"Separatists" in Russia

Just yesterday I heard from Volker Haufler of northern Germany who had been exploring our the finding aid online for the MHSA's Odessa State Archvives microfilms in our archival vault.

He wrote:

My own ancestors, although not Mennonites, emigrated to that part of Europe, too, at about 1812 to the Molotschna colonist district (Prischib, Rosental, Alt-Montal). Their family names were Wagner, Gallauner, Jekel and Klein.

In 1819, my ancestor Johann Gottlieb Haufler emigrated from Grunbach/Wuerttemberg via the Molotschna colonist district to area near the Azow Sea where he was one of the co-founders of Neuhoffnungstal in 1822. These three colonies (Neuhoffnung, Neuhoffnungstal, Rosenfeld) and Neu-Stuttgart (founded about 1832) were all Separatist colonies that had close connections with the Mennonite colony of Molotschna. Around 1880 my great grandfather moved to the Crimea and was a co-founder of the daughter colony Hebron, parish of Schoenbrunn.

As you may know, there are practically no church records available for Separatists which makes it quite difficult to research them and to follow their traces...

Now - we've written back and forth and I've gotten him connected with what he was looking for. But, it begged the question - who were the "Separatists"?

Until this point, I'd generally only had the Quebec context for the term "Separatist", though I had heard of non-conformists (e.g., Quakers) in the United Kingdom as well.

Separatists, in this context, were highly religious Lutheran Protestants who didn't feel well within the big and bureaucratic official church in Germany. Therefore they stepped out and organized their own divine services with, however, pastors educated by the Lutheran Church. In Russia they lived in the four so-called Schwabenkolonien near Berdjansk; and succeeded to be independent until about 1890.