Published in 2022 by the University of Toronto Press, Friesen's book offers a history of Mennonites from their initial settlement in the Russian Empire to the collapse of the USSR.
About the lecture
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.
This is the second lecture in the series.
Leonard Friesen teaches in the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. Last year he taught the MA course, "Russian History: Russia and the great Soviet experiment (aka Stalin and his shadow)." He received a PhD from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on Russian and Soviet history, the Russian writer Fedor Dostoevsky, and the history of Russian Mennonites.
Location Information
140 Westmount Road North
Waterloo, ON, CA N2L 3G6
