Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ted several appeals to Pentecostals and also urged other members not -to be afraid to elect a former Pentecostal as presbyter if he now promised to abide by the agreement.® In fact, one gets the distinct impression that this over-concern about keeping the Pentecos- tals, as well as the rapidly increasing time-and energy devoted to interna- Dissent Begins, 1960-1965 159 tional peace conferences, meant that the leadership was caught by surprise when the Baptist dissent movement started. The fundamental factor which some of the key dissident leaders never fully recognized was that little had changed since 1945. Former evangelical leaders, at least some of them broken in spirit in the Stalinist terror, had been released from prison in order to form a registered.union of evangel- icals. Stalin had granted some concessions but the evangelical leaders knew that in the negotiations they merely had the rights of a hostage. They were reminded of that fact repeatedly. By the time general registration of the churches ceased in 1948, only about one third of all the congregations had been legalized.* Ministers were arrested, including such key persons as the Pentecostal leader Ivan Pan’ko, while many other former leaders remained in prison till the mid-fifties. Each man knew he should carefully watch his tongue and not simply because the Apostle James had advised it. L I. Mo- torin, who becarne a member of the presidium in 1958, once lost his preach- ing license for six months because he had made a passing reference to the crosses in the Kremlin in a sermon on the cross. Soviet historian Mitrokhin was quite correct in pointing out that the AUCECB structure fostered centralization which was a. Russian Baptist tradition.” It was of course a key concern in the new Soviet religious policy. Zhidkov and his associates, especially A. L. Andreev, exercised an authori- tarian control over the union. Usually it was paternal in intent but Moscow directives right from the start ensured that local zealots would be restrained or eliminated from leadership positions if state officials required it. A legiti- mate argument in favor of this authoritarianism was that the bulk of the membership was at best semi-literate and needed to be dependent on a few men of wisdom. : What had actually changed was that Soviet society had become less rigid. Many former preachers were released in the mid-fifties. These were persons who had never bowed the knee to the Caesar God and who intended to resume their preaching activities where they had left off. These had also been more isolated than Soviet society generally, so that the new spirit of ecumenism and disarmament was strange to them. The more they learned about the nature of the AUCEGB, the less they liked it, Anybody who received permission to travel abroad they suspected as having ‘made a deal with the secret police. When in early 1960 Alexander Karev and Michael Orlov receiv