CHAPTER EIGHT Conclusion

Orthodox state peasants, sectarians, Islamic Nogai Tatars, and German­speaking Mennonites, Catholics, and Lutherans arrived in the Molochna River Basin facing virtually identical challenges.

Within a few decades they faced a second common challenge: adap­tation to demographic growth and land shortages. Nogai reached the crisis point first. Their land grant was the poorest in the region, and as pastoralists by tradition, they had arrived in the Molochna region with large herds. Consequently, by 1825 their herds exceeded the carrying capacity of their land and they faced the need to change.

By the mid-1830s Orthodox state peasants faced the same dilemma. In 1835 the average Orthodox state peasant land allotment in Molochna was just 12.81 desiatinas per male soul, already less than the 15 desiatinas per male soul that made a region ‘land-rich’ in the state’s eyes. Nor was there free crown land in the region to make up the shortfall; although some 97,000 desiatinas of crown land in Melitopol uezd remained unas­signed in 1835, it was scattered in the most remote and arid places and had little value to the existing population.¹

Foreign colonists, too, faced land shortages. By 1839 fully 47 per cent OfMennonites were landless and other foreign colonists had only avoided the same problem by using up their entire supply of surplus land.

This study began with the question of why these different ethnocultural groups, facing common conditions, parted ways and followed sharply divergent developmental paths in reaction to demographic pressures.

The Great Drought of 1832-4 gave particular urgency to the need to change agricultural practices in Molochna. Johann Cornies even saw a positive side to the drought, thinking it would force Mennonites to ‘reconsider many things, deal with them and carry them out better, in order to prevent similar disasters in the future.’² Because it affected the entire empire, the drought pushed the state to renew efforts to reform state peasant administration, particularly contributing to the decision to create the Ministry of State Domains in 1838. The new ministry played an important role in the Molochna region by selectively lending its authority to settlers’ demands for change.

With the need for change apparent, the critical question became the forms that it would take. Studies of peasants both in Russia and else­where identify them as ‘risk averse,’ preferring economic and social solutions that minimize the risk of starvation in times of dearth to innovative solutions that offer potentially higher returns, but at greater risk. The characteristic Russian peasant manifestation of ‘risk averse’ practices is communal land repartition. What makes the Molochna case particularly interesting is that at the Criticaljuncture in the 1830s, when Orthodox peasants fell into the expected pattern and instituted com­munal repartition, Mennonite peasants chose a different path.

A key element in this argument is that Mennonites, when they came to the Molochna region, closely conformed to standard definitions of peasants. They had lived in insular, self-sufficient agricultural commu­nities, played no role in the state administrative system, and had been subject to state expropriations that, as a result of religious prejudice, often were even more severe than those experienced by their non- Mennonite peasant neighbours. In Mennonite historiography these char­acteristics are commonly ascribed to Mennonite religious beliefs. Con­sequently, the process of economic change in the nineteenth century that saw Mennonites in Russia transform themselves from peasants into farmers, labourers, craftsmen, and industrialists is interpreted as a pro­cess of secularization rather than de-peasantization.

Religion clearly played a key role in the development of the Molochna Mennonite settlement. Common religious beliefs were important to the growth of an independent administrative system, while the sense of facing an alien world as a small religiously and ethnically cohesive group helped foster a sense of community. Meanwhile, the congregational system provided a medium for political activity. The importance of religion in forging community identity is further reinforced by the Doukhobor example. Doukhobors, too, developed a sense of commu­nity in Molochna, forming a ^lDoukhobor commonwealth’ strong enough to resist the state’s efforts to convert them to Orthodoxy, even at the expense of accepting exile.

Nevertheless, the Mennonite religious ideal called for the colonists to live in a manner that is almost indistinguishable from peasanthood. That ideal, and their condition as peasants, underwent fundamental changes in Molochna as a result of the self-administrative system that Mennonites developed - a system that included among its most impor­tant functions the administration of land allocation and use. To under­stand the changes Mennonites in Molochna underwent it is necessary to temporarily set aside religious issues and think of Mennonites, not as a religious group in the process of secularizing, but as peasants in the process of ‘de-peasantizing.’

A critical factor that helped Mennonites break out of peasanthood was their abundance of land in their first years in the Molochna basin.

Why, then, did Mennonites continue along the path of de- peasantization in the 1830s, while Orthodox peasants reverted to peasanthood? Mennonite economic success in Russia has traditionally been explained as a consequence of the state endowing them with more land than Orthodox peasants. This ‘land explanation’ can be quickly dismissed. Although initial Mennonite allotments of sixty-five desiatinas per family did give the average Mennonite family more land than the average Orthodox peasant family, by the 1830s rapid demo­graphic growth in the Mennonite settlement had already eroded this advantage. Although landed Mennonite families still had more land per male soul than Orthodox families, by 1839 land per Mennonite male soul, including the landless, had dropped to 10.98 desiatinas, and by 1847 the figure had dropped to 9.35 desiatinas. By comparison, in Bolshoi Tokmak volost, the most populous state peasant district in the Molochna, average land holdings in 1844 were 9.93 desiatinas per male soul. Even the distribution of land within the two communities was similar. In 1844 about one-third of all Bolshoi Tokmak peasants had large hold­ings in the khutors, 11 per cent engaged in trades, and 55 per cent owned ‘only a hand’s-breadth’ of land.

A second factor often offered in explanation of Mennonite economic success is that the state gave more aid to Mennonites when they arrived in Molochna than it did to Orthodox peasants. This too is a misperception, probably rooted in the fact that aid to Mennonites is well documented, while aid to Orthodox immigrants has heretofore gone unnoticed. State policy towards Orthodox immigrants to New Russia explicitly recognized the need to treat them ‘with precisely the same care as are foreign immigrants.’³ Orthodox settlers received subsi­dies, loans, and tax deferrals during their first years in Molochna, just as Mennonites did. More importantly, whatever the role of subsidies in the early years, up until the 1830s Orthodox settlers followed a develop­mental path closely paralleling the Mennonites; this belies the sugges­tion that state subsidies at the time of immigration account for later Mennonite successes.

Changes in state policy in the 1830s played an important role in the parting of ways, but the state took an increasingly active role in both the Mennonite settlement and the Orthodox state peasant villages. State backing, for example, was critical in the outcome of internal political disputes between Warkentin and Cornies in the 1830s and 1840s. The increased role of the state helped make change possible, but the state cannot take credit for the nature of the change. Even the Doukhobors could resist the state’s efforts to convert them, albeit at the expense of accepting exile. Peasants, whether Doukhobor, Orthodox, or Menno- nite, had substantial control over how state authority entered into local decisions.

This leads to the contradictory idea that in the Molochna basin, the more sophisticated the mechanisms of community self-administration before the land shortage crisis, the less communitarian the outcome after the crisis.

Although the state, by way of the Guardianship Committee, played a significant role in Mennonite disputes in the Molochna River Basin, the critical issue was which Mennonite faction would lead the settlement. There was never any question that the reins of control would stay in Mennonite hands. Indeed, contrary to conventional interpretations that Cornies represented a statist fifth column in the Molochna settlement, the relationship between the state and Cornies can be interpreted in quite the opposite light. Comies conceived an administrative system completely outside of the Russian state’s experience, and the state tried to adopt it as a model for other state peasants. In a sense, this was a case of the state becoming ‘Corniest,’ and not the other way around.

Cornies’s role in the development of Molochna Mennonite society demands special attention, for he was a remarkable figure who left a permanent imprint on the settlement. The explanation for Mennonite development I have offered thus far suggests that developments in Men- nonite society were based on objective economic conditions; this leaves little room for Cornies’s personal contributions. There is some truth to this, for other Mennonite settlements in places outside of Cornies’s control shared in the Mennonite success story. Cornies was a product of a system that allowed brilliant men to shine, and had he not risen to the task it seems likely that someone else would have. Still, Molochna was the most progressive of Mennonite settlements in Russia, constantly attracting the praise of the state, and this leading position must be credited to Cornies.

There were three important factors in the development of the Molochna Mennonite community: a self-conscious religious identity, a land tenure system that permitted Mennonites to take control of their own public resources, and the guiding hand of Cornies. As important as religion and Cornies’s genius were, arguably it was control over com­mon resources that played the decisive role. Administration of the settlement’s surplus land encouraged Mennonites to develop a system of civil administration to parallel the congregational system. The civil administration system in turn took responsibility for the welfare of the entire Mennonite community. Mennonites created mechanisms to pro­tect the interests of their poor without sacrificing the land tenure rights of individual community members. Wealthy progressive Mennonites then led the way to agricultural innovations that served the whole community.

The Orthodox state peasant solution to land shortages was far differ­ent from the Mennonite one. Orthodox peasants arrived in Molochna with a system of communal land administration already in place. But in Molochna the function of such self-administrative structures eroded because there was neither a shortage of land to necessitate communal administration nor a surplus to encourage it. The peasants’ Orthodox faith provided no basis for developing a distinct community identity, for unlike Mennonites, Orthodox peasants were only passive partici­pants in church affairs. The lack of corporate structures meant that when the land crisis came, Orthodox peasants lacked formal commu­nity problem-solving mechanisms to resolve them. In effect, theirs was a community without politics. The ‘depredations’ the village of Popovka committed against the village of Berestova in 1834 were the result of this lack of strong internal administrative structures. As a consequence of this deficiency, when the crisis hit, peasants had no choice but to turn to outside authorities to resolve their problems. It must be empha­sized that this was not a reflection of the peasants’ desire to have the state take control of their lives. Indeed, peasants in Bolshoi Tokmak resisted most of the reforms proposed by Wilhelm Bauman in 1844. Yet they could not resolve their central problem for themselves, and in the end they had no choice but to turn to the state. The result, namely, repartition, amounted to the imposition of Communalism as a cure for the lack of community.

Stepping back from local specifics, the Molochna story has important implications for broader questions regarding the Russian state peas­antry. Clearly, in Molochna the image of state peasants as ‘the state’s serfs’ will not do, for foreign colonists, Nogai, Doukhobors, and Ortho­dox peasants, with their widely differing experiences, were all formally designated as state peasants. Molochna is not representative of the ex­perience of all state peasants everywhere in the empire. Nevertheless, like the Molochna settlers, the majority of Russia’s state peasants lived on the empire’s peripheries. If the experiences of Siberian or Central Asian state peasants were not the same as those of state peasants in New Russia, the Molochna story nevertheless obliges us to recognize that it cannot be assumed that any state peasants fit neatly into a single socio­economic mould. By 1858 state peasants made up half of Russia’s peas­ant population and almost 40 per cent of the total population of the empire. They represented a vast, potentially innovative and productive human resource for Russia, and their role in Russia’s development demands far closer attention than it hats heretofore received.

Finally, the Molochna story highlights the barriers that hindered the state from effectively administering its peasants. The oasis that the state imagined to exist in the Molochna basin was a gross simplification of an environmentally, economically, politically, socially, and ethnically com­plex region. The state’s inability to understand such complexities left it with Iitde chance to administer Molochna effectively. Instead of guid­ing regional development it could only react when harvests failed or whole communities sank into poverty and fled. Even when the state attempted to become more closely involved, it relied so heavily on local administrators that its authority was reduced to Iitde more than an unwieldy club, lent to whichever local figure or group was strong enough to swing it. Thus, Doukhobors, although ‘among the best of the government’s colonies,’ were needlessly exiled.

The oasis was a mirage, and the government in far-off St Petersburg, thirsty for control of its peripheries, was only too eager to be deceived by it. The real Molochna combined the ‘dry cracked ground’ of Gnadenfeld and the lush orchards of Iushanlee, the Byzantine com­plexities of Mennonite Intercongregational disputes and the crude ex­propriations of Orthodox peasant ‘depredations.’ Isolated from the state, constrained by the environment, pressured by demographic growth and changing markets, settlers had no choice but to draw upon their own traditions, experiences, and conceptions of justice and equity, as they fled, formed communes, or created commonwealths on the rolling steppes of the Molochna Iiiver Basin.