Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ntinued throughout the field of education, but the Russian Baptists (as we shall call the new united organi- sation for brevity’s sake) were allowed some access to a public forum and to international contacts, provided that this came under the banner of | supporting the peace campaign of the Soviet government.* With the advent of Nikita Khrushchev to power there was a change in the Party’s attitude to religion. From atheist indoctrination a more active anti- religious policy began to emerge, especially notable from 1959. Khrush- chev, having denounced Stalin in 1956, found himself increasingly under pressure to “prove” to his critics that he was at heart a dedicated Marxist- Leninist. It seems that believers formed a defenceless sector of society who could be persecuted with relative ease. The new policy affected all believers of all religions and denominations, but it was the Baptists - soon to be followed by the Lithuanian Catholics, the Jews and to a lesser extent some figures in the Russian Orthodox Church - who put up the most organised resistance. Eventually, the later work of nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, after he became a campaigner for civil rights, brought these strands of protest together. Fr Gleb Iakunin, the most prominent spokesman for reform in the Orthodox Church, also founded an ecumenical “Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights” in 1976.° > The authoritative account of this founding conference is Walter Sawatsky, Soviet Evangeli- cals since World War II (Kitchener, Ontario: Herald Press, 1981), pp. 78-104. * Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals, pp. 104-131. * Michael Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), p. 9. 121 A clear line runs from the earliest days of coordinated Baptist protest in 1961 through to the emergence of what one might truly call a democratic movement, concertedly demanding civil rights, in the late 1980s. Events in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland in the 1970s and ‘80s, have some parallels: the demand for religious liberty played a role to a lesser or greater extent in each; together they contributed massively to the eventual collapse of communism. We should remember, though, that these all emerged from very different circumstances and, in its way, the evolution of a civic consciousness in the Soviet Union is the most remark- able of all; the Baptists were there first. Self-destruction Nikita Khrushchev’ attack against religion (1959-64) was three-pronged. The physical side of it was a pogrom, with widespread violence against both people and buildings. The newspapers, radio and television led a ferocious ideological campaign, the focus of which was the new monthly periodical, Nauka i religiia [Science and Religion]. The combination of the two was devastating for all believers, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish. Far worse, though, was the attempt to subvert religion