Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

evangelicals Reunification Rejected, 1964-1974 235 had been forced to acknowledge defeat. That hurt. Throughout the ne- gotiations each side always expected the other to make the bigger con- cession. Neither side appeared to be influenced by those spiritual heirs of the 1920s, who expressed their faith in nonresistant love.*8 Those early pac- ifists had been successfully eliminated. Among Pentecostals and Men- nonites that nonresistant mentality was still functioning. That explains why those two bodies agreed to subordinate themselves to a union where they were treated as second rank. I. K. Pan’ko, shortly before his death, again urged fellow Pentecostals to join and stay in the union, because the New Testament admonished the Christian to take the attitude of “always considering others better than yourselves.’’2° A Second Union Develops—CCECB The AUCECB agreed to engage in formal discussions with the -Orgkomitet leaders only after the reformers announced, in September 1965, that they had formed the| Council of Churches of Evangelical Christian- Baptists (CCECB). Once the CCECB had formed, it quickly developed a momentum of its own and from then on there were, in fact, two ECB unions of churches functioning in the Soviet Union. The reformers’ first leader, A. F. Prokofiev, ceased to play a leading role following his arrest in May 1962. This man, about whom relatively little is known, eventually became an embarrassment to the reformers, During his five-year term of exile (1967-72) he had circulated one letter which reemphasized the sanctification theme,*° but then committed adultery and was excommunicated by the CCECB.®! Another gifted and much more irenic person, Boris M. Zdorovets, was also eliminated from any influential role. After his first ten years of prison and exile (1962-72) he was rearrested at a youth rally ten months later and received a further four-year sentence, Gennadi K. Kriuchkov and Georgi P. Vins (beginning in August 1963) very quickly emerged as the two dominant figures in the movement. Both were relatively well educated; Kriuchkov was an electrician, and Vins an electrical engineer. Both were young and aggressive, and both were no strangers to prison. Vins’s father had been an active evangelical leader in Si- beria and the Far East. He was first arrested in Moscow in 1930 at a conference of Baptists when Georgi was only two. Young Georgi saw his father for short intervals a few years later between two other arrests, but after the final arrest in 1937, he never heard from his father again. Georgi started attending church in Omsk, Siberia, in 1944 and was converted soon after. Baptism followed on June 5, 1945, when he was only 236 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II seventeen years old. In 1946 he and his mother moved to Kiev where he soon started to preach in the registered church located on Spassky Street. During these years he continue