The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War

by Hans Werner

  For Ivan and the rest of the family, the famine ended when the whole village turned out with pitchforks to spear the fish that came up the creeks to spawn. Some of them were trapped in the pools left behind by the receding water and were easily harvested. They were carried home in baskets and smoked in the chimney to become the main staple until the regime finally relented on grain procurements and the new crop was harvested. Ivan’s memories of smelling and tasting rye bread when it became available again were particularly vivid. His stories of the famine were centred entirely on himself. Other than his references to bringing home eggs and picking sorrel, my father never mentioned how the rest of the family, or other villagers, fared during the spring and early summer of 1933. He did say that no one in the village died as a result of the famine.

  The artel form of collective, the most common in Mennonite areas, evolved in the 1930s to a system that compensated its peasant members on the basis of piecework. Each type of work on the collective farm, such as plowing, combining, or harrowing, was assigned a certain number of trudanye or “labour days.” For instance, someone in charge of running a combine, one of the most valued skills in rural areas, might earn three or four labour days for each actual day of work, depending on how much grain was harvested that day. At the end of the season, the collective’s members were paid according to the number of trudanye they had accumulated. They received a share of what was left after the collective had delivered its allocation to the state, kept back seed for the next year, and paid its bills. Members were usually paid in kind—a certain number of kilograms of wheat per trudanye; or quantities of sunflower oil, in the case of crops not consumed directly. Occasionally, in good years, a cash payment might be paid out in proportion to the number of trudanye a member had accumulated. The amounts received could vary greatly depending on the effectiveness of the collective farm’s management, the vagaries of the weather, and the state’s grain procurement policies. For example, in the concentrated German settlement area north of Slavgorod, collective farmers received between 2.1 and 15.0 kilograms of grain per trudanye in 1934.13 The aim of collectivization was to replace small and fragmented horse-powered agriculture with large mechanized farms. To achieve this transformation, the regime created the machine tractor station (MTS). It was a second-tier collective that performed all of the mechanized tasks that required tractors for a number of collective farms. The MTS charged the collectives for its services in kind—wheat, vegetable oil, and other produce.

  After finishing school, Ivan became an active participant in the MTS. In the winter of 1933–34, he went to the nearby town of Kulunda to receive both training and experience in operating and repairing agricultural equipment. In the spring of 1934, Ivan no longer worked for an individual collective farm but for the MTS. Each winter he returned to Kulunda for further training and repair work. As a tractorist, he could earn three trudanye for each day worked plus a cash bonus at the end of the year. When he became a combinyor, or combine operator, his earnings rose even more. The combine operator was in charge of a tractor that pulled two combines. The process was still not entirely mechanized because each combine had a person, usually a young woman, who sat on a seat above the header and raised and lowered it manually. My father told stories about how he worried that the girls would fall into the cutting knife when the days got long and they became sleepy. Combinyors got paid according to the number of hectares and the amount of grain they harvested. It meant one had to go as fast as possible but not so fast that the combine became overloaded, resulting in poor separation and too much grain ending up with the chaff on the ground behind the machine. According to my father, the combinyor was the highest-paid position in rural Russia, matching and often exceeding the pay of the brigadier, or manager, of the collective farm. The rise in earnings finally put the family on a reasonable economic footing. But it meant working hard. In one letter to her daughter Aganetha, Anna excused Ivan for not writing to her because “your brother is at work every day, only on Sunday he is at home.”14

  By the mid-1930s, there were signs that the Soviet Union might finally step back from a constant state of revolution. In 1935, Stalin pronounced that “life has become better, comrades. Life has become more joyous…and when life is joyous, work goes well.”15 Although the drive to make the Soviet Union a military force through industrialization would continue, in the mid-1930s life was less austere than during the early days of the revolution. Along with more consumer goods and perks for meritorious workers, there was more fun. Dancing, condemned in earlier times, was now encouraged. Ivan and his friends were models for the new outlook. The young people of the village led a busy social life in which Ivan and his friends were active participants. He came by his musical talent honestly, but now he played the balalaika at dances rather than the hymns his grandfather had played on the violin on warm summer evenings. Since his stories of those days were often told in the context of the Mennonite community of Steinbach, the stories of playing for dances were somewhat muted, and one always sensed there was more to be told. Dancing was not considered an appropriate activity for the Mennonites of Steinbach in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Ivan and two friends, Jakob Wiebe and Abram Friesen, posing with their instruments in 1934. Although his stories most often referred to playing the balalaika, here he is the one in the middle of the photo holding a guitar.

  The possibilities for increased social interaction made possible a memorable trip for Ivan and his family. In the fall of 1935, the family, and others from the village, made a trip to the Eighties Villages to visit family and friends. The trip was important in my father’s memories and was mentioned in his mother’s letters to her daughter Aganetha in Canada. In a letter in which Anna described the trip, she seemed somewhat embarrassed to admit that they were no longer independent farmers. She noted that they “drove to Silberfeld with a truck. We bought a vehicle last year, a group of us.”16 Ivan was the driver of the truck, though it belonged not to their collective farm but to the MTS. While in Silberfeld, Anna visited her sister, who had returned from an attempt to flee collectivization by going to the Amur River region. My father vividly remembered visiting at the home of his aunt, Tina (Werner) Hinz, which provided the context for a story of having danced with his cousin, who had kept the fact that they were cousins secret from her boyfriend. As he recalled,

  The girls were very nice, they took me along to their friends; one of them said—she had a boyfriend—that she would really confuse him. She took my arm, and we went to the dance. These were German colonists; they were all Lutherans. We came there, and she sat with me and put her arm around me, and her boyfriend came. She said, “Look, there he comes.” I told her that I hoped I wouldn’t get into a fight with him; he had such a long face! He came to us and said, “What’s this?” She laughed and then introduced us, indicating that we were cousins. We sat down, and he was a fine person; it was a bit of a joke.17

  Aganetha (Neufeld) Werner, Ivan’s grandmother, standing beside her sister.

  The “cousin” of his memory was likely Maria, a year younger than Ivan and the stepdaughter of his aunt and no relation to him. According to Anna’s letter, Ivan’s grandmother, Aganetha (Neufeld) Werner, had also been visiting in the Eighties Villages but had already returned to Nikolaipol. Ivan took the truck and continued on to Nikolaipol to visit her. It was the only time he ever saw his grandmother.

  I was there possibly an hour, because I went there alone...with the truck. It was in the garden, she was hoeing, she was in her eighties, she was hoeing, she came along the path, she didn’t know who I was. I had been four years old when we moved away from there. She looked at me.... I said, “Don’t you know me?” “No,” she said. I said, “I am Hans Werner.” She said, “That little four-year-old boy?” “Yes,” I said, “that’s who I am.” Well, we went inside and had a cup of coffee, and she told me that I was the only Werner left that she knew about, and I was supposed to see to it that the family name didn’t become extinct. She told me various
things about my father, and she mentioned some things about my grandfather—and I had to leave again. From there, I went back to the Eighties Villages.18

  There were also possibilities for rewards for good performance at work. Although my father was never entirely clear about what exactly he had done, sometime in either 1936 or 1937 he was honoured for his performance in exceeding the norms for a tractorist and combinyor. He recalled with great pride his methods of fine-tuning equipment so that it worked at maximum efficiency. He had devised a system of tuning the tractor’s fuel–air mixture until just the right amount of blue flame appeared above the exhaust pipe at night. It meant the tractor was producing maximum power using the least amount of fuel. His diligence likely won him the award—a trip to Moscow and coupons to purchase consumer goods, likely at the Torgsin stores, which required hard currency. Ivan made the trip to Moscow alone and came back with a variety of consumer goods. He never explained how the community reacted to the honour bestowed on him, but it seemed he had purchased a large amount of cloth that was distributed throughout the village and helped to relieve the chronic lack of clothing that plagued the Siberian villages.

  On the night of 30 August 1935, a Donbass coal miner named Alexei Stakhanov mined 102 tonnes of coal, a record that exceeded by almost fifteen times the norm of 7.3 tonnes for a six-hour shift. The event marked the beginning of the Stakhanovite movement, in which Stalin created a series of merit awards to honour overachievement in work performance. The Stakhanovite movement also signalled a new attempt by Stalin to woo non-party members. In a 1935 speech, he suggested “one can be a Bolshevik without being a Party member.”19 Some years after my taped interviews with my father, I was reading about the Stakhanovite movement and casually asked him if he had ever heard of it. He replied that he had and went on to say that the reward of a trip to Moscow came with the honour of being a Stakhanovite.

  While winters in Ivan’s early years at the MTS were spent in training, in later years Ivan would drive a truck transporting various agricultural products and supplies. My father enjoyed telling the story of one of these trips when he travelled into the forests some distance south of the Pashnaya villages to pick up a load of lumber for the kolkhoz. He recalled driving through many Russian villages with their large numbers of dogs not accustomed to the noise and dust of trucks passing through. Inevitably a few dogs got run over in each village, and to avoid the wrath of villagers they continued without stopping. They spent the night deep in the forest at the home of a forest ranger. In the evening, the ranger’s wife bustled about providing a meal for them and preparing a place for them to sleep. In the morning when they awoke, she was already in the kitchen preparing breakfast for them. The story’s surprise ending related how the ranger announced at the breakfast table that during the night they had been blessed with an addition to the family. It had not been apparent to Ivan and his companions that the woman who had served them had been in the last stages of pregnancy.

  In the late 1930s, Stalin unleashed what historians have called the “Great Purge.” During the purge, millions of people were arrested, many of them were executed, and others were sent to the gulag. My father told very few stories of arrests in the village of Markovka, though sprinkled throughout his casual references to individuals were comments about them having been arrested. The miller, a Mr. Wiebe, whom he had helped as a fourteen-year-old boy, was arrested for sabotage when the mill burned down in the later 1930s. He had left the mill with the wind vane’s panels in place and the gears engaged. During the night, the wind had picked up, and the friction brake had set the mill on fire. Almost incidental was a brief reference to the arrest of thirty men and one woman in their village on an afternoon in 1936 or 1937. The arrests emanated from the discovery of an alleged plot in which the brigadiers of the collective and the MTS had collaborated to seed 100 hectares of land outside the plan. That meant the harvest from the land could bypass the state’s procurement system and be distributed directly to the collective’s members based on trudanye. The increasing threat of arrest in the later 1930s was likely also responsible for the end of letters to Canada. The last letter Ivan’s sister Aganetha received from her mother was dated September 1935—after that, all contact between Aganetha and her mother was lost.

  The threat of arrest was likely also the source of my father’s memory of being sent to bury a “Werner” book. Ivan was instructed by his mother to bury a thick book, “like a Bible,” bound with a wooden frame, that she indicated would incriminate all the Werners and provide evidence for their arrest. As later evidence would reveal, my father created a story to fill in gaps in the history of his ancestors based on this memory. Although he acknowledged he never thought to look into the book, he believed it contained evidence that the Werners had been wealthy landlords in south Russia. “The Werners had been rich at one time in Ukraine. My great-grandfather had owned a lot of land. Wernersdorf—Werner’s khutor—belonged to this land. Afterwards it was land that was rented out, everybody rented it and paid him rent, in the first years. Later on it was sold and divided into villages. How it turned out later—I have no idea.”20 There might have been a hope to recover the book someday, because Ivan wrapped it in wax paper and then put it into a burlap bag and buried it in a deep hole behind their barn.

  When I asked my father whether his mother had been a happy person, he acknowledged that after the jolts of losing her daughter, the failed trip to Moscow, the death of her husband, and forced collectivization, she had rarely smiled or laughed. In spite of her unhappiness, “sometimes [you] could notice that she had been happy at one time.” In one particular memory, Ivan came home to the sound of her playing the small accordion she had received as a wedding gift. With one foot on a chair, she was playing a brisk polka on the instrument usually reserved for playing hymns. It was one of the few times in the 1930s that my father could remember her laughing and enjoying herself.21

  By the later 1930s, Ivan was a young man—his twentieth birthday was in 1937. With the older Froese children marrying and starting their own families, he assumed the role of both breadwinner and authority in the Froese household. But the fabric of family life and moral codes that had governed Mennonite life had been considerably frayed by the events of the previous fifteen years. My father recalled having to go to his sister Katya’s room at two in the morning one night to suggest it was time for her suitor to leave. Katya was thirteen, and her suitor was Abram Isaac, a boy a few years older to whom she would be briefly married.

  I never took particular note at the time, but my father’s stories of these years never mentioned any interest in girls. Even though my father portrayed himself as being active in the social circles of his village, playing at dances, visiting the neighbours, and attending community events, he never mentioned any girlfriends. The reason for the absence of such stories only became clear many years later. In the summer of 1990, I travelled to Germany with my parents to visit my father’s sisters, Katya and Martha, who had come to Germany as part of the large migration of Soviet Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. On a Sunday morning, we were at the Darmstadt Baptist Church, where both my father’s sisters attended and where my aunt Katya would meet her first husband, Abram Isaac, again. The marriage to Isaac had failed soon after it was solemnized, and a lot had transpired before the awkward “reunion” in the church lobby in 1990. After a brief conversation between them, Isaac came to talk to me since we were both standing somewhat apart from the group, which included my parents, my father’s sister Katya and her husband Johann, and his other sister Martha. Isaac casually commented that it really was too bad about my father’s first wife but added that there really was nothing else my father could have done.

  Although he told so many stories of his life, he never, not before or after, intimated that he had been married before he met and married my mother. In my search for documentation on aspects of his later German military record, I had come across evidence suggesting
he had been married in occupied Poland, but the casual remark in the lobby of the Darmstadt church was a surprise. If Orlando Figes’s suggestion that the “intermingling of myth and memory sustains every family” is true, then it must also include the myths created by memories never revealed in the stories told.22 My father seemingly could never find a narrative that included the story of his previous marriages without destroying the “myth” he was creating about himself. In 1990, I was not sure even my mother knew. By then, she had also told me the story of her first husband, who had disappeared during the war. In the 1950s, a few years after marrying my father, she had found out from a mutual relative that her first husband had survived the war, had remarried, and was living in what was then East Germany.