Part Five - Trapped in the Bloodlands

This is the fifth part of an essay on the Schulz Clock by Liza Kroeger that we are publishing in instalments. Read the introduction here, and find previous instalments on our blog.

The First World War and the ensuing revolutions that rocked the Russian Empire would bring about dramatic changes for the Mennonites in Russia.

A map of Zachariasfeld. Illustration by Arthur P. Kroeger.

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno (1888–1934), photo dates from 1921.

Perhaps not noticeably at first, but gradually, their German ethnicity and their isolationism branded them at best as outsiders and at worst as traitors. Affluent families were especially hard hit as they became targets for revolutionaries and anarchists before and after the October Revolution in 1917, finding themselves caught especially in the maelstrom of conflict that tore through the Ukraine between 1917 and 1921, then singled out for expropriations and collectivisation during the ascendancy of Lenin and Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s. Life as Anna had known it had ended. The years ahead would have something very different in store for her. Yet she never remarried. Now it would be the bond between the Schulzes and the Zachariases sealed on the day of Anna and Peter’s wedding that would have to shield and carry Anna and her family through the coming trials.

The first blow came when Anna’s oldest nephew, Isaak Zacharias, Jr. was conscripted into the Russian army. He would go missing for seven years, only to return in 1922. Mennonites were pacifists. They had been invited to Russia by Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century to settle the Ukrainian steppes in exchange for religious freedom and exemption from military service. For a people who had been allowed to live by the principle of pacifism for over a century this was a very radical breach with the past.

By 1917 the inner turmoil and revolution that was reverberating through Russia hit Osterwick and Zachariasfeld. Anna and her kin, the Schulzes and the Zachariases had become the class enemy. They were now the hated ‘masters’ in the ‘master/slave’ relationships decried by the anarchists. They were, as Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno believed, ‘the personified enemies of freedom,’ for they were property owners.

Time and time again roving bands commanded by a changing cast of warlords came to Zachariasfeld demanding money, looking for food and shelter and threatening to kill if these demands were not met. When the Tsar was forced to abdicate in March 1917, then murdered (along with his family) in July 1918, it was clear to Russian Mennonites that they had lost their protector. Right or wrong, they had felt an unflagging allegiance to the Russian tsars who had brought them to this country and granted them their charters of privileges. The Schulzes and the Zachariases were now trapped in the Bloodlands.

And so, the terror and bloodletting began. In early 1918 Anna’s son Peter was held hostage at gunpoint for days. Was he being held by Communists or anarchists? I don’t know. Did Anna and her people even know the distinction back then? Or care? When I hear about the Syrian civil war, about Aleppo, for instance, who do the mothers trapped there with their children fear most, hate most? The Free Syrian Army, the Levant Front, the Al-Nusra Front, Bashar al-Assad, the Hezbollah, or the Kurdish People’s Protection Units? Or does it even matter? Somehow Peter managed to escape, causing Anna, her brother-in-law and their families to flee to Zachariasfeld for what they thought was safety. But then in November Zachariasfeld once more came under attack. This time the Zacharias men were armed––in violation of one of the highest Mennonite principles. In a gun battle that ensued a band leader was killed. For everyone it was clear that they would have to leave immediately. In the early morning hours of November 18 (New Style), the families with a total of eleven wagons left their beloved Zachariasfeld, never to return.