Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ction.) The presbyter continued to read Russian Christian literature and translated quite a few articles from Russian for publication in Glas Evandelja. In 1939 this couple moved from Zagreb to a village two hundred kilo- metres away and for all practical purposes disappeared from the Zagreb Baptist church, although the wife remained the leading sister in the local village Baptist church. They died several decades later. However, they made one more significant contribution to my research. Several months ago, a colleague of mine who has researched Baptist history suddenly remem- bered that two or three years earlier, a leader of a Baptist church in a faraway village mentioned to him that in his church archive (or rather a wooden box), there were a number of books and journals in Russian which nobody could read. As it turned out, these were books and journals belonging to the former Zagreb presbyter and his wife, some with signatures and dates. All these documents were then scanned and sent to me for inspection. I added these documents to the collection of Russian literature I had 230 already amassed, which by now contained Bibles published from the 1880s to the 1960 in the Russian Empire/USSR and abroad, devotional literature, hymnbooks, tracts and journals. All these will need to be further studied, but they already create a fairly good picture of the literature used by Russian Baptists in the early period of the Yugoslavian Baptist movement. A good many of them came from Aleksandra, and some of the books from this collection contain signatures and dated inscriptions related to the other two Russian women in the Baptist church in Zagreb. One dedication reads: “To sister Solovjeva [Soloveva] in remembrance of perfect cooperation in the Lord’s work. In Paris 1935”. Other documents from the accumulated collection came from Lidija Kalmikova via her daughter, still others from another Baptist church (although it cannot be inferred how these docu- ments ended up there) and several from the attic of the first pastor of the Zagreb Baptist church, Vinko Vacek (1923-1939), which he evidently inherited from others, as he did not read Russian. My inspection of Vacek’s belongings in the attic produced several other primary sources of the highest significance which some suspected existed but nobody had seen. There I found Vacek’s diary from 1926, providing details from weather to health; a notebook listing all baptisms Vacek performed between 1925 and 1935, with places, dates and names; and a ledger of members of other Croatian Baptist churches from the previous period (i.e. the earliest period), including the names of persons who performed baptism. This ledger does not say anything about Aleksandra, but mentions the name of the person who baptised the earlier-mentioned presbyter of the Zagreb Baptist church in Russia, Bukrejev [Bukreev]. The Russian Baptist Front I have already mentioned the photograph, al