Under Bolshevik and Nazi rule, nearly one-third of all Soviet Mennonites - including more than half of all adult men - perished, while a large number were exiled to the east and the north by the Soviet secret police (NKVD). Others fled westward on long treks, seeking refuge in Germany during the Second World War. However, at war's end, the majority of the USSR refugees living in Germany were sent to the Soviet Gulag, where many died.

Paths of Thorns is the story of Jacob Abramovich Neufeld (1895-1960), a prominent Soviet Mennonite leader and writer, as well as one of these...

Under Bolshevik and Nazi rule, nearly one-third of all Soviet Mennonites - including more than half of all adult men - perished, while a large number were exiled to the east and the north by the Soviet secret police (NKVD). Others fled westward on long treks, seeking refuge in Germany during the Second World War. However, at war's end, the majority of the USSR refugees living in Germany were sent to the Soviet Gulag, where many died.

Paths of Thorns is the story of Jacob Abramovich Neufeld (1895-1960), a prominent Soviet Mennonite leader and writer, as well as one of these...

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian empire opened the grasslands of southern Ukraine to agricultural settlement. Among the immigrants who arrived were communities of Prussian Mennonites, recruited as "model colonists" to bring progressive agricultural methods to the east. Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe documents the Tsarist Mennonite experience through the papers of Johann Cornies (1789-1848), an ambitious and energetic leader of the Mennonite colony of Molochna.

Cornies was well connected in the imperial government, and his papers offer...