Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

28 except for the period from 1938 to 1942 when he was in prison or exiled.?¢ Initially he played the dominant role through the edi- torial pages of Bratskii Vestnik. He was also very active initially when the peace campaign began in the 1950s. In 1955 he was elected one of nine vice-presidents of the Baptist World Alliance and was the only one of the nine to be reelected in that important summer of 1960. Whereas initially he had made several trips to visit the churches, this local’ fence-mending activity soon became the responsibility of senior presbyters, plus infrequent visits were made by other specially appointed Moscow leaders. Alexander Karev was eight years his junior, had turned sixty-seven in 1960, and by then had assumed a greater leadership role than Zhidkov. Dissent Begins, 1960-1965 _ | 181 except for an eight-year exile term, a From the new beginning, Karev as general secretary was administra- lvely responsible for the central office and conducted foreign affai himself. After his first trip abroad in 1958, his involvement in he ae program escalated, necessitating long absences abroad.27 During the 1950s he reigned unchallenged as the pastor of pastors. Virtually every issu f Bratskii Vestnik was filled with his sermon outlines for Baha wens 3 llia G. Ivanov, born 1898, was five years younger than Karev onverted in the tent mission in Moscow in 1918, he had been active - sass That must remain speculation, but what is more apparent is that as.a ota leader he was one of the first to tremble before the authorities ree other men, also living in Moscow, played a less prominent but 182 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il dominant role in the central leadership. In the summer of 1956, Arthur I. Mitskevich, the longtime deputy senior presbyter for the Ukraine, was brought to Moscow as assistant general secretary.° Since 1948 he had been senior presbyter for the large Kiev Oblast, as well as a member of the powerful All-Union revision or auditing commission. In 1954 he became chairman of the revision commission, retaining this position when he be- came assistant general secretary. Like Karev, he demonstrated considerable exegetical and didactic abilities (although much more self-taught than was Karev). By 1960 he was traveling abroad more frequently than his superior. In the summer of 1961, just prior to the split in the AUCECB, he attended an executive committee session of the Baptist World Alliance leadership to work for unity in those countries in which the Baptists were divided. He went so far as to propose that some of the authoritative workers from the Baptist world leadership could be utilized for this purpose.*° I. I. Motorin had been an Evangelical Christian leader and publisher in the Ukraine till at least 1929. In 1945 he was appointed to head the pub- lishing division of the AUCECB, which m