Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ation of Church and State and the right of people to propagate their faith, as well as to practise it themselves. The “freedom of conscience” guarantee in the constitution has twice been modified to make it deliberately ineffective, indeed to give protection to those very people who wish to deny the principle. The main instrument of oppression is the complicated religious law of 1929, which dates, pointedly enough, from the time when Stalin was preparing to initiate the greatest purge in history. This law must be repealed and the original sense of the consti- tution restored.” The authors circulated this document widely. The channels were secret, but the text was designed to be read by as many as possible. It may have been a little above the heads of many believers of lesser education, but the influence spread upwards and indicated to officialdom that the Baptists were truly an element in Soviet society which they had to consider very seriously. However, their only response was silence, or an increased deter- mination to root out the offenders. Vins and Kriuchkov now turned their attention to something which every believer could understand: the organisation of the demonstration in Moscow in May 1966, the event with which this paper began. The leaders had broken cover and presented themselves in person to the authorities, '°? Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel, pp. 7-8. » Bourdeaux, Religious Ferment in Russia, pp. 105-113. 21 Bourdeaux, Faith on Trial in Russia, p. 99. 128 who had been trying to locate them for some years. They were in prison under investigation over the whole summer, but meanwhile the AUCECB was preparing the congress for which they had made provision three years earlier. : Walter Sawatsky has a persuasive chapter detailing the achievements of this event.” One delegate went as far as to call it “the perfect congress” because it was the most open and democratic of the three he had attended. It would be difficult to go this far, since KGB agents had already knocked on believers’ doors in order to “discuss” the suitability of certain candidates for election as representatives at the congress. 478 delegates with voting rights were elected. Aleksandr Karev, the General Secretary, was obviously deter- mined to heal the breach with the Reform Baptists if he could. Two of their representatives who remained at liberty attended the congress and were permitted to read a formal statement, which was, as expected, extremely critical of the past record of the AUCECB. With hindsight, the attempt of the Baptist officials to be conciliatory might just possibly have been successful, because it was genuine, but, as Sawatsky concludes, it was doomed to failure, because, “unfortunately, during all these painful exchanges at the congress, no one could afford to accuse the chief culprit, the state with its administrirovanie’.” Administrirovanie. The word means so much more than its st