Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Intentional Communities in Eastern Europe and Russia

Communal living has a long history in eastern Europe and Russia, with nonmonastic communalism in Russia dating back at least to the eighteenth century. In Russia, the Mir was a pattern of village community in which land was owned by the entire community. These traditional communities inspired Russian sectarian movements (e.g., Doukhobors and Molokans) to start intentional communities in which they could mutually support each other and in which they were free to put their beliefs into practice. These Russian groups were joined by religious dissenters from Germany and eastern Europe, such as Hutterites, Mennonites, and Templars, who moved to Russia in search of religious freedom and who also formed communal organizations.

Mennonite Villages

Mennonites, a persecuted Protestant religious group from Prussia, Germany, settled in southern Russia beginning in 1789. They started large colonies, which were semicommunal land cooperatives. They did not practice community of goods, but anthropologist James Urry notes that by Russian law “all colony land belonged to the colony in perpetuity, not to individual families” (1989, p. 61). The colonies were economically self-sufficient and represented Mennonite German islands in the vast Russian plains. Other religious groups, foreign as well as Russian, including German Lutherans, Templars, Doukhobors, and Molokans, also organized colonies. In June 1871, because of the land reforms of the State Peasants by Czar Alexander II, which were in statutes of November 1866 and March 1867, each Mennonite “colonist” became a “settler proprietor” and received a title deed to his land. However, the colony still had to provide for the needs of its members, and land could only be sold to outsiders with the agreement of the entire community.

The introduction of compulsory teaching of Russian in schools in the 1860s and the intention to introduce universal compulsory conscription (publicly announced in 1870) caused a mass emigration of Mennonites to Canada in 1874. From Canada, thousands of the ultraconservative “Old Colony” Mennonites later moved to Mexico, Belize, Paraguay, and Bolivia, where they continue to maintain their communal way of life even now. Nevertheless, in 1888, there were more than 30,000 more liberal Mennonites still living in Russia. Many of them left the Soviet Union after the forced collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s and started large Mennonite land cooperatives in Brazil and Paraguay that still exist. Russia's Mennonite settlements were destroyed in World War II, but their descendants in Latin America are still flourishing. They number today about 75,000 residents in 53 colonies.

Hutterite Communities

The Hutterites, an Anabaptist Protestant group, started their first communities in Moravia in 1533, then a part of Germany and (Upper) Hungary. At this time, they were just one of many communal groups in this region; other large communal groups were the Philippites and Gabrielites. After German imperial troops crushed Anabaptist preacher Burkhard Roth's “Kingdom of David” in 1534, the persecution of Anabaptist communal groups became so extreme that the Hutterites had to spend Easter of 1535 hiding in the forests. Jacob Hutter, the group's founder, was captured on November 29, 1535, and publicly burned at the stake on February 25, 1536. Persecution persisted for almost two decades, and in 1548 the group fled to mountains and caves to survive. Some of these Hutterite catacombs are still known by the local people. Between 1554 and 1592, the Moravian nobles were strong enough to ignore the antiAnabaptist mandates from the imperial government in Vienna, and 102 communities developed, with an estimated population of over 20,000 residents. During these golden years, the Hutterites became famous for their ceramic industry, their educational system, and their outstanding physicians, who were even called to the Imperial Court in Prague to treat Rudolph II.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution