Conrad Grebel University College presents a special lecture series celebrating the publication of Leonard Friesen’s book, Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: Through Much Tribulation (University of Toronto Press, 2022).
Please register in advance to attend this free public lecture. This is an in-person only event.
A reception will follow this lecture.
Location: Great Hall, Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, Ontario
Time: 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
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.
