Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

uth. The famous ideolo- gist of the Communist Party Nikolai Bukharin said at the Eighth All-Union Congress of the Young Communists in May of 1928, We have assumed that the Komsomol [Union of Communist Youth] is the only youth organisation in our country. It turns out, however, that there are a number of sectarian organisa- tions which unite within their ranks approximately the same *8 Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov v SSSR, p. 189. *? Levitin and Shavrov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tserkovnoi smuty, pp. 164-172. 99 number of youth as in the Komsomol.*° Trying to resist Communist pressure in the late 1920s, the Soviet Baptists created, to some degree, an apology of Russian Baptist beliefs with the following line of argumentation: we are also Soviet citizens; we love our country and work honestly on Soviet enterprises; the founder of our Christian faith was Jesus Christ, who in His life on Earth was from a poor carpenter family; His disciples were also common fishermen, and they were the first to proclaim the famous socialist slogan, “he who does not work, shall not eat”; our beliefs are similar to the Communist principles; Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet law provided freedom to all religions in our country; ... so we have the full right to live peacefully in the USSR.*! Such speeches, however, did not help at all in Stalin's USSR. The goal of the Bolshevik revolution was to destroy the old life at its foun- dations. Many survivals of times past were considered to be “counterrevo- lutionary’. In the context of the Communist struggle against any religion, innovations such as of the five-day week (with the days of Marx, Lenin, Red Star, Sickle, and Hammer) instead of the “old biblical” seven-day week, and the demand to exchange the old Christian (both Julian and Grego- rian) calendars starting with the birth of Christ for a new calendar starting with the Bolshevik revolution, the closing and expropriation of evangelical prayer houses were the necessary actions. Soviet sectarianism was consid- ered a dangerous alternative to socialist and communist society. In April of 1929, the second Congress of Militant Atheists of the USSR proclaimed that “sectarian organisations, in the persons of their leaders, preachers and activists, are the political agents ... and espionage ring of the international bourgeoisie’. Certain Baptist practices and beliefs were considered especially counterrevolutionary, including prayers for the “new Christian martyrs” and “believers in prison for the sake of God’s Word”; disinclination to divide “God's children” into the Communist class labels of kulak, middle peasant and poor folk; reluctance to use the expropriated property in kolkhozes, referring to it as “stolen”; and preaching that “people 4 NI. Bukharin, “Tekushchie zadachi komsomola: doklad na VIII vsesoiuznom s’ezde VLKSM, 6 maia 1928 g’, in Put’ k sotsializmu: izbrannye proizvedeniia (Novosibirsk: “Nauka’,