Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

eant that he held executive responsibility for Bratskii Vestnik. During the late fifties he was dispatched on several troubleshooting missions, for example three visits to Voronezh in 1956, twice again in 1957, and again in 1959. Here a separatist free church union was threatening. In 1958 he was added to the AUCECB council al- though he had participated in most of the meetings previously.: The other appointment at that time was A. N. Karpov, who had switched places with Michael Orlov in 1954 to become the Moscow presbyter when Orlov went to Leningrad. Karpov’s role, however, does not appear to have been prominent.3! From the beginning there had been a conscious attempt to have as many Baptists as Evangelical Christians in the central leadership. At one point there was also an attempt at parity for the senior presbyters.*? After the leadership shake-up in 1954, the two former vice-presidents Orlov and Goliaev were sent to Leningrad and Rostov respectively. By 1960 Orlov was fighting a losing battle with cancer and died in 1961.35 Goliaev was still able to attend the 1963 congress as an honored pensioner of 81 years of age. His leadership role had, however, never been taken very seriously. Two key leaders who.emerged in 1954 as the new vice-presidents were N. A. Levin- danto and A, L. Andreev, Levindanto, born 1896 in Saratov, had been a secretary of the Baptist Federation in 1921. Released from prison in 1942 in order to arrange for a Baptist union with the Evangelical Christians, he was appointed AUCECB | | | | | Dissent Begins, 1960-1965 183 plenipotentiary for the Baltic region at his own request in 1945. He gained a reputation for toughness in the initial purge of the Latvian Baptist leadership but eventually was accepted as a necessary overlord who allowed Latvian and Estonian leaders considerable latitude on local affairs. When the ae statute was issued, he called a meeting of Latvian piyecls and on ia bri read the instructions to them. The Latvians responded The other vice-president, A. L. Andreev, was much more influential in . the church as a whole. Andreev, five years older than Zhidkov, had worked together with him since 1903. Andreev, like Orlov, successfully maintained the good will of the authorities, which guaranteed him a post in the central leadership of the Evangelical Christian Union at the time when that union was forced to abandon pacifism. 35 During the war Andreev and Orlov had remained at liberty and during the period of restriction were able to travel in border areas on church business, Like his opposite number Metropolitan Nikolai, he became the head of the AUCECB movement in the Ukraine which from the start represented half the membership. By the late fifties Karev claimed that 75 percent of the membership was in the Ukraine.3 Andreev ran the Ukraine with an iron hand. By the late forties, he was rely: ing increasingly on Mitskevich as his assistan