The beleaguered country of Ukraine continues to
be much in the news, and no one knows what is going to happen there.
In March I wrote an article titled “What about Crimea?” Of course, Ukraine was mentioned several times in that article. But
this time I am writing about events in Ukraine in the 18th and 19th
centuries and not about the current turmoil there.
In the article about Crimea, I mentioned
Catherine the Great, who was the Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. (I
mentioned her because she annexed Crimea to Russia in 1783.)
Soon after becoming Empress, Catherine issued a manifesto in 1763 inviting
Europeans to move to the Ukrainian area of Russia and to farm the unoccupied
agricultural lands there.
Many Europeans moved east to do
just that, including many Mennonite Christians from the country we now know as
Poland.
In 1787 two Mennonites from
Prussia (Poland) visited Russia and were even able to meet with the Empress.
Catherine promised that if they
moved to Ukraine, each family would be given 175 acres of free land and they
all would be given special privileges, including religious freedom, exemption
from military service, and the right to establish their own schools and teach
in their own language (Low German).
That sounded good to them, so
their migration to Ukraine began. In 1789, 228 families formed the first colony
there, about 125 miles north of Crimea.
The second wave of migration
was in 1803-04, two years after Alexander, Catherine’s grandson, had become
Emperor of Russia. That colony, Molotschna, was less than 100 miles from Crimea.
It became the largest Mennonite colony in Ukraine.
By 1806 there were 365 families
living in Molotschna. In the years that followed, others families from Prussia
joined them. During their journey there in 1820-21, one group met Emperor
Alexander, who wished them well (wohl in
German). Consequently, they decided to name their new village Alexanderwohl.
In 1870, the
Russian government issued a proclamation stating its intention to end by 1880
all special privileges granted to the Mennonites. Alarmed at the possibility of
losing those privileges, especially their military exemption, many of them
decided to migrate to the United States.
Among them was
the entire congregation of the Alexanderwohl church, who in 1874 migrated to
Marion County, Kansas.
A couple of
years ago, as June and I were driving south from Abilene to Newton, Kansas, we
came upon the largest open country church building we had ever seen. It turned
out to be the building of the Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church, which was constructed
in 1886. (It has been remodeled and added on to at various times through the
years.)
As you know, a
lot of winter wheat is grown in Kansas. But you may not know that it was the
Ukrainian Mennonites who first began to grow wheat there, having carried wheat
seed with them when they migrated to Kansas in the 1870s.
Many of our
church friends now are descendants of those Mennonites who came to Kansas from
Ukraine.
Also, some of
you know our oldest son Keith and his wife Brenda. Brenda’s mother was from a
Mennonite family, and all eight of her great-grandparents lived in the
Molotschna colony in Ukraine, although their families migrated to Minnesota
rather than to Kansas.
Largely
because of the strong desire to maintain their pacifistic beliefs, many
Mennonites migrated to Ukraine and then later from Ukraine to the United States
and elsewhere. For that reason, among others, it seems to me that the Ukrainian
Mennonites are praiseworthy indeed.
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What a fascinating piece of Ukrainian and Kansas history, Leroy! Thanks.
ReplyDeleteLocal Thinking Friend Eric Dollard wrote,
ReplyDelete"Leroy, thanks for your interesting comments below. There is also a large population in north central Kansas of Volga Germans, who are mostly Roman Catholic. Their ancestors had also emigrated to Ukraine and Russia at the invitation of Catherine and then later to the U S.
"As for the Mennonites, many went to Canada, which now has about 200,000 Mennonites. Many of the Canadian Mennonites live in Manitoba, which also has a sizable population of Ukrainian Orthodox, so the Mennonites (and German Catholics) were not the only ones to emigrate from Ukraine.
"It was interesting, in crossing the Canadian border from Minnesota into Manitoba, to see the transition from Lutheran and Catholic churches in Minnesota to the onion-domed Orthodox churches of Manitoba."
Eric, thanks for your comments. They help correct two misunderstandings my article might have triggered.
Delete(1) Certainly, Kansas and Minnesota were not the only places the Ukrainian Mennonites emigrated to. As you correctly pointed out, there are also many who emigrated to Canada. I am a bit confused about the numbers, though. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives the number of Mennonites in Canada as 200,000, which you cited, but the Mennonite Church Canada, said to be the largest of the Mennonite denominations, lists only 31,000 members on their current website.
(2) Also, it is true that various church groups in addition to the Mennonites migrated to and from Ukraine for various reasons. Pacifism was not the main reason for other groups' emigrating, nor was it the only reason for the Mennonites--but I think it was the main reason for the latter.
Thinking Friend, and church historian, Glenn Hinson wrote,
ReplyDelete"That's very interesting, Leroy. Mennonites deserve more attention than we've given them in church history."
Local Thinking Friend Jerry Cain, sent the following comment:
ReplyDelete"This is a wonderful history lesson. What a wonderful example of radical adjustment to maintain a radical principle."
When I wrote the above blog article, I had forgotten that Dr. Fred Belk, my old college friend and current Thinking Friend, had written a book titled "The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia: 1880-1884"
ReplyDeleteThe first chapter is about Mennonite backgrounds, the second chapter includes information about Mennonites moving to Ukraine, and the third chapter contains information about how some of them moved to the U.S.
So while the bulk of the book is not directly related to the blog posting, there is much in the first three chapters which is.
"Pratitya Samutpada" (interdependence of all elements in the Cosmos) is a central pillar of both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. There is no independent, permanent existence of anything in the universe (anicca, "continual flux") which means for humans "anatta" (no self). Thich Nhat Hanh called this "InterBeing." By this principle alone, all Buddhists must be committed "conscientious objectors" promoting pacifism. But the WW2 Japanese war machine that combined colonialism, Shinto Emperor worship, fascism, racism, and militarism, pushed a military chain of command on the entire society, whether Shinto, Buddhist, Christian, or non-religious. Only two religious groups pushed back against the government, preaching pacifism--the Holiness Church (Christian) and Soka Gakkai (Buddhist). The Holiness Church preached that Jesus Christ was the ruler of Japan, not the Emperor. Their ministers were abused and sent down to the coal mines. In 1965 I lived in the Missionary housing within their headquarters. Their ministers had not yet recovered in numbers from the wartime abuse. The leaders of Soka Gakkai were thrown in prison for the duration of the war. Jesus Christ was a pacifist, teaching us to forgive enemies, pray for enemies, love our enemies, return good for evil, and he died for his enemies. But this pacifist chain of command of Jesus is not presented persuasively by the church to our youth because of the head on collision with the military chain of command demanded by the U.S. government. So the pacifism of Mennonites is not a distant historical issue of small groups of weird Christians. At the start of the Gulf war my son in college phoned me in Japan asking what he should do as they were threatening to revive the draft. He as a Buddhist could not smash ants or mosquitoes, much less kill humans. The son of our Christian Ethics Professor in Louisville escaped to Canada during the Vietnam War. So the Mennonite problem is also my problem, and my son's problem, and my grandson's problem. If they revive the draft, they will also draft our daughters. Women are active in all roles in the U.S. military today. So today we must ask whether we are all Mennonites.
ReplyDelete