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

in peace and tranquillity. It was not to be. After a lengthy stay in the processing camp he and his wife Olga were finally able to move into a permanent apartment. He died two weeks later on April 11,1993. He was finally at peace follow¬ ing a life filled with turmoil and dislocation. Fortunately he had done more then simply complete his memorial list. While still in Kazakhstan, he completed a memoir of his arrest, imprisonment and eventual incarceration in the Karaganda concentration camp. In doing so he provided another documentary link in the catastro- 98 JOURNEYS phe which destroyed the Russian Mennonite world under Stalin¬ ism. Abram Berg was seven years old when his village of Blumenort was attacked by members of a partisan army headed by the anar¬ chist Nestor Makhno. Unknown assailants ambushed a Makhnovzi patrol in Blumenort leaving several dead. Vengeful anarchists de¬ scended upon the village in early November 1919. When it was over twenty Blumenort men were murdered, including Bergs fa¬ ther, a well-known homeopathic doctor in the region. Over the next two decades Bolshevism would claim almost every member of Bergs family. Like thousands of others he was caught up in the totalitarian politics of the 1930s and the mass dislocation gener¬ ated by W.W.II in the early 1940s. Bright and gifted young Berg eventually specialized in animal husbandry and soon became part of the factory style agriculture generated by Stalins forced collectivization. His major life crisis began with his arrest in 1936. He with millions of others was a victim of the final phase of Stalins consolidation of power, the so- called “GreatTerror.” As Bergs experience in the Karaganda Gulag repeatedly illustrates, the purge was directed against the intelli¬ gentsia, everyone from the village teacher upward. It destroyed the last vestiges of the traditional Russian Mennonite commu¬ nity by the execution or dispersion of its civil and religious lead¬ ership. Those who remained behind on the collective farms lost much of their sense of initiative and enterprise to the all-pervad¬ ing will of the communist party. Berg is a scientist and not a philosopher. He chronicles events and sequences as he experienced them. There is economy and crispness in the narrative. He says what is necessary but little more. On the other hand he is deeply sensitive to the human tragedies of every kind which he encountered during the course of his impris¬ onment. He expresses anger and indignation at the multiple evils inflicted upon the good and the innocent. In the context of Abrams experience curiously contradictory forces were at work among those caught up in a system of cruelty, sadism and expendability. On the one level it encouraged the survival of the fittest — those who were aggressive, recognized the moments of opportunity and made the most of them. These pris¬ oners were confident of their abilities and usefulness and willing t