Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2007

vention of World War II, on 8 October 1941, his family was deported to the region of Kustanai in Kazakhstan. In 1942, Ginsman was mobilised to the Labour Army in Chelyabinsk from where he was released in 1947 and moved to the family of his brother who had died of starvation in the Labour Army and had left five children as orphans. Ginsman decided to bring them up himself. In 1953 he received permission to move to his brother, Johann, to the village of Osakarovka near the city of Karaganda. Johann was exiled here in 1947 after he was released from a 10-year sentence. Here Jakob Ginsman and his family met a small number of believers of different denominations, including Lutherans and Baptists who 33 J. Dyck, ‘Revival as Church Restoration: Patterns of a Revival Among Ethnic Germans in Central Asia after World War II’ in Mission in the Former Soviet Union, eds. W.W. Sawatsky and P.F. Penner (Schwarzenfeld: Neufeld, 2005), pp. 74-93. 44 Journal of European Baptist Studies held hidden gatherings. Ginsman was finally converted through the perseverance of his wife. Until 1959, Baptists and Lutherans met together. 34 Thousands of Germans in the Soviet Union had similar experiences. The strict pressure and severe conditions did not eliminate faith. In 1942 the Mennonite preacher Johann Woelk organised hidden prayer meetings in Borovsk (Perm region); a Ukrainian Ivan Gordeyuk gathered Mennonite women for prayer in Orsk (Ural region) in 1946; Peter Duck started prayer meetings in 1954 in the village of Komsomolets, North Kazakhstan. 37 The list could easily be extended. Common to all were group gatherings and conversions. Both belonged to the core of Christian identity in its Pietistic form present in Russia at least since the 1820s. 38 The gatherings were attended by Baptists, Mennonites and Lutherans. During the war, the long forgotten interdenominational fellowship was re-established. The war shattered the denominational borders, and a considerable number of believers formed small hidden groups for prayer and sometimes, even singing. Denominational identity was less important when facing the need for survival. Gerd Strieker suggests that the brethren community pattern was the only way to survive, at least for the Lutheran Church in the USSR. 39 The Spread of the Revival The war-time and post-war revival spread in several ways. Gerhard Wolk, a MB Church elder, himself a child of these times, sees women - often widows - as the main driving force behind the revival. 40 Indeed, as later congregational statistics show, 41 a large number of the post-war revival participants were young people. Those statistics also show a generation gap between 1930-50 in the German churches in the USSR. The youngest 34 Material of J. Ginsman, Honingen, 13/14 September 1999. Phonogram, J. Dyck’s personal archive. 35 H. Heidebrecht, Fiirchte dich nicht, du kleine Herde: Mennoniten in Russland und Sowjetunion (Bielefeld