Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

s portrayed as an active member of the Zagreb Baptist Church board. By this time I had already learned a lot more. I had combed Glas Evandelja [The Voice of the Gospel], the only official Baptist journal in Yugoslavia, which started in the SHS 1922 and was published until 1941, when publication was interrupted by the Second World War. It did not mention Aleksandra, but supplied a rich picture of life in Baptist churches of the period, with reports on regional conferences, youth conferences, Zagreb Baptist Church Mothers’ Day celebrations, New Year vigils and similar events. There I also found a published translation of a letter written to Aleksandra by her father; it was unaccredited, but as I was already in possession of an independently translated text (more below on Russian letters), there was no doubt about the author. The interesting fact is that this letter was published in 1933; according to family tradition Aleksandra had not yet known about the Baptist church in Zagreb in that year. So family tradition had to be corrected. The journal further reported on the process of the gradual inception of the national Baptist Womens Association in 1939, founded by a certain Lidija Kalmikova [Lidiia Kalmykova], a Russian Baptist émigré living in Belgrade, by which time several local chapters were already in existence. This story, backed by the earlier-mentioned photograph, prompted me to go back to my primary sources of family tradition and ask pointed questions. 228 Thus I learned that Aleksandra communicated with Lidija Kalmikova, that Lidija visited Zagreb several times between 1935 and 1941, and that she stayed in Aleksandra home more than once. An elderly lady from the Baptist church in Zagreb then informed me that her relative, the daughter of Lidija Kalmikova, lived (and still lives) in the Czech Republic. So I first wrote and asked a number of questions, and eventually visited her. Although in her eighties, she proved an exception- ally detailed and accurate source of information. She prepared and even- tually lent me for scanning many photographs related to her mother and her work, and supplied me with abundant information about the Russian Baptist and Evangelical Christian émigré network in Yugoslavia between 1920 and 1945. She took the effort to write to her friends of several decades in several countries and gave me their replies. She also opened the door for me to Russian Baptist and Evangelical Christian literature published after the Russian Civil War in Russian émigré centres in Europe and North America. One illustration of the kind of information I obtained from this source will be of interest to our Russian colleagues: In the 1930s, Lidija and her husband, a Molokan, had contact with several Russians in Belgrade. One of them was a Pastor Urban who visited them often from Paris where he published the journal Prizyv [The Call]. (Let me mention in passing that my family tradition info