Mennonites In The Russian Empire And The Soviet Union

Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union is the first history of Mennonite life from its origins in the Dutch Reformation of the sixteenth century, through migration to Poland and Prussia, and on to more than two centuries of settlement in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Leonard G. Friesen sheds light on religious, economic, social, and political changes within Mennonite communities as they confronted the many faces of modernity. He shows how the Mennonite minority remained engaged with the wider empire that surrounded them, and how they reconstructed and reconfigured their identity after the Bolsheviks seized power and formed a Soviet regime committed to atheism. Integrating Mennonite history into developments in the Russian Empire and the USSR, Friesen provides a history of an ethno-religious people that illuminates the larger canvas of Imperial Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet history.

In Minority Report, Leonard G. Friesen and the volume's contributors boldly reassess Mennonite history in Imperial Russia and the former Soviet Ukraine.

This book is about everyday life of people in Soviet Russia who called themselves Mennisten, meaning Mennonites. They lived in the village of Konstantinovka, which was established by Mennonites from Chortitza in 1907 in the Central Asian steppe between Russia and China.

Rempel combines his first-hand account of life in Russian Mennonite settlements during the landmark period of 1900-1920, with a rich portrait of six generations of his ancestral family from the foundation of the first colony in 1789.