Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

villages. In 1926-27, Evangelical Christians and the cow: Politizdat, 1965), p. 96. '* A. Rudenko, “Evangel’skie Khristiane-Baptisty i perestroika v SSSR’, in Abdulla Abdul- gani et al., Na puti k svobode sovesti (Moscow: Progress, 1989), p. 345; Savinskii, Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov, chast’ 2 (1917-1967), p. 5; J.C. Pollock, The Faith of The Russian Evangelicals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 80; Zavatski, Evangelicheskoe dvizhenie v SSSR, p. 24. 'S Academician Lev Mitrokhin refers to official data indicating 6500 Baptist communi- ties existing in 1927. L.M. Mitrokhin, “Baptisty v sovetskom obshchestve”, chapter 5 of Mitrokhin, Baptizm: istoriia i sovremennost’ (filosofsko-logicheskie ocherki) (St. Petersburg: Russkii Khristianskii Gumanitarnyi Institut, 1997), http://rchgi.spb.ru/christian/mitrokhin_ 2.htm (accessed 29 October 2005). '6 Mitrokhin, “Baptisty v sovetskom obshchestve’. 92 Baptists of the Voronezh region (considered representative of the entire country) consisted of 43-44% poor peasants, 55-56% middle peasants, and 1-2% well-to-do peasants. The majority of members of Baptist commu- nities were women, consisting of 50-75% of church members in different regions of the USSR during this period. They were primarily widows and unmarried young women.” However, I think this positive process had its dark sides. When (begin- ning in late 1917) the Bolshevik terror against the Russian Orthodox Church started, including destruction and desecration of Orthodox churches and arrests and executions of priests, this indirectly led to a rise in attend- ance at the legally-existing evangelical services; and almost all Evangelical Christians and Baptists remained silent as Orthodox sacred items were destroyed.'* Of course, Orthodox leaders had not always acted with kind- ness toward Baptists in the past, but it would have been a very Christian act for Baptists to have raised their voices in defence of their former oppres- sors. But the flirting of the Communists (the “godless men” and militant atheists) with the leaders of the Unions of the Evangelical Christians and Baptists created illusions among the latter that their churches would avoid persecution. They were wrong. The Soviet power first dealt cruelly with the Orthodox Church and then later dealt in the same way with the evangelical brotherhood. This was a bitter lesson for Baptists of that time period. “Christian Communism” During the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s, many urban evangelical tradesman founded cooperative workshops; some dozens of evangelical churches in villages took up the call of the Soviet power to establish agricultural communes. The most famous of the latter were “Priluche” [Occurrence] in the Novgorod region, “Sigor” [Zoar] in the Briansk region, and “Gefsimaniia” [Gethsemane] and “Vifaniia” [Bethany] in the Tver’ region.'? Some such communes (or voluntary collective farms) were