First, in the early-to-mid 16th century, we fled the Catholics in the Low Countries and went to West Prussia, where the king and the rich landowners welcomed us to settle in the Vistula delta and gave us a Privilegium. We drained the swamps, because we knew how to do that from living in the Low Countries, and built farms. It was during our more than two centuries in West Prussia that speaking Plautdietsch and eating zwieback and foarmaworscht and living on colonies became the Mennonite way of life.
But then there was a war, and King Frederick William II of Prussia needed soldiers. He didn’t respect the Privilegium, and he didn’t give the Mennonites special treatment like previous kings had. Soon families were saving money to buy their sons out of the military. And we needed more land, so we started looking for a new place.
The Mennonites sent scouts to southern Russia, where Catherine the Great had issued a manifesto inviting European colonists. She welcomed the Mennonites, promising land for every family, and plenty of wood, fish, and hay. She would give the Mennonites credit to build farms, and the best part of all: they would not have to join the army. Another Privilegium. They accepted Catherine’s offer and became rich, buying more land and building bigger barns and houses. Soon the Russians were working for the Mennonites, and they learned to speak Plautdietsch if they wanted to eat.
But in the 1870s the rules in Russia changed, which is when Johann packed his bags for Canada. The wealthiest Mennonites—the ones who couldn’t bear to lose what they’d earned through such hard work—chose to stay in Russia. Those who remained in Russia suffered horrible indignities during the Bolshevik Revolution and the World Wars, and we were taught to be thankful that our forefathers left when they did. Those of us that moved first had put value in our religious principles above our riches, and that had saved us.
Those Mennonites who remained in Russia soon lost their autonomy and property. The Red and White Armies took turns pillaging food and livestock from the Mennonites, and Mennonite industries were seized by the military. Anarchists attacked the wealthy farmers, and the Mennonites’ Germanic background bred suspicion among the Russians. Mennonites were murdered, robbed, raped, and imprisoned. Religious freedoms were restricted, and churches were monitored by the government. Many of the remaining Mennonites fled Russia in the 1920s, with more following after World War II.
So, in Mennonite minds, Russia was a place of tragic failure and broken trust, of bad things done to decent people. Whenever Russia was mentioned the elders shook their heads with sadness. The name Stalin and the word communist sent shivers down our backs as children. If something was bad, hopeless, and cold, my father would compare it to godless Russia. For us, the fear of Russian invasion went far deeper than Cold War nuclear threats. Russia was the ultimate bogeyman, representing the evil in all our bad dreams. When, as children, we were caught tormenting each other, my grandmother scolded us for acting “like communists.”
The biggest threat of Russia’s communism was the godlessness of it. During the Cold War and the threat of Soviet invasion we asked ourselves, How would we live under such gottloos mensch? If those godless people torture me, will I still be brave enough to say I love Jesus? What would come first, the rapture or the Russians, and which would be scarier? As a child, I thought if the communists came to Canada and forced me to decry Jesus, I’d go to hell. That was a real enough fear to warrant fervent prayers, said in my pajamas, kneeling beside my bed.
I was jolted from my thoughts by a major highway intersection, the one I had been told would appear after the place I was looking for. After—so I’d driven too far. I wheeled my bike around and spotted my destination, Gas K-19, on my return. Steel tanks, rust peeking through their paint, sheds, and bits of machinery filled the yard. A small office building with a front porch. The rotten-egg stench of propane filled the air. I splashed through a large puddle in the middle of the yard and found a firm patch of ground that would support the kickstand of my motorcycle.
I knocked the mud off my boots on the porch of Gas K-19, which took some time given the rain, and walked into the office. Through a back door of the office I could see the schmiede (metal workshop), and hear the sizzle of a welder, the clang and rattle of metal and machinery.
“Hallo,” said the burly blond machinist with a grime-streaked face. He was standing behind a high counter.
“How can I help you?” he asked in Plautdietsch. The height of the counter combined with the shortness of my legs made me uncomfortable, and I took a step back.
“Sounds like you’re busy today,” I said, peering over the counter and around his shoulder at the work going on in the schmiede behind him.
He nodded. Too busy to make conversation.
“Is Hein Voth in?” I said. His full name was Enrique Voth Penner, but I had been told to just ask for Hein Voth.
The worker gave me a look that suggested he’d been asked this before. Hein had people talking.
Hein appeared, giving me a curious look over the counter. I introduced myself, then stumbled as I tried to explain why I’d come looking for him.
“People told me you’re the guy who knows something about this Russia thing. I don’t know…do you have a few minutes to talk?”
A pained look crossed Hein’s face. He looked at his watch, then led me down the hallway to his office.
“Ya, a few minutes, sure.”
Hein was tall, with trim grey hair and wire-rim glasses. He wore cowboy boots and jeans held up by a silver-trimmed belt. The pocket of his blue long-sleeved shirt bulged with pens and a box cutter. He carried himself with energy and confidence: a modest Mennonite businessman.
Hein was Sommerfeld, a branch of the Mennonite community that embraces social conservatism while adopting any technological advances available in their farms and businesses. His people had fled from Russia to Canada in the same wave as my great-grandfather Johann, and then some of them came to Mexico. Sommerfeld women dressed conservatively, with small head coverings, but they drove cars and trucks and knew the value of computers when it came to marketing their crops and managing their businesses.
The shelves in Hein’s office were cluttered with miniature mustang horses and Mustang cars. A bull’s head hung on the wall and a brown leather saddle was slung across a frame. These were the icons of Mexican gaucho lifestyle, a pop culture familiar to the Mennonites and their relationship with the land, even though it was the folklore and spirit of another people. From a Mennonite point of view it was a safe form of pop culture.
“You like horses a lot. Or is it the car you like most?” I said, pointing at the red model sports car.
“All of it. I like that kind of stuff,” Hein said, adding a nervous laugh.
“You drive a Mustang?”
“No,” he said, waving at the air as if that was a ridiculous suggestion. “Nice cars, but no.”
“Horses? You ride horses?”
“A bit, sure. But I just like the…” Hein waved at the paraphernalia.
When Mennonites move across oceans, into deserts and the deep forest, they often say they are doing so to escape from the influences of the world, in order to live separate. But it never works. They always absorb their surroundings and the cultures they imagine themselves isolated from, like islands. They can’t stop the sea from lapping at their shores. I thought of the Mennonite restaurants that dotted the colonies, serving a mix of Mexican and Mennonite staples. Caldo de res and chile rellenos next to foarmaworscht and koomst borscht. The borscht was adopted on the steppes of southern Russia, the caldo here on the dry plains of northern Mexico, and they’d both become staples of Mennonite cuisine. So much for being pure Mennonite.
“So I wanted to hear more about this move to Russia,” I said. Move to Russia. Just saying that was enough to startle me. Mennonites were not meant to move back to Russia.
Hein winced, pursing his lips.
“I’m a bit worried over what people
will say if they know,” he said. “It’s not a good time, with what is happening between Mennonites and the Mexicans. Everyone is upset, who knows what could happen if they know we want to leave. What are you writing for? A newspaper? I don’t want to have my name in a newspaper about this now.”
I assured him that I wasn’t writing for a newspaper. No one in Mexico would be reading what I was writing for a long time.
“It’s for a book.”
Hein nodded, satisfied.
“The issue is that there is not enough land,” Hein said as he settled into a chair behind his desk. “If we had ten times more land, I think we could have that in crops right away, it would not be enough. Also, there’s not enough water here. We need water and we need more land for the poor Mennonites. How can we make this work for the poor, so that they can benefit?”
One hundred and forty years ago the Mennonites’ search for a new home away from Russia was driven by faith and culture and the belief that to assimilate was to lose it all. At least that’s what we were always told it was about. In reality, two-thirds of the families in Johann’s Molochna Colony were landless, and the lure of land certainly made the move easier. But this time land was the sole motive. The same methods could serve different purposes. The 7,000 Mennonites who moved to Chihuahua in the 1920s had multiplied nearly tenfold in population but they weren’t able to add land at the same rate that they had children. Now, with droughts year after year, each hectare felt smaller than ever. Land prices had soared beyond the reach of small farmers, with irrigated land near the colonies selling for prices similar to those recorded in the US Midwest.
In 1983 some of Mexico’s Mennonites moved farther south to Campeche state, where land was more affordable. Fifty years later they had once again outgrown their land, and one of the Campeche colonies purchased a 15,700-hectare plot of land in the neighbouring state, where they were starting a new colony, creating more space for expansion. Others moved to Belize, Bolivia, and Paraguay, and soon I would see for myself the colonies they had created in these places. Some even moved north to Texas, but no one had considered moving back to Russia. Until now.
“We’ll have to negotiate our own deals with the sellers,” Hein said. “The government won’t set up the deal for us. But they said the land there can be bought for a tenth of what it costs here.”
Hein’s eyes shone as he said this. The promise was just so great. What a sucker, I thought.
When Joseluis Gomez-Rodriguez, a Canadian-educated Mexican businessman living in Russia, came knocking on Mennonite doors he found willing listeners. Joseluis acted as a land agent and invited the Mennonites to visit the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, which is rich in oil, natural gas, and farmland and nestled between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. Land was plentiful and affordable and tax breaks and freedom were there for the taking.
Not exactly a Privilegium, but many of the same commitments as those made when Johann made the journey from Russia. When Johann was planning his escape from Russia there were agents, unseen men working from the world’s greatest cities. Their names—Hespeler, Jansen, Shantz—became bywords of hope and opportunity to the immigrants. These contacts offered help: they would find financing, they had spoken to the men in power and would have everything ready for their arrival. Now Hein and his neighbours were putting that same trust in Joseluis.
“He said that there are some Muslims there,” Hein said, referring to Joseluis’s description of the Tatars, a Turkic minority. “But there are still five million hectares of land available if we want it, and they will give us some tax breaks.”
Joseluis’s promises sounded like a familiar refrain, sung by a new agent every time the Mennonites prospected for new homeland. But there was also another repetitive factor at play.
Mennonites such as Hein could negotiate with officials from a vastly different culture, build and run a successful business, and invent and then manufacture clever, well-built products that no one else had thought of. They could create a community, learn new languages and adapt to foreign lands, and become rich within a generation of landing on foreign soil. They could do all those things to survive. They could learn whatever was needed to make the farm work, to build up the business, to ensure Mennonite prosperity. It was in their DNA, it was what Mennonites did.
What Mennonites didn’t do, and what their village schools didn’t teach, was to think beyond the physical, practical matters of building farms and feeding families, unless it involved memorizing the biblical truths. To weigh up the political, the abstract, or the historical context, was trying to measure those forces best left to the Lord’s control.
“What do you think of Putin?” I asked. Hein looked at me, questioning.
“I don’t know much about that,” he said.
“Well, he’s very nationalistic, for the old Russian motherland,” I explained. “Russification is a big thing now, the same as when we left Russia, and they don’t always welcome foreigners.”
Hein shrugged in dismissal and indifference. Russian politics were of little interest to him.
“We want them to guarantee our freedom. We want them to commit to us that we won’t have to serve in the military, that we can have our own schools,” he said. “They have already promised us this, on a provisional basis, but not officially.”
Freedom, independence, and opportunity were not the words that came to my mind when I thought of Putin’s Russia. Hein used these words with naive hope, praying them into truth so that the Mennonites could take advantage of this golden opportunity. Russia’s iron-fisted control of its people, churches, and media weren’t factors in his consideration. Those were faraway problems, far from the pressing need for land and a fresh start.
“So Tatarstan. Where exactly is that in Russia?” I asked, turning to more practical matters.
“It’s somewhere in the northeast, I think,” Hein said. He made a round globe with his hands, looking at me questioningly. “But of course once you’re there…well, the world is round, it will be…where? Which side of the country?”
We turned to the computer on his desk, and he seemed as interested as I to see where Tatarstan was located, about eight hundred kilometres east of Moscow. Not in the northeast, but in the southwest of the country.
Many of the farmers sizing up a move to Russia were struggling to match the economic growth they saw some of their wealthier neighbours enjoying. They looked at Russia as a second chance to build financial security. This was also in keeping with tradition. Many of the first Mennonites who left Manitoba for Mexico in the 1920s were struggling farmers rather than successful ones, just as many of the first ones to leave Russia for North America were landless.
I don’t know what our family’s financial situation was in Russia, but I did learn that Johann’s father, my great-great-grandfather, was an occasional farmer who also worked as a teacher. At small Mennonite schools there a long tradition of male teachers being the ones who were bad at farming, or seen as weak or frail, forced into a last-resort type of job. The female teachers were spinsters, the women who couldn’t get married and have their own children. My great-grandfather Johann became a teacher like his father, so I come from a family of bad farmers. Being a writer has similarities to teaching, and I’m a bad farmer, so I see the family resemblance. Knowing they were teachers also makes me feel safe in concluding that our flight to the New World was at least partially driven by economic factors. The wealthy always remained, hoping that conditions would improve and allow them to keep their well-established farms.
“Maybe Russia can be a new start for the poor,” Hein said. “Mennonites, we need to own something, to have our own business, our own thing. We don’t like to work for others on an hourly wage. That’s not our way.”
I took in his shop, employees, and tanks full of fuel with a sweep of my arm. “Your business here looks successful. You’d be willing to sell it and move to Russia?” I
asked.
Hein looked uncertain. “Well, who knows. We have to see first. I might not even move there myself. But I can still help the others that are sure they want to move.”
The wealth divide among Mennonites was growing wider, and it was often viewed in terms of land, rather than of the truck they drove, the house they built, or the vacations they took. It was still seen as distasteful, sinful even, some might say, to flash your cash. My father intentionally bought used cars instead of new fancy models, even though he could afford better.
“I’d feel funny driving a fancy new car when others can’t afford one,” he’d say.
Some Mennonites took it even further, prying chrome off the fenders of newly purchased cars in order to make them look more humble. Having a big farm was more acceptable, though it didn’t stop people from talking. How many hectares is that family farming? That son will inherit it all! The poor muttered that the avarice of the rich stood between them and God, while the rich were content knowing that their wealth gave them power and position in the community, which was almost as good as genuine probity anyway.
Land within the boundaries of the Mennonite colony in Mexico was much more expensive than “Mexican” land because it included the roads and irrigation systems built by the Mennonites, and it was closer to their slaughterhouses and cheese factories.
“We don’t know how long we will be able to stand it here, doors are closing for us. People with money can still buy land, but the poor cannot. The fat, they can feast, and the poor, they get skinnier,” Hein complained bitterly. “The poor have no say, no power. The rich here don’t let the poor starve by a long shot. They give money, but not enough for the poor to get their own land. When the rich man and the poor man are fishing side by side, it is the rich man who is catching fish and the poor man who remains hungry.”
Menno Moto Page 6