Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

* Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 5 (Moscow: Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1950), p. 278. | 0 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 158. '! At the eightieth anniversary celebration of the Baptist church in Kherson (Ukraine) on 9 October 1988, according to a report by Aleksei Bychkov, V.F. Goncharov, Senior Presbyter of the Nikolaevsk and Kherson oblasts, noted in his anniversary address that “the church 213 Still, the spirit of charity must have remained latent. In a November 1991 interview, acting chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs Mikhail Ivolgin, referring to efforts of Orthodox and Protestants alike, stated, “Tt seems to me that during the years of administrative prohibition and perse- cution, a huge supply of kindness and mercy accumulated in the Church, which it is bringing forth into the life of society today.’” A specifically Christian response to human need - apparently the first to be recognised as such by the Soviet government - came in 1986, when the Orthodox Church responded to the Chernoby] nuclear disaster.'’ Two years later, on 29 April 1988, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Pimen and five metro- politans met with Communist party secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin. Among other requests, these church leaders sought permission to do charitable work, including care for the sick and elderly. According to historian Nathaniel Davis, government attitudes toward Church-spon- sored charity “shifted markedly” after this meeting. Evangelicals began to consider the implications of social service ministry at about the same time. One of the first recorded references to charitable outreach was made by Aleksei Bychkov, General Secretary of the All- Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), at a plenary meeting of the AUCECB in Moscow on 15-16 April 1988, just days before the patriarch’s meeting with Gorbachev." Thereafter, encouraged by eased restrictions, individual churches began to address themselves to the needs of society in a variety of ways. For example, in 1988, the Central Baptist continually prays for peace, takes part in the material [aid] work of the Peace Fund and pro- vides aid to those who have suffered in natural disasters both in our country and abroad.” A.M. Bychkov, “Poseshchenie tserkvi goroda Khersona’, Bratskii vestnik, no. 6 (1988), p. 68. This and other articles from Bratskii Vestnik, 1945-1993, are also available on the CD-ROM: Istoriia Evangel’skogo dvizheniia v Evrazii: Materialy i dokumenty (History of Euro-Asian Evangelical Movement: Primary Sources], 2.0 (Odessa: Euro-Asian Accrediting Associa- tion, 2002). '2 Mikhail Ivolgin, “Poslednee interv’iu’, Nauka i religiia, no. 1 (January 1992), p. 6. ' Dmitry V. Pospielovsky, “Religious Themes in the Soviet Press in 1989”, Religion in Com- munist Lands, vol. 18, no