Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

ion often produces intense debate. Some researchers stress the contribution of the foreign missionary as against others who stress the role of native personnel, divorcing a movement from all western or imperialistic associations. In a recent issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Jeffrey Cox, who has written on British missionary history, has come to the conclusion: ‘Yet Third World Christian churches are neither independent of Western influences nor purely indigenous; in historical terms, they are hybrid, the results of a dialectical relationship between missionaries and non-Western Christians.’ 1 What about Baptists in Russia? From the start, Baptists have been attacked for being a foreign import, incompatible with the culture of the country and a threat to society. N.I. Petrov, in his article, ‘Novyya svedeniya o shtundisme’, wrote, ‘...in the beginning of the 70s missionaries of Baptism were deliberately sent out from Hamburg to the German Kherson colonies; they find there fortuitously Ukrainian workers - people for a long time already isolated from the family and society with the church [ — ] without difficulty they master them and turn them into an instrument of spreading their heresy among the people, never having had knowledge of the heresy’. 2 One of the chief proponents of rejecting the indigenous character of the evangelical movement or stundism in Russia is Alexii Dorodnitsyn, a Russian Orthodox anti-sectarian missionary, later a bishop and rector of Kazan Religious Academy, a collector of official documents, and a writer of a number of works on stundism and Baptists. His work in 1903, Yuzhno- Russkii Neobaptism’, izvestnyi pod’ imenem’ shtundy (or South-Russian Neobaptism, Known by the Name Stunda ), first of all identifies the Baptist movement with continental Anabaptism, including its revolutionary manifestation in Munster, Germany, an old falsehood. He rejects the thesis that Ukrainian stundism arose from the German colonies in Russia but insists it is a product of German Baptist missionaries from abroad. He wrote at a time of intense Germanophobia, a fear of Germans and Germany, a fear also directed against the German colonists in Russia. In such a climate, Orthodox writers, upholding Russian autocracy and 1 Jeffrey Cox, ‘What I Have Learned About Missions from Writing The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, XXXII/2 (April, 2008), pp. 86-87. 2 Trudy KievskoiDukhovnoiAkademii, 1887, no. 3, p. 383. 30 Journal of European Baptist Studies Orthodoxy as the only legitimate religion for native Russians/Ukrainians, stressed the German ties with stundism or the Baptists, thereby discrediting both of them in the eyes of the populace. But can such a position be sustained? 1. Dispersion of Religious Bodies Before one considers these contentions, one should first of all consider some other factors. First, fro