Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

nfant and virgin sacrifices are still alive. Today Russian mass consciousness holds stronger prejudice against Baptists than against any other Christian confessions, although they are no longer officially identified as a fanatically cruel sect. Soviet anti-Baptist propaganda bore fruit. In the early 1960s, the city of Leningrad gave Evangelical Christians-Baptists the former Orthodox Church of the Trinity at Poklonnaia Gora,” rather than the nearby Evan- gelical Christian-Baptist “House of Prayer’, which was instead slated for demolition. This fact evoked negative feedback from local residents. Editorial boards of various newspapers and magazines received letters of protest. “I am deeply offended. Who needs this church? Who gave [them] the right to clutter up our city?” wrote a reader named Torkhova to the magazine Krokodil’ [Crocodile]. A doctor named Kharinskaia wrote to Komsomolskaia Pravda: On January 24, 1962, I went to a parents’ meeting at school number 118, which my son attends. There I learned that a Baptist church would be opened in Ozerki. I was so shocked by the news that I can hardly express my indignation. All parents were furious. Is somebody mocking us? I think there should be a stadium, a cinema hall or a theatre built where '8 §. Krushinskii, “Glukhoi ston na kraiu sela Glazatova” [A Muffled Groaning on the Out- skirts of the Village of Glazatov], Nauka i religiia, no. 1 (1959), pp. 56-58. '° Informatsionnyi otchet leningradskogo upolnomochennogo SDRK za 1961 g. [Informa- tional Report the Leningrad representative of the Council for Religious Affairs for 1961], Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga [Central State Archives of St Peters- burg] (TsGA Spb), f. 9620, op. 1, d. 55, I. 42. 0 Informatsionnyi otchet...za 1961 g. TsGA Spb, f. 9620, op. 1, d. 55, 1. 44. 138 one could relax, but they give us a Baptist church! Take it! How do you like it! Our indignation is not enough.... If this infection is incurable, it must be simply cut off. There is no other way.” ; Nikolai Vasilev, a representative of the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA), reported that Kharinskaia told him, “Read and listen to what these sectarians do; they must be wiped out and all the churches should be closed down.’” Some opponents of the Baptists moved from words to deeds. On 16 September 1962 the new prayer house in Leningrad was vandalised while several church members and nine British tourists looked on.” During that period, intolerance and antireligious zeal accompanied criminal and public trials of believers. On 25 January 1962, young Baptist Lidiia Semenova was taken to a comrades’ court [tovarishcheskii sud] at the Leningrad experimental veneer factory. “Citizens told a group of young believers who were waiting for her near the factory building to get lost with their holy tales, or there would be short shrift made of them. The Evan- gelical Christians feel this intolerance themselves