Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

booklet produced in Omsk recounting the history of Baptists in western Siberia, especially Omsk.' This regrettably contained no refer- ' Istoriia vozniknoveniia i rosta khristianskikh obshchin v Omskoi oblasti 1896-1993 (Omsk: 233 ence to Iakov and was too general for my purposes. The second book is an excellent compilation of documents, from secular sources, dealing with non-Orthodox Christians in Siberia.’ It has an excellent extensive histor- ical survey and fills in the history of the Omsk Baptist church and various Baptist congregations in and around Omsk. The book throws light on the split in the Baptist church in Omsk in the 1920s, which I have not found referred to elsewhere in literature. I mention this split in order to illustrate how information from literature can confirm or complement information from family tradition and vice versa. At one time I talked to my aunt and made a remark about a split in the Baptist church in Zagreb in 1946, about which I learned much in the course of the study of the above-mentioned minutes. She suddenly remembered how her mother Aleksandra, who lived through the 1946 split, years later, said: “Yes, exactly the same thing happened in the church in Omsk.” _ Intrigued by the history of the church in Omsk, and desiring to learn more, I launched a five-pronged Siberian initiative. First I wrote a deluge of emails to a number of scholars - Baptist, Mennonite and non-Christian - and solicited their help. Some of these are professors at universities, some at seminaries, others directors of historical research centres. I am sad to report that this initiative yielded very little fruit. The majority ignored both my broad and my specific questions and failed to respond at all. Second, I established contact with the library and archive of the All-Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUECB) in Moscow. After some time the kind archivist was able to supply me with a small quantity of relevant information, a scan of the memoirs of Gavriil Mazaev, and some articles from sources to which I have not had recourse, but no specific information on Iakov Chernozubov. Third, I contacted the pastor of the Baptist church in Omsk, but he explained that most documentation about the early period I was interested in had perished, destroyed by the Soviet authorities, and that there was nothing in the church archive. Fourth, I contacted several individuals from secular institutions in Omsk, from the faculty of history of the local university to the city archive to individual authors whose names I found in academic journals. Only one of these responded, and he has given me much local information about villages, hamlets and settlements, Baptist and Mennonite congregations, and streets and shops. Fifth, my work took me to Moscow a year ago [2004], and I made a Ob’edineniia tserkvei EKhB Omskoi oblasti, 1993). : ? A.I. Savin, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i evangel’skie tserkvi Sibiri v