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In this vivid and engaging study, David Rempel combines his first-hand account of life in Russian Mennonite settlements during the landmark period of 1900-1920, with a rich portrait of six generations of his ancestral family from the foundation of the first colony - the Khortitsa Settlement - in 1789 to the country's cataclysmic civil war.

Born in 1899 in the Mennonite village of Nieder Khortitsa on the Dnieper River, the author witnessed the upheaval of the next decades: the 1905 revolution, the quasi-stability wrought from Stolypin reforms, World War I and the threat of property expropriation and exile, the 1917 Revolution, and the Civil War during which he endured the full horrors of the Makhnovshchina - the terror of occupation of his village and home by the bandit horde led by Nestor Makhno - and the typhus epidemic left in their wake.

Published posthumously, this book offers a penetrating view of one of Tsarist and early Soviet Russia's smallest, yet most dynamic, ethno-religious minorities.

The late David G. Rempel received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. He was professor of history at the College of San Mateo in California, from 1934 until his retirement in 1964.