Interlocking Development - The Nogai-Mennonite Story

For Nogai and Mennonites the 1850s saw important changes. The live­stock epidemic signalled the end of sheep sharecropping. From 1848 to 1850 there were just forty-one new contracts and after 1850 there were none.

Meanwhile, in early 1848 for the first time the Nogai borrowed money, not sheep, from Mennonites. The interest-free loans were small, averag­ing just seventy-three rubles, due in full from six months to two years later. Records of thirty-one loans survive, although there is no indica­tion of whether they were repaid on time or indeed repaid at all.⁴ Other sources show that Nogai had great difficulty repaying their debts after 1848. Johann Cornies died in 1848, but that year and the next his heirs again sold sheep from his Iushanlee estate to Nogai on credit.⁵ The amount, 21,134 rubles, was almost three times what had been granted in 1843 (see Chapter 5). All but twenty-five rubles of the 1843 loans were repaid by 1847, while repayment of the 1848 and 1849 loans stretched over nine years and in the end 5,844 rubles, over a quarter of the total, were never repaid. Records from 1848, 1849, and 1851 show that other Mennonites also sold sheep, worth over 28,000 rubles, on credit to Nogai, and although there are no payment records it is un­likely they were any better repaid than Cornies.⁶

The most compelling evidence of a crisis in Nogai society after 1848 comes from the two model villages, Akkerman and Aknokas.

TABLE 7.3

Economic differentiation in Shuiut Dzhuret, 1836, and Akkerman and Aknokas, 1850

Sources: 'Imennyi Spisok Pogorevshim Khoziaievam Melitoporskago Okruga Dzhuretskoi Volosti Derevni Shuiut-Dzhureta,' 1836, PJBRMA, file 374, 1-14ob; 'Vedomosf î SOStoianii Sei.

An 1850 report on the condition of the two model villages shows that while some residents were still wealthy, many had been reduced to abject poverty. Differentiation in the model villages in 1850 was an extreme version of that in the Nogai village of Shuiut Dzhuret in 1836. A much larger percentage of households in Akkerman and Aknokas owned sheep, and the rich in Akkerman and Aknokas were much richer than those in Shuiut Dzhuret, while the poor were poorer (see Table 7.3). The report details the economic condition of some Nogai in­volved in lease transactions. Unfortunately, inconsistent spellings of Nogai names and the use of only first names in some contracts make it impossible to identify all participants, but ten of the thirty-three can be identified. Eight of these ten were poor, owning no sheep and on average fewer than three head of livestock, while the other two owned eighty-four sheep between them, putting them at the bottom end of the sheep-owning households. As might be expected, Nogai who leased their land out to pay tax arrears were poor. The loss of use of their best land could only make them poorer, and confirming this, records for Akkerman from 1853 show that the amount of land leased to Menno- nites had climbed to an average of 12.75 desiatinas per participating household, while the number of households involved grew from thirty- three to thirty-seven of the households in the village.¹¹ As for Menno- nites who leased the land, unlike with sharecropping contracts in the 1840s, the majority of identifiable renters - seventeen of twenty-four - were landless, while none of the landed renters were owners of an exceptionally large sheep herd.

While poor Nogai in Akkerman and Aknokas were losing control of their land, a parallel process also appeared - in thirty-eight extant con­tracts Mennonites contracted to Nogai as sharecroppers.¹² The con­tracts called for Nogai to provide ploughed land, which the Mennonites were to sow.

Evidence of conditions in the Nogai villages in the 1850s is much scarcer than for earlier decades. Travellers to the region continued to report that the model villages were shining examples of order and prosperity - a description sharply contradicted by the data already pre­sented above.¹³ In 1855 Alexander Petzholdt described somewhat less idyllic conditions in the Nogai village of Baurdak, just south OfAkkerman and Aknokas. He was dismayed by the haphazard layout of the village, its homes built of manure-and-straw bricks with crooked chimneys and badly thatched roofs.¹⁴ Yet even here there was no hint of the deeply rooted problems that were soon to provoke a wholesale exodus of the Nogai to Turkey.

Russian officials were under no misconception about the decline in Nogai conditions. In 1853 the governor of Tavria reported to the Minis­try of State Domains that ‘the Nogai... are almost completely identical to the Tatars.’¹⁵ This contrasted sharply with the 1842 report that ‘Nogai are far better than the Tatars, and are progressing by the year.’¹⁶ The optimism that had permeated official reports before 1848 was gone. Nogai too, were no longer optimistic, and in the 1850s their leaders increasingly aligned themselves with the Crimean Tatars, Ultimatelyjoin- ing in the Tatar exodus to Turkey in 1860.

A full explanation of the Nogai exodus from the Molochna basin requires a brief detour into the subject of relations between the Russian state and the Crimean Tatars. These relations had never been good, and they deteriorated rapidly in the 1840s and 1850s, reaching bottom during the Crimean War when suspicions of Tatar collaboration with Turkish forces caused the state to consider evicting large numbers of Tatars from their homes and relocating them inland.¹⁷ Tatar dissatisfac­tion with the tsarist state centred on Russian nobles who had acquired large parcels of Tatar land, often through dishonest means.¹⁸ The last

straw for the Tatars was the Ministry of State Domains’ rejection in 1859 of Tatar petitions for new land grants to ameliorate their poverty.¹⁹

There is no evidence to suggest that the Nogai were subject to the same suspicions as were the Crimean Tatars during the war.

After the war Nogai leaders aligned themselves closely with their Crimean Tatar neighbours. In 1857 a group of Nogai murzas joined in Tatar petitions for increased land grants. Justifying their claims with stories of the services that their forefathers had provided the state, the Nogai protested that ‘not having private land, we not only have been reduced to poverty, but a great many among us are compelled, in order to obtain subsistence, to work as simple servants.’²¹ In ruling to reject the Nogai petition the Ministry of State Domains con­cluded that, although many of the murzas possessed legitimate proof of the noble status granted their ancestors by Catherine II in the eigh­teenth century, those ancestors were already long dead and claims based on their service had no significance.²² With a stroke of the pen the murzas that remained were reduced to state peasants with no claim to special privileges.

In the fall of 1859 some 16,000 Nogai from the Caucasus obtained permission to emigrate to Turkey. They travelled overland to the Molochna basin, wintered with their Molochna cousins, and then in the summer of 1860 journeyed on to the Crimea where they continued by ship.²⁸ When they left, the Molochna Nogai went with them.

This brings to an end the story of Nogai in Molochna, but it leaves the Mennonites at a Criticaljuncture. By 1860 roughly 60 per cent of all Molochna Mennonite families were landless. In 1863 their demands for land resulted in a crisis that ultimately provoked state intervention on their behalf. The resultant ‘landlessness crisis’ has long been a signifi­cant issue both for Mennonites and for historians of Mennonites.

The full story of the landlessness crisis, which lingered on for de­cades, is beyond the scope of this study. Briefly, the Nogai exodus and the large, uncontrolled illegal influx of peasants into Molochna follow­ing the emancipation proclamation of 1861, compounded with a seri­ous harvest failure in 1862, drove landless Mennonites to demand that they be allotted all unassigned surplus land in the Mennonite settle­ment. Opponents and proponents of this proposal engaged in heated disputes in the German-Ianguage press, as well as in a battle of appeals to the Russian state. Ultimately, a number of concessions were made to the landless including the distribution of reserve lands in half-holdings (32.5 desiatinas) and quarter-holdings (16.25 desiatinas) and, in the 1870s, community-funded purchases of land in other regions, which created the so-called daughter colonies.

For Mennonites the crisis, which saw poor landless Mennonites pit­ted against wealthy landed Mennonites in a bitter struggle over rights to land and to a voice in the administration of their communities, has been seen as a black mark that challenges Mennonite perceptions of their own society as being just and egalitarian. In this tradition, in the early twentieth century the great Mennonite historian Peter M. Friesen wrote, ‘Like a misfortune [the crisis] lies on the soul of the community because there has not taken place a thorough cleansing of the corpo­rate body through conscious repenting.’²⁵

More recently, Mennonite historians have come to regard the crisis as a watershed event after which social and economic differentiation within Mennonite society became dominant forces. Such historians have not escaped the moralizing tone of earlier writers. David G. Rempel, whose pioneering work in the 1960s to 1980s revitalized the study of Russian Mennonite history, characterized the actions of the landed as ‘unconscionable. ’

For other historians the landlessness crisis has been seized upon as a particularly clear instance of class conflict in an industrializing society. James Urry, whose None but Saints has become the standard work on the first century of Mennonite settlement in the Russian Empire, writes that the ‘land struggles revealed the ugly and unacceptable face of the eco­nomic and social transformations that had occurred since first settle­ment in Russia.’²⁶

The crisis caused important changes in Mennonite economic life, and the deepness of the resentments it stirred is indisputable. It may be argued, however, that the severity of the initial dispute has been substantially inflated in subsequent accounts, while its resolution represented less a sharp discontinuity in Russian Mennonite life than a demonstration of the strength of reform traditions in the Molochna community.

In looking closely at the sources upon which assessments of the land­lessness crisis have been made, it quickly becomes evident that much of the historiography has very shaky foundations. Too frequently it is based on statements made by participants in the crisis who had clearly vested interests in how it would be resolved. Letters to newspapers and petitions to the Guardianship Committee, written in the heat of the crisis, have been accepted as de facto confirmation of the claims of the landless, while isolated accounts of rapacious subleases of pasture land have been interpreted as evidence of widespread profiteering by all landowners.

One source has particularly influenced all subsequent interpretations: Franz Isaac’s Die Molotschnaer Mennoniten reproduces several key letters and petitions from disputants in the crisis. Isaac’s account is invaluable because it preserves many documents that are not available elsewhere. It is also very biased in favour of the landless. Die Molotschnaer Mennoniten tells the story almost exclusively in the words of the landless; it provides just two petitions from the landed, and these, introduced by Isaac as ‘slanderous letters’ (Schmahschriften), show the landed position at its worst.²⁷

It is Isaac, too, who provides two of the most damning pieces of evidence regarding the attitudes of the landed during the crisis: district mayor (Gebietsvorsteher) David Friesen’s alleged statement that the land­less ‘will never receive so much as a half desiatina of land,’ and the contention that the wealthy were leasing large tracts of land for 2 ko­pecks per desiatina and subletting it to the landless for 3 to 4 rubles per desiatina.²⁸ These contentions, provided without references and tucked into a footnote, have come to symbolize the greed of all Molochna Mennonite landowners. As will be shown below, the credibility of these contentions is dubious at best.

As a first step in re-examining the crisis it is necessary to question whether the terms by which the principals in the dispute are usually identified are accurate. Neither ‘the landed’ nor ‘the landless’ identi­fies any group in Molochna with precision. The landless Molochna Mennonites can be divided into two groups: the Einwohner (cottagers, or renters) and the Anwohner (owners of houses, but not of agricultural land allotments). In 1860 of the landless families 69 per cent were Einwohner and 31 per cent were Anwohner. Although the petitions of the landless supposedly represented all of these people, it seems apparent that the two groups did not form a united front. After all, the resolu­tion of the crisis saw land allotted to the Anwohner only. The Einwohner, who come closest to representing a true proletariat in Molochna, gained little or nothing.

As for the landed, they too can be divided into two groups: estate owners and owners of sixty-five-desiatina full holdings. The estate own­ers were the principle target of the landless, who never challenged the rights of the run-of-the-mill fullholders to their basic sixty-five-desiatina allotments. Moreover, and despite assumptions implicit in the historical literature, there is no explicit evidence that the fullholders united as a corporate body to oppose the claims of the landless. Indeed, there is important evidence that implies quite the opposite.

This evidence comes from Die Molotschnaer Mennoniten and is a good example of how Isaac and others have distorted the record of the crisis. Isaac relates that a third important interest group of Molochna Menno- nites, the merchants, largely supported the landless. Yet the petition Isaac produces in support of this contention comes not just from mer­chants but from ‘merchants and landowners.’²⁹ Because there is no record of the signers of the petition (the original is not extant; the version reproduced by Isaac is the only record), it is impossible to be certain who these landed were. Still, as this petition makes clear, this was not a crisis that pitted all the landed against all the landless. Rather, it was a dispute between some of the landless and some of the landed.

The landed in question were the wealthy estate owners. Here again it is necessary to be cautious. Philip Wiebe, Johann Cornies’s son-in-law and one of the wealthiest estate owners in the Molochna basin, was a leading defender of the rights of the landless during the crisis. Still, the identifiable leaders of the landed, including most notably district mayor Friesen and chairman of the Agricultural Society Peter Schmidt, were clearly from the wealthiest strata of Molochna Mennonite society.

If there is some justification for the accusation that some wealthy landowners were dealing unfairly with the landless, the broader accusa­tion that the structure of the Mennonite economy was intentionally unjust and exploitative of the landless is patently untrue. Chapter 5 describes the efforts of Cornies, and those who supported him, to in­dustrialize and to diversify agriculture in Molochna in order to provide employment to the landless. Cornies was constandy cognizant of the needs of the whole community, and his decisions were heavily influ­enced by Mennonite ethical norms.

The primary criticism levelled against the landed is that they failed to distribute surplus and reserve lands. These two categories of land have already been defined in Chapter 3, but it may be convenient to review them. Reserve land was crown land set aside for future settlement by new Mennonite immigrants. Mennonites had no direct control over the unoccupied portion of this land.³⁰ In addition to the reserve, to allow for natural population growth the state gave each Mennonite village surplus land equal to one-sixth its allotment land for future distribu­tion.³¹ This land was owned by the village collectively, and its allocation fell fully within the discretion of landed Mennonites. On the eve of the landlessness crisis, surplus land in Molochna amounted to 15,820 desiatinas - enough to grant just 243 of the 2,356 landless families allotments at the state-mandated sixty-five-desiatina norm.⁵²

Although it is clear that the surplus land offered no solution to the landlessness crisis, that the landed failed to distribute it at all demands closer attention. There was not enough surplus land to provide a real solution, and (as pointed out in Chapter 3) it was of marginal quality anyway. Nevertheless, its monopolization by the landed was obviously perceived as unjust by the landless, and this acted as a rallying flag for disaffection of the landless.

The failure to allocate surplus land to the landless has been credited to the fact that landed Mennonites granted themselves cheap leases on it, instead, thus monopolizing it. Such landed lessees are condemned for in turn subletting the leased land at much higher rates to the landless. There is an element of truth in these allegations, albeit a small one. Three Mennonite landowners leased a total of 8,360 desiatinas of the surplus land. The remainder was divided between the Neuhalbstadt cloth factory (3,000 desiatinas) and the communal sheepfold (4,460 desiatinas). Whereas the three private lessees may have been the targets of landless wrath, there are no grounds for tarring all landed Menno- nites with the exploiters’ brush, and the idea that the landed as a group refused to redistribute the surplus out of financial self-interest clearly is without merit.

As for the accusation that landed lessees sublet land to landless Men- nonites at unconscionably high rates, in truth surviving records show that, with few exceptions, Mennonite lessees paid lower rent to Menno- nite landholders than they did to Nogai.^3s It should be noted, too, that Isaac’s contention that the wealthy lessees paid just 1 to 2 kopecks per desiatina is simply unfounded. Although records for the 1860s are un­available, in 1849 the Gebeitsamt already charged approximately 62 kopecks per desiatina for surplus land.³⁴ While the large landholders were undoubtedly turning a profit on the venture, the low rates they gave to Mennonite renters do not bear out the charge of profiteering.

Not only is there little merit to the charges against landed Menno- nites - there is also no evidence whatsoever of disaffection among the landless before the Nogai exodus. As already argued in Chapter 5, it seems probable that the landless, whatever their dissatisfaction with not owning land, accepted the existing system as just. The ability of landless Mennonites like Peter Loewen to become wealthy without land helps to account for this lack of internal opposition to the landlessness situa­tion. The economy was working, there were options for the landless, and the Molochna Mennonite settlement was economically and politi­cally stable.

What threw the Molochna Mennonites into crisis was not deep-seated class alienation, but the sudden loss of thousands of desiatinas of land.³⁵ As a result of inflation after the Crimean War, landless Mennonites who held cheap long-term leases on Nogai land experienced an economic boom. At the same time, rising agricultural prices made land rental more attractive to landless Mennonites who until 1855 had been em­ployed in cottage industry or as wage labourers, encouraging them to redirect their efforts into agriculture. This created labour shortages and drove wages up even for those landless Mennonites who remained dependent on wage labour and did not turn to leasing land. No doubt the sudden reversal of fortunes when the Nogai left was an important contributing factor to the activism of the landless during the landless­ness crisis. Moreover, because increased competition for labour raised the operating costs of large landowners, a few such landowners wel­comed the labour glut that followed the Nogai exodus and resisted the distribution of Mennonite land to the landless. The landlessness crisis, then, grew out of immediate, short-term conditions brought on by a combination of the declining condition of the Nogai and the economic turbulence sparked by the Crimean War.

The crisis did indeed see Mennonites divide into landed and landless factions, leading to the legalization of the subdivision of allotments, but (as pointed out in Chapter 5) this was hardly revolutionary. In the 1840s Cornies had already created a system to permit half-allotments. Of far greater significance for the resolution of the crisis was the cre­ation in the 1870s of daughter colonies (new colonies established on land purchased or leased by the original colonies). It should be noted again that the problem was not solved by establishing new villages on reserve land, but rather by buying new land. Although there was some unoccupied reserve land, it was far too arid to be suitable for establish­ing new villages.

Two further points must be made about the resolution of the land­lessness crisis. First, it is not surprising that the loss of access to thou­sands of desiatinas of land provoked a crisis. Indeed, it would be aston­ishing had it not. The ability of Mennonite society to weather such a storm is a testament to the strength of the system that Cornies had engineered. Second, the solution - finding land for a relatively small portion of the landless in newly created daughter colonies or on half- and quarter-allotments - suggests that, far from rebelling against the traditional ideals of Mennonite society, the ‘rebels’ sought inclusion in the Mennonite mainstream. This was hardly a rebellion against the Mennonite commonwealth.