Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

rst place, because we are a back- ward country, Secondly, education in our country is minimal. Thirdly, we are getting no help. Not one civilized country is helping us. On the mark on church-state relationships, nevertheless, This persistent problem of state persecution makes it difficult to gain a 30 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II regularly optimistic and emphasize that only during the Soviet period were they able to produce Bibles and songbooks and conduct theological courses.8 At present they emphasize: “We have never had it so good.”® Both claimants are truthful in what they say; it is the intended general in- terpretation that is problematic. Various Beginnings To choose 1867 as starting date for the Russian evangelicals is to start late. If Nikita Voronin was the first Russian fruit of evangelical teaching, there surely was a seeding and germination period before. Even if there are no direct links, certain emphases in the long history of the Russian sectarians provide the progenitors of the evangelicals. For example, when the writings of the 18th-century freethinker Grigorii Skovoroda were published recently,!° one leading Russian Baptist called him an evangelical because of his emphasis on biblicism. To explain the beginnings in the 1860s, we must note three specific influences: Pietism, the Russian Bible, and the Molokan sect. Yet these influences were appealing because the decay within Russian Orthodoxy had become so apparent. Generally speaking, the Russian Orthodox Church was in a sorry con- dition by the middle of the nineteenth century. Since the church reform of Peter the Great in 1721 the state had managed to convert. the church administration into a sub-department of the state. The Orthodox Church could claim very impressive achievements in education, in the piety of the individual monks and in the liturgy, but the spiritual voice of the church had become muted. A modern translation of the Bible was not completed till 1876. The church had not managed to raise its voice against the institu- tion of serfdom, which was finally abolished in 1861, although the lot of the peasant did not improve significantly through emancipation. And at the parish level where a word from the church was most needed, the clergy were generally in disrepute. Prince S. P. Gagarin, governor of Astrakhan in the 1860s, declared that “‘our clergy are uncultured, uncouth and needy,” !! most of them forced to earn a living from the soil like their parishioners, yet overburdened with innumerable bureaucratic tasks imposed on them by various governmental offices. The governor of Perm province declared that the Old Believer schism and the sectarians drew their strength from the fact that the Orthodox clergymen exercise no moral influence over the people, that they are prejudiced, dull, and too strictly scholastic in their attitudes. ... In private life the motives of the cler