The history of the Black Sea littoral, an area of longstanding interest to Russia, provides important insight into Ukraine as a contemporary state. In Minority Report, Leonard G. Friesen and the volume’s contributors boldly reassess Mennonite history in Imperial Russia and the former Soviet Ukraine.

This volume engages scholars from Ukraine, Russia, and North America, and includes translated and accessible contributions by scholars from the Ukrainian-German Institute of Dnipropetrovsk State University. Minority Report is divided into four sections: New Approaches to Mennonite History; Imperial Mennonite Isolationism Revisited; Mennonite Identities in Diaspora; and Mennonite Identities in the Soviet Cauldron. An appendix is included which recounts for the first time the emergence of Mennonite public history in southern Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The volume’s contributors reveal that far from being isolated from the larger society, Mennonites played an integral role in shaping the entire region. Minority Report successfully places Mennonite history within the recent historiographical insights offered by Ukrainian and Russian scholars and significantly enriches our understanding of minority relations in Soviet Ukraine.

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

Leonard G. Friesen's profile page

"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."

<em>Slavic Review</em>

"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."

<em>Journal of Mennonite Studies</em>

"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."

<em>The Mennonite Quarterly Review</em>

"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."

The Russian 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."

<em>East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies</em>