Eichenfeld massacre: Members of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine murder 136 Mennonite colonists at Jaskyowo, initiating a series of massacres that resulted in the deaths of 827 Ukrainian Mennonites.
Eichenfeld massacre
The Eichenfeld massacre was a 1919 attack against the Mennonite colonists of Eichenfeld by the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Rising tensions between the native Ukrainian peasantry and Mennonite landowners had culminated with attacks on the latter, as insurgents took control of southern Ukraine and began carrying out reprisals against those that had collaborated with the Central Powers and the White movement.
Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine
The Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, also known as Makhnovtsi, named after their founder Nestor Makhno, was an anarchist army formed largely of Ukrainian peasants and workers during the Russian Civil War. They protected the operation of "free soviets" and libertarian communes by the Makhnovshchina, an attempt to form a stateless anarcho-communist society from 1918 to 1921 during the Ukrainian War of Independence.
Russian Mennonites
The Russian Mennonites are a group of Mennonites who are the descendants of Dutch and North German Anabaptists who settled in the Vistula delta in West Prussia for about 250 years and established colonies in the Russian Empire beginning in 1789. Since the late 19th century, many of them have immigrated to countries which are located throughout the Western Hemisphere. The rest of them were forcibly relocated, so very few of their descendants currently live in the locations of the original colonies. Russian Mennonites are traditionally multilingual but Plautdietsch is their first language as well as their lingua franca. In 2014, there were several hundred thousand Russian Mennonites: about 200,000 live in Germany, 74,122 live in Mexico, 150,000 in Bolivia, 40,000 live in Paraguay, 10,000 live in Belize, tens of thousands of them live in Canada and the US, and a few thousand live in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.
November 8
November 8 is the 312th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 53 days remain until the end of the year.