Siberia (p. 145 - 151)

The completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway provided a vast new frontier where the overpopulated Mennonite colonies in European Russia could relocate their landless families. During the decade before World War I more than one hundred villages and estates were settled in this area. The first Mennonites came to Omsk in 1897. Barnaul, the largest settlement in this area, was founded in 1907. At the end of World War II many repatriated Mennonites were sent to labour camps near Novosibirsk and to Karaganda.