Towards Understanding of the Practice of Proclamation: The Core Element of Russian Baptist Worship, Timofey Cheprasov, 2015

s and even individual pastors and missionaries, most of written history is still concentrated on “big names,” who are considered to be the “apostles” of the Russian Baptist movement, such as Kargel, Prokhanov, Ryaboshapka, Pashkov, Voronin, Pavlov and others, or important events and hall-marks in the history of the baptistic movement. The number of works written about them will continue to grow, as historians discover new material, and as state archives are being gradually opened. *° However, less significant events and people are often forgotten. There are reasons for this omission. Little material exists about small churches or about people who did not become famous preachers or missionaries. There are various roots of this scarcity of historical material. Firstly, Russian culture is primarily an oral culture; the stories that were told in particular communities died with those who kept them. Secondly, being persecuted throughout their existence, Russian Baptists nonetheless preserved a missionary zeal, and were more interested in ‘saving souls’ and surviving the oppression than in writing books. Moreover, because a lot of them (particularly those people who could be considered as leaders) were killed or died in prisons, a significant part of their history did not survive. Thirdly, the majority of people who lived at that time either lacked education or did not see themselves and their lives significant enough to leave a record.’ Finally, in many small communities, a conviction that the Bible was the only important book and that Christ would come very 33 Cf, Aleksandr Negrov and Tatiana Nikolskaia, “Baptists as a Symbol of Sectaianism in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” in Corrado and Pilli, Eastern European Baptist History; Nichols, the Development of Russian Evangelical Spirituality. 4 The story | am going to use can be a good example of such “insignificance” of their history in the eyes of its participants. The story of a Christian commune in lvanovka, Voronezh Area, bears personal significance to me, since this is a story of my family. The main participants — Peter Leschev and Timofey Cheprasov — are my great-grandfathers. Nonetheless, neither of my grandmothers ever mentioned their story to me, until after | started to work on this project. When | asked them why they never spoke about it, they simply said, they had never thought it was of any importance. 144 soon were theological reasons for not leaving any written records. In the few following paragraphs, | will offer an insight into a less known history of Russian Baptists with a short story from a Baptist community that existed in the Voronezh Area. World War | provides the starting point of the narrative. During the war, a young Russian solder, Peter Leschev, was taken prisoner by the German army and sent to Germany. It would have made a fascinating story about this time in Germany, which unfortunately will never be found. What matt