Conclusion

WhenJohann Cornies died in 1848, few Mennonites mourned his pass­ing. In the end he was more feared than loved, and as historian Harvey L. Dyck points out, only eight of the forty-four extant village histories that were written on the orders of the state shortly after Cornies’s death have anything positive to say about him.¹²⁷ Yet it must be noted that these histories were written in the midst of the most severe drought since the Great Drought of 1832-4, a situation hardly likely to weigh in Cornies’s favour in the minds of those who compiled the histories.¹²⁸ The fact that this drought, unlike the Great Drought, caused barely a stir in the Molochna Mennonite economy is a greater testament to Cornies’s accomplishments than any tributes that village officials might have written.

The religious turmoil that accompanied the transformation has per­haps received more attention from historians than it warrants. It must be remembered that to a significant degree these were political dis­putes. There is little, if any, evidence that they were accompanied by social turmoil. Before condemning Cornies’s actions, it is important to ask what other options there were. In the 1860s and 1870s Mennonites bought land and established daughter colonies, but this solution grew out of a real social crisis in a society that was already exploiting its other economic options to their fullest. Until internal solutions had been exhausted, it is hardly reasonable to expect that the Mennonite settle­ment would have taken more radical steps. Nor was land redistribution an attractive alternative, even setting aside the fact that it was forbidden by the Mennonite charter and certain to be even more vehemently opposed by conservative landowners than were Cornies’s reforms.

The transformation of the Molochna Mennonite economy has im­portant implications for the larger story of Russia’s nineteenth-century economic development. Although Mennonites had special privileges,

Johann Cornies and a New Mennonite World View 143 their success was less a consequence of these privileges than of entre­preneurship and leadership. The state adopted the Molochna Menno- nite settlement as a shining example for all Russian state peasants and actively encouraged similar reforms in other places. However, the state could not replicate either Mennonite attitudes or Cornies’s leadership, even among neighbouring peoples in the Molochna basin, and it would be several decades before the rest of Russia would follow the Molochna Mennonites down the road towards the industrial revolution. The Molochna Mennonite story is an object lesson about what could be accomplished even within the institutional and political constraints of prereform Russia.