Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

the Mennonite Brethren immigrant congregations in North America.” Kargel returned to St Petersburg in 1898 to resume leadership of the cell groups started by Radstock and Pashkov. Also returning to St Petersburg that same year was Ivan Stepanovich Prokhanov,”' who had been studying theology for three years in Bristol, Berlin, Paris and Hamburg. It is at this point that the ideas of this emerging community are challenged. Prokhanov was a strong leader who sought to create order from the scattered cell groups of the Pashkovites and the Stundist Bible studies in southern 8 Wieler was persecuted by government officials and the Russian Orthodox Church for his Baptist work among the Russian peasants, who were not legally permitted to convert from the Russian Orthodox Church. He lived in Romania until his accidental death in 1893. Dueck, Moving Beyond Secession, p. 41. ? By 1886, German-Russian tensions had come to a head among the Baptists. Without the consent of the German Baptists, the Russians elected Molokan businessman Dei Mazaev as their president, who remained the dominant Russian Baptist leader for the next thirty years. The Germans continued with a separate German Baptist Union within the German-speak- ing population of the Russian Empire. This survived until the anti-German sentiment of the mid 1940s forced them to curtail their activities. In the 1950s, what remained of the Ger- man Baptist Union was gradually absorbed fully into the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, ending this chapter in Baptist history. * It is estimated that between 1874 and 1884 approximately 18,000 Mennonites (including Mennonite Brethren) emigrated from Russia to North America. *! Tvan Prokhanov was born in 1869 to a Molokan family in the Caucasus. He was edu- cated at the Baptist Stokes Croft College and the New Congregational College in Bristol. He graduated from the theological faculty of the University of Berlin and attended theological lectures at the University of Paris and in Hamburg. In 1898, he returned to Russia to become the publisher of several journals, a writer of many hymns and poems, and the founder of the All-Russian Evangelical Christian Union. Although Prokhanov made many efforts to cooperate with the other evangelicals (especially the Russian Baptists), he always insisted that they move closer to his views. Prokhanov had been influenced by the Evangelical Alli- ance and Pietistic ideals that had influenced Radstock, Pashkov and Kargel, but Prokhanov’s ministry demonstrates his belief that the Russian groups needed to be organised and led into unity. 84 Russia. Over time, Pashkovite cell groups lost contact with the established churches and developed into independent house churches, distinct from other evangelical groups. They did not want to become Baptists because of the heavy Oncken-type leadership and restrictive doctrines. They preferred to maintain an open Communion table and