Johannes Dyck

The Historical Roots and the Correlation of Confessional and Ethnic Elements within Mennonite Identity in the USSR

Johannes Dyck - Director, Institute of Theology and History, Bibelseminar Bonn (Germany), jdyck@bsb-online.de

The article examines historical roots and dynamics of Mennonite identity in USSR using the concept of an ethno-confessionality, introduced to Soviet religious studies by Alexei N. Ipatov. As a result of secularization, in the beginning of the 20th century a part of Mennonites gave up religion but continued to regard themselves Mennonites by culture, and Mennonite identity ceased to be strictly religious. During the Civil War, the confessional identity lost its traditional core - obligatory nonresistance. Ethnic assimilation and loss of German language have been forced by the deportation of 1941 and special settlement. The number of Mennonite identity carriers significantly dropped due to the bitter struggle with religion. Many Mennonites joined the Evangelical Christian-Baptists producing a further erosion of identity. After decline of religious persecutions, reproduction of Mennonite identity could take place in rare Mennonite congregations and families. As a result, Mennonite identity did not disappear but significantly changed.

Keywords: identity, Mennonites, Germans, ethno-confessional community, Evangelical Christian-Baptists, deportation.

In 1978, a landmark event occurred in Soviet literature about Mennonites: the religious scholar A. N. Ipatov, in his next book, called their community ethno-confessional.

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on page 1. There is every reason to believe that he came to his generalizations and conclusions while working in the Orenburg Regional Committee of the CPSU in 1961-1070 - at a time when there were still two compact Mennonite settlements in this area. They emerged in the 1890s and even preserved their faith and traditions, despite a period of severe persecution in the 1930s and a period of severe harassment in 1958-1964. 2 Ipatov's communication with Mennonites also influenced the choice of the topic of his PhD dissertation, 3 the first chapter of which is entitled " The interrelation of religious and Ethnic Diversity in the ideology and organization of Mennonitanism".

Ipatov correlated the concept of "ethno-confessional" primarily with isolated communities. It was used with the same connotation in ethnography4, from where he transferred this concept to religious studies. Subsequently, in his doctoral dissertation, he extended this concept to other isolated groups.5 As applied to Mennonites, this term was accepted without reservation and entered Russian historiography without any significant discussions.6 However, in the last two decades, the term has lost its connotation of isolation.

The ethno-confessional outline outlined by Platov fully coincided with the self-consciousness of Mennonites in the Soviet Union, but had a somewhat abstract character, although it was based on material collected in the Orenburg region. Ipatovskoe

1. Ipatov A. N. Mennonites (Voprosy formirovaniya i evolyutsii etnokonfessional'noy obshchnosti) [Mennonites (Issues of formation and evolution of ethno-confessional community)].

2. Memoirs of Mennonites of the Orenburg region about the post-war period, see, for example: Dick D. Vinogradnik in a beautiful place: Suzanovo (1911-2011). Нюмбрехт, б. и., 2011; Neu Samara am Tock (1890 - 2003): Eine mennonitische Ansiedlung in Russland ostlich der Wolga. (2003) Warendorf, б. и.; Janzen, D. (2011) Das Abendrot der Gemeindezeit: Mennoniten-Brudergemeinde Donskoje 1901 - 2000. Warendorf, б. и.

3. Ipatov A. N. Problema religioznogo i natsional'nogo v sovremennom mennonitstve [The problem of religious and national education in Modern Mennonitstvo]. Dis. ... Candidate of Philosophy, Moscow, 1971.

4. Compare Ipatov A. N. Mennonites. p. 3.

5. Ipatov A. N. Ethno-confessional community as a social phenomenon. (Problems of interaction between religion and ethnos). Abstract of the dissertation of Doctor of Philosophy, Moscow, 1980.

6. See, for example: Ethnic confessions in the Soviet State. Mennonites of Siberia in the 1920s-1980s. Annotated list of archival documents and materials. Selected documents. / Comp. Savin A. I. Novosibirsk: Posokh Publ., 2006; Ethnoconfession in the Soviet State. Mennonites of Siberia in the 1920s and 1930s: Emigration and Repression. Documents and materials / Comp. and scientific. editor: Savin A. I. Novosibirsk: Posokh Publ., 2009.

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The description of the collapse of the Mennonite ethno-confessional community 7 concerns primarily the loss of religiosity, which was largely the result of a fierce struggle against religion and its bearers in the 1930s, which he does not even mention, following the canons of Soviet historiography. At the same time, it was during Ipatov's time in the Orenburg Region that a renaissance of religiosity took place among the Mennonites and their descendants. The Mennonite identity has not ceased to exist. Having lost many of its former sources, it has acquired a number of new features.

Before turning to the topic of Mennonite identity proper, we will give a brief historical background. Mennonites , the northern wing of the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century, began to settle in Russia in 1789. The country of their exodus was Prussia. All the Mennonites who moved to Russia were Germans, but not all the German colonists were Mennonites. The Russian government has allocated land in Southern Russia for their settlement. In the 1860s, as a result of demographic growth in the colonies, an acute shortage of land began to be felt, which led to the organization of subsidiary colonies, first in the same Southern Russia, and then in its eastern regions - Orenburg, Omsk region and Altai. The last Mennonite colonies were established under Soviet rule in 1927 in the Far East8. In the 1920s, the number of Mennonites in the USSR was estimated at 100,000; about 40% of them lived on the territory of the RSFSR, 9 that is, outside the original area of settlement, which by that time was already part of Ukraine. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the vast majority of Mennonites emigrated to Germany.

Having preserved German culture and ethnic homogeneity for several generations, the Mennonites of Russia were unable to preserve their confessional integrity. The most significant schism was in 1860, when fraternal Mennonites emerged from the mainstream. Known from pietism, the strong emotional experience of turning to God and, as a result, the certainty of personal salvation was also known among the Mennonite mainstream, but it became a mandatory requirement for

7. Shpatov A. N. Mennonites, pp. 131 and sl.

8. Krahn, C. and Sawatsky, W. (2011) "Russia", Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online [URL: http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Russia#Daughter_Settlements_2, доступ от 30.06.2014].

9. Ehrt, A. (1932) Das Mennonitentum in Russland von seiner Einwanderung bis zur Gegenwart, s.152. Langensalza: Julius Beltz.

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membership in a Mennonite fraternal congregation. In addition, under the influence of the Baptists of Germany, they introduced mandatory baptism by immersion, rejecting the traditional form of sprinkling. A decade later, fraternal Mennonites had a decisive influence on the emergence of Baptist communities among the Russian-speaking population of Southern Russia. The main difference with the Russian Baptists was the language. Hostility between the main group of Mennonites and the fraternal Mennonites persisted for the first fifty years; in Soviet times, relations between them were no longer hostile, but cold. At the same time, fraternal Mennonites remained part of the larger Mennonite community. In world Mennonism, Fraternal Mennonites remained a minority, though influential. Only in Russia and the USSR were the Mennonite majority called church Mennonites. Following the practice generally accepted in the global Mennonite community, in this article mainstream Mennonites are referred to without the adjective church.

So far, the vast Mennonite historiography has paid little attention to identity issues, and the issues of Mennonite identity in Russia and the USSR have not been considered at all. The purpose of this article is to study the dynamics of Mennonite identity as a marginal group specific to Russia and the USSR in the context of radical social transformations, intensive confessional interaction, and lively ethnic processes.

Development of the ethnic component of Mennonite Identity in conditions of voluntary and forced dispersion

The Orenburg region Mennonites did not have to survive the deportation of all Soviet Germans from the European part of the country in the fall of 1941 after the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The same advantage over other Germans in the country was enjoyed by the Mennonites of the Omsk region and the Altai Territory, who did not have to start a new stage of life in a new place under the supervision of a special commandant's office with almost no means of subsistence. They were, however, an exception. The deported Germans, including Mennonites, were scattered over the vast territory of Siberia and Central Asia, not having the right to leave their new place of residence. Combined with mobilization to the Labor Army-

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For all able-bodied men and many women in 1942, this created a new geography for the settlement of Germans, including Mennonites, in the USSR.

The deportation radically changed the social context of the Mennonites ' habitat: the vast majority of them before 1941 were residents of the former compact German colonies that preserved their culture and, above all, their language. The colonies played a special role in the fate of Russian Mennonites. Before the migration to Russia, which began under Catherine II and ended in the early 1860s, Mennonites were distinguished from the rest of the population primarily by confessional characteristics. The Russian government defined for them, as for the vast majority of peasant migrants, a new form of cohabitation - closed colonies, homogeneous along confessional and national lines, with local self-government and their own schools. For the first three generations of Mennonite settlers, life in the colony was so solidified that when the colonist class was abolished in 1871 and they were given a new status of settler-proprietors, they could no longer imagine life without the usual colonist form. Even decades later, when Mennonite refugees from the USSR were starting a new life in Paraguay in the 1930s, they chose the usual structure of social organization in the form of a colony. However, this was their only chance to survive in the harsh climate of Chaco Province 10.

The colony form introduced by the Russian government in the 18th century proved to be a very effective way of social cohesion. It achieved its original goals by rapidly achieving economic independence and prosperity. At the same time, it has created ideal conditions for preserving the culture of the country of origin and reproducing identity. By the time of the economic heyday of the colonies in the second half of the 19th century, the colonies had become, figuratively speaking, islands of German-type European culture surrounded by the Russian population. The preferred place of education of the colonists, first of all pedagogical, and then humanitarian and technical, became educational institutions in Switzerland and Germany. Colonies and colonists actively participated in the transfer.-

10. Ratzlaff, G. (2001) Ein Leib - uiele Glieder: Die mennonitischen Gemeinden in Paraguay, s. 23. Asuncion: Gemeindekomitee.

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German books and periodicals were read in the colonists ' homes. All this further strengthened the role of the German language among Russian Germans. In Russia at the beginning of the XX century. it was still possible to live without knowing Russian, and the ideals of German-born Russians, even in the fourth generation, were still nourished by the culture of the country of origin - Germany.

A special attribute of the Russian Mennonite identity was the Low German dialect Plattdeutsch. It was brought with them from West Prussia by Mennonites of the first phase of immigration in the 1789-1820s. The settlers of the second phase, which was much smaller in number and took place much later, in the 1850s, because of cultural assimilation in the area of the exodus, no longer used this dialect. Despite this, there was a stable association of Mennonites and Plattdeutschs in the minds of Russian Germans.11
The decree of Nicholas II "On strengthening the principles of religious tolerance" (April 1905), combined with the manifesto on freedom of conscience, speech and assembly (October 1905), opened the possibility for Russian citizens to openly identify themselves outside the church or a particular confessional community. The spectrum of religiosity within the Mennonite community has expanded even further. Until 1905, it had two wings-the Mennonite church proper, which united a wide range of believers, and the more demanding Mennonite fraternal community, which emerged under the influence of pietism in 1860. After 1905, the Mennonite community was no longer reprehensible for openly rejecting the faith: secularization also took visible shape here. However, even those who left the faith claimed to continue to be called Mennonites and considered members of the community. They were called cultural Mennonites (Kulturmennoniten). B. Unruh called this process the transition of Mennonitism from a cult to a cultural community. 12 At this time, all the prerequisites for calling the Mennonite community ethno-confessional were finally formed.

11. Reimer, J. (2007) "Mennonite rede Plautdietsch. Konfessionalitat und Sprache unter Plattdeutschen der ehemaligen UdSSR", Mennonitische Geschichtsblatter 64: 57.

12. Unruh, H. (2009) Fugungen und Fuhrungen: Benjamin Heinrich Unruh (1881 - 1959): Ein Leben im Geiste christlicher Humanitat und im Dienste der Nachstenliebe, s. 55. Detmold: Verein zur Erforschung und Pflege des Russlanddeutschen Mennonitentums.

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Secularization has contributed to the continued diversification of the Mennonite community. A non-ecclesiastical element has been added to the diversity of the confessional spectrum. There was no central governing body that would determine the confessional direction of development and determine who is a Mennonite and who is not. Since the 1880s, church and fraternal Mennonite communities have been influenced by the World Evangelical Alliance and the Sanctification movement. The Mennonite fraternal community almost experienced a split in its ranks; a new kind of Mennonite movement emerged - Evangelical Mennonite communities. The Mennonite mainstream continued to be influenced by pietism. On the one hand, this led to a blurring of the Mennonite profile, on the other hand, it once again emphasized that by the beginning of the First World War, a homogeneous Mennonite identity that could be raised to a standard did not exist. It has long been heterogeneous, which, however, is typical for free churches.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian Mennonites developed prerequisites for raising their historical identity to a new level. Identity began to be fueled by a conscious interest in one's own history, which was stimulated by the widespread celebration of the centenary of the Mennonite settlement in Russia in 1889, marked, among other things, by a number of historical publications. This interest was further stimulated by the publication in 1911 of a monumental thousand-page work on the history of the Mennonites in Russia13. Around the same time, a number of other works on history were published. The Mennonite community now has the first historian with a Ph. D. from the University of Leipzig. 14 A discussion about teaching history in Mennonite schools has begun. 15 On the same wave of historical self - identification, the General Conference of Mennonite Communities decided to establish a Mennonite archive on June 6-8, 1917 .16 Pre-revolution-

13. Friesen, P.M. (1911) Die Alt-Evangelische Mennonitische Brilderschaft in Russland (1789 - 1910) im Rahmen der mennonitischen Gesamtgeschichte. Halbstadt: Raduga.

14. Friesen, A. (2006) In Defence of Privilege: Russian Mennonites and the State Before and During World War I, p. 38. Winnipeg: Kindred.

15. Ibid., p. 38.

16. Selected Documents: The Mennonites in Russia from 1917 to 1930 (1975), p. 398. Winnipeg: Christian Press.

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This surge of historical awareness has become an important element in strengthening Mennonite identity.

During the First World War, Russian Germans, among them Mennonites, became involved in the conflict between the warring powers as an internal enemy. The tsarist government's anti-German campaigns did not end with the collapse of the Russian Empire. Distrust of German citizens was also reflected in the policy of the Soviet state. The ethnic component of the Mennonite identity became the basis of a fundamental conflict between Mennonites and the State that lasted for several generations.

Mennonites entered World War I as patriots of their country17; just six years later, at the end of the Civil War, there was no trace of their Russian patriotism. The Bolsheviks who came to power in 1917 stripped the Mennonites of their property rights, redistributed their land, and nationalized their businesses. The foundation of Mennonite welfare collapsed. The colonies were nominally abolished. The first break in Mennonite identity occurred: patriotism was suddenly replaced by internal opposition to the Fatherland. As a result, about twenty thousand Mennonites, or more than 15%, left the USSR in the mid-1920s.

The deeply confessional nature of the Mennonite identity has intensified the internal confrontation with the new anti-religious authorities. The Bolshevik authorities never succeeded in persuading the masses of Mennonites, who still lived by the values of the faith and the ideals of the colony. It could only rely on individual members who had been socialized outside the colony. The trials of the Civil War eventually had a consolidating effect on the confessional component of Mennonite identity. In 1918, some Mennonites in the Ukrainian colonies joined the local armed self-defense units. Numerous gangs were stronger; the defensive effect of squads was negligible. Scenes of gangsters ' massacres of unarmed residents with dozens of victims have pushed out of the collective memory armed actions of self-defense; as a result, the traditional confessional tradition of self-defense has been replaced.-

17. Friesen, P.M. Bruderschaft, p.492; Loewen, H. (1979) "The German-Russian Tensions among the Mennonites in Russia (1789 - 1917)", in Friesen, A. (ed.) P.M.Friesen & His History: Understanding Mennonite Brethren Beginnings, p. 142. Winnipeg: Christian Press.

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the tradition of non-resistance prevailed over the pragmatism of the defenders. Only a few years later, in January 1925, at their congress in Moscow, the Mennonites were the only evangelical communities in the spectrum to affirm their commitment to the principle of non-resistance. Four decades later, during the anti-religious campaign under N. S. Khrushchev, the long-standing Mennonite refusal of weapons became the basis for accusing the Mennonite sect of reactionary orientation and refusal to register.18
In the 1920s, Mennonites made several attempts to create non-denominational organizations to protect their rights. These include the Union of Citizens of Dutch Origin in Ukraine, as well as the All-Russian Mennonite Agricultural Union. Both of them did not last long and were closed by the authorities, not having had time to have a significant impact on the Mennonite identity in the USSR.

The struggle for the preservation of Mennonite identity reached a new qualitative level with the beginning of widespread collectivization and a new round of widespread struggle against religion in 1929, the full force of the blow fell on the remnants of the social basis of Mennonite-the colonies, and on their most important surviving social institution - the church. In the early 1930s, church communities as a major factor in the formation of Mennonite identity ceased to exist; their leadership was arrested. In 1934, the next wave of arrests took place in the German colonies, as a result of which church activists ended up in correctional labor camps. The repressions of 1937-1938 took with them the remnants of the Mennonite confessional and pedagogical elite - those who could actively form the foundations of identity for the next generation. In the same 1930s, most of the books and periodicals that could also have influenced the reproduction of identity in the next generation also died.

As mentioned earlier, the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 entailed a number of measures for the forced resettlement of Germans in Siberia and Central Asia. Before the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 13, 1955 "On the lifting of restrictions on the legal status of Germans and their family members in special settlements", that is,

18. GAKO. F. 1364. Op. 1. d. 59, l. 117-118. The author is grateful to V. Fast for pointing out this document.

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for at least fourteen years, they were forced to live in conditions of forced dispersion. Part of the Mennonites, being mobilized into the Labor Army, ended up on large wartime construction sites, while the other part - in rural areas, among the foreign-speaking population.

The ethno-confessional Mennonite identity has come under double pressure. Being German by nationality, Mennonites were perceived as the losers of two world wars. The authorities ' trust in Germans in general and Mennonites in particular was lost. Among the Germans of the military generation, there is a significant decline in the level of education compared to both the surrounding population and the previous generation. Most Germans eventually got used to this role and did not expect a favorable attitude towards themselves, having gone into the "internal opposition" and believing that they had nothing to lose. Decades later, after 1987, they left the USSR at the first opportunity.

Another factor that did not allow Mennonites to "fit in" with Soviet society was confessional. Prior to the Decree of 1955, there were no separate legal German religious communities, including Mennonite ones. During the period when the party's new policy towards religion was being developed in 1955-1958, the pressure on believers significantly eased, and many small illegal German communities emerged in the places of deportation. In the fall of 1956, the president of the Mennonite World Conference, Harold Bender, and a preacher from Canada, a native of Russia, David Vince, visited the USSR as tourists. They managed to meet some Mennonites. This aroused some interest among the authorities - the Council for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR began to monitor the situation with Mennonites in the country. 19 However, the authorities did not intend to register Mennonite communities in the country, adding them to the list of sectarian organizations "whose activities are extremely reactionary and antisocial" .20 The attitude of the authorities towards them changed somewhat only after the adjustment of the religious course in 1964-1966. The first Mennonite community received legal status only in December 1966,21

19. GARF. F. 6991. Op. 3. D. 132. L. 150.

20. GAKO. F. 1364. Op. 1. D. 60. L. 22-23.

21. GARF, F. 6991. Op. 6. D. 3. L. 63.

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Dynamics of Confessional Identity: Mennonites among Baptists

Despite the attempt to totally destroy religion, which began in 1929, personal religiosity has not completely disappeared. Starting in 1942, informal inter-confessional groups formed on its basis at a number of objects of the Labor Army, which met for joint prayers.22 Mennonite returnees who had experienced a revival of their faith in Germany, where they were taken from Ukraine in 1943 by retreating German troops and returned to the USSR after the end of the war, also gathered in illegal conditions. A small part of the Mennonite youth was able to join the Evangelical Baptist congregations that were legally active after 1944 under the conditions of the Labor Army.23
The confessional component of Mennonite identity in the conditions of dispersion faced existential challenges. Many young people had to decide for themselves about the essence of their faith. Those with a strong Mennonite identity among the church's mentors could not help them - they either emigrated in the 1920s or were liquidated in the 1930s. In an environment where even the Bible was rare, religious literature was not available. At best, the decision could be based on a family tradition, which, in the absence of fathers, was carried by mothers.24
Joining Mennonites in Evangelical Baptist communities, where possible, was often the only way to preserve the faith. A. Weiss from the Altai Territory

22. Strieker, G. (1989) "Deutsches Kirchenwesen in der UdSSR nach 1941", in Basse, O., Strieker, G. (Hrsg.) Religionen in der UdSSR: unbekannte Vielfalt in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ss. 161 - 175. Zollikon: G2W.

23. I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Life of believers and communities of evangelical Christians-Baptists and Mennonites in Karaganda and the Karaganda region. Book 1. Karaganda: B. I., 2001, p. 152.

24. Дик Д., Виноградник. С. 93. 110; Dyck, J. (2012) "A Root of Dry Ground: Revival Patterns in the German Free Churches in the USSR After World War II", Journal of Mennonite Studies 30: 102 со ссылкой на Wolk, G. (2000) "Frommigkeit und gemeindliches Leben der Mennoniten in der Sowjetunion", in Hildebrandt, G., Hildebrandt, J. (Hrsg.) 200 Jahre Mennoniten in Russland: Aufsatze zu ihrer Geschichte und Kultur, ss. 227 - 241. Bolanden-Weierhof: Verl. des Mennonitischen Geschichtsvereins.

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expresses it as follows: "It was not a choice between Mennonite and Baptist, but between Baptist and atheism." 25
A. Weiss describes the conditions under which such decisions were made. This is, first of all, a fierce struggle against religion: According to the statistics of the Altai Territory Commissioner of the SDRC, in 1964 alone, one out of seven illegally operating Mennonite communities was liquidated, and the number of Mennonites decreased from 413 to 328, that is, by 20%. On the other hand, according to A. Weiss, in the area of Mennonite settlement in the Altai Territory, the actual Mennonite points of consolidation of believers were so strongly suppressed that in the 1960s the only such point in the region was not the Mennonite, but a related community of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in Slavgorod, which later became part of the Council of Churches EXB 26.

The distance between Mennonites, primarily Fraternal Christians, and Evangelical Baptist Christians was minimal. The main reason for the similarity between them is historical. It is well known that fraternal Mennonites played an active role in the emergence of Baptism in Southern Russia in the 1860s. Their representative, Johann Wheeler, formulated the first official creed and helped shape structures at both the community and inter-community levels.27 After the Mennonite community was cut off from the European context during World War I, Baptists became their most natural ally.

Both fraternal Mennonites and Russian-speaking Baptists were largely influenced by German pietism, which emphasized the primacy of personal faith and personal salvation. Pietism remained a prominent phenomenon in the religious life of Russia and the Soviet Union even in the twentieth century. The previously mentioned illegal prayer meetings of the 1940s were essentially pietistic. After the 1905 Edicts on Freedom of Conscience, the role of pietism in the Mennonite mainstream continued to increase, which was already noted in the 1920s. 28 Finally, in the 1970s, pietism among Mennonites-

25. Weiss, A. (2012) "The Transition of Siberian Mennonites to Baptists: Causes and Results", Journal of Mennonite Studies 30: 137.

26. Ibid., p. 136.

27. "Johann Wieler (1839 - 1889) Among Russian Evangelicals: A New Source of Mennonites and Evangelicalism in Imperial Russia" (1987), Journal of Mennonite Studies 5: 44 - 60.

28. Selected Documents, pp. 439 - 440.

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Tov won the final victory. The only thing that still distinguished them from the fraternal Mennonites was the form of baptism.

Pietism may have been one of the reasons that church Mennonites have significantly lost their position in the general spectrum. If the ratio of fraternal and church Mennonites in the 1920s was approximately 1 to 4 29, then in the 1980s this ratio was already the opposite of 30. The effects of the tumultuous twenty-five years of 1929-1954 were felt even later in Germany, where the majority of Mennonites emigrated in 1987-1992. The number of members in fraternal Mennonite communities here correlates with membership in church communities, according to some estimates, as approximately 6 to 1.

Since the restoration of the congregations in the mid-1950s, the Mennonite identity has come into competition with the Baptist one. After dekulakization, deportation, and the Labor Army, the largest contingents of Mennonites and their descendants ended up in major cities. Some of them already had Evangelical Baptist congregations, and Mennonites, especially fraternal ones, found it much easier to join a Baptist congregation than to start a new one.

Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the person of their governing body VSEKHB 31 willingly went to meet the Mennonites. Since the Evangelical Baptist Convention in 1963, there have been 4 models of interaction: (1) ALLHB is ready to assist in the registration of fully Mennonite congregations under the name of Evangelical Christian Baptists. For communities that were under heavy pressure from the authorities, this path promised legalization and relative peace in exchange for the loss of a confessional name. (2) Mennonite congregations form a kind of section within the existing Evangelical Baptist congregation. They have their own worship meetings in German and retain their leadership structures, but lose their Mennonite name. For example, German branches of the Evangelical Baptist congregations in Novosibirsk and Frunze functioned according to this principle. (3) Mennonites participate in the work of the community on a common basis. So, for example,

29. Ibid., p. 479.

30. German-Mennonite Brotherhood. Communities that have members of the brotherhood. [VSHB statistics for 1986-87; electronic copy].

31. All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists.

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The work of a large community was built in the town of Kant in Kyrgyzstan. In the 1980s, it had about a thousand members, of whom 85% were German, and its presbyter was a Mennonite. Most of the community's activities were conducted in Russian; German meetings were sparse. (4) Individual Mennonites may be accepted as members of a community of Evangelical Baptist Christians, regardless of the form of baptism, if they can attest to their personal salvation in accordance with Pietistic principles.

The communities of the first three models were theoretically able to preserve the ethnic component of Mennonite identity-language. Sermons, community and choral singing in German were common. There was a problem with the language, however. If the older generation grew up in a German environment and attended German schools (they were abolished in 1938), then the younger generation was subject to full language assimilation. German remained the language of the family and worship only. The transition to Russian in the 1980s was in full swing, and only emigration to Germany stopped this process.

Mennonite natives in the third-model congregations used mostly Russian in their worship services. For them, the process of assimilation - linguistic and ethnic-was even faster. Mixed marriages were more common here.

Mennonites did not come under the pressure of a Baptist church identity, perhaps only in one region of the USSR - in the Orenburg region. Local villages, up to emigration to Germany, retained a homogeneous composition of the population and even Plattdeutsch as the street language. The authorities started registering communities here after 1975. The congregations had a choice - to register independently from the ALLHB under the name of fraternal Mennonites or as part of the ALLHB, but with the loss of the confessional name. In the 1980s, there were nineteen VSEKHB communities here, of which only five were autonomous.32 In 1987, the presbyter of one of the Orenburg rural communities from the descendants of Mennonites told the author:"For us, the main thing is faith, not the name."

Fraternal Mennonites in the Omsk Region also abandoned their confessional name. Their colonies were once adjacent to those of Lutherans and Baptists. When in the 1950s.

32. German-Mennonite Brotherhood, pp. 54-61.

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when the restoration of communities began, at a very early stage, it was decided to form a united brotherhood of communities, without making a distinction in the name. It was not until 2006 that this fraternity officially decided to adopt the name Evangelical Baptist Christians, in order to somehow emphasize its similarity to other faith-related communities. 33
The situation in the Omsk region, where Mennonites and Baptists united, is typical for most communities that emerged in the dispersion. Each ethnic group within the Russian Germans had its own dialect and customs, and each of these groups saw advantages over the others. The vast majority of German communities were ethnically heterogeneous with some advantage of the Mennonite component (according to some estimates, it was about 60% in the average community). Thus, almost all communities had groups that would disagree with the Mennonite designation for the entire community. The neutral name "Evangelical Christians-Baptists" smoothed out such conflicts.

The core of the Mennonite identity in Russia was the rejection of weapons. Mennonites were the only evangelical denomination that strongly affirmed this principle to the Government in the 1920s. The consequences were still felt four decades later: the measure of Mennonite loyalty to the state, and therefore the likelihood of legalization, was still the same attitude to military service. The Baptist majority in the country, represented by the VSEKHB, strongly supported serving in the army with weapons in their hands. The Council of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists (CCEHB), which opposes him, in practice opposed weapons and the oath. Mennonite communities and groups left the decision on the oath to conscripts and did not subject those who took it to church penalties.

In 1972, the SCEHB published information about Baptist Ivan Moiseyev, who did not take the oath and paid for it with his life. The case received wide international publicity, after which the army began to treat refusals of the oath much more tolerantly. After that, cases of refusal to take the oath on religious grounds became more frequent. Some of them were young men of Mennonite origin. So an important element is

33. Epp P. 100 years under the roof of the Supreme: The history of Omsk ECB communities and their associations. Omsk; Steinhagen: Samenkorn, 2007. P. 350.

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The traditional Mennonite identity was once again given the right to exist thanks to the Baptists.

Diversification of the spectrum of Mennonite identity necessarily involves not only expanding the field of identification attributes and even blurring confessional boundaries, usually with Evangelical Christians-Baptists, but also, in the opposite part of the spectrum, a struggle for some exclusive qualities that distinguish Mennonites from all others. Identity in this case acts as a mechanism for distinguishing with other faiths and separating from them.

The easiest way was for church Mennonites. Their form of baptism - pouring or sprinkling-effectively separated them from the Baptist environment. However, their congregations were small, and they were losing young people who were trying to join more active communities of evangelical Christians-Baptists.

The most important identification attribute is the name of the denomination. In the second half of the 16th century, the name Mennonites provided patronage in some geographical areas. Mennonites in Russia, even if they were not very religious, did not leave the confessional field, because they considered themselves protected by the royal privilege and stubbornly defended it. 34 The influence of the Evangelical Alliance among Mennonites, which emerged in the 1880s and helped strengthen the spirit of unity of believers, blurred confessional boundaries, not stopping at the names of denominations. Fraternal Mennonites were more susceptible to this influence than others.

Threatened with extinction after World War II, Mennonites, especially fraternal ones, found allies in Evangelical Baptist Christians who were willing to provide them with shelter and welcome them into their ranks. After 1963, Mennonite identity was welcomed at the level of ALL NHS-it once again emphasized the universal nature of the association, in which there was a place for a wide variety of faiths. At the local level, the situation was different. Baptists, especially Russians, were wary of Mennonites and did not accept those who were not baptized by immersion into their communities. Even Pietistic Mennonites were encouraged to repeat baptism.

Senior presbyters of ALL churches preferred a homogeneous Baptist environment. Mennonite features promised more-

34. Friesen, A. In Defence of Privilege, p. 9.

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a lot of trouble in their already hectic lives. N. N. Sizov, senior presbyter of the ALLKHB in the Kirghiz SSR, told the author in 1987:"We all serve in the army and therefore all are Baptists." He knew that the first evangelical congregations in the area he served had been Mennonites since 1883; at least half of the congregations were of Mennonite descent, as were most of the members of the presbyterian council.

The SCEHB communities were even more homogeneous. There was even less scope for maintaining a Mennonite identity.

Conclusion

The Russian-specific course of secularization initially led not to the dissolution of those who had left the faith in the main mass of the population, but to the isolation in the Mennonite environment of a stratum of those who began to consider themselves Mennonites by culture, who continued to share with their community historical roots, mentality and a specific dialect.

The participation of some Mennonites in the self-defense units during the Civil War expanded the number of those who left the core of the Mennonite faith, but continued to identify with Mennonism. Mass Mennonite organizations in the 1920s no longer had exclusively confessional, but socio-cultural and economic foundations.

After the crucial persecution of religion in the 1930s and the deportation of 1941, Mennonites remained an ethno-confessional community, which continued to exist, however, in a purely confessional form. The doctrinal proximity to Evangelical Christians-Baptists, on the one hand, helped them survive, on the other-led to a further erosion of the Mennonite identity, which, since the 1960s, could be preserved at the family level and cultivated in a few communities that retained their traditional Mennonite name.

Bibliography/References

Archived sources

State Archive of the Karaganda region (GAKO): F. 1364 Commissioner of the Council for Religious Cults under the Executive Committee of the Karaganda Regional Council of Workers ' Deputies.

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State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF): F. 6991 Council for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

Personal Archive

German Mennonite Fellowship. Communities that have members of the brotherhood. [VSHB statistics for 1986-87; electronic copy].

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