Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

legedly from 1904, and the family tradition related to it. The “Russian” claims which formed the foun- dation of my investigation, and which I have always taken as axiomatic, have proved to be extremely difficult to confirm or otherwise, and have posed difficulties rather different from those posed by the Croatian line of investigation. One of these is the simple fact that I have never studied Russian and cannot claim much knowledge of it. On the positive side is the fact that Yugoslavia was a bi-alphabetic country and that the Serbian and Russian Cyrillic alphabets, the former of which were taught throughout Yugo- slavia, are substantially the same with the exception of a few characters. 231 In addition, Russian and Croatian both belong to the Slavonic group of languages, allowing a degree of informed guesswork and linguistic trans- ference. Several years of interaction with Russian-speaking students has also helped. While these factors enabled me to read short emails in Russian from people responding to my emails in English, reading, though under- taken with shameless boldness, proved much more difficult. Whenever I concluded that I had stumbled across a reference in a Russian journal or book that was potentially significant, I had to double-check with someone with proficient Russian. Luckily enough I have been able to rely on such people at the Keston Institute. Handwritten letters in Russian proved too much, however. The large body of such letters, retrieved after decades of neglect, from the base- ment of the house which remained in the family after Aleksandra died, had to be given to a Russian native speaker to translate. These personal letters provide much material of interest to family history. For instance, they reveal that Aleksandra’s father fled to Tashkent after 1929, that he was arrested in 1937 (although the charge is not stated), sentenced to ten years, and died in a camp in 1942 (or 1943 according to another source). Furthermore, these passages in the letters are interspersed with allusions to political events, references to economic developments in the Communist USSR, and insights into the religious situation. (In places mirror-reading allows for further inferences about the life of the addressees, e.g., that some members of the Zagreb Baptist church joined Aleksandra in sending money to impoverished Siberian relatives.) Thus one learns of Baptist and Mennonite settlements in the Omsk region, separate and joint services, German-singing choirs, the figure of two million Baptists estimated to exist in USSR in the 1930s, tensions related to pacifism, an almost millenarian outlook on the future, and many other things. Yet there is very little of a specific nature about the Omsk Baptist church in which Aleksandra grew up, information which I thought necessary to provide a fuller picture of her life and construct her spiritual profile. In order to supplement meagre information about