Moscow Archives
by Paul Toews

This past December I stood on a street in Moscow clutching five big boxes with 101 rolls of microfilm.  It was a very cold afternoon. The wind was howling, the temperature well below zero and yet it was a moment of great exhilaration and satisfaction.  For in the five boxes was the most extensive collection of materials, created by Mennonites during the early Soviet period, that to date has been retrieved from archives in Russia and Ukraine.  The films acquired after a very long and frustrating set of negotiations with the State Archive of the Russian Federation (the national archives of Russia) are records of  the work of the Allrussischer Mennonitischer Landwirtschaftlicher Verein (All-Russian Mennonite Agricultural Union) and American Mennonite Relief during the 1920s.

The All-Russian Mennonite Agricultural Union (AMLV) was an organization created in 1922 by a meeting of representatives from various communities across European and Siberian Russia. The original intent of those who gathered was to create an organizational structure by which Mennonites could stay in contact on many different issues. Soviet regulations did not permit the co-mingling of economic and religious interests so the Union was registered as an economic entity.  Its chief task was to insure survival in the face of a widespread famine and to assist the economic reconstruction of Mennonite communities that had suffered substantial decline because of the First World War, the civil war that followed and early Soviet policies. With nineteen chapters and fifty-six sub-chapters scattered across vast sections of Russia and Ukraine, the Union worked to improve seed and livestock in these communities and to facilitate the marketing of produce. The minutes of the local chapters provide us with vivid descriptions of the desperate economic conditions in many communities.  The correspondence between the chapter leaders and the central office in Moscow gives us insight into the their collective efforts at rebuilding.

If the charter of the Union stipulated economic activity, its real function among Mennonites was much more. It was a means to maintain contact, to collectively resist the intrusiveness of the new Soviet order, and to reinforce solidarity in an increasingly hostile environment.  It also played a central role in the emigration of 20,000 Mennonites who left the Soviet Union during the 1920s.
In 1920 North American Mennonites responded to the starvation facing their co-religionists in Russia by creating Mennonite Central Committee (MCC).  American Mennonite Relief (AMR) was the vehicle by which they brought food, medicines, clothing, seeds and ultimately also agricultural machinery to Russia and Ukraine.  AMR worked under the general administration of the American Relief Administration organized by Herbert Hoover and along side the International Red Cross and many relief organizations that sought to forestall the effects of a widespread famine. AMR, while technically a relief agency, brought much more.  The AMR personnel brought assurances that the Russian Mennonites would not be cut off from the outside world.  They brought solidarity and cooperation with Mennonites elsewhere.

The offices of both agencies were closed and in 1928 the records were seized by the Soviet government. The archives do not reveal which Soviet agency took the records.  No doubt it was the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) for they were both interested in, and suspicious of, agencies that had religious and foreign connections. From discussions with the personnel at the State Archive of the Russian Federation it is apparent that the NKVD kept the materials till 1951. Then both collections were turned over to the Central State Archive of Ancient Documents.  In 1953 they were sent to the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Social Construction of the USSR.  Finally in 1966 they were received by the State Archive of the Russian Federation. A note from 1978 reveals that they were bound and stitched with covers. Presumably it was with this cataloguing that a short introductory note was written describing the agencies and the surviving archival material. This commentary is mostly prosaic except for the charge that AMR was engaged in “intelligence tasks.” In the 1920s the Soviets generally assumed that all foreigners were agents of their governments and were spying.  The charge, while complicating relationships for western MCC personnel with Soviet officials could have far more dreadful consequences for locals who had worked with them and remained once the MCC personnel left.

That these records survived is not surprising.  During the past decade I have spent several weeks each year visiting archival institutions in Russia and Ukraine in search of records relative to the Mennonite story. Mennonites first moved into what is now Ukraine in 1789.  With time, either through voluntary migration or forced relocation, they fanned out across many parts of the vast Tsarist and Soviet empires.  The Tsarist bureaucracy was relentless in the collection of data and the Soviets continued this tradition of extensive record taking and preservation. Record collections now in many regional archives and the national archives of Ukraine (Kiev) and the Russian Federation (St. Petersburg and Moscow) contain an astonishing amount of documentation on the Mennonite story.  Until the collapse of the Soviet Union these records were closed to foreign scholars and in many cases to locals as well.

In the early 1990s, when the archives first became open to foreigners, it was difficult to locate materials in many places.  Mennonites were lumped together with other Germanic peoples and during the Soviet period, research into their past was marginalized.  Ethno-cultural studies were not fashionable in Soviet historiography. I will never forget a visit in 1997 to a large regional archive in Simferopel, Crimea. I inquired of the Director of the Archives as to what kinds of materials they had relative to the long history of Mennonites in that region.  She replied that she did not know for they had never searched for such materials. With a little seed money and the collaboration of a German research institute they have since located thousands of pages of archival records and even published a thick volume listing documents relative to the history of Crimean Germans.

The records in the Moscow archives that we filmed had been previously identified by several Russian scholars interested in the Mennonite story.  So I went to Moscow in the fall of 2004 knowing that these two large collections were there.  They had been declassified in the1990s and now could be reproduced.

The exhilaration I felt that cold day in Moscow was from the sense that these records were finally coming home.  They were created by Mennonites.   And while we have not the original paper, but only films, after seventy-five years the records are finally accessible to those who care most about the story they tell.