530 Slavic Review important volume’s broad scope and precision of documentation place the conversa- tion on a high level. The book is dedicated to the memory of the much-beloved and highly influential St. Petersburg historian, Boris Vasil évich Anan΄ich, who did much to define this collective agenda and who died in 2015. Catherine Evtuhov Columbia University Chosen Nation. Mennonites and Germany in the Global Era. By Benjamin W. Goossen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. xiv, 266 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Tables. Maps. $49.50, hard bound. doi: 10.1017/slr.2018.169 Chosen Nation presents a sweeping history of Mennonites and Germany in what Benjamin Goossen calls a “Global Era,” roughly the nineteenth and twentieth centu- ries. Though he focuses on Mennonites within Germany, Goossen also comments on Mennonites in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and, to a lesser degree, Paraguay, Brazil, Canada, and the Dutch East Indies. Goossen uses such a vast landscape to consider the relationship between reli- gion and nationalism, terms that he deems highly malleable. Nations, he writes, “are amorphous to the point of incoherence” (8), as are “faith formations” (6). In their place, Goossen is attracted to those who bypass the “vagaries of ‘identity’ altogether” (6) and focus more on a collectivism that is inherently dynamic and necessarily fragmentary (17). He believes that the investigation of Mennonites and Germany in “a Global Era” will allow us to better understand “the fluidity of group loyalty” (16). Goossen also finds it almost impossible to define who Mennonites are, or how Mennonite identities changed over time. Mennonites emerged out of sixteenth cen- tury Anabaptism but he accepts that it was always “disunited in even basic prin- ciples” (7) and that its statements of faith were “multiple and contested.” Goossen suggests that there is no core to who Mennonites are, at least no “core values”; all is merely process (212). Even “Christ’s foundation” (212) is in constant flux, a claim he makes but does not investigate or substantiate. With such a vast and indeterminate approach it will not surprise readers that his study struggles to attain an overall coherence, nor will readers find an overview of the book’s argument in the introduction. Goossen first investigates how selected Mennonite leaders in the German lands and beyond responded to German unifica- tion. Here and elsewhere he is primarily interested in Mennonite “activists” (69), pro- gressive leaders like Carl Harder, Hermann Mannhardt, and Hinrich van der Smissen who sought to create a broader pan-German Mennonitism within a pan-German nationalist mold. Leave aside the difficulty of knowing what terms like “progressive” and “conservative” mean within the great indeterminacy of Mennonite identities for Goossen, he is at his best in his portrayal of these Mennonite progressive “activists” within Germany proper. Mennonites themselves, however, are rarely investigated, which is ironic given Goossen’s stated commitment to collectivism. For example, we are told (71) that only a small fraction of the seventy-one Mennonite congregations in the new German Reich joined the Union of Mennonite Congregations, but the Mennonites in those seventy-one congregations are rarely given a voice. This lack of voice is particularly troublesome in his chapter on Ukrainian Mennonites during the Nazi invasion and Holocaust. His approach is best captured in the book’s cover photo. What the reader http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1017/slr.2018.169&domain=pdf 531Book Reviews sees is a small group of defenseless women hemmed in by a large, armed regiment of Nazi soldiers on horseback, all of whom are male. It is a sobering photograph. But the caption reads: “Residents of the Molotschna Mennonite colony in southeast- ern Ukraine, including a cavalry Squadron of the Waffen-SS, celebrate a visit from Heinrich Himmler, 1942” (back flap). Though that adequately captures Goossen’s conclusions of Mennonite complicity in Nazi atrocities in Ukraine during World War  II, at no point does he investigate who those women were in the photograph, and to what degree they might have felt compelled to “celebrate,” if “celebrate” they did. His own commentary on page 161 suggests that alternate narratives are entirely plausible. Yet for reasons unclear, Goossen declares that (some? all? many?) “Mennonite leaders had assisted Hitler’s empire building in Ukraine and Poland,” and that Ukraine’s Mennonites were a “tool of Nazi colonialism” (172). At no point does he engage any Russian language sources or the work of Viktor Klets, the leading Ukrainian historian of Mennonites during the Nazi occupation. Here and elsewhere, Goossen’s text reveals the dangers that arise in attempting to cover too vast a territory. The reader often is unsure how Goossen’s conclusions have been reached. Taken as a whole, Goossen has provided valuable insight into how select Mennonite progressive “leaders” in the German lands responded to German unifica- tion, and how they worked to transform their confession up to and after World War I. It is to be hoped that Goossen will now dig deep into the German Mennonite experience, and investigate the people within those “collectivisms” whose voices, until now, have rarely been heard. Leonard G. Friesen Wilfrid Laurier University Fascism in Manchuria: The Soviet-China Encounter in the 1930s. By Susanne Hohler. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. ix, 262 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $110.00, hard bound. doi: 10.1017/slr.2018.170 By focusing on 1932–37, Susanne Hohler breaks new ground in English language studies by writing about emigres in Manchuria after the Japanese occupation. She is also the first scholar to argue that Russian fascism was an integral part of civil soci- ety. Drawing on recent challenges to the definition of civil society as inherently toler- ant or democratic, she is interested in examining the function of movements in civil society and how they spread their influence. To achieve this she focuses on fascists’ activities in Russian clubs, Russian education, and in promoting antisemitism. She offers a new explanation for the spread of Russian fascism in the 1930s: she argues that it was their dense networks of associations that allowed the fascists to deeply penetrate émigré society. Arguing that Russian fascism was not just a copy of Italian or German fascism, she illustrates how effective Russian fascists were at working with likeminded individu- als and groups. Her most persuasive evidence is that of the Russian clubs that they established. Because they downplayed their association with these seemingly apo- litical institutions, they were able to serendipitously promote their political agenda. Unlike John Stephen, Hohler also emphasizes how Russian fascism differed from its western European counterparts in promoting itself as a defender and advocate of religion, and how this helped increase its popularity. Yet while all émigré organiza- tions focused, as do all diasporas, on preventing denationalization, and the fascists’