To migrate from one country to another legally often depends on filling out applications and getting the right paperwork. Countries pass laws and have policies that restrict who may visit or settle permanently, and in some cases who may leave and for what purpose. There was a remarkably short period of time in the 1920s when the door opened for Mennonites to leave what had become the Soviet Union and immigrate to Canada. The opening would not last. For Mennonites attempting to leave the Soviet Union legally, the door was shut by 1930. During the seven or so years that the doors were somewhat open, migrating to Canada would still require moving political roadblocks and navigating bureaucracies to get the right paperwork completed in the Soviet Union and in Canada.

The first wave of Mennonite immigration to Canada from imperial Russia occurred in the 1870s, when more conservatively oriented Mennonites immigrated to Canada after the tsar’s reforms threatened their military exemption. These early migrants to the Prairies were pacifist and isolationist. They preferred concentrating on converting the prairie of Manitoba’s Red River Valley to agriculture rather than participating in the Canadian nation and society. In the years before the First World War they also moved to Saskatchewan, establishing block settlements in the Swift Current and Saskatoon areas. During the war their propensity to remain German-speaking and separate, in addition to their resistance to compulsory school attendance and public schools, conflicted with the swell of nativism that gripped the country’s Anglo-Saxon population. In the 1920s approximately a third of them would migrate to the Bustillos Valley in northern Mexico, where they negotiated privileges with the Mexican government that they believed would allow them to preserve their religious particularism and educational preference.¹

At the same time as these Mennonites were leaving Canada, those who had stayed behind in imperial Russia experienced the waves of trauma brought on by revolution, civil war, and famine. They were desperate to leave the Soviet Union, and Canada emerged as the preferred destination. Mennonites were, however, no longer permitted to enter the country. The problems with conservative Mennonites during the war and British nativism contributed to amendments to the Immigration Act in 1919 that allowed the government to refuse entry to persons “deemed undesirable owing to their peculiar customs, habits, modes of life and methods of holding property, and because of their probable inability to become readily assimilated or to assume the duties and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship within a reasonable time.”² The government issued orders that applied this provision specifically to Mennonites, Hutterites, and Doukhobors.³

As the devastation suffered by their coreligionists in the Soviet Union during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath became apparent, Mennonites remaining in Canada exerted pressure on the federal government to rescind the 1919 orders. A delegation of Mennonites approached the government in July 1921, and while in Ottawa they also met with Mackenzie King, the leader of the opposition, who committed himself to rescinding the order if the Liberals should win the upcoming election. King’s Liberals were victorious at the polls later that year, and in March 1922 the Mennonite delegation met with the new acting minister of immigration and colonization, Charles Stewart, to press their case. In their petitions to the government, Mennonites took pains to point out their desirable traits and stressed the differences between the prospective new Mennonite immigrants and their more conservative counterparts who were then threatening to emigrate in large numbers. They also tried to address the problem of the “peculiar . . . methods of holding property” mentioned in the 1919 orders by distancing themselves from the “communistic people called the Hutterites.” They tried to allay fears that Mennonites would not assimilate easily by assuring the government that learning English would be a priority for these immigrants and that they would have “close contact with the culture, the fate, and the history of the country.”⁴ The new government followed through on King’s promise by repealing the restriction on Mennonite and Hutterite immigration on June 2, 1922, clearing the way for the immigration of Mennonites from the Soviet Union. In a letter to the government, the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization (CMBoC) committed Mennonites to a guarantee that none of the immigrants “at any time would become a burden or inconvenience to the Canadian Government or any Provincial or Municipal Government.”⁵ The successful negotiations with the government and an agreement with the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) for the transport of the immigrants opened the door for Mennonites seeking to leave the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union, the Mennonite colonies that had come to thrive in the nineteenth century had been devastated by war, revolution, and anarchy. The new Bolshevik regime was not amenable to their religious sensibilities and their previous economic success made them suspected counterrevolutionaries. For a brief period, the combination of a measure of Ukrainian autonomy and the desire to allow the emigration of a group that did not fit the Soviet vision for society helped to open the exit door. The opening of the doors in both countries made possible the emigration of some twenty thousand Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union between 1923 and 1930.⁶

The Passport Problem

Even though the ban on Mennonite immigration to Canada was lifted and leaving the Soviet Union was possible, there would be many hurdles that would have to be overcome when it came to securing the necessary paperwork. The signing of the peace that ended the First World War also signalled an era of stringent admission requirements for potential immigrants to Western countries. Among the myriad of admission requirements, the passport became a necessity. The League of Nations, formed after the end of the war, held several conferences devoted to standardizing the passport system that we have come to know.⁷ Canada began to require a valid passport to immigrate in 1919, and during the 1920s a valid passport gradually became essential: you simply could not cross an international border without one.

For Mennonites seeking to leave the former Russian Empire, passports were a problem. The modern definition of a refugee, someone who is outside their country of nationality and unable or unwilling to avail themself of their homeland’s protection and hence stateless, was in its infancy.⁸ While the League of Nations and its Commission on Refugees developed the “Nansen Passport” for the refugees of the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war,⁹ Mennonites desperate to leave their homes in the former Russian Empire did not qualify as refugees as they had not crossed an international border. In addition, the status of their required documentation was in question.

By 1922, the new Bolshevik regime had gained control of all areas where Mennonites lived. The regime had essentially eliminated the former systems of documentation, and to complicate matters, the new communist state was not recognized by other countries. However, when the emigration was set to begin, Soviet Ukraine, one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union, had some autonomy in granting permission to leave the country. An emigrant ready to leave in 1922 who was over the age of sixteen was required to have exit permit from Ukrainian authorities in Kharkov (Kharkiv) and a certificate from the Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage (Verband der Buerger hollaendischer Herkunft [VBHH]) in order to emigrate.¹⁰ This document usually also provided a guarantee they would repay their travel debts. Throughout the summer of 1922, exit permits were readily obtained from the Ukrainian authorities on the basis of lists of names presented to officials, and by August 14, lists totaling 17,121 persons had been submitted.¹¹

However, by the time the first group left the Soviet Union the requirements had changed, as they often would over the next seven years. In 1923, when the point of departure moved from Ukrainian Odessa (Odesa) to the “Red Gate” at the Latvian border, Mennonites faced the additional requirement of receiving permission from the Moscow-based secret police (the GPU). Under these new circumstances, the VBHH had to prepare a special certificate for every family and submit these names to the Moscow GPU for an exit visa.¹² Also, by the end of 1923, group emigration by lists was prohibited. Although the emigration in 1924 of two groups previously sanctioned was authorized, from this point exit permits could only be obtained on an individual basis.¹³ Emigrants still required a certificate declaring they were bona fide Mennonites, which the VBHH continued to provide.¹⁴ After 1924, when the possibility of travelling without using CPR credit emerged, immigrants still needed the certificate from the VBHH and an exit permit. They also generally had individual passports.¹⁵

Canadian immigration regulations enacted in 1921 required the submission of a valid passport for all countries of origin other than Britain and the United States.¹⁶ Canada had vigorously rejected the Nansen passport because it did not provide for returning immigrants to their countries of origin.¹⁷ In the negotiations to allow entry for Russlaender immigrants in 1922, F. C. Blair, the secretary of the Department of Immigration and Colonization, assured David Toews by letter that if there were a “slight passport difficulty owing to the unsettled conditions in Russia and Ukraine,” the department did not wish “to place any technical difficulty in the way of the movement.”¹⁸ Russlaender Mennonites were exempted from having passports, but the myriad of immigration officials that processed them were not always aware of the exemption. When a group of immigrants were being refused visas by Canadian authorities in November 1923, a flurry of telegrams once again confirmed that passports were not required of them. It appears the Canada Colonization Association’s T. O. F. Herzer was instrumental in gaining an exception to these regulations from the Canadian government. Herzer pressed the deputy minister of immigration, William Egan, who agreed that visas would be granted, provided the CMBoC ’s European representatives, B. H. Unruh and B. B. Janz, recommended the prospective immigrants.¹⁹

The Medical Examination

Although the passport issue was challenging and kept changing in the Soviet Union, it paled in comparison to the problem of meeting Canadian medical requirements. The Canadian government proved to be inflexible in enforcing its strict medical and psychological requirements, causing untold stress and grief for the CMBoC and Russlaender families. The revised Immigration Act had expanded the list of prohibited immigrants to include those with tuberculosis, psychopathic inferiority, and persons who “upon examination by a medical officer are certified as being mentally or physically defective to such a degree as to affect their ability to earn a living.”²⁰

The first problem for the leaders of the emigration was to work out who would carry out medical inspections, and where. On November 26, 1922, a despondent B. B. Janz reported to B. H. Unruh in Germany and A. A. Friesen in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, that the Canadian government would not accept medical examinations conducted by Soviet doctors and the Soviet government would not allow Canadian doctors and immigration officials into the country. “We’re caught in a jam,” he remarked.²¹ The Soviet authorities had refused to grant medical personnel visas in retaliation for the Canadian government’s refusal to allow entry of a Soviet trade mission. The Soviet government also stipulated that those leaving the country could not return. With no solution for those who might fail a Canadian medical examination in Latvia and hence could neither go to Canada nor return to the Soviet Union, the prospects for emigration in 1922 ended. Eventually an arrangement was worked out whereby Germany would temporarily accept those unable to obtain medical clearance at Lechfeld, a former military drill ground in Bavaria. The most prevalent medical cause for rejection was the eye disease trachoma, and the plan was to treat cases at Lechfeld and to send them on their way to Canada once they had been healed. A second camp at Atlantic Park in England was operated by the CPR and other passenger ship companies.

The medical examinations were much more rigorous than anticipated by leaders in Ukraine or the CMBoC in Canada. In F. C. Blair’s 1922 letter to the CMBoC outlining the requirements for entry, the medical examination requirement had seemed sufficiently innocuous. The official promised cooperation, allowed for entry without a passport, and suggested that “immigration regulations will be made as simple as possible for settlers of the agricultural class who are mentally and physically fit.”²² The CMBoC seemingly focused on the promise of a simple process and underestimated how extensive the medical examinations would be. In a 1924 letter to the Canadian minister of immigration, B. B. Janz asked the government to conduct its “severe” medical inspections before they left and to provide prospective emigrants with results that would be “final and decisive” so that they could sell their possessions and not fear rejection while in transit. He begged the minister for “leniency in the [medical] examinations.”²³ While inspections ultimately took place in the Soviet Union, the Canadian government would not grant the persistent requests of Janz and David Toews for leniency. In individual cases the immigration department relented on the regulations only when age was a factor, but as the acting deputy minister pointed out in a letter making such an exception, “when negotiations took place for the admission of the Mennonites it was not anticipated that the Permit would include any number of persons who in the ordinary way might be included on the grounds of age, physique, or occupation.”²⁴

The Door Closes

By the fall of 1925 there were increasingly negative portrayals of the VBHH in the Soviet press. While the government did not directly refuse further exit permits, there were longer and longer delays in obtaining the critical document.²⁵ In late fall 1925 and early 1926, the VBHH was reorganized by the Ukrainian authorities and ultimately forbidden to act in legal and emigration matters. In March 1926, B. B. Janz resigned his position as chair, and in June he left the country. After the 1926 emigrants had left, the bureaucratic processes became insurmountable, with most applications refused outright.²⁶

In Canada the door also began to close. The tide of public opinion was increasingly resentful of immigration, particularly of arrivals from countries other than Britain or the United States. In the fall of 1927, the government began to withdraw the privilege Mennonites had been given of entering the country without a valid passport. An October 1927 letter from the Department of Immigration and Colonization to David Toews, who had written requesting entry for Russlaender emigrants who had gone to Mexico, noted that the department was now enforcing the passport requirement but in some cases was still granting exceptions for Mennonites. A. L. Jolliffe, the commissioner for immigration, begged Toews to keep “requests for the waiving of the passport regulation . . . to the absolute minimum.”²⁷ Even the waiver in individual cases would not last. In an August 28, 1928, response to a letter from David Toews about specific immigrants, the deputy minister formally gave notice that future Mennonite immigrants would need a passport. He noted that he had consulted with the minister and had been “directed to inform you that the Department cannot disregard the same” for the CMBoC.²⁸

The relatively orderly exit of Russlaender from the Soviet Union that began in 1923 slowed to a trickle by the end of 1926, and with the increasing difficulties in obtaining exit permits and passports the migration appeared to be over. The collectivization of Soviet agriculture was particularly discouraging for Mennonites in Siberia. For a variety of reasons few Mennonites had come to Canada from Siberia in the early 1920s, and now they wanted out. In the fall of 1929, thousands of Mennonites, primarily from Siberia, sold as many of their assets as possible and congregated in Moscow with the hope of leaving the Soviet Union. The rush to Moscow was triggered by the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which granted exit permits to twenty-five families in August 1929.²⁹ The news of the possibility of emigration stimulated a rush of destitute farmers, who congregated at the “gates of Moscow,” triggering an international diplomatic incident. In Canada, Mennonites immediately sought to have the country again open its door to more Mennonites. In Germany, B. H. Unruh and the Brueder in Not organization aroused sympathy for the plight of those in Moscow, but the German government would not allow them into the country permanently. The Soviet Union was caught not wanting to acknowledge that some of its citizens were desperate to leave, while not wanting to harm its relations with Germany by returning German-speaking Mennonites to their homes by force.

In Canada, the Mackenzie King government had become cautious due to negative publicity and deferred to the provinces in its decision about admitting more Mennonites. The Saskatchewan government and its premier, J. T. M. Anderson, were most adamant against reopening the door. Even with persistent requests from the federal minister of immigration, Saskatchewan would only agree to limited admissions for family reunification. After more than a week of appeals, the premier informed the federal minister that his government refused to sanction any immigration movement “other than relatives referred to.” On November 26, 1929, Minister of Immigration Robert Forke informed the German government that Canada would not accept any Russlaender immigrants. By that time some five thousand emigrants had made it out of the Soviet Union and were temporarily in refugee camps in Germany, while some eight thousand were on their way back to Siberia. Despite the almost closed door, just over one thousand would eventually be admitted to Canada under various arrangements with the railways, cases of family reunification, and special guarantees. The rest would establish the Fernheim Colony in Paraguay and settlements in Brazil.³⁰

In 1930, a year after Soviet authorities began sending Mennonites back to their homes and while those who had managed to get to Germany were on their way to new homes in Paraguay and Brazil, the CMBoC was still trying to gain admission of Mennonites to Canada. F. C. Blair’s correspondence with David Toews offered no hope that any accommodation would be forthcoming. While he assured Toews that he sympathized “very greatly with the troubles of your people in Russia,” he nevertheless suggested they go to South America.³¹

By 1929 the political and economic landscape had changed in Canada, prompting the closing of its door. In Saskatchewan, the avowedly anti-immigration J. T. M. Anderson and his Conservative party came to power in September. Mackenzie King’s Liberals lost the July 1930 federal election, and in March 1931 the Conservative government of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett closed the door to immigration almost completely.³² By then the country was in the throes of the Depression, and provincial and municipal governments saddled with responsibility for relief were urging deportations. Canada did not begin to re-open its door until 1947.

Decisions made by governments to allow people to migrate ultimately must be translated into policies about how an individual gets the necessary paperwork to buy a ticket, passes a medical examination, and obtains the stamp from an immigration officer that means they can go on to the next step. The successful emigration of Russlaender Mennonites required an almost impossible level of persistence by people like B. B. Janz and David Toews to navigate the political and bureaucratic structures that ultimately made it possible for twenty thousand Russlaender to come to Canada before the door closed.

Hans Werner is an associate of the Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies and a senior scholar at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of several books, including The Constructed Mennonite (2013).

1. The most complete study of this conflict between Mennonites and the state is: Adolf Ens, Subjects or Citizens?: The Mennonite Experience in Canada (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994). ↩︎
2. An Act to Amend the Immigration Act, S.C. 1919, c. 25, s. 13. ↩︎
3. Orders-in-Council P.C. 1919-923 (May 1, 1919) and P.C. 1919-1204 (June 9, 1919). The latter was published in Canada Gazette, June 14, 1919, 3824. ↩︎
4. Peter H. Rempel, “Inter-Mennonite Cooperation and Promises to Government in the Repeal of the Ban on Mennonite Immigration to Canada, 1919–1922,” Mennonite Historian 19, no. 1 (Mar. 1993): 7. ↩︎
5. “Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization to The Minister of Immigration, July 6, 1922,” Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization Collection (hereafter CMBC), vol. 1269, file 602. ↩︎
6. Frank H. Epp, Mennonite Exodus: The Rescue and Resettlement of the Russian Mennonites Since the Communist Revolution (Altona, MB: D. W. Friesen, 1962), 282. ↩︎
7. Daniel C. Turack, “Freedom of Movement and the International Regime of Passports,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 6, no. 2 (1968): 230–251. ↩︎
8. “1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees,” art. I, in “Convention and Protocol Relating to Refugees,” UNHCR, 14, https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10. ↩︎
9. Barbara Metzger, “The League of Nations, Refugees and Individual Rights,” in Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?, ed. Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (London: Bloombury Academic, 2007), https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/refugees-in-europe-1919-1959-a-forty-years-crisis/ch7-league-of-nations-refugees-and-individual-rights. ↩︎
10. John B. Toews, Lost Fatherland: The Story of the Mennonite Emigration from Soviet Russia, 1921–1927 (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1967), 104. See also B. B. Janz to the District Administration of Khortitza, Nov. 7, 1922, and B. B. Janz to the Study Commission, Apr. 17, 1922, A. A. Friesen Collection, as translated and transcribed in Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage in Ukraine (1922–1927): Mennonite and Soviet Documents, ed. John B. Toews and Paul Toews (Fresno, CA: Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 2011), 410, 433. ↩︎
11. Toews, Lost Fatherland, 97. ↩︎
12. Toews, Lost Fatherland, 132. ↩︎
13. Toews, Lost Fatherland, 148, 162–170. ↩︎
14. After the VBHH was dissolved in 1926, a similar certificate could be issued by A. R. Owen, a CPR official, or even by Dr. Drury, a Canadian doctor conducting medical examinations. See Toews, Lost Fatherland, 193. ↩︎
15. Toews, Lost Fatherland, 147–148. ↩︎
16. Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, “Rejecting ‘Misfits’: Canada and the Nansen Passport,” The International Migration Review 28, no. 2 (1994): 283. ↩︎
17. Kaprielian-Churchill, “Rejecting ‘Misfits,’” 285. ↩︎
18. F. C. Blair to David Toews, Sept. 22, 1922, CMBC, vol. 1269, file 601. ↩︎
19. See the exchange of correspondence between David Toews and T. O. F. Herzer and copies of Herzer’s correspondence with Col. Dennis of the CPR, CMBC, vol. 1170, file 47. ↩︎
20. Act to Amend the Immigration Act, 1919, s. 3. ↩︎
21. B. B. Janz to Mennonite Representatives of the Russian Mennonite Churches Abroad, Nov. 26, 1922, in Toews and Toews, Union of Citizens, 437. ↩︎
22. F. C. Blair to David Toews, Sept. 22, 1922, CMBC, vol. 1269, file 601. ↩︎
23. B. B. Janz to the Honourable Minister of Immigration, Ottawa, Canada, Mar. 26, 1924, A. A. Friesen Collection, Toews, Union of Citizens, 471. ↩︎
24. F. C. Blair to David Toews, Nov. 5, 1924, CMBC, vol. 1269, file 603. ↩︎
25. Toews, Lost Fatherland, 184–186. ↩︎
26. Toews, Lost Fatherland, 196. ↩︎
27. A. L. Jolliffe to David Toews, Oct. 5, 1927, vol. 1270, file 605. ↩︎
28. Willam F. Egan to David Toews, Aug. 28, 1928, CMBC, vol. 1270, file 605. ↩︎
29. Andrey I. Savin, “The 1929 Emigration of Mennonites from the USSR: An Examination of Documents from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 30 (2012): 45–55. ↩︎
30. Epp, Mennonite Exodus, 249–251. ↩︎
31. F. C. Blair to David Toews, Dec. 14, 1930, CMBC, vol. 1270, file 605. ↩︎
32. Order-in-Council P.C. 1931-695 (Mar. 21, 1931), https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/order-in-council-pc-1931-695-1931. ↩︎