Ben Klassen was born in the Ukraine, Russia, in 1918 to a God-fearing Mennonite family. However, after immigrating to Canada as a boy, he rejected God and the peaceful ethic of his Christian heritage and later--when he had moved to the United States--founded the hate group, the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC). This background explain how Mennonites came to be in Russia in the first place and what happened to them.

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Mennonites first came to Russia from the area around Danzig, Prussia (now Gdansk, Germany) in the year 1789. They were responding to an invitation from Catherine II for foreigners to settle the vast, relatively uninhabited areas of Russia. It was her hope that they would by example and intermarriage improve the life and fortunes of the Russian peasantry.

Over two hundred years earlier, Menno Simons, after whom the Mennonites were named, had been a Catholic priest in Friesland (Northern Netherlands) when he came to agree with Martin Luther that the Bible should be the Christian's highest authority. He studied it extensively and became uncomfortable with several of the practices of the Catholic Church, particularly the baptism of infants who could not understand and had not chosen to follow Christ. He also didn't like the symbiotic tie between the church and the state. He found it to be coercive and corrupting to true Christianity. The state's ultimate power was, of course, the sword.

Therefore Menno Simons left the Catholic Church in 1536 to be rebaptized by Obbe Philips as a public statement of his desire to follow Christ voluntarily, what he considered the only biblical foundation for Christ's church. This placed him among the ranks of believers then being called Anabaptists or re-baptizers. He was not their founder. That distinction falls to Conrad Grabel and his decision to be rebaptized in 1525. Menno, however, was soon asked to become a preacher and leader among the newly forming congregations.

Even though the Anabaptists were not rebels against the state, their rejection of the state church posed a serious threat to both the church and the state. This was exacerbated because the Anabaptists eschewed violence. As followers of Christ, they would not bear arms either in their own defense or on behalf of the state . . . which had so often conspired with the church to coerce people and wage war in the name of Christ.

Severe persecution followed as thousands were martyred in both Catholic and Protestant countries. Estimates by historians of the number martyred range from four to twelve thousand. Finally, a significant number of survivors found a peaceful home in Prussia until Frederick the Great began to conscript their young men into his army.

It was this pressure and the lack of land for expansion in Prussia that made Catherine II's invitation very attractive to Mennonites in the waning years of the eighteenth century.

Mennonites were not the only ones to respond. Several German, Greek, Armenian, and Swedish groups settled in various locations in Russia. But the Mennonites chose the Ukraine, establishing four colonies, each including dozens of villages. The first was Chortitza, which, in two waves, attracted 462 families. A second colony was established about a hundred miles south known as Molotschna. By 1835 some 1200 families built sixty villages in that colony. Later, two additional colonies (Samara and Vilna) received 580 families. Altogether the number of Mennonite immigrants was estimated at 10,000.

Along with generous financial assistance in resettlement and broad promises for self-rule, Catherine II promised the Mennonites freedom from military conscription for one hundred years.

But as the hundred years drew toward a close near the end of the nineteenth century, war in Europe put increasing pressure on Russia to expand her imperial army. A decision was reached in secret to Russianize all foreign colonists. The Mennonites would lose all their special privileges and be subject to conscription.

Beginning in 1874, when they learned of this development--and also received generous encouragement from the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad to settle along their route through Kansas--Mennonites by the thousands chose to leave Russia for the United States and Canada. This mass exodus panicked the Russian government. It was true that Mennonites hadn't assimilated into the Russian population as had been hoped--in fact there was strong jealousy and enmity among the native Russians toward the prosperous and aloof Mennonites--but these people had made Russia rich. The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe, largely due to the Mennonites. And advanced Mennonite factories produced the finest farm implements in all of Russia.

Finally, the government offered a compromise: stay in Russia, and your sons can serve the Fatherland in the national forest. They wouldn't have to bear arms. That stopped the hemorrhage by 1880, but not before eighteen thousand--fully one third of all the Mennonites in Russia--had left.

There was no way to predict how tragic the future would become in a short forty years, but given the animosity of the local peasants and nothing more than grudging tolerance for their religious convictions from the government, one might wonder why more--if not all Mennonites--didn't leave Russia during this golden window of opportunity?

Undoubtedly each family's decision was unique with many extenuating circumstances, but some Mennonites may have been influenced by one of the following generalizations. For some, their commitment to nonviolence may have been waning to the point where the government's long-term intentions concerning conscription no longer seemed so repugnant. Indeed, of the fourteen thousand Russian Mennonites drafted during World War I, only half insisted on forestry service. The others agreed to serve in the Army Medical Corps or the Russian Army itself. And then there were those Mennonites who joined the Selbstschutz in the early part of the Revolution; they obviously had lost something of their pacifist convictions. Other Mennonites may have found the price of leaving their beautiful garden spot in the Ukraine just too high. And for many it truly would have been high.

As a group, the Russian Mennonites had grown very prosperous. After Carl Bernhard Schmidt, the American commissioner of immigration for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, visited them in 1883, he wrote:

My desire to transplant to Kansas as many of these people as possible increased as I traveled through those thrifty and handsome villages. The dwelling houses were large brick structures with tile roofs, a flower garden between the street and the house, and well-kept vegetable garden and orchard in the rear. The stables were filled with splendid workhorses of heavy build, and the sheds with vehicles of all descriptions, among them comfortable family coaches and all kinds of American farming machinery. They were certainly the best-appointed farming communities I had seen anywhere. Scattered over the country were large, isolated estates, with buildings reminding one of the feudal baronial castles of Western Europe. Their owners were millionaire Mennonites, who had acquired large tracts of land by private purchase. I was entertained by one of them, who had the reputation of being the largest sheep owner in Europe. When I asked him how many sheep he owned, he could not tell but said he had three thousand sheepdogs taking care of his flock. A little figuring developed that he owned over half a million sheep, scattered in flocks all along the coast of the Black sea.[1]

Whether the final figures in this report were accurate or not, The Mennonite Encyclopedia recognizes that at least one Mennonite estate encompassed fifty thousand acres.[2] Possibly this was the one Schmidt toured.

The Mennonites did not live in the gold and opulence of the Russian nobility, but the hundred thousand who were in Russia at the time of the Revolutions (the population had substantially increased after the 1874-80 exodus) had allowed enough distance to develop between themselves and the common people that after the Revolution one Communist official said, "We [Communists] do not move against the masses, but with them. These masses are against you [Mennonites]. If we [let you keep] the land you have possessed for 130 years, the neighboring Russians will continue to destroy and murder. What shall we do then? We simply cannot help you. We must reckon with the masses."[3]

Mennonites were certainly part of the an estimated sixteen to twenty million people who died in Russia between the outbreak of World War I and the end of the civil war. Additionally, the trauma of war, the privations of the Communist regime, and the raw persecution directed at Mennonites as "foreigners" and Christians, drove another twenty thousand from the country.

During the World War II an estimated thirty-five thousand Mennonites were taken back to Germany by the retreating German army in 1943. However, the Red army repatriated nearly two thirds of them when the Nazis fell. The remainder migrated to Canada and Paraguay.

As many as forty-five thousand Mennonites who did not leave in the 1920s were later imprisoned in forced labor camps or exiled to the Asiatic Russian interior or Siberia. Whole villages were "removed" and never found again.[4]

Modern estimates of the population of Mennonites in Russia again exceed one hundred thousand.

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1. C. B. Schmidt, "Reminiscences of Foreign Immigration Work for Kansas," Brothers in deed to Brothers in Need. (Newton, Kansas: Faith and Life Press, 1974), p. 450. [Back]
2. The Mennonite Encyclopedia (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1959), Vol. 4, p. 386. [Back]
3. Toews, John B., ed., Lost Fatherland: the Story of the Mennonite Emigration from Soviet Russia 1921-1927. (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1967), p. 110. [Back]
4. The Mennonite Encyclopedia (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1959), Vol. 4, p. 391. [Back]