Preservings $20 Issue No. 26, 2006 - Home at Plett Foundation

Teaching Staff of Barnaul School for Visually Impaired Children.
leave by 1929, when the great majority had been
content to stay in 1926.
What happened during those three years?
And up to the beginning of The Great Fatherland
War? What really unsettled many (including my
grandfather Peter J. Wiebe, leading minister in
Orlovo) was the development in 1927 of the
German Rayon under a German Communist
Section. One of the main reasons the Kremlin
was prepared to give the German colonies some
degree of autonomous status was the fact there
were German Communists available and prepared
to lord it over their own kind of people.
By creating autonomous regions they could use
these Germans to sovietize the German-speaking
colonies in the Muttersprache. Some of these,
often prisoners of war from 1914-1917, had
already assisted in grain requisitioning during
War Communism. In July 1927 such a German
Rayon was organized, including 57 villages,
taking Halbstadt as its center of gravity. In these
villages were just over 13,000 people, 96 % of
which were Mennonite and other Germans.
This sovietizing meant the reduction or
eradication of religious services, the introduction
of atheistic teaching in the schools, new
programs for all youth. Sovietization was one
Larissa Belcovec, right, with Elena Marchuk, my host
in Akademgodorok.
thing. The collectivization campaign of the First
Five Year Plan in the Kulundasteppe was quite
another (1928-32). This was accompanied by
a concerted chorus of anti-sectarian venomous
press directed against the Mennonites and
many Baptists in Siberia. These groups were
singled out just when Stalin himself made a
visit to Barnaul and Rubsovsk in the Altai. All
of the ‘rich peasants’ and others were branded
as kulaks; they were portrayed over a period
of about six months as the ‘absolute enemy’ of
Katarina Berg and her daughter Anna, Protassowo
Collective, always working.
the regime (1928 to 1930). “Das Bild des absoluten
Feindes” as written by Savin, I believe, is
horrible to contemplate. The Communist press
tarred and feathered all so-called sectarians with
such designations as class enemy, misleaders of
all youth, spies, counterrevolutionaries, wasters,
drunkards, reactionaries, and their ‘prayer
houses’ were designated combat headquarters
for the counterrevolution.
In this way the world of the Mennonites and
other Germans collapsed: spiritually, intellectually,
and culturally. The principles and values on
which they stood explain the panic emigration
of 1929. Were they not descendants of those
invited by a Tsarist government; had they not
enjoyed decades of independence; had they not
been recognized far and wide as model farmers,
enjoying the highest productivity; and how could
they be expected to be glad to join a collective?
[Schellenberg, 50]
This labelling of the sectarians as the
‘absolute enemy of the state’ in the press stood
in sharp contrast to the more balanced, wholesome
portrait of the German colonist in Party and
Soviet documents. Larisa Belkovec has found
references to the image of the ‘model farmer’
who had ‘great respect for the law.’ The positive
elements were diminished somewhat by those
things less pleasing to the Kremlin, such as the
“Drang nach dem [Westen],” the desire to emigrate;
their determination to remain landowners
and ‘kulaks’ (exploiters of soil and people); to
remain religious rather than ideological; to shy
away from party organs and functionaries. To
the Communists, most displeasing of all was
the fact that the German women stood with their
men. They were labelled “rueckständige Frauen”
(backward-looking women) in her“Das Bild
des sibiriendeutschen Kolonisten in Partei - u.
Sowjetdokumenten “ [Belkovec (9/99)].
Accompanying these disturbing changes
was disenfranchisement, as told by Olga Gerber,
which applied to: “Geistliche, Pastoren, Prediger,
Vorsaenger, Kantoren und Diakone…” This
of course occurred over a period of a decade,
beginning about 1927. Even then, their world
had been devastated enough that they thought of
nothing but emigration as a protest against these
repressive measures. The Kremlin functionaries
naturally thought it quite monstrous that these,
their best farmers, would want to leave at the
beginning of the implementation of their beautiful
theory of collectivization.
Back in Halbstadt, the colony party functionaries
were also not amused when the farmers who
had remained or returned ventured into more active
protests against collectivization in the early
part of 1930. As substantiated by Schellenberg
who was not far away in Gruenfeld this was
interpreted as a “Kulakenaufstand”, in which
Mennonites participated. They seemed on this
occasion to escape severe punishment when the
Slavgorod police rode in. Some were subdued
only after a large contingent was rounded up in
1931 and sent off by train to Omsk, where they
were put on a barge down the Irtysch and back up
the Ob to create a new work area at Narym, above
Tomsk – without provision, without adequate
clothing – and ordered to produce logs. [Detlef
Brandes (4/99); Schellenberg, 50-52.]
Even after succumbing to collectivization,
they did not escape the aftermath of the mass
terror which was initiated by the murder in
Leningrad of Kirov in 1934 – one of the most
discussed events in Soviet history. This impacted
on the Germans in Slavgorod, Halbstadt, and
Orlovo in a devastating way with the personal
visit in that year of Molotov, a right hand man of
Stalin. Molotov had been Premier of the USSR,
and succeeded Litvinov as Foreign Secretary
in 1938, I believe. He was very harsh in his
demands. [Belkovec; Schellenberg, 63]. His
visit was marked by arrests for ‘stealing’ heads
of grain during a drought year. The Gulag for
‘five grains’ of wheat! Anyone was in danger
of being called a ‘spoiler, saboteur.’ People
were challenged to become finger-pointers.
Identify the kulak, have him sent away and get
34 rubles! Many Mennonites were ‘cleansed
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