Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

the local Evangelical Christian and Baptist churches, has not been ° Bourdeaux, Religious Ferment in Russia, pp. 22-26. Cf. pp. 125-53. '0 Sovetskaia Moldavia (27 January 1963), p. 4. 124 authorised by them and does not represent them. Its members have long since cut themselves off from the believing masses, followed the path of dictatorship and abolished the rights of local church to self-determination... [We] censure the All- Union Council for including in the Union only one-third of the communities (the registered ones), while two-thirds (the unregistered ones) have not been recognised by it." In June 1962 the Reformers went further. They issued a document excommunicating twenty-seven of the leaders of the AUCECB, including Iakov Zhidkov and Aleksandr Karev, their top officials. The response of the authorities was to ratchet up the number of arrests, affecting Reform Baptist leaders from virtually all regions of the USSR. The list of prisoners compiled in the late 1960s contains twenty-eight names of men arrested in 1961, but a further sixty in 1962.'? Most prominent of these was Aleksei Prokof ev himself, arrested in August 1962, the first leading member of the group to be brought to trial, although other less prominent figures were already in gaol. The Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults clearly did not know how to handle this emerging protest. Their blunt response of increasing the number of arrests backfired, as the Baptist reformers gathered information systematically and sent it abroad, where it began to attract the attention of such organisations as the recently-founded Amnesty International and, later, Keston Institute in its early days. Their other tactic was to allow the convening of a congress, thus osten- sibly responding to the demands of the reformers. It is clear that, from the outset, such a move was doomed to failure. The atmosphere was fraught, to put it mildly. The excommunications were still in place; nearly one hundred of the Reform Baptists were in prison; the Council for the Affairs of Reli- gious Cults was in control of the proceedings. From this time, too, the KGB began to designate the prisoners as criminals who had received their just sentences for illegal activities, not for their religious activities, as opposed to the majority of Baptists, who were law-abiding and lived comfortably in the Soviet state. Such a formulation was foisted on innumerable visitors to '! Bourdeaux, Faith on Trial in Russia, p. 82. The most detailed study of this period yet published is in the central section of Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals since World War II, pp. 157-224, while many of the relevant documents are printed in Bourdeaux, Religious Fer- ment in Russia, pp. 32-94. '2 Printed as Appendix II of Bourdeaux, Religious Ferment in Russia, pp. 211-229. 125 the USSR, some of whom appeared to believe this travesty and repeated it abroad."° The congress convened in