Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

lasphemed and described religion using terrible language.’* Article twelve of Lenin’s decree On the Separation of Church from State and School from Church (23 January 1918) stated, “No churches or religious communities have the right to own property. They do not have the rights of a juridical person.”!’ Because of this, Bolshevik toler- ® V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1959), p. 188. '° 8 September 1921. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Omskoi Oblasti [State Archives of the Omsk Oblast] (GAOO), f. 32, op. 1, d. 275, 1. 13. Cited in A.I. Savin, “Sovetskaia vlast’ i khris- tianskie sekty: k istorii odnoi antireligioznoi kampanii v Sibiri v 1922-1923 gg”, in VI. Shishkin (ed), Bakhrushinskoe chteniia 1996 g.: Sotsiokul’turnoe razvitie Sibiri (XVII-XX veka) (Novosibirsk: Novosibirskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1998), http://www.gf.nsu. ru/bakhrushin/savin1996.shtml (accessed 29 October 2005). '' A.I. Klibanov, Religioznoe sektantsvo i sovremennost’: sotsiologicheskie i istoricheskie ocherki (Moscow: “Nauka’, 1969), p. 237. '2 See FI. Fedorenko, Sekty, ikh vera i dela (Moscow: Politizdat, 1965), p. 217. '? See text of the decree in F. Garkavenko (ed), O religii i tserkvi: sbornik dokumentov (Mos- 91 ance of the Russian Protestants could not gain serious and firm ground. According to Communist teaching, one day all religions in the USSR would be destroyed, including, of course, churches of the Russian Evan- gelical Christians and Baptists. Causes of Baptist Church Expansion in the 1920s The first ten years of Soviet power in the USSR are usually considered in both Russian and Western Baptist historiography a “golden” or rela- tively “trouble-free” period.'* The 1920s saw unprecedented growth in the Evangelical Christian and Baptist communities. It was a period of wide- spread missionary activity, reaching not only Molokans, but also Russian Orthodox Christians and even some pagan ethnic groups in the terri- tory of the USSR. There were many Baptist congresses and conferences, many Sunday schools, and even the first theological schools had begun their work by the late 1920s. Most of the new communities were founded between 1924 and 1926.'° It was a time of liberalisation of the Soviet economic system, the so-called “New Economic Policy” (NEP). In addition to adult church members, there was the sizable Union of the Baptist youth, or Bapsomol. Some Soviet historians, beginning with Boris Tikhomirov, number the Bapsomol at approximately 400,000 teenagers!’® It is impor- tant to remember that Russian Baptists do not baptise children, and thus members of the Bapsomol were primarily unbaptised and officially were not considered Baptists at all. Historian Boris Tikhomirov provides some information on the social classes represented in Baptist communities of the 1920s. According to Tikhomirov, poor and middle peasants comprised the core of Baptist communities in