Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

started even in the regions of the USSR where Communist pressure was not so strong, such as a Baptist agricultural commune in the village '7 B. Tikhomirov, Baptizm i ego politicheskaia rol’ (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1929), pp. 19, 52. See also Mitrokhin, “Baptisty v sovetskom obshchestve”. '8 T know only of Ivan Prokhanov’s “Open Message” of 1922 to Russian Orthodox Church leaders with Christian words of consolation. A.E. Levitin and V. Shavrov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tserkovnoi smuty (Moscow: Krutitskoe patriarshee podvore, 1996), pp. 165, 170. '? See V. Popov, “Evangel’skie trudovye arteli’, Bratskii vestnik, no. 2 (1990), p. 27. 93 of Astrakhanka in northern Kazakhstan. The leader of that commune was brother Andrei Eropkin (probably a minister of the Omsk Baptist Church). His grandson, long-time church member Nikolai Murchich of Kiialy, Kazakhstan, told me in December 2001 the following interesting story of that commune, which he learned from his mother, Praskovia Eropkina, who had been a member. The Baptist commune in Astrakhanka existed for two years, from 1922 to 1924. The majority of the population of the village was Baptist, with several hundred brothers and sisters. They decided to establish what they called a “model Christian agricultural commune’, following the example of the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem. As described in the Book of Acts (chapters 2 and 4), they “socialised” their property (lands, cattle, imple- ments) and started with enthusiasm. They worked together, held frequent worship services, had good preachers and a choir, provided Sunday school for children, and evangelised in the neighbouring villages. There were both good and bad sides of that life. When sometimes the teenagers would fight in the street, as punishment, they were forced by the elders to dig graves in the rural cemetery “for their edification”. The commune members were inspired by plans of the leader of the All-Russian Union of Evangelical Christians, Ivan Prokhanov, to build a Christian “City of the Sun” [Gorod Solntsa]. But soon they faced the normal problems of collective farms, including irresponsibility and laziness. Some people, for example, did not want to sew a button on their clothes, feeling that should be the work of a tailor. Finally, the bad harvest of 1924 intensified disagreements within the brotherhood, and the commune collapsed. “Probably this was not God's will’, the Baptists decided, and they took their property back home.”! It appears that some of the similar Baptist communes in other places may have been somewhat more successful; some historians write about competitions (an unfavourable concept within Communist ideology) between the “non-drinking” Baptist agricultural communes and the usual “sinners” cooperatives, which the Baptists won, as being the primary cause of the former's forced liquidation.” However, I do not agree with this analysis. I consider the first ten y