More than Victims: Soviet Mennonites from Stalin to Gorbachev 

This talk challenges assumptions that the USSR was a totalitarian, police state where Mennonites were little more than powerless. By engaging scholarship on the Soviet State showing that the USSR never exercised total control over its population and rejecting the dichotomy of victim or victimizer, this lecture shows how Mennonites in the late Soviet period consistently played a vital role in shaping their own lives, even under deadly conditions, including through Soviet civil disobedience, Mennonite style. As a result of the new narrative, we encounter moments of religious freedom even before Gorbachev's tsunami of reforms.

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.