Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

drich W. Baedeker meant that Eastern European events were reported in England. Radstock had extended ministry in St Petersburg, and Baedeker, a German who had been converted in England in 1866 through Radstock, moved to St Petersburg and lived there for three years from 1877. German Baptists also continued to send information to the British Evangelical Alliance. In 1873 Edward Steane brought to the Execu- tive Council of the British Evangelical Alliance a report received from the German Baptists about “acts of cruel persecution of Baptist Christians in the South of Russia’. Several had been imprisoned. The Foreign Secretary of the British Alliance, Hermann Schmettau, had been in correspondence with G.W. Lehmann, the Baptist pastor in Berlin. The Alliance set up a committee of enquiry to ensure that “reliable information can be furnished as to the alleged facts”. A year later a detailed report from Odessa spoke of “Baptists and Bible-readers’, including women, being imprisoned, fined and beaten (sometimes naked) with whips and rods. In one village twelve men and four women were tied to the Orthodox church railings and people entering the church were ordered to spit in their faces. Near Kiev four women, one aged seventy, and four men, received twenty-five lashes with a whip. They had been robbed of their clothes and the contents of their homes. The author of the report (his name was not given) had himself been arrested and had presented his case to the Russian Minister of the Interior. He hoped the Evangelical Alliance could offer help. By the mid-1870s the spread of evangelical beliefs in Prussia, Poland and southern Russia was common knowledge to many in British Evan- gelical Alliance circles. An Evangelical Christendom report spoke about meetings Lord Radstock was holding which were attracting the “elite of the Russian aristocracy’, with some “enabled to obtain joy and peace through believing’.** An international Alliance Conference in New York in 43 Executive Council Minutes, 12 May 1873. ~ “4 EC, vol. 28 (April 1874), pp. 112-114. 45 EC, Vol. 28 (July 1874), pp. 201-203. 24 1873 considered the pressures faced by Baptists and other evangelicals in Russia and a memorandum was presented to Baron d’Offenberg, a member of the Russian government, about the case of twelve Baptists arrested in Kiev. Baron de Rosen, a close friend of the Tsar, became involved, and told the American Evangelical Alliance in 1874 that he had advocated the cause of Baptists with the Governor-General of Kiev, Prince Aleksandr Dondonkov-Korsakov. All were released except one, Jerome Balaban, who was in Odessa. It is clear that the Russian government felt that the religious problems were being exaggerated by German Mennonites who had emigrated to America to avoid military service.*° Evangelical Chris- tendom, wanting to present a balanced picture, reported that one man who joined the “Stundists” and destroyed his icons was bro