Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

d his wife lived in Russia, and during that time and for years afterwards he was the British Evangelical Alliance's main Russian contact. He had a remarkable preaching ministry in prisons across Russia, his travels taking him across Siberia.*' Baptists such as Kargel, who had trained under Oncken, became more aware of wider evangelical thought through the connections forged by English evangelicals such as Baedeker. Kargel illustrates something of the tensions between Baptists and the Evangelical Christians. The hopes in the late 1870s for a lessening of the pressure on Baptists and other evangelicals in Russia were soon dashed. In the early 1880s Colonel Vasilii Pashkov, who with his wife and family had been at the centre of the meetings in St Petersburg, was told to leave the country. Evangelical Christendom reported that a number of the evangelicals among the aris- tocracy in St Petersburg were leaving to avoid persecution. The view from the Alliance was that it was important not to give in to the pressure, but to resist. The Alliance expressed great sympathy with the poor people among the Stundists, who could not go abroad, but had to suffer a fresh wave of imprisonment and exile. Many were exiled to Siberia. Others went to °° RM. Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 267-269. >! RS. Latimer, Dr. Baedeker and his Apostolic Work in Russia (London: Morgan & Scott, 1907). ; *2 EC, vol. 34 (July 1880), pp. 207-208. %3 EC, vol. 34 (August 1880), pp. 248-249. 26 Armenia, and the Evangelical Alliance featured many articles about the situation of evangelicals in Armenia. In 1875, for example, the British Alli- ances Executive Council received a report from a minister who met with evangelicals in Erevan. He was fascinated when they told him about the influence of a book by the English Congregationalist, Philip Doddridge, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul.** By the early 1880s, some in Evangelical Alliance circles held that the most significant spiritual develop- ments were taking place among the ranks of the poor believers, particularly in southern Russia, rather than the elite of St Petersburg. St Petersburg was described as foreign Russia, Moscow as stagnant Russia, and the south as the future - the emphasis being on a spiritual future.*° By the 1880s, however, believers in all parts of Russia and in several other parts of Eastern Europe had entered a new era of repression. When Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a Nihilist bomb in 1881, the govern- ment intensified its control. Baptists were among those who mourned the assassination. An account of the tsar’s memorial service was sent to British evangelicals by Pastor Ziehl, minister of the Baptist church in Cholossna, in the Volsk province (now Ukraine). Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, he wrote: “We Baptists have especially experienced the goodwill of the late Emperor; inasmuch as his l