Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

2ten Welt G2W [D—Glaube in der 2ten Welt Informations Dienst GNB—Good News Bible KNS—Keston News Service MCC—Mennonite Central Committee MQR—Mennonite Quarterly Review NiR—Nauka i religiia (Science and Religion), largest Soviet atheist journal RCDA—Religion in Communist Dominated Areas RCL—Religion in Communist Lands VNA—Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma (Questions of Scientific Atheism) WCC—World Council of Churches Soviet E vangelicals Since World War Il It would be ridiculous ... if the Party did not take into account that the history of the sectarians is a history of uninterrupted persecution. —Mikhail Kalinin President of the Soviet Union at the 1924 Party Congress 1 Beginnings and Patterns: Persecution Has Become Hereditary Under cover of darkness on (ueg@Queei?, Martin Kalweit, a German from Lithuania only recently baptized himself, immersed Nikita Isaevich Voronin in a small stream not far from Tbilissi in the Caucasus. This marks the official date for the beginning of the evangelical movement in the Russian Empire. By 1905 there were 86,538 Baptists and 20,804 Evangelical Christians. By the end of the Civil War membership had increased to 100,000 Baptists and 250,000 Evangelical Christians. At the height of the movement in 1929 the movement had grown to ap- proximately 500,000 baptized evangelicals, representing together with family members over four million people. The growth rate had been phenomenal. The evangelicals had taken seriously the motto: “Every Baptist a missionary!” Yet in 1930, the Baptist Union reported that its churches had only 50,124 members, and another source indicates that the total number of evangelicals was down to 250,000 by the mid-thirties.! By the autumn of 1929, over 100 Baptist preachers were known to have been arrested; all of the regional Baptist unions had been closed because of the arrest of their of- ficials. Some of them, including the central offices in Moscow, were reopened temporarily but the Russian Baptist Union officially came to an ° end in 1935. Those few ministers who were not arrested or did not go underground managed to join forces with the competing Evangelical Chris- tian Union which continued to maintain a tenuous existence.” Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II pg Beginnings and Patterns 29 on the clergy. For evangelicals the major arrest waves came in 1929-30, 1933-35, and 1987-38, These purges refer primarily to arrests, imprisonments, deportations, and executions, but the antireligious campaign was multidimensional. [t virtually ceased to exist by 1938, Then came another shift during the war when the antireligious cam- is persecution of believers. They prefer a more neutral nomenclature, Lenin telling the Comintern Congress in 1922 that “it is certain that we have done Why do we do “stupid things”? In the fi