Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2007

es. A small number of brethren who survived the purges of Stalin in the 1920s played an outstanding role in establishing new churches. Peter Bergmann has already been mentioned. Johannes Fast of Alt-Samara was exiled in 1931 to the Far East. In 1955, he moved to Temir-Tau near Karaganda and began his itinerant preaching ministry at 69 years of age. His last big preaching tour took place in 1978 when he was 92 years old. 77 The brethren visited churches, evangelised, preached, baptised, ordained ministers, and ordered church matters. In this way, a certain continuity with the 1920s was established. Stratification The first decade of church restoration in the ECB and MB tradition took place in the turbulent times after the Stalin thaw, Khrushchev’s repressions, and Brezhnev’s stabilisation. During this time, the ECB brotherhood split into two conflicting unions of the AUCECB and CCECB. 78 The latter represented the so-called Reform Baptists who rejected legalisation by the Communist state. On a smaller scale, a differentiation and stratification also took place in the German Churches. Atheistic state oppression forced the larger churches to divide into smaller groups. That made it easier to find a place to gather. Also, the number of leaders in the church and their influence on the group grew, both at the expense of the unity of the whole church and the more egalitarian leadership patterns. For example: the ECB Church in Balkhash was forced to split into four groups. In one group, the leader received special revelations about God in the Old Testament; the second group tended towards the CCECB that had in absentia excommunicated leaders of a parallel group. 79 For several years the MB Church in Karaganda was forced to split into three groups, each with their own affinities. Decades later in the united MB Church there were active supporters of the underground Baptists, the officially recognised Baptists, and the majority with a strict Mennonite identity disregarding both/ In the battle for the existence of the church, the sense of its unity was lost. 77 J. Fast, Autobiography. Handwritten copy, J. Dyck’s personal archive. 78 Istoriya evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov v SSSR, p. 238. 79 Material of R. Leneschmidt, Honingen, 13 September 1999. Phonogram, J. Dyck’s personal archive. 8,1 H. Wolk, Die Mennoniten Briidergemeinde in Rufiland 1925-1980 , pp. 94-100. 52 Journal of European Baptist Studies In general, at the time of the first regular congress of the AUCECB in 1966 81 the position was clear. Churches that were ready to legalise chose the way of the AUCECB, knowing that even then a confrontation with the state was unavoidable, as Karl Gotz remembers. 82 Those who rejected any compromise with the godless government were on the side of the CCECB. The MB Church in Karaganda opened up a third way, that of autonomous legalisation. In the subsequent years, several MB Church in Russia and one