By the 1860s Mennonites would become the best-known minority in all of Russia.
Their economic success in both agriculture and industry made them a shining example of what could be accomplished in the empire; it also made them a target for growing Russian xenophobia.
Early in the nineteenth century the tsar and his administrators publicized the Mennonite example widely, and Mennonites were urged to share their methods with other state peasants both locally and, through articles in newspapers and various government journals, nationally, as well. Mennonites became both the prime movers of economic development in the Molochna River Basin and poster children for Russian imperial economic planning. Their story demands careful assessment.The dominant figure in Russian Mennonite society in the first half of the nineteenth century was Johann Comies. His influence spread far beyond the Molochna region, extending to the halls of the Ministry of State Domains in St Petersburg and even to the tsar. Denounced as the ‘tree devil’ by outraged conservative Mennonite contemporaries, grouped with Menno Simons himself by Mennonite historian P.M. Friesen in 1911, and labelled the ‘prophet of progress’ by anthropologist James Urry in 1989, Comies and his legacy of modernization, secularization, and religious discord remains controversial to this day.1
Cornies’s actions guided Mennonite society along a path to great prosperity, broke down the barriers insulating Mennonites from secular authority, and led to serious religious dissension. About this there can be no dispute. However, the dominant image that has survived is of Cornies as a secular figure acting outside of and in opposition to traditional Mennonite society. This interpretation obscures one fundamental point: Johann Cornies was a devout Mennonite who owed his initial prominence in Mennonite society as much to his position as a leading congregational figure as to his role in secular administrative organs. Indeed, Comies was the leader, not of a secular movement, but of a religious one. This is what made his actions so politically divisive in a Mennonite world that was politically dominated by congregations.
The vision of civil society that Cornies began to develop in the 1820s, and had shaped into an articulate and all-encompassing model by the 1840s, was a moral vision. Cornies’s vision was born at once of his sophisticated understanding of the challenges facing Mennonites and of his equally sophisticated assessment of the options available to them - if they wished to survive as Mmnonites. Cornies changed the face of the Russian Mennonite religious world, but only to ensure its survival in a changing secular world. Along the way, he helped to transform the entire Molochna economy.