Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

In December 1955 he married Lina Korol’kova who had been rehabilitated and released in June of that year from a twenty-five-year prison sentence she had received in 1950. They. moved to Kirovograd in the Ukraine, joined the AUCEGB church and Antonov became secretary to the presbyter. When Antonov objected to state interference in the list of baptismal candidates he lost his post as secretary and began to baptize young people secretly. In spite of this, the congregation elected him presbyter in 1960. From 1962 to 1965 he worked full time for the Orgkomitet. A man with an even stranger story was Dmitri Vasilevich Miniakov (1922- ). He had met Christian believers for the first time when he began a prison sentence in 1944, He was finally converted in 1949 in the prison camp and baptized there, the prisoners having organized their own con- gregation. The presbyter of this congregation was transferred to another camp in 1950 so fellow prisoners elected Miniakov presbyter and he was or- dained by the departing presbyter prisoner! Miniakov was released in 1952 and moved to the city of Mariinsk (Kemerovo Oblast) where he became the local presbyter. In 1958 he moved his family (he had married in 1953) to Barnaul, Siberia and was again active as a preacher. Here the congregation tried to excommunicate its presbyter Ia. F. Sablin in 1960 because of the lat- ter’s close cooperation with the authorities but Sablin went to the au- thorities and the church was closed. Miniakov then became the presbyter of the unregistered house fellowships that began to meet. When Gennadi Kriuchkov visited them in the fall of 1961 the congregation elected Mi- niakov as their representative to the Orgkomitet. But he missed out per- sonally on much of the subsequent drama in Barnaul since he was in prison from 1962 to 1965 and again from 1967, to 1970. Still another gifted leader was Kornelius Korneivich Kreker (Kroeker), who was born into a Mennonite Brethren family in the Altai region of Si- beria in 1920, Although he had a Christian upbringing (his father was ar- Reunification Rejected, 1964-1974 239 rested for his faith in 1988 and never returned), Kreker started studies in a pedagogical institute and did not become converted till 1943 in Osinniki (Kemerovo Oblast). He had been sent there in 1942 to work as a teacher in the Workers’ Army. In 1944 he was baptized in the local ECB church and almost immediately after was interrogated by the authorities who expressed their usual surprise that an educated man would be religious. Kreker remained with the church group that split away when the authorities began to interfere. He was ordained presbyter in 1958, served a five-year term in exile in the taiga from 1962 to 1967, after which the Initsiationiki elected him to work for the CCECB. After a prison term (1968-71) he became a full member of the CCECB. Another very important leader, although only briefly on the council it- sel