Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

e he would preach to them. Gradually more were converted, a church was organized, and a better-educated new convert was elected the leader. Seventy years later there were sixty congregations in the oblast.” At first the Stundists attempted to remain within the fold of Or- thodoxy. But as the number of distrustful and worried priests increased, the persecution of these sectarians labeled Stwndists intensified, causing them to develop a self-identity outside of Orthodoxy. Then in 1869 the aggressive and self-confident German Baptist leader Johann Gerhard Oncken visited these communities and eventually persuaded them to accept believer's bap- tism. Some of them accepted an ordained clergy as well.?6 Oncken had also persuaded key leaders of the newly emerging Men- nonite Brethren movement of the rightness of baptism by total immersion. One of these Mennonite Brethren leaders, Abraham Unger, baptized the first Stundist, Efim Tsymbal, in 1869. Another of the early Mennonite Brethren evangelists, Johann Wieler, called meetings of Stundists and Cau- casian Baptists in 1882 and 1884. In 1884 he was elected president of the first short-lived attempt to form a Russian Baptist union.?” The third major tributary stream, that of the Pashkovites, was even less structurally precise than were the Stundists. A British nobleman, Lord Radstock, had experienced a personal conversion during the stress of the Crimean war and had joined the Plymouth Brethren.” In 1874 he visited St. Petersburg to hold a series of evangelistic meetings among the Russian aristocracy. These were primarily Bible studies followed by prayer and intense discussion led by the very persuasive Radstock. As a result, nu- merous prominent persons, such as Princess Lieven, Baron M. M. Korf and Colonel V. A. Pashkov, were converted. Radstock soon returned home and Colonel Pashkov became such a zealous activist for the movement that it came to be called Pashkovism.2* Due to the influence of the Plymouth Brethren, the Pashkovites did not ordain leaders, baptize, or maintain membership rolls. Pashkov became Beginnings and Patterns 35 very active in literature publication and used his influence and wealth to this end. Through this activity, Pashkov came in contact with Bible colporteur Deliakov and his stepson Ivan Zhidkov, and they launched joint publication ventures.2° Also as a result of Pashkov’s irenic style, it became possible to call the first meeting of the proposed Russian Baptist Union, which met in his house in 1884. When a full-fledged union was finally or- ganized in 1909, it was called the Union of Evangelical Christians in deference to the Pashkovites, who took a looser attitude toward standardiza- tion of doctrine and liturgy. As long as the evangelical movement was restricted to the foreign colonists living in the empire, it had little to fear. In 1879 the Baptist “sect” had. been legalized, but, according to the Ober-Prokuror