The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880-1884, Fred Richard Belk, 1976

excommunicated the dissidents, and made an all-out effort to convince the people that their leader was a completely new man, ‘‘Elijah of the New Testament, Melchizedek of the New Earth, formerly Claas Epp.” At this point Penner and many others left Epp’s community. But Epp still had a flock of ten to fifteen families who stubbornly relied on his preaching and poetry. As the nineteenth century ended, this small group of Mennonites staunchly held to their millennial convictions in Ak Metchet. 15 MIGRATION TO AMERICA Those Left in Lausan The Lausan Mennonites who had chosen not to settle at Ak Metchet in 1884 had taken a course far different from their more radi- cal brethren. Realizing the survival of the millennial refuge at Lau- san was no longer possible because the departure of 39 families so depleted their ranks, the remaining one third of the inhabitants chose to leave Khiva for America, a migration they hoped would be their last.' These pioneers had come to believe that it was the Lord’s will for them to travel westward, a definite reversal of opinion from their previous conviction that a move in that direction would have meant a confrontations with the Antichrist. The continuing danger from the Turkoman bandits was but a secondary consideration; by 1884 most were convinced that their earlier convictions concerning the second coming of Christ were in error. They were now prepared to discard a belief they had once seriously held to be a central teaching of Chris- tianity. Concomitantly they were reevaluating another hallowed tenet — that of nonresistance. Their hiring of cossack guards as protectors seemed to suggest that many were no longer sure that God would take care of them. It was these two religious uncertainties rather than the hardships — crop failures, grasshopper plagues, the depredations of wild hogs, fear of bandits, and the increasing radicalism of Epp — which provided the main motivation for their American migration. Migration to America 177 Change of Mind: Not the Lord’s Will During their Lausan stay, even the uncertainty about future Khivan or Russian army service had not troubled them as much as millennialism. As far as they were now concerned, the Lausan settle- ment had been a disastrous experiment; it proved to them that the millennial refuge was but a fantasy. They also saw that their staunch belief in nonresistance could be easily abandoned if pressure were sufficiently intense. Perhaps, they thought, in America they could tem- per their millennial position and regain the belief in nonresistance they had once maintained. Furthermore, their leaders — men like Ja- cob Toews, J. K. Penner, and Johann Jantzen — at last came to the conclusion that the God-forsaken marsh at Lausan was far from being a sanctuary. When they could stand it no longer, these leaders made it known to all the people that they believed it would be ‘Soul Suicide’ (to use Epp’s sermon title