Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

e persecution of identification with a harmful political ‘Stundist sect’ and have asked [the governor] to protect us from this discrimination” (emphasis added).* The nicknames “Stunda” and “Stundist” given to the Russian Protestant movements remained into the Soviet period, but eventually died out, along with Stundism itself. In twentieth-century public consciousness, identification of sectarianism with Baptists became stronger. Baptists, not Stundists, became a symbol of Russian sectarianism in general, a minority discriminated against before the 1917 Revolution and persecuted, alongside other confessions, under the antireligious slogans of Soviet times. Unlike the so-called foreign Prot- estant confessions (Lutherans, Reformed, etc.) which historically expe- rienced patronage in Russia, Baptists were much less privileged. In 1879 they were legally recognised as a foreign confession. However, despite state prohibition against leading the Orthodox “astray’, the first Russian Baptists immediately began active missionary work, and within several decades had significantly expanded among the Russian people, especially in southern Russia and the areas of sectarian settlements. By the early twentieth century, Russian society began talking about Baptists as a part of Russian sectarian life. Whereas liberal and democratic forces advocated the equality of all nations and confessions (including Russian Baptists), conservatives such as the Black Hundreds considered religious diversity a threat to the stability of the state. They viewed all Russian Protestants — including Baptists — as apostates from the traditional Orthodox faith, and hence betrayers of Russia. The fact that the Russian emperor granted permission to leave the Orthodox Church in his 17 April 1905 edict “On the Strengthening of the Principles of Religious Tolerance” did not reconcile conservatives to the relative liberty given to the Russian Protestants. In 1910 the Black Hundred newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow Bulletin] furiously stated that in Rostov-on-Don, “literally entire Orthodox families were converting to the Baptist faith. It is inconceivable 2 RGIA, f. 796, op. 445, d. 709, 1. 76. 3 RGIA, f. 796, op. 445, d. 709, 1. 94. 134 what is going on in the village! They say there are villages where churches are nailed up because the whole parish has turned Baptist.”* “In recent times hundreds of Baptists have flooded one-horse villages in Karelia’, wrote the newspaper Zemshchina in a 1910 article entitled “A Baptist Crusade in Karelia.” Many such publications were sheer propaganda and contained numerous exaggerations and blunt lies. Remarkably, these anti-Baptist articles were often given blatantly anti-sectarian titles such as “Our Remote Areas and the Russian Sectarians”® or “The Jews and Russian Sectarianism”.” Prior to the 1917 Revolution, attempts were made to create a negative image of Baptists as a well-organised sect with inte