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

ngaged the Red Army approaching the Molotschna settlement, not realizing that Makhno had allied himself with the Red Army. Makhno utilized this uneasy alliance to terrorize Mennonite and German villages in the Molotschna, Chortiza and Zagradovka re¬ gions until late in 1919. Meanwhile the region remained a major theater of the Rus¬ sian civil war. Until mid-October 1920, the front see-sawed across the Mennonite settlements. Red Army “guests” in the morning were often replaced by White Army soldiers by evening. Civil war and banditry soon reduced affluent colonies to poverty. Food reserves vanished as the various armies requisitioned supplies or as government officials seized grain using a variety of pretexts. Now a new threat emerged - famine. The quartering of Red Army soldiers (November 1920 - March 1922), Mennonite refugees from the Caucasus and a severe drought in 1921 all contributed to an escalation of the crisis. Widespread starvation was a real threat by March 1922, and only the timely arrival of aid sent by American Mennonite Relief prevented a mass catastrophe. A NEW POLITICAL ORDER Ukrainian Mennonites were initially unable to respond to the ever changing circumstances and events confronting them. Al¬ most everything they stood for conflicted with the new revolu¬ tionary order: their practice of capitalism; their religious piety; their pacifism; their nonassimilation and their use of Germanic languages. Similarly their social structure based on traditional religious practices and a broad array of educational, welfare and medical institutions could not survive an ideology determined to destroy all that had been. UNDERSTANDING THE MEMOIRS 5 Initially some compromise appeared possible. In 1921 Mennonites in the Ukraine organized the Union of South Rus¬ sian Mennonites in the hopes of negotiating a survival strategy with the Bolshevik government. Once ratified by the Ukrainian government in Kharkov, it became known as the Union of Citi¬ zens of Dutch Lineage. Any identification with German authori¬ ties was undesirable in the wake of the recent occupation. The Union was granted an amazingly broad range of economic privi¬ leges in commercial, industrial and agricultural areas. Mennonites were even allowed to continue independent farming on land hold¬ ings no larger than thirty-two dessatines. Socially the union was given a free hand in the operation of benevolent and cultural in¬ stitutions and even schools remained somewhat under its control. Its charter, while somewhat restrictive, allowed the Mennonites in the Ukraine to continue as a separate people. In the years which followed, Mennonite leaders sought to up¬ hold the social, cultural, economic and religious structures essen¬ tial to group coherence and survival. Increasingly Mennonite eth¬ nicity was robbed of its strongest traditional defense — the school. It was decreed that religious instruction be banished and that no Menn