Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

forget their shared imprisonment and exile together with Russian Prot- estants. Because of this and the political indifference of the Baptists, the first decade of Soviet power, in spite of the bloody World War I, Civil War, famine and economic dislocation, became one of unprecedented growth for the Russian evangelical movement.’ According to historian of Russian Orthodoxy Dmitry Pospielovsky, There is no doubt that the primary task of the regime was the destruction foremost of the national church, the spiritual basis of national life. To facilitate completion of this task, the authorities sought, among other methods, to secure a type of alliance with other confessions, or at the very least to guar- antee their neutrality.® ° Serge Bolshakoff, Russian Nonconformity: the Story of “Unofficial” Religion in Russia (Phil- adelphia: Westminster Press, 1950), p. 119. ” §.N. Savinskii, Istoriia russko-ukrainskogo baptizma: uchebnoe posobie (Odessa: Bogo- myslie, 1995), pp. 84-87; Savinskii, Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov, chast’ 2 (1917- 1967), pp. 12, 85. “ * D.V. Pospelovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaya tserkov’ v XX veke (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), p. 60. 90 The socialists viewed sectarianism as a manifestation of the decay of off- cial Russian religion which began before the Bolshevik revolution. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin's famous assistant, published the newspaper Rassvet [Daybreak] especially for sectarians, “to instil the life-giving message of social democracy into the already awakened peasant masses, drawing into our party new groups from within the Russian population’ The Bolsheviks sympathised also with the communal teachings and practices of Russian Protestants. The Communist newspaper Izvestiia VTsIK [News of the All- Russian Central Executive Committee] wrote in September 1921, “Peasant communist associations such as Dukhobors, Molokans, New Israel and others are completely painlessly internalising Soviet civil laws and rules.’’® Mennonites were also favoured by the early Communists because of their “revolutionary” origins (i.e., radical German Anabaptism in the sixteenth century). The Bolsheviks liked to seek “communist precedents” in the remote past. However, not only ideological but also economic reasons caused the Communists in the 1920s to build relationships with Russian Protestants. In the early 1920s, Soviet authorities gave some Russian sectar- ians good land under the condition that they work it collectively.'’ It was imperative that the Communists have some successful agricultural experi- ments before the total collectivisation of 1929-1932. At the same time, its antireligious policy remained one of the strongest pillars of the Bolshevik dictatorship. The conviction of the disutility of any religion for communist society was the mainstream idea of the Soviet government. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Il’ich Ulianov (Lenin) was personally a strict atheist who b