Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

from within. There were many notorious examples. One of the worst was the prominence given to defectors from the faith and the example of the former lecturer at the Leningrad Theological Academy, Aleksandr Osipov, who betrayed his students in 1959, with widespread publicity given to his press articles and lectures.° In 1960 the governments Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, which set out to control all aspects of religious life (except for that of the Orthodox Church, which at that time had its own separate body) imposed a new set of regulations on the All-Union Council of Evangelical Chris- tians-Baptists (AUCECB) in Moscow. Their acceptance of these “New Stat- utes”, supplemented by a “Letter of Instructions’, under threat of increased persecution, caused grief to the whole Baptist community, and the effect persists to this day. The AUCECB presented these new regulations as their own, but it was obvious from the outset that force majeure lay behind them. The texts were not officially published, but became known only through the efforts of ° A full account is in Michael Bourdeaux, Opium of the People: The Christian Religion in the USSR (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 109-122. 122 those who opposed them. They are set out in the appendix of my book on the origins of the Baptist protest.’ To summarise a complicated issue, the “New Statutes” were almost exclu- sively concerned with control over local church life and not at all with the provision of spiritual guidance. The AUCECB was assuming an authority which did not reside in any of its founding or subsequent documents. Senior presbyters were to be the main line of communication between the AUCECB and local congregations - but the communication appeared to be one-way, with no parallel channel back to the centre. Restrictions were placed on where and when services of worship were to be held, who should preach and even say prayers. A choir could now perform only in its own church, never on invitation from a neighbouring one. Musical instruments were to be banned from church, with the exception of organ or harmo- nium. The most devastating provision was that only those congregations which had gained registration from the State were to be recognised by the AUCECB. This would disenfranchise the hundreds, possibly thousands, of congregations which had been refused registration or which, on principle, refused to apply for it. Registration also entailed the imposition of a pastor from above, as elections for such appointments were already banned. The “Letter of Instructions” to senior presbyters went further. Paragraph five read: “Zealous proselytisation in our communities must definitely cease... and an effort must be made to reduce the baptism of young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty to a minimum.” The extent to which these regulations were state-imposed is illustrated by what happened a year later (1961), when an irreg