The Forestry Society

Akkerman was not Cornies’s most far-reaching attempt at social engi­neering. The Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists’s main vehicles for improving agriculture were its various husbandry societies, beginning with the Sheep Society, established in 1824, and followed by the Forestry Society (1830) and the Agricultural Society (1836).

The Forestry Society was a state agency, not a Mennonite one. Comies was appointed its chairman for life by the Guardianship Committee, without any consultation with Mennonite district and village adminis­trations. The Guardianship Committeejustified the establishment of a distinct body (the Forestry Society) to do work that ought to have been supervised by existing Mennonite administrative bodies on the grounds that ‘the extent of [the Molochna and Khortitsa setdements], which are still increasing regularly and currently encompass fifty-seven [villages], constandy keeps the district officials busy with affairs in respect to ad­ministration, settlement, collection of taxes, keeping of accounts, etc., and even with their best intentions, it becomes impossible for them to conduct the exact supervision that is required for success.’²⁷

The creation of this new administrative body would lead to future discord, but at first Cornies’s position was not cause for Mennonite discontent. The Forestry Society is often inaccurately conflated with its successor, the Agricultural Society. However, the Forestry Society’s ju­risdiction was much narrower than the later agricultural organization.²⁸ It was intended ‘to impart advice and instruction to settiers inexperi­enced in the cultivation [of trees],’ and its instructions placed special emphasis on giving ‘these directions in a clear and well-meaning man­ner.’²⁹ Nevertheless, the instructions included the ominous injunction that farm owners ‘were to be warned in advance, that those among them who are disobedient, and pay no attention to these suggestions, will even­tually lose their farmsteads, which are then to be given over to other dependable young householders, who must commit themselves to fulfil what the government demands of them for their own advantage.^,so

The Guardianship Committee gave the Forestry Society no indepen­dent means to enforce its orders, instead leaving it to issue directions itself to village assemblies which were then responsible for carrying them out.

The Forestry Society was supposed to bring about the systematic culti­vation of trees in the Molochna River Basin. Trees were understood by the Russian state - and indeed by all nineteenth-century European states - to be an essential element of an agricultural economy. Trees provided fuel for heating and cooking, construction materials for homes, outbuildings, implements, and furniture, windbreaks to prevent soil erosion, fruit, and, in the case of mulberry bushes, a basic element for silk production.³¹

The creation of the Forestry Society shows tire unique outlook of the Guardianship Committee, which was distinguished from most Russian administrative organs by its flexibility and willingness to accept advice from local experts. In 1831 the committee sent a draft set of the For­estry Society Regulations to Cornies and asked for advice from him and the other members of the Molochna Forestry Society on its final formu­lation.³² In the end, the regulations observed that each region had its own unique soils and climates, and the committee enjoined the Molochna Forestry Society to research broadly in afforestation litera­ture, establish a library of relevant books, and develop programs appro­priate to local conditions. This attention to regional conditions was an important element of the Guardianship Committee’s success in admin­istering Mennonite and other German colonists. Because the commit­tee was regionally based, its members were aware of local conditions and able to take them into account. The administration of Orthodox state peasants was centralized in St Petersburg.

It is difficult to know whether the signal success of the Molochna Forestry Society should be credited to this remarkably enlightened Guardianship Committee policy or to Cornies’s willingness to seize the reins when they were offered and place his own stamp firmly on the society’s activities. Within a few years the society’s library included a broad collection of books and periodicals on forestry in German and Russian,³³ and by 1847 circulars from the Ministry of State Domains in St Petersburg were referring to Cornies (a self-acknowledged neophyte at forestry in 1831) as an expert who had ‘mastered steppe forestry through experimentation.’³⁴

Cornies’s Nogai projects had already shown that he possessed a clear vision of an orderly civil society. Echoing the approach to the Nogai that he first elucidated in 1825, Cornies established a model tree plan­tation at his Iushanlee estate in 1831. There he experimented with various species of trees and developed and refined specialized imple­ments. The estate also served as his headquarters for overseeing the inspection of existing tree stocks in the Molochna region.³⁵ By the end of 1832 Cornies had developed a systematic and rigorous program for tree planting. This program combined the basic principles defined in society regulations with knowledge that Cornies had collected through reading and experimentation, along with his own preconceptions about the importance of order and uniformity.

The original society regulations specified that each village establish a tree plantation of a size equal to one-half desiatina per village house­hold and that ‘every householder is assigned the duty of laying out an orchard behind his house of such size as the local situation and the means of the householder permit.’³⁶ The Molochna Forestry Society confirmed the requirement that villages establish tree plantations and added the specification that each householder set aside one desiatina of his or her home plot for an orchard, and plant between ten and forty trees per year until the orchard area was completely planted.³⁷ The society supplied seeds and saplings and issued detailed instructions on topics such as soil preparation, appropriate distances between sap­lings, and care for the saplings.

There was nothing implicitly controversial in these instructions. Af­forestation was among the obligations imposed on Mennonites by the charter they were issued in 1800, and Molochna Mennonites had en­thusiastically supported the state’s afforestation programs since first ar­riving in Russia. Their accomplishments in forestry were a source of community pride. Indeed, in their address to Alexander I when he passed through the settlement in 1825 they had even promised to re­double their efforts.³⁸ Although the creation of the Forestry Society marked more rigorous control over tree planting, its demands were not unusual or excessive. Uniformity in tree planting was fully in keeping with uniformity in housing and the layout of farmsteads, and with all the other community norms accepted by Mennonites. Consider, for example, the 1824 precedent of the Sheep Society. The state had sup­plied merino sheep, and rigorously defined a program for interbreed­ing them with native sheep. In 1823, describing the purpose of the proposed Sheep Society, Contenius produced detailed directions on interbreeding through five generations and instructed that ‘local au­thorities must pay attention, not just to the entire herd, but to each and every individual generation of sheep.’³⁹ The sheep program, adminis­tered in the Molochna region by Cornies, met with no opposition and was quickly implemented. With the Sheep Society as precedent there was little reason to expect opposition to the Forestry Society. This was particularly true in view of the fact that by 1830 the religious dis­putes of the 1820s seemed to have died down, giving Cornies hope that an accommodation had been reached among Molochna Mennonite congregations.⁴⁰

Unfortunately, just as Forestry Society activities were passing from planning to implementation the Great Drought of 1832—4 struck. Fami­lies frantically feeding their thatch roofs to starving livestock, under­standably, had little time for orders to plant trees, and policies that need not have been controversial under normal circumstances soon provoked bitter disputes.

The first indications of opposition to Cornies appeared immediately on the heels of the Great Drought. Some landowners ignored instruc­tions from the Forestry Society, and to Cornies this smacked of ‘a secret incitement to rebellion against [tree] planting.’⁴¹ In one of the most serious examples of resistance, in January 1835 the mayor and deputy mayor of Blumstein experienced so much opposition to their attempts to enforce Forestry Society orders that they resigned.⁴² Cornies’s reac­tion to such opposition is instructive. Because the Forestry Society had no direct authority, he appealed to congregational officials for support. In an effort to win the cooperation of district ChairmanJohann Regier, Cornies invited him to attend the Forestry Society’s meetings,⁴³ and in an 1836 letter to congregational officials Cornies wrote: ‘If the unhappy dissension which has existed between the spiritual and worldly leaders from our first settlement here on the Molochna until now is to be set aside and ended, so that the community can be placed on an orderly, solid footing of order and morality and to provide a basis for its general well-being at present and for its most distant descendants, then it is necessary that every elder admonish and encourage his congregation, particularly in accordance with the basis of its confession of faith, so that the congregation in general and every member strive especially and sincerely to fulfil punctually all orders and regulations of the ad­ministration.’⁴⁴ Obviously, in 1836 congregational authority remained intact in the Molochna, for Cornies required congregational support to implement his programs. But equally obviously, Cornies was conscious of the conflict between congregational and civil authority and was in­creasingly insistent that civil authority prevail.