Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

above-mentioned facts - from a highly exaggerated number of Soviet Baptists’ to the assessment of their political views - were supposed to demonstrate to the readers an unmis- takable malignance and danger, whereas the majority of Baptists (as well as other believers) were loyal to the Soviet authorities. On the whole, the ideology of the 1930s did not distinguish between the “clerics” (Orthodox) and “sectarians” (non-Orthodox Christians). Both were considered “alien” phenomena, though terms such as “sectarianism” and “sectarians” no longer bore a special derogative shade compared to the Orthodox. In post-war years the Evangelical Christians and Baptists, along with a fraction of the Pentecostals, united to become the largest Prot- estant confession in the USSR. Nevertheless, the full name of the confes- sion has never become an everyday, familiar expression, neither in Soviet society nor among believers themselves. Despite a congregation's adher- ence to either Evangelical Christian or Baptist traditions, people generally referred to them all as Baptists. The word was shorter, but there must have been another reason for doing so as well. Despite decades of anti-religious propaganda, “Evangelical Christian” as a definition did not become a nega- '' This was mentioned in the 1928 report on religious organisations and antireligious prop- aganda in the Leningrad area. Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov Sankt-Peterburga [The Central State Archives of Historical and Political Docu- ments of St. Petersburg] (TsGAIPD Spb), f. 24, op. 8, d. 53, 1. 27. '2 “Mirovaia burzhuaziia 0 polozhenii tserkvei v SSSR’, [The World Bourgeoisie on the Sta- tus of Churches in the USSR], Bezbozhnik, no. 1 (1930), p. 17. 'S The IV World Baptist Congress in 1928 announced there were 200,000 church members, with 350,000 to 400,000 adult parishioners total. M.Iu. Krapivin, A.la. Leikin, and A.G. Dal- gatov, Sud’by khristianskogo sektantstva v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917 - konets 1930-kh godov) [The Fate of Christian Sectarianism in Soviet Russia (1917 — late 1930s)] (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2003), p. 229; GA RE, f. R-5407, op. 1, d. 35, 1. 45. 136 tive term, whereas the word “Baptist” clearly referred to foreign roots and was frightening for its oddity and incomprehensibility. Escalation of public fear and distrust of sectarians - Baptists in partic- ular - reached a climax during the antireligious campaigns of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Though directed against all religions and confessions, the ideology was specifically anti-sectarian. A significant number of antireli- gious publications in the central and local mass media, documentaries and feature films, lectures, exhibitions and fiction were aimed against sectar- ians. Brochures bore expressive titles such as “The Truth about Sectar- ians’, “In the Darkness of Obscurantism’, “Life on the Knees’, “Fisher