Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

essence, one simple request: the right of these people to self-determina- tion, to appoint their own pastors without interference from state authori- ties, to educate their children in their own faith and to establish new churches where and when they wished. There had been many such appeals in the previous five years, but they had brought no result. Baptists as Democrats Were these unregistered Baptists the first Soviet democrats? They certainly would not have described themselves in this way, but their extraordinary courage in the face of totalitarianism in the 1960s paved the way for changes which were to follow in the 1980s. Some historians of international reputa- tion who have described the collapse of the Soviet Union have failed to give the human rights movement its due as one of the fuses which detonated the bomb which finished off the Soviet Union. The organisation of the demonstration contains features which one could describe as “proto-democratic’. Every movement or group, whether local or covering a wider spectrum, was under the control of the Communist Party. Any idea of democratic input or election was alien to the system. The events we have described were remarkable not only because this was the best- organised independent demonstration in Soviet history, and possibly the largest, if one excepts occasional on-the-spot strikes at the work place. To gather people together from all over the vast expanses of the Soviet Union would have been a feat in any context. To have done so under the noses of the KGB, who were by this time aware of Baptist demands, was amazing; that each demonstrator was locally elected to participate surpasses belief. The Evangelical Christians and Baptists came together from two main ? For a fuller account see Michael Bourdeaux, Faith on Trial in Russia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971), pp. 9-22. 120 Protestant streams in 1944 under an “All-Union Council” based in Moscow and, from the first, under the strict control of the Soviet authorities. It was an uneasy union, joined a year later by the Pentecostals, who had no other possibility of legal existence.’ Lutherans, who had been established on Russian soil since the eighteenth century, had lost their identity completely, except for some scattered and unrecognised groups in Siberia and their existence as the main denomination in Estonia and Latvia. It is difficult to identify any element of democracy in a conference which was under the tight control of the State authorities from beginning to end. Significantly, the Russian Orthodox Church established the Moscow Patriarchate at the same time, which was equally clearly under the control of the authorities. During the first decade of this new unions existence, the USSR was primarily concerned with rebuilding the country after the devastation of war, and the next decade and a half saw a period of modest development in Christian life. Atheist indoctrination co