Economic Transformation and Landlessness

Cornies’s attention to markets allowed him to encourage the produc­tion of commercial crops appropriate to international market condi­tions. Besides wheat, the most important among such crops in Molochna

TABLE 5.1

Gross grain production (chetverts) in the Molochna Mennonite settlement, 1828-1848

Source: 'Verzeichnis uber Aussaat und Ernte im Molotschner Mennonisten-Bezirk in den Jahren 1828 bis 1848,' n.d., PJBPMA, file 1308.

was flax.

The rise of landlessness in Molochna has already been discussed in Chapter 3. By 1839, 47 per cent of Mennonites were landless, and by 1847 this figure had risen to 53 per cent.⁶⁶ Hidden in this statistic is an important change in the character of landless families. They had always been younger than landed families, for it was only natural that newly married couples lived with parents until they were able to establish their own household. Cornies himself numbered among the landless in 1813 when he, his wife, and their infant son still lived WithJohann Sr.⁶⁷ However, while in 1847 landless families were still younger - and conse­quently smaller - than landed families, the gap between the two was narrowing. The average landless family in 1813 had 3.64 members, compared with 5.59 members in landed families.⁶⁸ By 1834 landless families on average had 4.12 members, while by 1847 they averaged 4.48 members.⁶⁹ Although they remained smaller than landed families, the trend was clear - landlessness was increasingly becoming a heredi­tary condition, as young families grew old without being able to acquire land.

Cornies was keenly aware of this development, and much of his activ­ity in his last ten years was directed towards resolving the problems it posed for Mennonite society.

In 1831 the Guardianship Committee proposed offering to landless Molochna Mennonite families forty-desiatina allotments southwest of the Molochna on the Tashenak River. Cornies advised that few were likely to accept such an offer when they could still ‘receive better land for setdement, and get more land as well’ in Molochna.⁷¹ However, with the rapid occupation of surplus land by new villages in the late 1830s and 1840s Cornies became an enthusiastic supporter of the newly pro­posed Judenplan project, which in the 1850s established mixed villages of Mennonites and Jewish peasants on crown land outside the original Mennonite allotment.⁷² The Russian state intended the project to pro­vide Mennonite farmers as models to educate Jewish settlers who were inexperienced with agriculture. For Cornies the Judenplan offered a desperately needed outlet for the landless.

The drought of 1848 temporarily increased the urgency of land short­ages in Molochna, and that year ninety-nine families left Molochna and purchased land in the Kiev and Volyniia guberniias.⁷³ The Agricultural Society vehemently protested such out-migration, complaining to the Guardianship Committee that unscrupulous Kievan and Volynian offi­cials were luring Mennonites away with Unfulfillable promises of cheap and plentiful land.

The alternative to out-migration was to provide gainful employment for the landless. This Comies did with remarkable success. In 1836 he proposed the creation of a craftsmen’s village alongside the village of Halbstadt.⁷⁵ To be called Neuhalbstadt, the new village was to be occu­pied by landless craftsmen and their families, of which there were 251 in the Molochna Mennonite settlement at that time.⁷⁶ Comies wrote, ‘These craftsmen, who live scattered around the District, only produce work that has been [specially] ordered, because most of them do not have sufficient means to purchase materials and to keep a supply of the products of their craft on hand to be sold.’⁷⁷ The idea of a craftsmen’s village in Molochna was not original to Cornies. Prischib had been a craftsmen’s village since its establishment by Germans in 1806.⁷⁸ In the context of the landlessness problem, however, Neuhalbstadt provides evidence of Cornies’s views. As usual, he perceived the benefits of the project in a mixture of moral and economic terms: ‘The goals of achiev­ing the best development of the spiritual and physical strengths of those practising a craft, so that they can raise their own prosperity, and of the delivery of better and cheaper craft production for use by inhab­itants who practise field cultivation, would be met if a portion of the craftsmen’s class were settled together in one location, from which more industry and zeal to perfect their products would develop and the products themselves would be sold more easily. The agriculturalists, moreover, would be able to fill their needs better and more cheaply in one location from one or another.’⁷⁹

Halbstadt was the obvious site for the new village.

Johann Cornies and a New Mennonite World View 127 objections Cornies pushed the proposal through, and in 1841 the craftsmen’s village was established.⁸⁰ Neuhalbstadt would eventually grow to be the commercial and industrial centre of the Molochna basin, a position it retains to the present day.

Cornies also concerned himself with provisions for the much larger group of landless families dependent on cottage industry. In 1838 he received the Guardianship Committee’s endorsement for a plan to set aside in every Molochna Mennonite village between four and six 300- square-sazhen (approximately 1.4 hectares or 3.5 acres) lots for ‘poor young families of the artisan class,’ whom he characterized as ‘non-self­supporting [nesostoiatel’nyi].’^8l The holders of such small allotments were known as Anwohner - cottagers - and while there had always been Anwohner in the Mennonite settlement, the creation of distinct Anwohner districts now became a distinguishing characteristic of Molochna Mennonite villages. Such districts are frequently cited as evi­dence of the inequity of land allocation in Molochna Mennonite soci­ety. It is important, therefore, to note that they grew out of a deliberate effort to improve the lot of landless renters.⁸²

A third project aimed at alleviating demographic pressures was the creation of the euphemistically named ‘shared farms.’ The Mennonite charter forbade subdivision of the standard sixty-fιve-desiatina farm al­lotments.

The first evidence of half-farms arose in 1845 when, in a widely dis­tributed account of Mennonite administrative practices, Cornies de­scribed the rules governing ‘those cases when two families want to share one farm.’⁸⁴ Such an arrangement was intended to permit two young families, who otherwise could not have afforded their own farm, to purchase one jointly. To circumvent the law against divided farms, one family was to be formally designated as owner, and the other as ‘helper.’ In practice, each family was to have ils ‘own equal share of the land, work its share independently, and be sole recipient of the pro­duce of its share.’⁸⁵ Although the two families were officially supposed

to share a single home and live as one household, the regulations allowed that ‘if the families are too large and cannot live in one house, then they may build a second house.’⁸⁶ There was even a provision for the families to sell their halves separately.⁸⁷ This shared-farm arrange­ment, which foreshadowed the creation of half-allotments by some twenty years, was a common practice in the Molochna region by 1848, when 202 of 1,170 landed families (17 per cent) lived on shared farms.⁸⁸

The document in which shared farms are described is a lengthy de­scription of Molochna Mennonite administrative practices that Cornies compiled for Kiselev, the minister of state domains. It is a comprehen­sive blueprint of Cornies’s vision of civil society in its fully mature form.⁸⁹ Kiselev was in charge of reforming the state peasantry, and his projects would eventually have an important influence on the Emancipation Edict that freed Russia’s serfs in 1861. He and his senior aides were profoundly impressed with the order and industry of the Molochna Mennonite community and looked to it as a model for what might be accomplished in Russian state peasant villages throughout the empire. The description that Cornies provided Kiselev was thus widely distrib­uted to the ministry’s guberniia-level offices as a primer on efficient social management.⁹⁰ Cornies is often viewed as an agent of tsarist policy in Molochna, but this instance shows a second side of this relationship, in which Comies acted as an agent for the dissemination of Mennonite policy throughout the Russian administrative system.

Of the thirty-five page, five-part, 126-point description, only slightly over three pages and twenty-six points addressed the duties and author­ity of district and village elders. The remaining thirty-two pages and IOO points described the duties, authority, and accomplishments of the Ag­ricultural Society. Duties ascribed to district and village elders were limited to taxation and the enforcement of local laws. These conformed closely to the law of 1797 that defined the role of elders in all state peasant villages. Notably lacking in the description was any mention of congregational authority.

The document identified the Agricultural Society’s role as reaching into every corner of Molochna life. It claimed that the society’s author­ity, once based on the cooperation of congregational officials, was now explicitly based on the authority of the Guardianship Committee. The latter, the description implied, enforced the society’s orders by decree. Although village elders were still responsible for enacting society or­ders, the document characterized elders as little more than liaisons between the society and individual householders. Even their election by the village was supposedly vetted by the society ‘in consultation with representatives of the state, and in cases where they are unfit, the vil­lages are forced to choose new ones.’⁹¹

The all-encompassing administrative system that Cornies envisaged in his report evidences the influence of contemporary European eco­nomic theory on his thought. The language of such theory had been creeping into Cornies’s writing for several years, most notably in his increasing tendency to categorize members of Mennonite society into ‘classes.’ In the 1845 document phrases plucked from such theories jump from the page. For example, the Agricultural Society, Cornies claimed, ensured ‘that [labourers] receive good pay, but only in mea­sure to the work they perform,’ and it prevented the development of ‘any monopolies whatsoever.’⁹² Yet Cornies was a Mennonite, too, and at the heart of his world view remained the good of the community. He charged the society with providing loans (at interest) to young, indus­trious Mennonites to permit them to establish themselves in trades, and with finding them allotments and helping them build homes.⁹³ ‘In ev­ery case’ the society was to ‘ensure that the rich and strong do not oppress the poor and weak.’⁹⁴ As for settling families on new land, ‘the objective,’ Cornies wrote, was the profitable development of both the community and ‘the very land that [the new settlers] till.’⁹⁵

It is perhaps appropriate to pause briefly and reflect on the extent of Cornies’s ambitions for Molochna Mennonite society as reflected in the 1845 document. This largely self-educated Mennonite farmer, living in an isolated river basin on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire, was fomenting a revolution - indeed, an industrial revolution. The complex integrated economy Cornies envisaged, with large and small industrial enterprises, cottage industry, commercial agriculture, primary and secondary schools, credit institutions, and a social safety net, was progressive by any standard. It was fully two generations ahead of any semblance of comparable developments in the rest of Russia. This was far more than a simple echo of Contemporaiy economic thought in Western Europe, for the concern with public welfare, and particularly provisions to evict slipshod farmers from their land and give it to young, poor, but industrious families, represented a uniquely Mennonite con­tribution to liberal economics.

Not surprisingly, it was also a vision that was deeply distressing to conservative Mennonite Congregationalists. By 1845 Cornies had alto­gether abandoned any pretence at enforcing his actions through con­gregational channels. In 1836 he had appealed to congregational offi­cials for cooperation; now he issued decrees backed when necessary by the ready support of the Guardianship Committee. Always a decisive and domineering figure, Comies had become authoritarian and even dictatorial in his actions, provoking bitter opposition from leaders of conservative congregations.⁹⁶