Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2007

AUCECB, file 1.1, document 159 (electronic copy). 28 Pis’mo po voennomu voprosu k evangel’skim khristianam i baptistam v SSSR [Letter on Military Issue to Evangelical Christians and Baptists in the USSR], circular letter of AUCEC and B from end of 1942; Vsem evangel’skim khristianam i baptistam, nakhodyashchimsya pod gnetom nemetsko-fashistskikh okkupantov [To All Evangelical Christians and Baptists Who Are Under the Yoke of German-Fascist Occupants], circular letters with identical title of AUCEC and B from April 1943 and from 05 January 1944; Vsem obshchinam evangel’skikh khristian i baptistov v mestnostyakh, osvoboshdennykh ot nemetskoi okkupatsii [To All Congregations of Evangelical Christians and Baptists in Regions Liberated From the German Occupation]. Archive of AUCECB, file 1.1, documents 156, 161, 150, 151 respectively (electronic copies). 29 Vsesoyuznoe soveshchanie, 1-53. 30 Spisok delegatov Soveshchaniya Evangel’skikh Khristian i baptistov v Moskve s 26/X po 29/X 1944 g. [List of Delegates of the Conference of the Evangelical Christians and Baptists in Moscow from 26.10 to 29.10 1944]. Archive of AUCECB, file 11a, document 5 (electronic copy). 31 Vsesoyuznoe soveshchanie, 44-45. 32 Circular Letter of the AUCEC and B JV° 3498 from 01 September 1945. Archive of AUCECB, file 10k, document 7 (electronic copy). Rebirth in the Valley of Shadow 43 controlling the main evangelical church bodies. The price for the opportunity to restart church work was loyalty towards an atheistic state. Not all believers agreed with this position. Firstly, a significant number of Evangelical Christians and Baptists had been pacifists since the 1920s. Secondly, some believers considered loyalty towards an atheistic state as collaboration or even apostasy. These attitudes were so serious that they led to a split in the ECB brotherhood in 1961. Oppression produces not only loyalty but resistance. At that time, the deported ethnic Germans were not affected by the changes in the religious policy of the state. The war with Germany was still going on. They struggled with bitter poverty and hunger far removed from any feelings of loyalty or war patriotism. Later, when many of them joined the Baptist Union, they had to put up with patriotism and loyalty or even the alleged collaborationism of the first Union leaders. Phase One: Revival as Fellowship Pietism - the Genetic Code of the Revival Beginning in 1942, a spiritual revival slowly emerged between Germans in the USSR when small hidden prayer meetings started. It developed along Pietistic patterns of conversion and fellowship without denominational distinctions. A separate published essay of the author deals with this more deeply. 33 The way of Jakob Ginsman, born in 1920, is typical. His father died in 1924 and in the second year of collectivisation, 1930, his mother fled with the family ‘from the peasant’s persecution’ to the Caucasus. With the inter