Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

the church in Omsk and the Chernozubovs' role in it, I resorted to two devices: reading early issues of the Russian journal Baptist, and trying to obtain information about the Baptist church in Omsk from various sources in Russian and English. Reading through several classic works in English on the history of Russian Baptists in this period gave me a wide background, which I filled in with information from dissertations, journal articles, and the internet. Yet this 232 gave me little direct information on Omsk. Sources were unified in the assertion that the first baptism in Omsk took place in 1897, that the baptiser and subsequent leader of the congregation was a certain Ievstratenko, and that the church building, with seating for two thousand people, was built in 1907. (Today it is referred to as the Omsk Central Baptist Church.) All secondary sources agree that the person who single-handedly financed this undertaking was Gavriil Mazaev. In light of this unified testimony, how was I to interpret my family tradition and its insistence that Aleksandra’ father had helped build the church? A possible explanation was found in an issue of the journal Baptist from 1907. The Keston Institute library has several early issues of the journal on microfilm, so I spent days skimming them for references to Omsk. The report about the construction of the church mentions a board of five members of the Omsk Baptist church in charge of the actual construc- tion of the building. One is Gavriil Mazaev. Another is Iakov M. Cher- nozubov. This enabled me to reinterpret information from family tradi- tion and incorporate it into a tentative new hypothesis based on the not unlikely assumption that the people elected to this building board were also those who could actually contribute financially towards the cost of construction. It may not be insignificant that at this time, as Russian letters disclose, Aleksandra’s father owned a mill and several bakery shops and had a house in Omsk and one in the nearby village of Marianovka, and that Aleksandra attended a rather posh elementary school and later a gymna- sium in Omsk. Reading the journal Baptist yielded a few additional pieces of informa- tion as well. In the second decade of the twentieth century several Baptist leaders attending a Baptist council in Omsk visited the house of brother Iakov Chernozubov before proceeding to another congregation. Finally, a 1950s article refers to Ia. M. Chernozubov as a faithful worker in the Baptist church in Omsk. The same article mentions another Chernozuboyv, also in the Baptist church in Omsk, but I been unable to find out anything about him. Putting the snapshots from Baptist together with snapshots from the Russian letters and against the general background produced a degree of clarity, but I wanted to know more. For that purpose, and after consider- able searching, I obtained two books which sounded promising. One was a short