A Mennonite Family in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, 1789-1923

T.D. Regehr is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
He is the author of Mennonites in Canada, 1939–1970: A People
Transformed, The Beauharnois Scandal: A Story of Canadian
Entrepreneurship and Politics, and Remembering Saskatchewan:

This book is the work of a lifetime of observation, reflection,
research, and collection of oral and archival material by David Rempel.
It was, at the time of his death in 1992, a manuscript of nearly a
thousand pages. The manuscript was edited and rewritten for publication
by his daughter, who was assisted by relatives, friends, and scholars.

David Rempel was born in the Russian Mennonite village of Nieder
Chortitza in 1899. He was a participant in the 1918–22 Russian Civil
War, and a keen observer of the lawless terror and Soviet ascendancy
that followed and that destroyed his beloved homeland. His home village
was regarded as the most Russianized village of the Old (meaning First)
Russian Mennonite Colony. Rempel felt that the village provided him with
an unusual vantage point different from that of other Mennonite writers
who came from the newer—and allegedly more culturally and
educationally advanced—Molotschna Colony.

Rempel was a secular historian who studied at American universities and
served in the Historic Section of the U.S. Strategic Air Force during
World War II. He was interested in political, social, and economic
developments, and therefore does not write about the religious aspects
of the Russian Mennonite story. What he provides is a detailed critical
discussion of class tensions between the Mennonites who owned land and
estates and those who became marginalized workers. As the son of a
small-store owner and grain buyer, Rempel was keenly aware of those
tensions; he became a liberal critic of powerful, elitist, and
conservative Mennonites in Russia and later in the United States.

In addition to cogently presenting his perspectives on the
Russian–Mennonite experience, Rempel dismisses a number of Mennonite
“myths,” includes detailed biographical sketches of his ancestors,
and vigorously defends the work of Jacob Hoeppner. Hoeppner, a Rempel
ancestor, served as one of the two delegates who conducted the key
negotiations with Russian officials that made possible the Mennonite
migration from Prussia to Russia. He was later vilified by disgruntled
colonists.