Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule by Jacob A. Neufeld (review)

Harvey Dyck’s introduction to this memoir/reflection provides readers of Soviet Gulag stories (popular and scholarly) a valuable, current presentation of the story. Like the vast memoir literature on the Soviet Mennonite experience, written in German and Russian, Neufeld’s story is an insider account, from the perspective of an important leadership group in Ukraine during the 1920s famine. The most interesting section covers his five years in the Gulag camps of Vorkuta (between Archangel and the vast Ob River delta) and “Bamlag” in eastern Siberia, which focus on Neufeld’s experiences, but offer little on the Mennonite communities of Siberia and central Asia, where the majority of Mennonites were living. This Ukraine focus (mostly Molochnaia colony) is supported by Dyck’s personal familiarity with archival resources from the Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozh’e regions (oblasty), the primary locales where Jacob A. Neufeld (1895–1960) lived when he was “a prominent Soviet Mennonite leader and writer” (3). The many quite fascinating vignettes read smoothly because of the free translation style.

The three part division consists of Neufeld’s previously unpublished memoir (My Path of Thorns) of surviving the Gulag (1933–1939), followed by a more general survey of Russian Mennonite life in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1929–1949) privately published in 1957 as Tiefenwege (Tragic Passages), now in abbreviated English translation; and a sixty-page letter/memoir to his wife completed in 1955. What comes through quite consistently is a highly negative picture of Stalinism, its animosity especially toward an ethnic-religious community like the Mennonites, while pursuing radical revolutionary restructuring of society in excessively brutal ways. Another quite personal faith theme, extended also to fellow Mennonite believers he encountered, are the times of personal hopelessness and near total collapse when trusting in God became deeply real. Neufeld relied heavily on biblical phraseology and images such as Christ’s “crown of thorns.” These contrast, especially during the trek to Germany (1943–1944) to his commentary on fellow Mennonites steadily becoming brutalized and losing their grip on faith.

Neufeld’s privations in the Gulag (especially when manually building the Baikal-Amur rail line) exacerbated his early onset of arthritis, so that thereafter he could at best do desk jobs from a wheelchair. This gave him access to more data than simple workers, and made him a particularly good observer of the forced trek with the retreating German forces to settlement in occupied Poland (near Poznan). The wheelchair perspective accounts for his closing eulogy (after frequent comments along the way) to the heroism of women and adolescent children, without whose labour to push horse-drawn wagons out of the muck, find forage, prepare meals from scarce resources, and even their leadership in singing and worship, far more would have perished. The absence of men, whether deported eastward, in the workers’ army (Trudarmiia) or who disappeared forever in Gulag graves, was the additional burden these women carried.

Neufeld focused on the travails of Russian Mennonites after 1929 (collectivization, war on religion) as “a single unique path of suffering” (154) with the exception of noting that during the Holodomyr (1932–1933) where so many Ukrainians perished, it was “less destructive” for Mennonites still getting aid from abroad. Dyck’s commentary, relying heavily on Terry Marten, presents the Bolshevik efforts to control the Mennonites as “close to a fixation” (22) and “by far one of the toughest groups to integrate” (26). This is a commonly held view by Russian Mennonites in the diaspora, and its historians, and accounts for the relatively late scholarly attention to the realities that members of that same community worked with the authorities supplying names of “Kulaks” to dispossess and deport, or who became careerists in the Soviet system, and “Mennonites” who participated in the Nazi-driven Holocaust against Jews and other...