My specific interest in writing Events and People was piqued by reading the account of the dedication of the Mennonite Brethren church building in Lugovsk, Neu Samara Colony [a Mennonite settlement of dozen or so villages in eastern Russia, near the Ural mountains along the Tok River], an event which occurred in 1901. First of all the scale: there were three thousand guests. That is a lot of people in a little out-of-the-way Mennonite colony somewhere on the broad steppes of Russia! The visiting choir from the Ufa Colony concluded the celebrations by singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah by Handel. How would the Hallelujah Chorus have reached these same broad steppes of Russia? Specific interests such as these underlie many of the events in which Mennonites in Russia were involved. Added to this is my historical theory that trends do not just occur out of the blue: people make things happen. So, a logical extension to studying specific events is to look into the lives of the people who made them happen. I have therefore included many mini-biographies as part of the historical survey.
~Helmut T. Huebert, from the Preface