Minority Report

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

"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."- Emily B. Bara (The Russian Review) "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." - Gregory L. Freeze, Brandeis University (Slavic Review) "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." - Vitaliy V. Proshak, University of Amsterdam (East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies) "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."- Walter Sawatsky, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (The Mennonite Quarterly Review) "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."- Hans Werner, University of Winnipeg (Journal of Mennonite Studies)

• AcknowledgementsA Note on TransliterationLeonard G. Friesen, Introduction 1Part I Overviews: New Approaches to Mennonite History1 Svetlana Bobyleva, "The future deprived of support, the past cruelly discredited..." Notes on the History of the Borozenko Settlements2 John Staples, "Johann Cornies' Aethetics of CivilizationPart II: Imperial Mennonite Isolationism Revisited3 Irina Cherkazianova, The Mennonite School in the Russian Empire: Transformation of the Relations between the State and the Mennonite Communities on Matters of Education in the 19th to the Beginning of the 20th Century4 Oksana Beznosova, Church Life of the Mennonites in the Russian Empire through the Eyes of Tsarist Officials. 1789-19175 Nataliya Venger, Mennonite Entrepreneurship as a Subject of Russian Nationalism in the Russian Empire, 1830-1917Part III: Mennonite Identities in Diaspora6 John Toews, Mennonite Identities in a New Land: Abraham A. Friesen and the Russian Mennonite Migration of the 1920sPart IV: Mennonite Identities in the Soviet Cauldron7 Colin Neufeldt, Collectivizing the Mutter Ansiedlungen: The Organization of Mennonite Kolkhozy in the Khortytsia and Molochansk German National Districts in Ukraine in the late 1920s and early 1930s8 Alexander Beznosov, In The Grip of Famine: The Germans and Mennonites of Southern Ukraine 1932-19359 Viktor K. Klets, Caught between Two Poles: Ukrainian Mennonites during World War TwoLeonard G Friesen, Appendix. Dnipropetrovsk National University, Khortitsa '99, and the Renaissance of Public (Mennonite) History in UkraineList of ContributorsIndex