THE MENNONITE BROTHERHOOD IN RUSSIA (1789 - 1910), P. M. Friesen, 1911

oon thereafter, on December 7, 1863, the Area Administrative Office issued circular No. 12652, the text of which is given [in H110 above, ‘Marriage’]. ... c) On December 13 Claassen received the December 11, 1863, order of the Area Administrative Office, No. 12780, through the Liebenau village administration, ordering him to revise his settler list to conform to the above-mentioned circular. We could not do this for conscience sake, since we honestly regard the marriages performed in our church as in the Lord and entered them in the register as duly constituted families, d) Furthermore, in the order frequently referred to, indeed, at the request of the higher colonial administration, Claassen was required to be deputized in such a way as to authorize him to function in the interest of our church in a m ann er similar to that which has been the practice to date. We cannot explain this demand for deputization. [There follows an exposition of the well-known obstacles the Area Administrative Office used to prevent Claassen ’s formal deputization; cf. Petition to His Majesty, May, 1862] .... Thus Claassen, from the time when we first sent him to plead our case in 1860 [so say the brethren in a document submitted to the Area Administrative Office on December 30, 1863, referred to in the Promemoria] to the submission of our petition directed to His Majesty, our most gracious Tsar, as well as later, even to this day, has functioned as our deputy in oral and written negotiations without 184 a confirmed deputization (because we requested such a confirmation of deputization from the municipal council in vain). This fact is well known to the Area Administrative Office as well as the Supervisory Commission. Due to his negotiations, our concern regarding the hoped for and requested resettlement from the present place of residence to the Kuban, has succeeded to the extent described in what follows. [Narration of events from the receipt of the document from the Minister of War to Count Evdokimov up to the receipt of the document 408 THE MENNONITE BRETHREN CHURCH of October 2, 1863.] Should the Area Administrative Office now be ready to confirm our deputization of Claassen, we would not neglect to apply at once, e) [Returning to the order of the Area Administrative Office, dated December 7, the petitioners continue . . . .] 1. In its order the Area Administrative Office calls us a newly established sect. We already rejected this charge in our petition of December 27, 1860, to the Supervisory Commission [cf. #99 above]. 2. The Area Administrative Office continued in its circular: ‘before their new sect will be recognized by the higher authorities and our entire council of church elders, etc.’ Our answer to that is: a) that there can be no doubt as to our recognition by the higher and highest authorities is clearly and easily evident from point 1 of the most gracious royal invitation extended to us: ‘We affirm the