Mennonite Women: Russian and Joseph Stalin

mennonite women: Loewen and researchers at the centre will use the 450,000 Paul Toews Fellowship in Russian Mennonite History to fund research into Ukrainian archives from the 1930s made available to researchers about a year ago, although they had been previously opened to direct descendants of subjects in the files, according to CBC. Sacrifices of Mennonite women honoured in new exhibit What the legacy of the Russian Revolution means for socialism today Included in the archives are details on the fates of Russian Mennonites arrested by the secret police under Joseph Stalin in the second half of the 1930s, when the dictator began directing the arrests of men from ethnic and religious minorities, Loewen says. This is the question that Mennonite families have often asked over the decades What happened to my father, what happened to my grandfather, what happened to my brother said Royden Loewen, director of the Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg. In the mid-1930s, Loewen says, at least 9,000 Mennonite men were arrested on trumped-up charges. Photographs kept The Soviet authorities kept documentary evidence of some of those who were executed, Loewen says. But especially between '36 and '38, approximately one-half of all Mennonite men were arrested, middle of the night, by the secret police we call them the NKVD, the precursor of the now defunct KGB, taken away and charged with trumped-up charges, and then usually executed within two weeks time. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.