Conclusion

The interlocking story of Nogai and Mennonite economic development has several important lessons. To begin with, contrary to the image portrayed in most Mennonite sources, Mennonites were neither isolated from surrounding populations, nor simply paternalistic benefactors to backward neighbours.

It must be emphasized that traditional Nogai pastoral practices had already led to the brink of disaster through overgrazing as early as 1825. Something had to change. Cornies’s programs were intended to guide that change along manifestly successful Mennonite paths. Even after Cornies’s death, when the 1847 epidemic wiped out Nogai herds, Mennonites, although hard hit by the disaster themselves, gave interest- free loans to Nogai. Too, the Mennonite solution to the problem, namely, transition to arable husbandry, was not necessarily a panacea. Nogai land was the poorest in the Molochna region and only a relatively small proportion of it, along the banks of the Molochna and Iushanlee rivers, was truly suited to crop agriculture. The Bulgarian settlers who inher­ited the land in the 1860s quickly pronounced much of it uninhabit­able, and they were only persuaded to stay by a large-scale state-funded well-digging program.³⁶ Still, some Nogai land was suited to arable hus­bandry, and indeed was ploughed and planted in the 1850s - mainly by landless Mennonite renters.

Placed in the context of Mennonite-Nogai economic relations and the post-1848 Nogai economic collapse, the Nogai exodus itself appears at least partly a product of Mennonite landlessness. Because the land­lessness crisis occurred in the 1860s, the significance Oflandlessness in earlier decades has received only passing attention, but the Nogai story suggests it needs to be reassessed.³⁷ The role of Mennonites as models to surrounding settlers was hotly debated in the 1830s and 1840s. Pro­gressive Mennonites, led by Cornies and supported by the state, argued that the terms of the Mennonite charter obliged them to act as model setders. Conservative Mennonites responded that Mennonite faith was founded on separation from ‘the world,’ and thus precluded active involvement with other setders.³⁸ Participation by landless Mennonites in Cornies’s sharecropping program is a pointed reminder that the conservative ideal of living as ‘the quiet in the land’ was only possible for those with land. For the 53 per cent of Molochna Mennonites with­out land by 1848, the insular ideals of conservative congregations of­fered but cold comfort.