Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ed state peace medals, their suspicions seemed con- firmed.8 A major split threatened between 1955 and 1957 as a direct result of 160 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il the released prisoners. There were attempts to set up free church unions in the North-Central Russian Federation, in Baku, in Novosibirsk, in the Donbass region, in the Northern Caucasus, in the Crimea, and in Central Asia.® Mennonites and Pentecostals also made futile efforts to organize their own unions of churches, In the Donetsk region in particular so-called “pure Baptists,” who insisted that all ministers must be ordained, managed to split twenty-two churches. Evangelical Christian Perfectionists had initial suc- cess in the Sumi Oblast of the Ukraine. Both movements opposed the union with Pentecostals. 9 The first leader of the Baptist Initsiativniki was Aleksei F. Prokofiev, so that initially the atheist press referred to the movement as the Prokofievtsy. Born 1915 in Ishim (Western Siberia), Prokofiev's biography is less well known than that of his associates. He only became a believer in 1945 while in prison, where he had been sent in 1941 under Article 58 for anti-Soviet activity. Earlier he had worked as a teacher and in 1940 was studying geology in university. In 1937 he was married but separated soon after. Then he formed a common-law link with Paraskovia Markovna in 1939. A daughter was born to them in 1940. As a Christian in the postwar years he joined the Evangelical Christian-Baptists, but in 1954 was again sent to prison. This time the sentence was for twenty-five years and the charge was missionary activity. The sentence was reduced, however, and he was released in 1958. Soon he went into full-time Christian work as traveling evangelist. Prokofiev was the first leader of the Initsiativniki but with his ar- rest in May 1962 he disappears from the story. Word only filtered through indirectly in the seventies that in September 1969 he had been excommuni- cated by the CCECB for immoral behavior. !! Within two years, Gennadi Konstantinovich Kriuchkov and Georgi Petrovich Vins had become the outstanding leaders.!2 Kriuchkov was from Tula, not far from Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana estate. He had been converted in 1951 and was serving as presbyter in an unregistered church in the town of Uzlovaia. Georgi Vins now lived in Kiev. He moved there with his Ukrainian mother after his father, a Siberian Baptist preacher of German Mennonite background, had disappeared in the camps. He was converted in 1945 and became a member of one of the registered churches in Kiev. Kriuchkov and Vins were only thirty-four and thirty-two years of age respectively when the movement began and a disproportionately high percentage of their supporters were young. Prokofiev, on the other hand, was already forty-five and had been imprisoned previously. Many of the other key Initsiativniki leaders such as S. T. Golev