno bandits, and the devastations caused by disease epidemics were not enough for any people to bear at one time, a famine of unprecedented proportions followed hard on the heels of these calamities. The famine was caused by a combination of factors. All reserves of wheat and other grains had been confiscated by the robber bands or requisitioned by the Red Army. The lack of draft horses and seed grain excluded any sizeable seeding operation in the spring of 1921. More important, however, was the severe drought that affected the entire Ukraine, the "bread basket of Europe" for two successive years, resulting in total crop failures. It seemed as though divine providence had closed the heavens in judgment over a nation that had been engaged