View source for Dyck, Harvey L. (1934-2025)

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[[File:Unnamed (1).jpg|300px|thumb|right''|Harvey L. Dyck<br>Photo: Courtesy of Leonard G. Friesen.'']]
Harvey Leonard Dyck:  historian, academic mentor, and a voice for Soviet Mennonite victims, born on 16 March 1934 to Isaac John Dyck (1896-1975) and Anna Warkentin Dyck (1899-1985).   On 6 July 1957 he married Anna (Anne) Justina Konrad.  They had three children: Maria, Elizabeth and Alexander.  Dyck died of heart failure in Toronto on 11 January 2025.   

Dyck was born in Winnipeg to parents who had emigrated from the Soviet Union to Canada in the 1920s. His father taught mathematics and science in Winkler, Manitoba. In 1944 the family moved to Abbotsford, British Columbia where Harvey’s father became high school principal of Mennonite Educational Institute. 

Dyck received his PhD from Columbia University, New York City. He taught at Wesleyan and Columbia Universities before he became Professor of Russian and East European history at the University of Toronto (UT), a position he held from 1966 to 1997.  From 1989 until his death, Dyck was Director of a Research Programme at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at UT.  

Dyck was an active member of Toronto United Mennonite Church where he chaired a committee that sponsored and settled over 50 Vietnamese refugee families.

Dyck initially researched the foreign policy of the Hapsburg Empire in the late 18th century as well as relations between Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1920s.   As a senior scholar, Dyck’s attention shifted to the investigation and popularization of the Mennonite experience in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. 

In 1991, with the fall of Communism, Dyck gained access to several state archives in post-Soviet Ukraine and began a multi-year microfilming program, collecting as many documents as possible given fears that governments might again restrict access. He oversaw getting copies of these documents back to Canada and shared them globally where they informed historical study of Mennonites.  Dyck spearheaded a multi-volume source collection on Johann Cornies from these materials.

In retirement, Dyck honoured the lives of Mennonites who disappeared under Stalin.  Collaborating with local Ukrainian scholars, civic administrators and museum officials, he co-organized two international conferences held in Zaporozhe (Zaporizhzhia), Ukraine (“Khortitsa 99” and “Molochna 2004”). He formed a committee to create scholarships at the Universities of Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipro) and Zaporozhe, Ukraine to support research and publication. Dyck became instrumental in a renaissance of Imperial Russian Mennonite studies, most especially in Ukraine where he mentored emerging scholars of Mennonite history at Dnepropetrovsk State University as well as his own doctoral students at UT.

Dyck fundraised to place monuments in former Mennonite settlements in Ukraine. A particularly important monument in the former village of Chortitza (Zaporozhe) acknowledged the thousands of Mennonites who perished under Stalin.  Other monuments in the former Mennonite homeland in Ukraine, created in collaboration with designer Paul Epp, included those fashioned after a simple bench at a railroad station in Lichtenau and one shaped as a threshing stone which carries the names of all Molotschna villages.  One monument in the former Mennonite village of Eichenfeld (Dubovka) memorialized the massacre there by the forces of Nestor Makhno in 1919.   

Beyond memorialization, Dyck played a pivotal role in the creation of the Friends of the Mennonite Centre in Molochansk (Halbstadt), Ukraine, a community centre that provided medical, educational and humanitarian aid to those in need. 

= Books authored by Harvey L. Dyck =
''Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia:  A Study in Diplomatic Instability.''  London: Chatto & Windus, 1966.

''The Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive.'' Co-authored with Ingrid I. Epp.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

''Nestor Makhno and the Eichenfeld Massacre: A Civil War Tragedy in a Ukrainian Mennonite Village.''  Co-authored with John R. Staples and John B. Toews.  Kitchener: Pandora Press, 2004.

= Books edited by Harvey L. Dyck =
''Empire and Nations.  Essays in Honour of Frederic H. Soward.''  With H. Peter Krosby.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969

''The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective.''  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1996.

''A Mennonite in Russia.  The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp, 1851-1880.''  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Neufeld, Jacob A.  ''Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life Under Communist and Nazi Rule.''  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2014.

''Transformation of the Southern Ukrainian Steppe.  Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies.'' With John R. Staples and Ingrid I. Epp.  3 volumes.  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2015, 2020, and 2025.

= Bibliography =
Dyck, Harvey L., “Odyssey to Odessa : Fresh Sources and Perspectives in Russian Mennonite Studies”, ''Mennonite Quarterly Review'', 65 (1991): 437-448.

Friesen, Leonard G. “Appendix: Dnipropetrovsk State University, Khortitsa ’99 and the Renaissance of Public (Mennonite) History in Ukraine,” in ''Minority Report: Mennonite Identities in Imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine Reconsidered, 1789-1945.''  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2018.

Todd, David.  “A People’s Past:  As the Soviet Union vanished, Harvey Dyck went briskly about the business of preserving,” in ''University of Toronto Magazine'', Spring 1994: 18-23.

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[[Category:Persons]]