Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ears of Communism - while a time of relative wellbeing for the Russian evangelical churches - sufficient to put © Istoriia Petropavlovskoi tserkvi EKhB (Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, 1998), p. 3; “Pomni ves’ put’: istoriya Omskoi tserkvi EKhB’, Slovo very [Omsk], no. 1 (2001), p. 5. 21 Oral testimony to the author of Nikolai Murchich, church member in Kiialy, North Kaza- khstan (December 2001). 22 Zavatski, Evangelicheskoe dvizhenie v SSSR, pp. 37-38. 94 such thoughts of Christian Socialism (illusions, as they later viewed them) out of the Baptist brothers’ heads. The main causes of the collapse of the Baptist and Evangelical Christian agricultural communes in 1920s appear to be internal, not external. There have been many such experiments, both Christian and Socialist, throughout history. The majority failed because their participants “were not ready” to put the theory into practice. This was part of a wider trend in other times and nations,” and I do not see any serious reason to consider the early Communist period in Russia an excep- tion. In general, “Christian communism” ended in the mid-1920s. The Military Problem However, the wellbeing of the Baptists in the early years of Soviet power should not be exaggerated. State security agents penetrated the churches, pressuring their leaders and pastors and demanding absolute loyalty to the Soviet authorities.“ Itinerant evangelical preachers, freer than ordinary church ministers, were cruelly persecuted. Conscientious objectors were often prevented from making use of their alleged right to refuse military service as stated in the Soviet decree of 1919, “On release from military duty based on religious conviction”? Antiwar tendencies among Russian Evangelical Christians and Baptists increased during World War I and the Russian Civil War. In 1920, pacifism became the firm position of both Russian evangelical unions. The joint congress of Evangelical Christians and Baptists in 1920 proclaimed in part, Considering the participation of Evangelical Christians and Baptists in the shedding of human blood under any state structure to be a crime against conscience as well as against the spirit of the Holy Scripture, and professing it unacceptable for Evangelical Christians-Baptists to bear arms, to manufacture arms for any types of military purposes, or to instruct others in military affairs, which is tantamount to direct participa- tion in the shedding of blood,... each Evangelical Christian 23 See A.M. Prokhorov (ed), Sovetskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsik- lopediia, 1982), p. 1386. 4 |.P. Plett, Istoriia bratstva evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov s 1905 po 1944 gody (unpub- lished manuscript, Sovet tserkvei EKhB, 2001), pp. 108-109. The manuscript is preserved in the Archives of the Baptist Union of Kazakhstan. 2° See Savinskii, Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov, chast’ 2 (1917-1967), p. 28. 95 or Baptist i