Research funding helps uncover fate of Mennonites arrested by Soviets in 1930s

A new research fellowship at the University of Winnipeg will help researchers uncover more about what happened to thousands of Mennonites who vanished nearly 80 years ago in the former Soviet Union, many of whom have descendants in Manitoba.

"This is the question that Mennonite families have often asked over the decades: What happened to my father, what happened to my grandfather, what happened to my brother?" said Royden Loewen, director of the Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Loewen and researchers at the centre will use the $450,000 Paul Toews Fellowship in Russian Mennonite History to fund research into Ukrainian archives from the 1930s made available to researchers about a year ago, although they had been previously opened to direct descendants of subjects in the files.

Included in the archives are details on the fates of Russian Mennonites arrested by the secret police under Joseph Stalin in the second half of the 1930s, when the dictator began directing the arrests of men from ethnic and religious minorities, Loewen says.

In the mid-1930s, Loewen says, at least 9,000 Mennonite men were arrested on "trumped-up" charges.

"But especially between '36 and '38, approximately one-half of all Mennonite men were arrested, middle of the night, by the [secret police] — we call them the NKVD, the precursor of the [now defunct] KGB, taken away and charged with trumped-up charges, and then usually executed within two weeks time."

Photographs kept

The Soviet authorities kept documentary evidence of some of those who were executed, Loewen says.

"And then oftentimes, too, after a short trial [and] found guilty, they'd be marched down into the basement and summarily executed. But oftentimes, too, a photograph would be taken of them just before, and the photograph was kept." 

The stories are heart-wrenching, Loewen says.

One of his former colleagues was eight years old when the NKVD showed up at his home in the middle of the night and arrested his father. His mother grabbed at him as he and his siblings wrapped themselves around his legs.

"What makes it even sort of worse is that oftentimes the loved ones had no idea what happened, and the Soviets weren't about to tell them," he said. "And so they would spend decades wondering — maybe father's in the gulag someplace, maybe he survived somehow."

'Time is of the essence'

The fellowship will help fund research into the archives, named after a Mennonite historian who led journeys into Ukraine for people who wanted to learn about their heritage.

The school is hoping to get a total of $3 million to fund the research, Loewen says. The first task will be to get versions of the archives out of Ukraine in case the rules governing them change..

"We think that time is of the essence. We don't know how long these archives will be open in this fashion," Loewen said.

Loewen says thousands of Manitoba Mennonites will have relatives who were affected by the arrests, especially those whose relatives emigrated to Canada in the 1930s.

"This is the story of their grandparents," he said. "We also had many Mennonites that came in the 1920s, so they'll have uncles, great-great uncles in here. There are a lot of folks that are affected by [that] kind of bloodline."