This collection is divided into 3 parts (divisions of the State Archive of the Zaporozhye Region):
-A. Tsarist-Era (9 fonds selected out of 43 that were identified as having Mennonite-related documents)
-B. Soviet-Era (16 fonds selected out of 129 that were identified as having Mennonite-related documents)
-C. Communinist Party documents (4 fonds were selected)
Before 1917, five Mennonite multi-village settlements existed within the present-day Zaporozhe region, each constituting a separate administrative volost: the Khonitsa and Molochna
mother settlements; and the Mariupol/Bergthal (1836-1871), Nikolaipole (Yazykovo), and Schoenfeld daughter settlements. Many had their own volost couns, banks, hospitals, and educational institutions. Also dispersed throughout the region were private Mennonite khutor-farmsteads and estates. In villages, towns and cities Mennonites owned factories, plants, mills, were actively involved in the trades and handicrafts, and participated in town and uezd Zemstvo councils.
Special strengths of the Tsarist era fonds, which make up about 25 percent of all Mennonite-related fonds, pertain to: the Nikolaipole volost administration; Mennonite-owned
farm implement factories in the Khortitsa volost; afforestation programs dating from the 1840s to the early 20th century (including service records of the Forstei, the alternative state afforestation service program for Mennonites); uezd statistical and land survey materials for Khorutsa volost and for Mennonite estates; and Mennonite enrollment and attendance at secondary schools in Aleksandrovsk. The Archive also holds smaller fonds on institutions ranging from courts and banks to the Maria School for the Deaf and Mute in Tiege.
The Archive's Soviet-era holdings are divided into state administrative and Communist Party fonds. These materials were housed in separate archives until the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, when the Party Archive was administratively integrated into the State Archive. In general it might be said that State Archive documents, generated by Soviet administrative organs, reflect what was happening in a region, while Party Archive documents often help to explain why.
State administrative fonds are richest for the period 1919 to the summer of 1930. The Civil War, the middle years of NEP, and the period of collectivization are especially well documented. The Khonitsa raion experience (including that of Mennonites of the former Nikolaipole volost) is extraordinarily well documented at all levels-okrug, volost/raion and village selsovet.
Turning to the Communist Party level, it should be noted that four significant fonds relating to the Mennonite experience exist. Indeed, such records for Khortitsa raion in the 1920s,
at the okrug, raion and selsovet levels, appear to have survived more or less intact. The sheer volume of such materials gives evidence of the preoccupation of the Party, from the central committees in Kharkov and Moscow to the Khortitsa raion, with Mennonites, who were a difficult ethno-religious minority for the Party to deal with given their relatively great social solidarity and resistance to the social-discriminatory and anti-religious facets of sovietization. Comparatively few Party records have survived for the Molochna Mennonites during the 1920s. Party records for the 1930s, on the other hand, are quite numerous for the Molochna Mennonite settlement, but virtually nonexistent for the Khortitsa raion. But such 1930s Party records are in general far less frank and revealing than for the preceding decade, the 1920s.
[excerpts from H.L. Dyck and A.S. Tedeev guide to the holdings, pp. xv,xvi].
Centre for Russian and East European Studies. University of Toronto
