Building a Civil Society in Molochna

Johann Cornies first came to prominence in the Mennonite congrega­tional world in 1817 when he was put in charge of the setdement committee that supervised the arrival of new Mennonite settlers.¹¹ It is unclear whether a formal administrative title accompanied this posi­tion.

Because he supervised the founding of the new villages, and the newcomers were considered to be Frisians, many Flemish Congregation- alists associated Cornies with the views of Frisians. Always a strong be­liever in the value of education, Cornies was also a founding member of the controversial Christian School Association in 1820, and in 1822 he accepted the role of supervisor of the Bible association’s distribution depot. As a result of his involvement in these endeavours, Cornies was at the heart of the religious disputes that troubled the Molochna settle­ment in the 1820s.

Contrary to conservative Flemish assumptions that Cornies was politi­cally aligned with Gdrz and the Frisians, in truth he was a religious moderate and remained a member of the original Old Flemish congre­gation led by Bernhard Fast. Comies had Iitde patience with the pietis- tic beliefs of the Frisian leaders, referring to them dismissively in his private correspondence as the troublesome folk ‘up there on the Iushanlee.⁴⁴ He was particularly unhappy with Voth, the Ohrloff school­master.

Most accounts of Cornies’s life focus on his secular (and seculariz­ing) activities, and there is little attempt in the historical literature to define his religious world view. Yet Cornies’s correspondence is filled with obviously genuine Christian sentiments, as shown in this excerpt from a letter to a Pmssian Mennonite acquaintance, where Cornies is bemoaning fatalistic Nogai attitudes towards the cholera epidemic of 1831:

[The Nogai] say [cholera] is a spirit with 3 heads and 500 assistants which was sent by God to remove the vicious people from this earth, and for this reason it is very sinful to apply methods against this divine judgement and whoever among them uses [such methods] dies as a Christian and has no part in the joy of the Muslim heaven... I have had conversations with the priests themselves in an attempt to convince them that they should permit the lay people to use at least some medicines, but... the Tatars whom I had taught as doctors to deal with those ill with cholera had to give up on the matter and could speak no further word about it, much less give medicine...

Now they feel sorry for me that I have so little faith in God’s help... I do not see any doctor as God and no medicine as the Saviour, but I believe firmly that if God does not give his blessing to our daily bread, it will not nourish us, and [if he does not bless] the medicine, it will not heal any­thing.¹⁷

Here, however imprecisely, is the religious justification of most of Cornies’s actions.

Cornies’s own understanding of what constituted a civil society prob­ably began to develop from the time he took charge of settling new Mennonite immigrants in 1817. This task brought him into close asso­ciation with Samuel Contenius, who was the head of the Guardianship Committee, and Contenius’s cameralist administrative philosophy had a fundamental formative influence on Cornies. In 1820 the Guardian­ship Committee appointed Cornies to supervise the settlement on the Berda River of new immigrants arriving from Wiirttemberg. The devel­opment of his administrative world view continued, and by the time he took a close interest in Nogai in 1825 he was already formulating his own blueprint for society.

Cornies’s efforts to improve Nogai sheep have already been discussed in Chapter 3. However, the prize exhibit in his program to ‘civilize’ the Nogai was the model village of Akkerman. Cornies first mentioned the idea of creating a model village in 1825, and by 1832 the project had developed into a full-scale plan.¹⁹ Built in 1835 on the Iushanlee River near Cornies’s estate, Akkerman represented Cornies’s vision of an ideal community. His instructions comprised thirty-five articles defining ev­ery aspect of the village’s construction and administration.

Akkerman was an extension of the state’s earlier policies towards Nogai, for it upheld the regulated, organized peasant village as a sym­bol of civility. It must be emphasized that the model village was not solely Cornies’s project; it was strongly supported by the state. The cameralist policies that defined Russia’s ambitions for its state peasants had been clearly laid out in 1797 in the laws governing their adminis­tration.²² What distinguished Cornies was his success in applying such cameralist policies at the local level. Yet Cornies took them further. Cornies took the prescripts of cameralism, incorporated the practical lessons he learned in building Akkerman, combined them with his religious beliefs, and conceived a model for society that went well be­yond the aspirations of the state. Akkerman was to replicate a Menno- nite village, and taken to its furthest extreme, it also became Cornies’s model for the future of Mennonite society.

The nuclear villages in New Russia were themselves a recent innova­tion in Mennonite society. When the Mennonites first arrived in New Russia in 1789 they intended to settle on dispersed farmsteads, but the threat of marauding Cossacks and Tatars forced them to build compact nuclear villages instead.²³ The uniformity of these villages was a reflec­tion of Mennonite traditions, following ‘logically from the community- minded tenets of Mennonite theology, from a mixture of bitter and prideful memories of a common martyr past, dating back to the Refor­mation, and from the obvious need for solidarity if the community was to survive as a small ethnic and religious minority in Russia.’²⁴

The attempt to impose an ideal version of this outer, physical mani­festation of Mennonite religious beliefs on Islamic Nogai provides a fascinating glimpse into Cornies’s philosophy. Mennonite commitment to peaceful withdrawal from the secular world effectively precluded proselytization.²⁵ There are no records of Mennonite attempts to con­vert Nogai. Indeed, Cornies’s regulations for Akkerman emphasized obedience to Islamic law. The implicit assumption governing planning of the model village, however, was that strict physical adherence to this outward manifestation of Cornies’s idealized version of Mennonite soci­ety was the key to what Cornies elsewhere called the ‘external prosper­ity’ of the Nogai.²⁶ Nor can there be any doubt that, for Cornies, im­proving the economic condition of the Nogai was tantamount to im­proving their moral condition.

The Akkerman project can be interpreted as evidence that Cornies understood the Mennonite system of social organization as nothing more than an efficient vehicle for economic advancement, equally ap­plicable to Islamic Nogai and Christian Mennonites. However, an ex­amination of Comies’s other activities suggests that he more Iikelyviewed the project as a reaffirmation of his belief in Mennonite society and even, perhaps, as an act of proselytization.