Mennonite - Russian Mennonites

Russian Mennonites

In 1768 Catherine the Great of Russia acquired a great deal of land north of the Black Sea (in the present-day Ukraine) following a war with the Turks. Russian government officials invited those Mennonites living in Prussia to come farm the Russian steppes in exchange for religious freedom and military exemption. Over the years the Mennonite farmers were very successful. By the beginning of the 20th century they owned large agricultural estates and were even successful as industrial entrepreneurs in the cities. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War (1917–1921) all of these farms (whose owners were called Kulaks) and enterprises were expropriated. Beyond expropriation, Mennonites suffered severe persecution during the course of the Civil War, at the hands of both the Bolsheviks and, particularly, the anarchists of Nestor Makhno who saw Mennonites as privileged foreigners of the upper class and targeted them. Hundreds of Mennonite men, women and children were murdered in these attacks. After the war people who openly followed religion were in many cases imprisoned. This led to a wave of Russian Mennonite emigration to the Americas (U.S., Canada and Paraguay).

When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, many in the Mennonite community saw them as liberators from the communist regime under which they had suffered. When the tide of war turned, many of the Mennonites fled with the German army back to Germany where they were accepted as "Volksdeutsche". After the war the remainder of the Mennonite community emigrated, or (because, as the Soviets saw it, they had "collectively collaborated" with the Germans) was forcefully relocated to Siberia and Kazakhstan, and many were sent to Gulags. Many German-Russian Mennonites who lived farther to the east (not western Russia) were deported to Siberia before the German army's invasion, and were also often placed in labor camps. In the 1990s the Russian government gave these people the opportunity to emigrate. The Russian Mennonite immigrants in Germany outnumber the pre-1989 community of Mennonites in Germany by 3 to 1.

The world's most conservative Mennonites (on technology) are the Russian Mennonites of the colonies affiliated with the Lower Barton Creek Colony in Belize. These Mennonites do not use motors, paint, or compressed air.