JOURNEYS Mennonite Stories of Faith and Survival in Stalins Russia, John B. Toews, 1998

, yet is designed to always convict each per¬ son in custody. The arrests associated with collectivization and the great purge of 1937-38 naturally brought a tremendous level of suffering to individuals and the community. ATTRITION Coupled with the fear and pain associated with arrest and fu¬ ture survival, a cultural and religious attrition evolved which steadily eroded the very soul of what it had meant to be a Mennonite in Old Russia. School, church and family were the closely interre¬ lated components of a distinct Germanic peoplehood amid a Slavic world. All three faced a continuous onslaught during the 1930s. In the past the school played an important role in dealing with the pressures of russification. At one end of the spectrum was the elementary school with its Mennonite teachers, on the other, two teacher training colleges staffed by Mennonite profes¬ sors. Buttressed by such supports, the child moved into adult¬ hood secure in its sense of peoplehood. The teacher came from the village and belonged to the village. More often than not he was both a teacher (Lehrei) and a minister ( Prediger *). He not only offered religious instruction but embodied the essence of Mennonite religious convictions. The role of the school was al¬ ready threatened by the conscription of young teachers during W.W.I, but retired teachers were fortunately able to step into the gap. The school had barely returned to normalcy in 1917, when the Bolshevik revolution prohibited ministers or those with reli¬ gious beliefs from teaching. Convinced communists, some of them imported from Germany, took their place. The new curriculum included military training and atheistic indoctrination. School attendance was compulsory for all children to the age of fourteen. Amazingly German remained the chief language of instruc¬ tion until 1937 and in some cases 1938. By 1938 radical changes were introduced into most schools. Russian and Ukrainian be- UNDERSTANDING THE MEMOIRS 11 came the languages of instruction while German became a special subject offered at the fourth or fifth class level. Many of the younger children, usually reared in low-German speaking homes, had dif¬ ficulty coping with the language change. The importation of Rus¬ sian teachers into Mennonite villages and the transfer of Mennonite teachers to Russian villages also characterized the shift. An equally drastic change came after the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1941: Russian teachers were expelled and German once again became the language of instruction. The erosion of Mennonite identity not only related to the school but to several other forces. In order to speed up the ideo¬ logical indoctrination of the peasantry libraries containing between two and six hundred Russian language books were established in each village. Apparently little or no German reading material was available. Most people destroyed their German journals or news¬ papers since