Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ntradictory strains in the reformers’ actions which betray either inexperience or disagreement among the reformers on a proper method to follow. They found themselves in a situation of power: politics. In August 1963 they addressed a letter to Premier Khrushchev which began by noting that this was the seventh time that they had dis- ’ patched an appeal to the government requesting permission to convene a congress, but since there were no replies, it was becoming a serious prob- lem. The long letter was extremely frank in charging that the church was Dissent Begins, 1960-1965 189 “completely under the illegal control of various state authorities.’’6 The let- ter accused government authorities of molding local church councils like clay and of appointing senior presbyters “from among their own trusted men, and they subordinated them to the AUCECB.” After further details, they stated in summary that such thorough unanimity has been established between the AUCECB and the state authorities that any expression of opinion against the AUCECB is looked upon by both as opposition to the state,”’70 Recognizing that both state authorities and AUCECB officials were exercising their considerable powers against them, they tried to get Khrushchev to see that this exercise of power was illegal. In an earlier docu- ment addressed to the churches, they had challenged the AUCECB’s claim that the new statutes were based on the Soviet legislation on cults.” Analyz- ing numerous clauses of the 1960 statute on the basis of an official legal “commentary of 1961,72 they argued that religious centers had no right to ap- point local church clergy, this was the right of local congregations only; that local executive bodies had no right to make decisions, only to execute deci- sions taken by the members; and that the law only restricted membership to persons over eighteen, whereas the statute went so far as to forbid baptism for persons under fifteen.”3 These criticisms involved differing interpreta- tions of the law but that is less important than the fact that the law had changed. Since this was kept secret, the reformers protested in vain about terrible illegality. In fact, according to the new changes, individuals, interested groups, or local congregations no longer had the right to call a congress, only the AUCECB could do that. In their published statements the AUCECB leaders ignored the ex- communications although these may have influenced replacement of some senior presbyters. Without referring to the Initsiationiki specifically, a series of articles on the subject of sanctification began appearing in Bratskii Vestnik immediately after the first Initsiativniki visit to Moscow in 1961. The first article by S. P. Fadiukhin described sanctification as a process and . defined it as “knowing the will of God and converting it into life.”74 Sanc- tification concerned one’s personal relationship to God and also the re