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.

Leonard G. Friesen is an associate professor in the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Leonard G. Friesen's profile page

“An expansive history of Mennonite communities from their initial settlements in imperial Russia to their near universal emigration in the waning days of the Soviet Union … The history that emerges from Friesen’s narrative is one of a coherent, but complicated Mennonite identity that is adaptive and layered in response to massive internal and external processes of transformation and rupture.”

<em>Slavic Review</em>

“An ambitious study of the Mennonites, stretching from the foundation of Anabaptism to the end of the Soviet Union … Friesen offers a compelling and coherent survey of the history of Mennonites in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, providing a useful guide to the questions answered by current historiography and the holes in scholarship yet to be filled.”

<em>The Russian Review</em>