Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

began selling books to Russian-speaking peasants. One such Bible colporteur was Martin Kalweit, the man who baptized the first Russian Baptist. This was a life for heroes. The colporteur would arrive in a village, locate the individuals who could read to sell them some books, or he would read to a small group of curious people. Often he had to leave quickly to escape the local constable trying to arrest him for proselytizing among Orthodox believers, which was forbid- den. Jacob Zhidkov recalled his own youth spent with his grandparents while his own father traveled the countryside with a rucksack full of books. As a small child he had met two-year-old Polia Kapustinskaia, whose family needed temporary lodging before joining their father S. E. Kapustinskii, who had been exiled to the Trans-Caucasus region because of his work for the Bible Society in Orel Oblast. Years later Jacob and Polia were reunited again, this time in marriage. 8 The seedbed having been prepared by Pietism and by Bible colporteurs, evangelicalism at first had its greatest success among the Molokans, a purely Russian sect which began in the mid-eighteenth century. One of their leading preachers was Simeon Uklein of Tambov, who emphasized’ the primacy of Holy Scripture, opposed the sacra- mentalism of the state church, rejected all militarism, and stressed the equality of all men. The Molokans differed from Russian Baptists pri- marily in that they rejected baptism. Baptists therefore won converts among them by persuading Molokans about the scriptural admonition to baptism. Major leaders in the evangelical-Baptist movement, such as Nikita J. Vo- ronin, Dei I. Mazaev, Vasili G. Pavlov, Ilia A. Goliaev, and Ivan S. Prok- hanov, as well as Jacob Zhidkov and Alexander Karev, had Molokan back- grounds, © Since the war, official Russian Baptist historians have frequently com- pared the evangelical movement in the Soviet Union to an ever-widening stream fed initially by three tributaries with several tributary streams join- ing subsequently. The way such tributaries fused with each other in the central stream and became indistinguishable from each other is precisely the way the AUCECB (All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians- Baptists) leadership likes to regard its union. If we take into consideration that the AUCECB eventually became a multinational union, not only Russian or Slavic, then earlier tributaries must be added. The first Baptists Beginnings and Patterns 33 appeared in Poland in 1858 and many of the Polish Baptists were sub- sequently absorbed into the Russian Empire.” As early as 1861 the Baptist movement came to the Baltic, to Latvia.2! But the three most important tributary streams are the Baptists in the Caucasus, Stundism in the Ukraine, and the upper-class Pashkovite movement in the capital, the organi aeneadswncreeenese™ . Several key leaders joined the group here and later eae prominent in the n