Minority Report

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

Leonard G. Friesen is a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University.

"As a whole, Minority Report offers a nuanced view of both how Mennonites were much more a part of their Russian and Ukrainian environment and how their own identities underwent transformation with increasing rapidity in the later nineteenth century and the tumultuous years of revolution, famine, Sovietization and war."

Walter Sawatsky, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary:

"Len Friesen’s own forthcoming history of Russian Mennonites, reaching into the twenty-first century, will inspire more relational ties for readers, including the still unknown corps of experts among Russian Germans in Germany."

Vitaliy V. Proshak, University of Amsterdam:

"This book is one of the first comprehensive studies on the subject; it unites experts from Canada, United States, Ukraine, and Russia and makes it possible to benefit from previously unresearched or unavailable materials and resources. Thus, this publication is unique in its content and in its contribution to the field of Mennonite studies, and it is a pleasure to read. It occupies a well-deserved place on the list of ‘must-read’ books."

Gregory L. Freeze, Brandeis University:

"The collection is a useful contribution to a rich historiography. It should inspire further researchers to explore neglected sources and, no less important, to incorporate the rich burgeoning scholarship in post-Soviet Russia."

Emily B. Bara:

"This work is a reasonably successful reexamination of Mennonite identity in late imperial and early soviet Ukraine...this collection makes significant use of regional and federal archival collections from Ukraine and Russia. All of the authors rightly ascribe significant agency to Mennonites as they engage with their neighbors and state. If Mennonites are sometimes perpetrators, victims, and refugees, they are also much more than these rather reductive categories in a volume that adds much nuance to this history."

Mark Jantzen, Department of History, Bethel College :

"Deeply researched and broadly conceived, this volume makes the necessary connections between Mennonites and their social, political, and geographic environment. The Mennonite presence in this contested space shaped Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet history in important ways just as Mennonites’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world was profoundly molded by their many interactions with their neighbours. This volume finally buries antiquated understandings of Mennonite isolation on empty steppes."

Dr.Sergei I. Zhuk, Department of History, Ball State University :

"Minority Report is a unique book. It is a result of a collective effort to combine the fresh and innovative research by scholars from post-Soviet space and the West, who were related to Dnipropetrovsk school of German Studies, in fact the first Mennonite research centre in Ukraine. This pathbreaking study tracing a history of Mennonites, the typical representatives of the Radical Christian Reformation, in imperial Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union, will be a precious contribution not only to the literature on a history of religious minorities in Russia and Ukraine, but also to the world history of colonization, religion, and identity formation."