Thus far this series has explored a number of possible explanations for the decision by more than half of Waldheim’s residents to leave their land and lives behind and relocate hundreds of miles to the northwest. We first investigated John Boese’s claim that that those who left had been kept landless and subservient by the long-established settlers. That explanation did not fit the facts.
We then considered the possibility that, in the wake of a serious drought in 1848, unscrupulous politicians and land agents tricked a number of Mennonites into moving north to and buying land in the Kiev and Volhynia guberniias. True though that probably was for some who left Molotschna, it was not the experience of the Waldheim group, who planned their departure years before the drought and then leased, but did not buy, land on which to found their new village: Heinrichsdorf.
Finally, the last post suggested that those who left may have been doing so in order to escape Johann Cornies and the strict control of the Agricultural Society. Although that motivation may have played a role with many of the Mennonites who left in 1848, the fact that the Waldheim group did not return in 1849, after Cornies’s death, implies that there may have been some other factor at work as well.
This post will explore a final factor that likely contributed to the Waldheim group’s decision to leave, that possibly played the most crucial role of all. This final factor is not an alternate explanation to the others that we have already considered. Rather, it complements some of them and provides a fuller picture of the situation in Waldheim in the early 1840s.
We begin this post by returning to the focus of the previous one: Johann Cornies and the Agricultural Society. The conflict between Cornies and some Molotschna Mennonites did not remain within the realm of of farming, construction, work ethic, and the like. It eventually bled over into all areas of life, including the church.
At first, Staples explains,
Cornies still operated within the congregational system.… Bernhard Fast, Peter Wedel, and other leading figures in the Old Flemish congregation remained his close allies, and he relied on their support to implement the policies of the Agricultural Society. However, it was Cornies and not the congregational elders who now provided leadership. (2003, 119–20)
In time, this subtle but important shift in power led to serious disputes.
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 [the Russian governing body]. Always a decisive and domineering figure, Cornies had become authoritarian and even dictatorial in his actions, provoking bitter opposition from leaders of conservative congregations. (2003, 129–30)
One of Cornies’s primary opponents was the elder of the influential Flemish congregation centered in Lichtenau-Petershagen. One of the members of that congregation, Johann Regier, was both district mayor and a loyal supporter of Cornies. Unfortunately, he was also, by all accounts, an alcoholic, so Warkentin sought intervention from the Russian Guardianship Committee to remove Regier from office. Needless to say, Cornies did not appreciate this attack on one of his allies, and he responded in kind, ultimately convincing the governing authorities to side with him against Warkentin.
So it was that on a tour of Molotschna in 1841, the deputy of the Guardianship Committee accused Warkentin of making false accusations against Regier and dismissed him from his position as elder. As shocking as this action was, the deputy was not finished: he also divided the Lichtenau-Petershagen congregation into three smaller ones, “each with its own elder” (Urry 1989, 129).
Obviously, the pressing need for these congregations was to secure new elders. Unfortunately, only an existing elder could ordain a new one, and the ruling authorities were making it difficult for the congregations to make a connection with one. Eventually Peter H. Schmidt, the elder of Waldheim (!) church, ordained Heinrich Wiens as elder of the Gnadenfeld congregation, and Wiens then ordained “Dirk Warkentin to head the Lichtenau-Petershagen congregation and Heinrich Toews to the Pordenau group” (Urry 1989, 130).
At long last we arrive at the real point of this story: during the early 1840s, serious conflict among Mennonites in Molotschna colony led both sides to invite intervention by the Russian authorities. The governing authorities accepted Cornies’s invitation and decisively rejected Warkentin’s, leaving him without a church position and dividing his church into small, more easily controlled groups. Most important of all, once the ice had been broken, the authorities were more likely to intervene again—and so they did.
James Urry offers a long introduction to Elder Peter Schmidt and the Waldheim congregation, which no doubt included our ancestors Benjamin and Helena Buller and their family; it is worth quoting in full:
Peter Schmidt … was elder of a congregation formed by a new group of migrants who had come to the Molochnaia in 1836 from Volhynia, a province of Russian Poland. In Molochnaia they established the village of Waldheim in the east of the colony, close to the Russian village of Chernigovka. Like the earlier settlers who had founded Alexanderwohl, the Waldheim group were followers of the Groningen Old Flemish persuasion and they had been preceded in 1835 by yet another group of the same affiliation. This congregation of Groningen Old Flemish did not come from Poland, but from Prussian Brandenburg, and they formed their own congregation centred on the village of Gnadenfeld. Molochnaia now possessed three independent congregations of Groningen Old Flemish, although historically all were linked to the same congregation in West Prussia and many of their members were distantly related. However, each community maintained its independence in Russia as their different experiences since the eighteenth century in Prussia and Poland set them apart from each other as well as from ocher groups in the colony. (1989, 130).
We will return to this paragraph in due course; for now the end of the story awaits:
If Gnadenfeld was progressive, Waldheim was more conservative. In 1844 their elder, Peter Schmidt, was removed from office by Hahn for baptizing outsiders—without permission of the authorities—specifically people banned by the Gnadenfeld congregation and a Lutheran youth. (1989, 131).
In 1844, deputy of the Guardianship Committee Evgenii von Hahn, a governmental official, removed the Waldheim elder from his church position due to the latter’s baptism of banned Mennonites and a Lutheran youth. On the one hand, Schmidt was culpable for violating the law (as much as we might disagree with that law today). On the other hand, yet another governmental intrusion into Mennonite religious affairs, presumably with Cornies’s full approval, if not prompting, sent a clear message of what Waldheim residents could expect in the future. Is is not surprising, then, that the following year over half of Waldheim’s landowners and many of its original settlers signed their names to a request to leave Molotschna and relocate hundreds of miles away. The juxtaposition of events seems more than coincidental: Schmidt was dismissed in 1844, and by 1845 a sizable group had decided to leave.
The dismissal of elder Schmidt was likely the determinative factor that led over half of the village to leave Molotschna so soon after they had arrived. In fact, John Boese mentions the elder in his own explanation, although his facts differ from those given by Urry:
While Elder Peter H. Schmidt was the leader at Zabara-Waldheim, and appeared to have had good training and was a very able speaker, the residing ministers did not seem to want to tolerate him and with all this resistance he decided to resign.
Whichever account is correct (Urry is likely the more trustworthy), Schmidt’s leaving of the ministry seems to have played a central role in the Waldheim exodus from Molotschna. But more than this one event, the decision to leave was probably motivated more by what the event signaled: the startling expansion of control exercised by Johann Cornies, who could call the governing authorities to do his bidding even if it meant intruding in church affairs. If he could have elders deposed for resisting him, there really were only two options for all citizens: comply or leave. The Waldheim group chose the latter course.
We are not yet finished with this series, as other questions and curiosities await. For example, who was Peter H. Schmidt, and what more can we say about him? Moreover, why did the Waldheim group not return shortly after Cornies’s death, as other émigrés apparently did? The story is mostly told, but, as usual, it leads to other paths that we can and will enjoyably and profitably explore.
Works Cited
Staples, John R. 2003. Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Urry, James. 1989. None but Saints: The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia 1789–1889. Winnipeg: Hyperion.
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