Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

he conference opened and the mandate commission could confirm the credentials of the delegates, vice-president A. L. Andreev declared that the conference had the legitimate rights of a congress. During a break delegate tickets were changed—the word “conference” was struck out and replaced by “congress,” The Orgkomitet was not present, nor had it received an invitation to attend, but several Initsiativniki supporters did attend. The AUCECB printed a forty-eight-page report on the congress which went into extensive The Union Defended, 1963-1969 203 detail. The Orgkomitet also printed a report on the congress based on the notes taken’ by a participant and added their own comments. At several points the Orgkomitet version includes rather significant data which is help- ful for assessing what happened.8 The 450 persons attending (compared with forty-seven at the 1944 unity congress) represents a significant improvement in general representa- tion. Two hundred and ten persons were present as official delegates, had been elected by congregations, and represented all oblasts, republics, and regions. I. I. Motorin, credentials or mandate commission chairman, em- phasized that the representatives included not only senior presbyters but also presbyters and preachers, including persons from former Pentecostal and Mennonite congregations. An additional forty-five persons had the right to speak but not to vote and the remainder were guests. Not quite half of the delegates (eighty-nine to be exact) represented the Ukraine and an additional. fourteen came from Belorussia. The Russian Federation had sixty-six delegates, of whom fourteen came from Eastern and Western Si- beria. The remaining delegates were divided as follows: Latvia, six; Estonia, five; Moldavia, five; the Caucasus, seven; and Central Asia, seventeen, of which eight came from Kazakhstan. In 1969 Karev explained that since detailed statistics had never been given he would also avoid them at that congress. But the reformers in their report quoted ‘Karev as claiming that on July 1, 1963, there were 1,696 registered congregations totaling 175,688 members, This would mean that each delegate represented 840 members or eight congregations, Distribu- tion of delegates by region roughly conforms to the estimated membership distribution, although in Rovno, the oblast in the Western Ukraine with the greatest number of churches, each of the six delegates represented 1,700 members or twenty-seven congregations, 10 At each congress letters of thanks to the Council for Religious Affairs and even to the head of government were approved, although this was not reported in Bratskii Vestnik till 1969. One other fact that has never been ac- knowledged publicly until 1979 is that representatives of the Council for Religious Affairs attended each congress. Considering this damper on free- dom of expression, the relative frankness with which some delegates expres