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

onite minister could remain as a teacher. Other teachers were eliminated by special exams designed to expose the religiously inclined. Mennonite cultural-religious survival was at stake and increasingly that struggle was being lost. In the wake of such de¬ velopments the Union deployed two very different strategies. The first sought to stem the erosion of Mennonite peoplehood by maintaining some degree of economic and social control via the privileges granted in the Unions charter. The second argued that the economic disruption of civil war had generated more Mennonite refugees than the existing communities could absorb. The only solution for their plight lay in emigration abroad. Amaz¬ ingly Ukrainian and Russian authorities endorsed both policies during the mid-twenties and more than twenty thousand Mennonites left for Canada and elsewhere. At least eighty percent of the Mennonites residing in the So¬ viet Empire stayed behind. Their lives became subject to a series of complex and gruesome events reflected in the autobiographical accounts. Much of the tragedy was rooted in Bolshevik economic theory and practice. The early Bolsheviks saw the nationalization of agriculture as a key ingredient of their revolutionary strategy. The so-called era 6 JOURNEYS of War Communism (1918-22) with its mass requisitioning proved disastrous and was largely responsible for the famine disaster of 1921 -22. Now the party embarked upon a strategic retreat called the New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed private enter¬ prise to flourish on a small scale. Many Mennonites associated this with a return to normalcy and as a result postponed emigra¬ tion. From Stalins viewpoint NEP failed because of growing food shortages in 1927-8. In order to remedy the situation the party’s Central Committee resorted to the direct seizure of grain in 1928. All available grain and cash was moved directly from the fields to the railway stations. COLLECTIVIZATION The communist party, under pressure from Stalin, inaugu¬ rated its first Five Year Plan in 1928. One of its basic provisions called for the forced collectivization of agriculture. To achieve its objective the party decided to generate class war within the village by promising the poor the goods of the rich. The party discovered a conspiratorial class within the village, the kulaks (the tight fisted- ones), all of whom must be dispossessed and expelled. By May of 1929 the kulaks were defined in law and the measures to eliminate them put in place by late June. A new concept, “dekulakization,” now meant dispossession, confiscation and expulsion from the village. There was still another devastating weapon — disenfran¬ chisement. This not only meant the loss of local domicile, but virtually guaranteed the denial of shelter, food and work in other regions. The Warkentin manuscript clearly documents the effec¬ tiveness of this strategy. Widespread peasant resistance to t