Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ation, choral work, evangelism, and finance. The CCECB statute declared that the council included a department for evan- gelism and another for publication, as well as others which remained un- named. Other clauses of the statute specified additional activity, and it seems evident that the CCECB tried, where possible, to follow the statute guidelines. But the major problem was the difficulty of holding a national congress and establishing a consensus. A year after the creation of the CCECB, a major event took place that Gennadi Kriuchkov later claimed had not been organized by the council but was genuinely a grass-roots phenomenon. . The May Demonstration On May 16, 1966, onlookers near the Communist Party Central Com- mittee building in Moscow witnessed a mass demonstration that had not been organized by the authorities.44 ECB congregations from 130 cities sent representatives to Moscow with a petition addressed to Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. The leaders of the 500 delegates failed to see Brezhnev, but did submit the petition. It contained requests for permission to hold a congress, for recognition of the CCECB, for an end to religious persecution and state interference in church affairs, and for the right to receive religious instruction. Initially the authorities did nothing, but on the second day the demonstration grew to 600 persons, as members of the Moscow registered church joined them. Finally, soldiers, police, and KGB officers applied force, physically beating up people and dragging them into buses for the trip to prison. Most were released the next day; others received fifteen-day sentences. A week later a similar event occurred in Kiev. On May 19 Georgi Vins and Mikhail I. Khorev, who had been instructed by the Reunification Rejected, 1964-1974 241 CCECB to find out what had happened to the believers, presented themselves at the reception desk of the Central Committee. They were told to come back in an hour and a half. When they did so, they were hustled into Black Marias for the trip to prison. Such mass demonstrations were an embarrassingly public protest against the new wave of religious persecution that had been resumed that winter.** The Western world soon learned of the event, although newsmen encountered the same restrictions as at the Sinyevsky-Daniel trial. Aside from the many people who received fifteen-day sentences, the authorities began tracing down the local leaders of the Reform Baptists. Thirty-one were arrested in the month of May alone, but arrests continued throughout the summer—a total of 128 persons were arrested, bringing the total prisoner list to 202. Arrests continued in the following year, until in August 1968 the number of Baptist prisoners peaked at 240.46 The Council of Prisoners’ Relatives The CCECB might have been destroyed had it not been for the work of the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives (CPR). This remarkable organization