Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

nth and early twentieth centuries in the Russian Empire led to the rapid formation in this massive territory of thousands of evangelical churches.’ The first Christian church in Jerusalem was started on the Day of Pentecost and following this, the Christian Gospel spread quickly to all Roman provinces and cities; the Russian evangelical revival was similar. The first Evangelical Christians and Baptists (as well as their forerunners, the Molokans, Stundists, Pashko- vites and others) were committed to widespread evangelism. “Every Baptist is a missionary, the motto of German Baptist leader Johann Oncken, was understood in Russia and was often taken literally. The results were remarkable: by the end of the 1920s the total number of the Evangelical Christians and Baptists in the USSR amounted to half a million (or even, according to some estimates, 800,000’), and if including children, perhaps several million believers.’ Russian Baptists in the twenty-first century are still striving to return to the level of evangelistic activity and the number of churches known eighty to eighty-five years ago. However, it was not only the voluntary and devoted missionary work of the people that caused such significant successes. The period of growth ' In 1928, before Stalin's campaign of terror against evangelicals, the USSR had about four thousand Baptist churches. V. Zavatski, Evangelicheskoe dvizhenie v SSSR posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: ITs-Garant, 1995), p. 42. ? S.N. Savinskii, Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov Ukrainy, Rossii, Belorussii, chast’ 2 (1917-1967), (St Petersburg: Bibliia dlia vsekh, 2001), p. 12. * Zavatski, Evangelicheskoe dvizhenie v SSSR, p. 23. 88 was one in which there was also considerable opposition. Again there is a parallel with the early Church. When the first disciples were reluctant to leave Jerusalem, persecution against Christians left them scattered, and so they engaged in evangelism in new locations (Acts 8:1, 4). In much the same way, through exile or seeking to escape punishment, pioneers of Russian Baptist life spread into the outlying districts of the Russian Empire and penetrated into Small and White Russia (currently Ukraine and Belarus), Siberia, Central Asia, the Far East and the Caucasus. In those vast territories the evangelical movement developed in three main directions: founding of German Mennonite Brethren congregations, Russian Baptist churches, and German Baptist groups. The main problem with the traditional local Baptist sources, as I see it, is their “legendary” and “heroic” nature. We must be careful working | with such sources. The difficulties of life for Baptists in the USSR provoked believers to preserve the stories of past days which exhorted young Chris- tians to be faithful. All other points, including exact details of the stories or any negative information about Christian activity in the past, were consid- ered unimportant or even undes