The Mennonite world is rich with various primary sources and secondary narratives that help us to reconstruct, understand, and appreciate the history of our forebears and the contexts in which they lived. An increasing number of these works are freely available online, which benefits not only Buller Time readers but anyone who would like to explore more widely in the field of Mennonite history. As I become aware of such works, I will post about them under the series title Good Reads Online; I will also link the online version in the sidebar to the right, under Online Resources, below the current link to GAMEO.
We begin this series with a massive and important work of Mennonite history, Peter M. Friesen’s The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789–1910. I discovered recently that the entire work of 1,000+ pages can be read online or downloaded from Archive.org here. Because the book has been scanned, the file is roughly 220 MB in size, so please be aware before you begin downloading it.
The book dustjacket offers as good an introduction to the work as one could want:
How do you write the history of a movement when you are still a part of that movement? Whom do you believe when leading participants in those historical events disagree strongly not only on why things happened, but also on what happened? What imparts the ring of truth to a denominational history?
For P. M. Friesen the answer was a documentary history, letting the record speak for itself. Gathering historical documents over a period of twenty-five years, constantly transferring the information to his growing history of the Mennonite Church in Russia, he became the premier historian not only of the Mennonite Brethren but of the whole Mennonite community. Constantly revising, he finally let his magnum opus go to press—and even while it was on the press he was enlarging it and revising the data.
What appeared in 1911 as the Alt-Evangelische Mennonitische Bruederschaft in Russland (1789–1910) is clearly the most important single historical document to emerge from the Mennonite community in Russia. That is why this translation is so significant not only to scholars but any Mennonite interested in this important chapter in Mennonite history.
Historian Cornelius J. Dyck, director of the Institute of Mennonite Studies, Elkhart, Indiana, comments, “Thus it is that we have before us not only a history of the early years of the Mennonite Brethren Church in Russia, but a fascinating documentary and interpretive account of the entire Mennonite experience in Russia from the time of their first migration to the time of the publication of the volume in 1911.”
P. M. Friesen was truly a remarkable man. He knew both German and Russian well and taught in both languages. He had also done extensive work in history, giving the Lord a unique “vessel unto honor”. His irenic spirit, combined with a painstaking attention to detail, has provided succeeding generations of Mennonites with an outstanding example of the professional historian at his best.
The book dustjacket offers as good an introduction to the work as one could want:
For P. M. Friesen the answer was a documentary history, letting the record speak for itself. Gathering historical documents over a period of twenty-five years, constantly transferring the information to his growing history of the Mennonite Church in Russia, he became the premier historian not only of the Mennonite Brethren but of the whole Mennonite community. Constantly revising, he finally let his magnum opus go to press—and even while it was on the press he was enlarging it and revising the data.
What appeared in 1911 as the Alt-Evangelische Mennonitische Bruederschaft in Russland (1789–1910) is clearly the most important single historical document to emerge from the Mennonite community in Russia. That is why this translation is so significant not only to scholars but any Mennonite interested in this important chapter in Mennonite history.
Historian Cornelius J. Dyck, director of the Institute of Mennonite Studies, Elkhart, Indiana, comments, “Thus it is that we have before us not only a history of the early years of the Mennonite Brethren Church in Russia, but a fascinating documentary and interpretive account of the entire Mennonite experience in Russia from the time of their first migration to the time of the publication of the volume in 1911.”
P. M. Friesen was truly a remarkable man. He knew both German and Russian well and taught in both languages. He had also done extensive work in history, giving the Lord a unique “vessel unto honor”. His irenic spirit, combined with a painstaking attention to detail, has provided succeeding generations of Mennonites with an outstanding example of the professional historian at his best.
Without minimizing Friesen’s accomplishment, we should note that not everyone agrees completely with the glowing assessment offered by the publisher’s marketing department. In his foreword to James Urry’s None But Saints: The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia 1789–1889, David G. Rempel offers a more critical view:
[David H.] Epp, like his fellow Molochnaia writers on the Mennonite past includes [sic] Franz Isaak and Peter M. Friesen, can easily be faulted as an historian. Although Epp, like Friesen, had some academic training it was not in history. And while, unlike most Mennonites, they possessed experience of Russia beyond their little Mennonite world and both spoke and read Russian fluently, they lacked a proper perspective on the history and people of Russia.
I would place one of the great weaknesses of our historiography at the door of our ministry. Every Mennonite history writer of the prerevolutionary years was a minister in one of the established churches or in one of the more recently founded Mennonite churches. Sometimes such ministers wrote accounts of their congregation, village, or colony from their own predilection, but more often it was from a sense of duty that was driven by the expectations of their congregations. Overworked and beset by numerous trials and tribulations, they struggled to construct their accounts as best they could. But a minister was always severely handicapped in what he could write. It was almost axiomatic that the Mennonite past was dominated by religious issues, including the many migrations of our people. While this had on occasion been true, the emigration to Russia had hardly anything to do with religion. Economic necessity took our people to Russia. The entire period of migration from 1788 to about 1870 occurred on this basis. And later political struggles and religious movements in Russia were largely motivated by similar material concerns. The great problem was that the Mennonite church in Russia had become a state church within a Mennonite state and the village church was essentially a parochial church with all such a label implies. Our minister-historians were all too prone to view past events through the prism of the Bible and the tinted lenses of their minister’s spectacles. It was too easy to sweep difficult issues and those things considered to be derogatory to the congregation or to prominent people under the proverbial rug.
I could cite a number of examples based upon my own research in Russian archives of attempts in the work of Epp, Isaak, and Friesen to suppress events or to alter accounts, but this would take too long. Of course, it could he argued that I had access to papers these minister historians did not, but this is not the issue.
There is no real evidence that the pre-revolutionary historians made use of the Russian archives, even in their local areas, or that they bothered to consult the many Russian sources on Mennonites published in the journals of Russian ministries, economic and agricultural societies, or in such “thick” journals as Vestnik Europy and Istoricheskii Vestnik. … Friesen lived in Odessa for many years and could have consulted the later papers of the [Guardians] Committee. Both Epp and Friesen visited St. Petersburg and Moscow on numerous occasions where there were other collections of papers relating to Mennonites. At other times Epp lived in Berdiansk and Friesen near Simferopol, both centres that also contained material of significance. But there is no evidence that they availed themselves of the opportunity of wider research. (Rempel in Urry 1989, 12–13)
I would place one of the great weaknesses of our historiography at the door of our ministry. Every Mennonite history writer of the prerevolutionary years was a minister in one of the established churches or in one of the more recently founded Mennonite churches. Sometimes such ministers wrote accounts of their congregation, village, or colony from their own predilection, but more often it was from a sense of duty that was driven by the expectations of their congregations. Overworked and beset by numerous trials and tribulations, they struggled to construct their accounts as best they could. But a minister was always severely handicapped in what he could write. It was almost axiomatic that the Mennonite past was dominated by religious issues, including the many migrations of our people. While this had on occasion been true, the emigration to Russia had hardly anything to do with religion. Economic necessity took our people to Russia. The entire period of migration from 1788 to about 1870 occurred on this basis. And later political struggles and religious movements in Russia were largely motivated by similar material concerns. The great problem was that the Mennonite church in Russia had become a state church within a Mennonite state and the village church was essentially a parochial church with all such a label implies. Our minister-historians were all too prone to view past events through the prism of the Bible and the tinted lenses of their minister’s spectacles. It was too easy to sweep difficult issues and those things considered to be derogatory to the congregation or to prominent people under the proverbial rug.
I could cite a number of examples based upon my own research in Russian archives of attempts in the work of Epp, Isaak, and Friesen to suppress events or to alter accounts, but this would take too long. Of course, it could he argued that I had access to papers these minister historians did not, but this is not the issue.
There is no real evidence that the pre-revolutionary historians made use of the Russian archives, even in their local areas, or that they bothered to consult the many Russian sources on Mennonites published in the journals of Russian ministries, economic and agricultural societies, or in such “thick” journals as Vestnik Europy and Istoricheskii Vestnik. … Friesen lived in Odessa for many years and could have consulted the later papers of the [Guardians] Committee. Both Epp and Friesen visited St. Petersburg and Moscow on numerous occasions where there were other collections of papers relating to Mennonites. At other times Epp lived in Berdiansk and Friesen near Simferopol, both centres that also contained material of significance. But there is no evidence that they availed themselves of the opportunity of wider research. (Rempel in Urry 1989, 12–13)
What, then, are we to make of Friesen’s substantial and substantive work? On the one hand, it often proves valuable for offering us a insider’s view of Mennonite life in New Russia before 1911, when Friesen finished his work. So, for example, his description of farming practice around the turn of the century have an immediacy that engages the reader and draws him or her into Friesen’s account:
Today, the Mennonites of Chortitza, Molotschna and their daughter colonies, believe that every farmer must own a large number of good horses: five for the plow, two for the harrow and another one or two for driving back and forth. He must also have an open wagon, or oboianka, with steel springs, which, in case of necessity, can carry six not too “heavy” people while springing properly and running as easily as possible on its axles, and a covered buggy on springs with glass doors “in case of rain,” or for more distant trips to visit in the more remote colonies or landed estates, which one cannot yet reach by rail. Naturally, there must be several “Britschkas”—heavy wagons—which one has “shortened” to spread manure, transport grain to the railway, the city or the Pristani (river port), or has “extended” into huge hayracks according to the old West Prussian models and improved by the Americans. (Friesen 1980, 175)
Another highly beneficial aspect of Friesen’s work is his documentary approach, “letting the record speak for itself,” as the marketing copy explains. Friesen’s work not only provides an orderly account of Mennonite history in Russia but also includes records and reminiscences from other sources. He supplements his description of nineteenth-century Molotschna life, for example, with a first-person account by David Hiebert of the 1818 visit by Tsar Alexander I, two long extracts describing both the Chortitza and Molotschna colonies by 1820 travelers, several letters from the tsar to the Mennonites, and the like. Of course, anyone interested in the history of MB Church certainly will profit from and enjoy Friesen’s history, since it is, after all, about The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789–1910.
Still, we dare not ignore David Rempel’s cautionary remarks. Friesen is not an objective, professional historian; he is, rather, an interested party in the story he recounts. In the end, the best approach, I think, is to rely on Friesen for one part of the story, not for the whole truth. Perhaps a sports analogy is appropriate here: Friesen is a color commentator, not a play-by-play announcer. He is the person in the booth who tells the interesting story, not the one who reports the facts of the game. Taken on these terms, Friesen’s The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789–1910 is well worth downloading and reading as time permits and interest leads.
Works Cited
Friesen, Peter M. 1980. The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789–1910. 2nd ed. Translated by J. B. Toews, ABRAHAM Friesen, Peter J. Klassen, and Harry Loewen. Fresno, CA: Board of Christian Literature, General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. Available online here.
Urry, James. 1989. None But Saints: The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia 1789–1889. Winnipeg: Hyperion Press.
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