Church Without Walls: Post-Soviet Baptists after the Ukrainian Revolution, 2013-14, Joshua T. Searle, 2016

ts relatively small size, can play a leading role not only in the renewal of the churches, but also in the transformation of all spheres of post- Soviet society in accordance with gospel values. Ukraine has now reached a critical turning point in its history. In November 2013 hundreds of thousands of people, including some close personal friends of mine, took to the * Oleh Turij, “Das religisse Leben und die zwischenkonfessionellen Verhaltnisse in der Ukraine seit der Wende”, in Vom Umbruch zum Aufbruch? Kirchliche und gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen in Ostmitteleuropa nach dem Zerfall des Kommunismus, edited by Dietmar W. Winkler (Vienna: Tyrolia, 2010), 257. > Catherine Wanner, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2. streets of Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, to protest against the refusal of the Ukrainian government to sign a treaty that would have led to closer integration with Europe. The central square in Kyiv, known as Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Matioan He3zaneocnocmi, translated as “Independence Square”), became a rallying point for the protestors. Several people died in the mainly peaceful protests, which were met with bulldozers, batons and police violence in the winter of 2013. In February 2014 the violence peaked and 103 protestors and 13 policemen were killed. It soon emerged that among the dead protestors there were dozens of Christians, including one young Baptist, Alexander Khrapachenko, who was a cousin of a friend and former colleague of mine. Alexander, like the others in the “Heavenly Hundred” (He6ecna comua), was campaigning to ensure the future of a free Ukraine. He paid the ultimate price when he was shot in the head by a police sniper on 20" February 2014. Alexander and millions of other Ukrainians like him were protesting against a state that had become little more than a system of organised “kleptocracy”* and extortion. Law had become not a principle that guaranteed the rights of all citizens, but a tool in the hands of a corrupt elite that could be applied to extort money and power. Under Ukraine’s fraudulent Russian-backed President, Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian state had become a vehicle for the self-enrichment of the President’s family and a narrow circle of oligarchs and regime insiders. When he took power in 2010 Yanukovych set about looting the Ukrainian economy. In just four years, it is alleged that he had embezzled $100 billion from the state funds of Ukraine. When he fled Ukraine, protestors entered his estate and found evidence of grotesque luxury and a large cache of incriminating documents that he had tried to dispose of in a lake before he left. Escaping from his presidential palace, Yanukovych took with him an estimated $32 billion of Ukrainian state funds over the border to Russia. The documents that were recovered from the lake at his palace showed that, as widows, orphans and pensioners were