A Russian Mennonite Nation in Ukraine: The Public Sphere and Strategies of Differentiation in a World of Coeval National Imaginings
Open AccessUsing the Russian Mennonites as an example, this essay illuminates alternative and coeval ways of imagining a nation that exists alongside the nation-state model often invoked. The study begins by considering the establishment of a Mennonite public sphere in Russia, which enabled the Russian Mennonites to imagine themselves as part of a unified group and to then articulate that distinction as explicitly “Mennonite.” As the “Mennonite Commonwealth” continued to flourish, so too did a unique Mennonite identity. Following the February Revolution in Russia, the Mennonites reacted to the provisional government’s new nationalities policies by clearly and decisively expressing their distinction in national terms. This only intensified once the Bolsheviks assumed control and granted rights based on nationality. During the next six years, the Russian Mennonites engaged in active debates concerning their national status, which served to further constitute their Mennonite nation. The end of the Mennonites’ national aspirations came with their official classification as “German” in the All-Union Census in 1926, after which their national distinction was refused. The Mennonites’ case reveals the ways in which current conceptions of nation-ness and nationalism need to be interrogated if the processes and strategies by which nations are constituted are to be studied. The Mennonites formed an imagined community that sought distinction, even if only briefly, in national terms and yet, due to their ultimate failure to establish a nation-state, their quest for nationhood has been rendered unintelligible by historians. By expanding the study of nations and nationalisms to include groups such as the Russian Mennonites a more nuanced narrative of nation imagining is revealed, which can be used to assist scholars studying minorities around the world whose failed nation invoking practices resulted in their silencing.
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Somawang_gwu_0075M_13642.pdf | 2018-01-16 | Open Access |
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