Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

6 which contained signatures of 1,453 mothers protesting against the practice, Nauka i Religiia, 7/71 printed an article on orphanages, noting that the majority of children were not orphans but had been removed for various other reasons; the example given concerned the True Orthodox Sect. 71. A full account with photos in AS 845, see also AS 90, 270, 615, 616, 816 and 819. : 72. Bourdeaux, Patriarch and Prophets, pp. 344-45 (1975 reprint). 73, Simon, p. 85. 74. A eet documentary collection is Leopold Labedz, ed., Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (2nd ed.; London: Penguin, 1974). The nuclear seep Andrei Sakharov became the most prominent human rights activist and appealed on behalf of believers, including evangelicals, as well as other dissidents. 75. Vedomosti verkhovnogo soveta RSFSR, No. 27 (873), July 3, 1975, pp. 487-91. . 76. Vins’s own church in Kiev is the best-known example. Seen as an experi- ment by the local church leadership, Soviet propaganda tried to isolate Vins from his church hereby but failed. 77. Vins’s son Peter was given a one-year prison sentence in February 1978 be- cause of his membership in the Ukrainian Human Rights Committee. 78. Total Baptist prisoners were: 110 (June/75); 69 (December/76); 53 (May/ 77); 40 (September/78); 34 (March/79); 34 (December/79). sth 79. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, “Religious Dissent in the Soviet State,” in B. R. Bociurkiw & J. W. Strong, ed., Religion and Atheism in the USSR and Eastern Europe (London: Macmillan, 197), p. 83. x 80. Quoted by Blane in “Year of Drift,” p. 12. In 1953-1954 after certain older workers returned to the congregations who had for a long time not been participating in the complex and laborious work of uniting three separate denominations, they stuck to their old separatist views ... — BV, 6/63, p. 21 | was released from prison in 1956. It’s possible that that peculiar prison smell hasn't worn off yet. —Dudko, Our Hope, p. 94 6 Dissent Begins, 1960-1965: Samizdat, Excommunication, Prison _ According to Marxist-Leninist theory every advance in science and social progress in thé Soviet Union should automatically mean a further de- cline in the number of persons still clinging to survivals of the past. The new enlightenment, which the frantic publication of atheist literature was sup- posed to foster, should also hasten the decline of religiosity. This wishful line of reasoning is behind the official Soviet interpretation for the split that took place in evangelical ranks. Soviet sociologists speak about a crisis confronting the Russian Baptists in the middle fifties.' The evangelicals had capitalized on the psychological disruptions of the war to boost their membership. A large percentage of the new Baptist members came from Orthodoxy—in the Ukraine this was over 50 percent and in Belorussia as much as 76 percent.? This later was to result in differences on ritual and, the sociologists argued, t