Living on Borrowed Time? The Settlement of Mennonites in Imperial Russia after 1789

It is often assumed that the Mennonites who settled in Imperial Russia after the late eighteenth century were outsiders who benefited from special privileges, alienated their neighbors with their wealth, and were rightly targeted during the Bolshevik revolution. This evening's talk challenges these assumptions by arguing that Mennonites were integrated members of society from the beginning, thereby suggesting that Mennonites were not merely living on borrowed time before the revolution.

Born in the Niagara Peninsula into an immigrant community of Mennonites, Friesen came of age in a world of overlapping cultures and places, some of which were never talked about.  His curiosity of the past came from a desire to fill in the missing pieces, and make sense of the whole.

Friesen received a PhD from the University of Toronto in 1989 after extensive graduate studies in the USSR, and has visited the successor states often over the decades. His research focuses on Russian and Soviet history, the Russian writer Fedor Dostoevsky, and the history of Russian Mennonites. He teaches in the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, and is the author of numerous books and articles.