528 Slavic Review

made the book’s argument more powerful. For example, since the Ottoman Empire 
took captives from many European countries, study of captivity narratives provides 
an opportunity to evaluate what distinguished Russian understandings of captivity 
from that of other countries. Taki includes Linda Colley’s influential Captives: Britain, 
Empire, and the World 1600–1850 (2002) in his bibliography (although with her name 
misspelled) but does not engage it in his text.

Taki is right to suggest in his conclusion that “Orientalist discourse does not nec-
essarily present the Other as immutable, stagnant, or ahistorical” (211). Taki’s careful 
work through much rich material illuminates well Russia’s changing understanding 
of itself and the Ottoman Empire.

Charles Steinwedel
Northeastern Illinois University

Protestanten und Altgläubige—Juden und Muslime: Die ethno-konfessionelle 
Struktur der russländischen Unternehmerschaft vor 1914. Ed. Dittmar Dahl-
mann, Klaus Heller, and Jurij A. Petrov. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2015. 461 pp. 
Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. €29.95, paper.

doi: 10.1017/slr.2018.168

The multiplicity and diversity of the Russian and then Soviet empires have been noth-
ing short of an obsession in the historiography of the past quarter-century. The present 
fascinating volume brings together sixteen prominent German and Russian historians 
to address a vital, and fraught, aspect of this multiplicity: the nexus between religion 
(specifically, religious minority) and commerce and entrepreneurship in the nineteenth 
century. With the ghost of Max Weber hovering more or less explicitly in the background, 
contributors examine the mindsets, community structures, individual ambitions, and 
negotiations with state regulation that different religious-ethnic groups—specifically, 
Jews, Germans, Old Believers, and Muslims—brought to the tumultous and sometimes 
uneven economic growth of the industrializing nineteenth century.

Following a series of three framing introductory articles, Matthias Winterschladen 
and Lutz Häfner set the stage with a locally-based discussion of young Moscow entre-
preneurs’ resistance to the regime, and the ethnic-religious dimensions of entrepre-
neurship in the provincial city of Saratov in the second half of the century. A set of five 
articles turns to the question of Jewish entrepreneurship, meticulously tracing the 
evolution of legislation regulating the assimilation of the Jewish population from the 
Polish partitions to the late-nineteenth-century pogroms (Galina N. Ulianova), docu-
menting the vicissitudes of the participation of Jewish businessmen in the commer-
cial infrastructures of St. Petersburg (Sergei K. Lebedev, Pavel V. Lizunov), and telling 
the story of two important entrepreneurial and banking families, the Ginzburgs and 
the Poliakovs, and their role as public figures (Johannes Raschka, Iurii Petrov). In 
each of these very different articles, the ways in which individual actors negotiated 
the considerable limitations on physical movement, social advancement, and com-
mercial success take center stage.

Germans come next, and introduce a different set of issues: Germans were for-
eigners or descended from foreigners, and likely to be voluntary settlers in the empire. 
The authors recreate the image of Germans in literature and business (Klaus Heller), 
a collective portrait of German large-scale entrepreneurs in St. Petersburg (Wolfgang 
Sartor), the role of Germans in the Moscow chemical industry (Iurii A. Petrov), and 
a sketch of the prominent Knoop family (Dittmar Dahlmann). There seems to be less 
emphasis on religion in this section, but the articles are replete with tactile detail. 

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1017/slr.2018.168&domain=pdf


529Book Reviews

We learn, for example, that marriage outside the ethnic group was relatively unlikely 
until the third generation; and that the Knoop family was able to forge a far-reaching 
network of international connections, building upon the empire they built in Russia. 
As Eric Lohr has also shown, German businessmen were thoroughly squeezed out of 
the economy in the course of World War I.

The Old Believers are relatively underrepresented in this volume, with one piece 
by Valerii V. Kerov. Kerov sets out to concretize the trope of Old Believers’ propensity 
for commerce, documenting their commercial activity, and success, in various regions 
of the empire. In Moscow, for example, fully 75% of entrepreneurs and workers in 
the cotton industry professed the Old Belief. Kerov further argues that specific com-
munal structures gradually gave way to individual and family entrepreneurship and 
proposes that certain ethical principles (among them the evolving image of the busi-
nessman or khoziain) in the belief system played into commercial success. Repressive 
legislation, while it might have been one stimulus for Old Believers to channel their 
energies into economic activity, was neither a decisive nor a unique factor.

While Radik R. Salikhov and Ramil΄ R. Khairutdinov examine the workings of 
Muslim (mostly Tatar) entrepreneurship in Kazan΄ with its significant Muslim popula-
tion, Mikhail K. Shatsillo engages the minority Muslim communities of the imperial 
capitals. If Muslim entrepreneurship was a world apart even in the early nineteenth 
century, by the early twentieth Muslim traders and businessmen had become almost 
fully integrated into “mainstream” merchant networks, belonged to Russian guilds, 
and were able to influence the course of politics in their regions. Like Kerov, Salikhov 
and Khairutdinov address Weber’s suggestion that religious minorities, because 
limited in their spiritual expression, tend to channel their energies into economic 
activity. Salikhov’s examination of Islamic modernism and the construction of “new 
teaching” schools, particularly in Kazan, shows how reformers were able to shape 
their local environment without coming into conflict with the central government.

The present volume grew out of an extended Russian-German research project 
that culminated in January 2009, when participants gathered at Bad Honnef on the 
outskirts of Bonn to discuss entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire from 1815 to 
1914, focusing on confessional and ethnic structures, local politics, charitable activi-
ties, and with a comparative glance at the German Empire over the same time period. 
Protestanten und Altgläubige is the second publication to result from this collaborative 
venture: an overlapping but distinct version in Russian, Chastnoe predprinimatel śtvo 
v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Etnokonfessional΄naia struktura i regional΄noe razvitie, 
XIX-nachalo XX v., came out with ROSSPEN in 2010. While some of the articles are pre-
cisely duplicated, in translation, others are new or substantially different. An inter-
esting advantage of this double format is that, for example, a reader more interested 
in Old Believers can read Kerov’s much longer piece—nearly a monograph, replete 
with archival materials, statistics, and personal stories—in the Russian version.

Capitalism, private entrepreneurship, and their history became a topic of near-
universal fascination in Russia as the new economy struggled to find its sealegs in the 
1990s, and took off in earnest in the first decade of the new millenium. Protestanten 
und Altgläubige, while a significant contribution to the blizzard of incredibly detailed 
archival scholarship on all matters commercial, stands apart in its attention to links 
with religion and ethnicity. The nineteenth-century Russian Empire emerges as a bril-
liant, interactive patchwork of cultures and communities, each with its strategies for 
commercial success and local political influence, in which individuals and families 
played the defining role. The bourgeoisie of the Russian empire is abundantly in evi-
dence, rather than missing, weak, or apolitical, as Soviet-era historiography insisted.

Although, by now, neither empire, nor commerce, nor religious minority are 
neglected topics, their combination leaves plenty of room for exploration. This 



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