This article was published on my website in German on 4 April 2023. But it can only now – in January 2025 – be published in English because we needed to await its publication by “Christianity Today” in the USA. A heavily-edited version of this article finally appeared in its once-annual “The Globe Issue” publication in late 2024.
--wy, 23 January 2025
“We Have Made Our Choice”
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The evangelicals of Western Siberia are counting on a bright future.
L a d u s h k i n -- The economic progress among Western Siberian Baptists and Mennonites in the region of Omsk is nothing short of breathtaking. Though the residents of rural Apollonovka and Solntsevka still lived in wooden cabins with outdoor toilets 30 years ago, many now reside in brick, ranch-style houses comparable to any middle-class-or-better neighborhood in North America. Still under-motorized three decades ago, the car fleet in these two villages now includes spanking-new Chinese vehicles as well as Japanese-brand Lexus.
A Mennonite lay pastor in the historically-Mennonite village of Solntsevka near the border with Kazakhstan reports that he has supplied his seven children with a piglet or heifer at age 14. Since animals tend to reproduce more rapidly than shares in a stock exchange, his children have been able to purchase a decent car after only four years. Backyard barns brimming with cattle or pigs are a common site in Solntsevka, their owners moonlighting as second-shift farmers.
Since the demise of the Soviet-era collective farm, its frequently ethnic-German employees have mutated into shop and sawmill owners, feed mill operators, butchers, beekeepers, metal workers, bakers, veterinarians, auto mechanics, carpenters and painters. In the more urban Altai-region city of Slavgorod south of Omsk, men once trained as mechanical engineers are dealing in plumbing and furniture production or working as electricians.
A large-scale, privately-owned grain farm at Apollonovka works 12,850 acres of land. “Willock Farm”, a related agricultural enterprise located primarily at Medvezhe 13 miles to the west, is farming more than 15,000 acres with vast amounts of mostly Western state-of-the-art machinery. Yet its firm, “SevMaster”, is also making a name for itself in central Asia by producing quality farm machinery, supplying its more than 50 employees with gainful employment during the long winter months. (See “www.willock-farm.ru”.) Yet this success has not occurred without Western involvement: It took a major loan from Walter Willms, a retired Mennonite farmer from Abbotsford, British Columbia, to get the firm up-and-running in 2002.
The above-mentioned lay pastor in Solntsevka guffawed louder than necessary when the subject of Western sanctions was broached. He rates their effectiveness at roughly zero. Initially, fears about inflation had been evident. Yet capital and the profit incentive are highly inventive and non-official paths slithering through the republics of Central Asia have kept Russian firms supplied with spare parts, even for machinery from Germany. Coca-Cola arrives from next-door Kazakhstan.
Peter Epp, proprietor of a metal-working shop in Isilkul, added: “Chinese parts are cheaper and nearly as good as anything from Germany. What we produce and need fits more into the living standards of China than the high-tech products stemming from Bosch.” Imported vehicle trailers do not fare well on Siberia’s rough roads. Epp’s shop in Isilkul therefore produces sturdy trailers suited to local conditions.
Current sanctions may be harming the sanctioners more than the sanctioned. Jakob Dirksen, who along with David Epp is the owner of Willock Farm, reported that the debt owed to Walter Willms cannot be currently serviced. Despite a green light from Moscow, the Canadian government is preventing Willock’s money transfers from Russia to Canada.
Peter Epp called it an irony of fate that the wide-open gates for Western imports had “harmed us more than recent sanctions. People had stopped producing and went shopping instead.” Skills were lost; “now we are once again being forced to become productive.”
In an after-church conversation in Apollonovka, one of the assembled church leaders claimed: “Materially, we now live better than our relatives in Germany.” Yet their industrious relatives in Germany hardly qualify as undernourished. Welfare payments and pensions are significantly higher in Germany, “but things are also moving upwards here”.
Peter Dirksen, a farmer and owner of Apollonovka’s bakery, assured: “I can travel wherever and whenever I please.” In recent decades, tourists from Apollonovka had traveled as far afield as California, Paraguay and Thailand. Yet, due to sanctions, travel is down significantly and flights to Germany currently require a Russian citizen to detour through Kazakhstan or Turkey. Dirksen though, along with a strong minority of Russia’s Russian-Germans, possesses both a Russian and a German passport.
The author questioned the local Mennonites and Baptists as to whether their restored wealth could lead to envy among their lesser-endowed Russian and Kazakh neighbors. That would lead to a repeat of the “revolutionary revenge” rained upon the Mennonites of southeastern Ukraine a century ago. Peter Dirksen responded that numerous local Russians and Kazakhs are employed by ethnic Germans. “We all know and appreciate each other,” he insisted. “When we were starving during the 1930’s and the 1940’s, it was also Russians who helped keep our families alive.” These big-time, ethnic-German farmers essentially do not qualify as land-owning “kulaks”, for they own little farmland. When the communal farms (kolkhoz) were broken up in the 1990’s, their workers were presented with a “pai” of land. A “pai” or “share” usually consists of 40 to 45 acres. This real estate is now being rented back to major farms, enlarging the circle of those profiting from the new-found wealth.
Government affairs
The “Omsk Brotherhood” consists of 30 Baptist and Mennonite congregations mostly west of Omsk while the large Slavgorod congregation belongs to the nation-wide "International Union of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists" formed in 1961. Since both of these religious groupings have never registered with the state, their religious activities are essentially illegal. Their “houses of prayer” (the new one in Apollonovka seats nearly 900) are officially private dwellings owned by individuals. Improper usage of private dwellings is becoming a government issue in European Russia - but not in Omsk region.
The authorities in Omsk region have clearly developed fondness for the evangelical entrepreneurs of Apollonovka and Solntsevka. State-funding for these two villages is far above average and cheap loans abound. Continuing economic success and high birth rates make these remote villages rare beacons of light and a lure for state investment on the barren, forsaken plains of Western Siberia. State subsidies for newborns as well as for families constructing new homes on their own initiative are having a major positive impact.
Willock Farm and the enterprises of Apollonovka have voluntarily taken on projects serving the common good. When a road between Apollonovka and Willock Farm in Medvezhe was lacking, Willock trotted out its road grader (the gift of another wealthy businessman from British Columbia) and plowed a road through the empty steppes without waiting for official consent. Apollonovka had long suffered from high water during spring. Consequently, volunteers recently heightened road surfaces, deepened ditches and diverted the excess water into a swamp. Two-thirds of the costs were covered by Willock Farm and a local mill owned by Peter Dirksen and others.
“We’re not sure why, but the government continues to refrain from touching us,” the after-church assemblage of brethren in Apollonovka insisted. “We continue to enjoy total freedom.” During the partial Russian mobilization of September 2022, none of the Mennonite nor Baptist young men both west and south of Omsk were called up. According to reports from Slavgorod, even those on the fringe of the church citing religious grounds for their pacifist stance were quietly sent home. Those young men who had fled to Kazakhstan to escape mobilization soon returned home. Consequently, these evangelical communities have no fallen soldiers from the conflict in Donbass to lament. Peter Epp from Isilkul, also a lay pastor and gifted historian, exclaimed: “Russia is no Soviet Union! During Soviet times, a mobilization would likely have sealed all borders immediately. But this time, everyone simply continued to come and go as they pleased. I know of no one in Siberia punished for unwillingness to participate in the current conflict.”
These brethren insisted that they must keep expressing gratitude to God for the continuing period of great personal and spiritual blessing. Yet Peter Dirksen kept spicing his assurances with the word “poka” (for now). “We are doing amazingly well – for now,” he exclaimed. Dirksen’s father had been Apollonovka’s last fatality for reasons of faith, perishing as a 61-year-old in a Soviet labor camp in 1985. Reminding one of a statement from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Slavgorod’s Vladimir Weis added that “we are doing great, but everything can change in the course of a single night. All that we have and are is in God’s hands.” Weis is a lay minister and furniture salesman.
Yet Peter Epp believes that one-time communists can no longer do as they please. Post 1990-legislation has “robbed them of the right to behave as they once did”.
Regeneration
It strikes the author that the churches of the 1957-founded Omsk Brotherhood are experiencing regeneration. These congregations had reached a low point in the late 1990’s after suffering emigration rates from 70 to 90%. But large families are still common and the “deforested woods” have now had more than two decades to begin recovery. These conservative believers retain the ability to retain most of their own. Though the Slavgorod congregation experienced over a thousand departures westward, adult membership is back to over 200 and up to 400 persons attend services there. The registered Mennonite-Brethren congregation at Solntsevka headed by Andrey Siemens (not a member of the Brotherhood) baptized 34 persons during 2022 and now has 217 adult members meeting in a brand-new sanctuary. Attendance at the Brotherhood congregation in Isilkul is running at 130, yet only 15 of these had been members at the time of the USSR’s demise. Between 1988 and 1990, attendance in this congregation had plunged from 240 to 70.
With average attendance running at 120, virtually the entire congregation in the village of Ivanovka had left for Germany. Yet three families totalling 15 persons have returned and the congregation is consequently continuing to function. Yet for the present, the percentage of those returning to Russia is still below 5%.
Entrepreneurs enjoy excellent prospects in Siberia. In Germany, nearly all markets are spoken for and bureaucracy dampens initiative. Only in parts of Russia is the sky still truly the limit. In Isilkul, young returnees from Germany have opened highly-successful businesses dealing in construction materials and truck sales.
It is nevertheless premature to claim that church regeneration is evident everywhere. Membership in the registered Baptist congregations in Omsk city has dropped from 3,000 to 2,000 over the past two decades. Siberia suffers from a double-whammy: Emigration “westward” also includes the movement of Russians to the milder climes of Kaliningrad and south-western Russia. It takes above-average salaries to keep people at home in the harsh Siberian climate – the two villages featured here have precisely that to offer.
The Secrets of Success
All those asked described current evangelical success in Siberia region as a blessing emanating from God. The Father has blessed them for displaying loyalty to the Bible’s commandments and fealty to the ways of their forefathers and –mothers. Parents have treated their offspring with the highest possible regard; theological transition is kept to a minimum.
These believers have clear red lines and those lines were crossed in 1961 when the government of Nikita Khrushchev attempted to forcibly imbue their children with atheism. Fathers went to prison in hopes of protecting their children. After WW II, the Brotherhood’s long-term head, Nikolay Dikman from Maryanovka, worked off two sentences in the rugged coal mines of arctic Vorkuta. Now 94 years old, it is the author’s impression that this patriarch is venerated not primarily for opposing communism, but instead for protecting the church and its families. The faithful do not regard this resistance as political in nature.
Nikolay Dikman practiced what he preached and Vladimir Weis noted that in the 1990’s, emigration was limited in those congregations which retained their original leadership. “When they too left for the West, hardly anyone remained and the congregations died.”
Peter Epp’s response also bore witness of the willingness to integrate into majority Russian society. “We do not remain on location because life is better or easier here. We have made our choice and want to share in the fate of the peoples of Russia.” All of us here are a part of Russia.” Ethnic German pietists first moved into Omsk region at the end of the 19th century.
In the economic realm, Epp reported that persons of German heritage have tended to be creative and equipped with a highly positive, “can-do” attitude. Formal education, especially involving the liberal arts, is held in low regard and people are autodidacts. The brain behind “SevMaster” machinery, David Epp, is a returnee from Germany who acquired his engineering prowess through self-study and trial-by-error construction. (David Epp is Peter’s youngest brother.) Another local entrepreneur complained that young Russian-German men growing up in urbanized Germany “only know that which they learned in school. Our guys though are ‘universalists’; we have no way to use the guys from Germany here.”
The conflict in Ukraine
The Baptists and Mennonites of Western Siberia are troubled by demands emanating from the faithful in Ukraine. Ukrainians essentially are demanding that Russians take to the streets and protest the Vladimir Putin-led government. Yet the Siberians had generally never protested, not even against the despotic reign of Joseph Stalin. As with North America’s Amish, they judge the state of world through the lens of that which they personally experience on the ground in their local context.
Alexander Scheiermann, the German-based Lutheran bishop of the Urals, Siberia and the Far East who continues to commute between Bielefeld and Omsk, cited a verse ensconced behind the pulpit of many Soviet-era churches: “We preach Christ crucified” (1. Corinthians 1:23). The verse was intended not least of all as an admonition to those ascending to the pulpit to stick to the primary topic. The Siberians continue to see adherence to this verse as a guarantor for their current and future success.
Wanting to be “modern” and Western, most Ukrainian evangelicals have, according to the Siberians, departed from the straight-and-narrow and subjected themselves to the highly slippery slopes of political expediency. The Siberians regard all war as sin; selectively dividing history into justified and unjustified ones is for them a profoundly high-risk endeavour. Asked whether he supported Western claims that Putin is a fascist, Vladimir Weis rejected the question as “political”. Yet he stressed thereby that he is no particular adherent of the current Russian government.
Since the whole earth is the Lord’s, Peter Epp expressed the conviction that God does not care about borders. “For God, it is not important to whom Crimea belongs. Nothing actually belongs to us. We have no need to determine what is mine and what is thine. This situation in Ukraine is indeed one indication of our present spiritual need.”
My commentary: The worldview of these Russian evangelicals seems determined by their own limited interests. We “Western intellectuals” consequently reject their perspective as selfish and naïve. Yet the “un-political” are much better suited as emissaries of church peace than the politically partisan. Their strong sense of independence also tends to insulate them from frequently-dubious Western (and historically Eastern) demands.
The future
Since our globe is now re-dividing, will the evangelicals of Russia need to reckon with new parallel church structures in East and West? Huge, insatiable markets to the south are beckoning and Willock Farm is already using Chinese seed to grow grain for that market. Yet the Chinese government appears opposed to cross-border church relations and Russian evangelicals are forced to restrict themselves to working with the 30+ larger Chinese congregations on Russian soil. These relate to Chinese businesspeople active within Russia.
Despite a drastic drop in visits, Russian evangelicals will remain, culturally and otherwise, wedded to their Western counterparts for the foreseeable future. Russians have not yet noticed any growth in parallel church structures in East and West. Nevertheless, at the beginning of March 2023, the “European Evangelical Alliance” held leadership sessions in Warsaw, Poland. The Russians were explicitly not invited. A week later, the “Russian Evangelical Alliance” held meetings with the Alliances of Central Asia in Antalya, Turkey. Is this a harbinger of things to come? More may be becoming parallel than immediately meets the eye.
William Yoder, Ph.D.
Ladushkin, Kaliningrad region, 05 April 2023
A journalistic release for which only the author is responsible. It is informational in character and does not express the official position of any church organisation. This release may be reprinted free-of-charge if the source is cited. Release #25-01, 2.660 words.
