Mennonite Martyrs: People Who Suffered for Their Faith, 1920-1940

T.D. Regehr, a professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan,
is the author of For Everything a Season: A History of the
Alexanderkrone Zentralschule and Mennonites in Canada, Volume 3,
1939-1970.

Toews was a Mennonite teacher and preacher in Russia during the
revolution and civil war. During those years, Russian/Soviet Mennonites
in their prosperous agricultural colonies suffered great hardships.
Hundreds were murdered by anarchist bands or by communist partisans.
Thousands more fell victim to the terror Joseph Stalin unleashed on the
Ukraine in the 1930s. Toews, who had emigrated to Canada in the 1920s,
was particularly troubled about the harsh fate many of his fellow
ministers suffered and began to gather stories and biographical
information about them.

An original manuscript, and much of the supporting documentary material
was lost in a fire that destroyed the author’s farm home, but the
publicity surrounding the loss prompted many more people to forward
information on Russian/Soviet Mennonites (not only the preachers or
ministers) who had been tortured, murdered, or exiled by Soviet
authorities. Eventually a two-volume compilation was published in which
the author sought “to portray individual martyrs among our
people—how they patiently struggled, suffered and died.” The work
was an early Mennonite version of the Gulag Archipeligo.

John B. Toews, a nephew of the author and a historian who has published
numerous books and articles on the Russian Mennonite experience,
translated, edited, and selected the materials now published in an
abridged English edition of Mennonite Martyrs. These are accounts of how
individual Soviet Mennonites experienced, remembered, and interpreted
their suffering and persecution.

Significantly, Aaron Toews and many other Mennonites focused on the
religious aspects of their suffering. There is no attempt to deal with
the political and economic roots of Soviet-Mennonite tensions. Not all
the people whose experiences are told in this volume were “martyrs”
in a strictly religious sense; but, from the compiler’s perspective,
presenting them as “martyrs” who had suffered for their faith
apparently gave greater meaning to that suffering.

This volume provides primary documentation on the experiences of the
Soviet Mennonites in the 1920s and 1930s. It also provides a unique
interpretation of that suffering’s significance.