Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ists came to power in Russia, they confiscated the mill that belonged to Aleksandra’s father. The extended family with a large number of children became very poor, and Aleksandra’s father eventually died in poverty (at an unknown location and at an uncertain date after World War II). Leaving aside elements of the story of interest only to the immediate family, several anecdotes gathered from family tradition deserve mention. One of them starts with the fact that Nikola was a Roman Catholic, as one would expect Croatians to be, then as now. However, his religious convic- tions apparently were not particularly strong, so the ecumenical couple did not baptise their first two children in a Catholic church in Croatia. The problem arose later as school authorities refused to enrol the eldest child in the elementary school, as the parents could not produce a certificate of Roman Catholic baptism. The problem of baptism could be remedied easily, and it was, by having both children baptised, but then the authori- ties realised that the marriage was also invalid: the SHS did not at that time recognise as valid a marriage conducted by an obscure sect such as Baptists, and in distant Siberia at that. So the couple with two children, according to family tradition, married in a Roman Catholic church somewhere in the SHS some ten years after their Baptist wedding. The second anecdote relevant for this story and my subsequent inves- tigation was the fact that Aleksandra continued to search for a Baptist congregation in her husbands country. Fifteen years elapsed and she could not find Baptists in what was then Yugoslavia, but she did not give up. According to family tradition, one day in 1934 Nikola - who by then held a high position in the Croatian government - heard unusual singing from a house opposite the Croatian parliament. Somehow he realised that he heard “Baptist songs’, and upon returning home said: “Shura, I think I have found those people of yours!” Aleksandra immediately put their third child, my mother, into the pram and went straight there, where she met Baptist leaders. This gem of my family history will later prove apocryphal (as will elements from the first anecdote) and will have to be modified, given that it happened about three years before my mother was actually born. ‘The rest, however, is probably true. 225 Aleksandra soon became active in the Baptist church in Zagreb. She helped lead women’s meetings in the church, during which she, also according to family tradition, read from Russian Christian literature and translated it into Croatian. In time, especially after World War II, Aleksandra developed and maintained contacts with Russian émigrés in Zagreb, both non-Christian and Christian, who would often come to their house. She also corresponded with a large number of Russian Christian émigrés in Yugoslavia and abroad. The reference to correspondence is a peg on which I wish to hang the ne