Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

alov (1950), Zinaida P. Tarasova (1942), Ida D. Korotun (1938), Tatiana S. Kozhemiakina (1987), and Nadezhda G. L’vova (1946) (Bulletin 18). 75. Arrested were: Ivan I. Leven (1928), David I. Koop (1931), Liudmila Zait- seva (1946), Larisa Zaitseva (1950). A printed announcement with photos appeared soon after. Recently one Khristianin co-worker developed cancer. Instead of obtain- ing treatments at a nearby hospital, this co-worker bade farewell, then left for a distant city to die in unknown surroundings in order not to betray the work. She had devoted ten of her 40 years to the secret press. Another press was discovered in Dnepropetrovsk in January 1980. The four arrested received three year prison terms. In June 1980 still another printing press was found in the village of Glivenki, Kra- snodarskii Krai. There were four arrests. ; 76. Nachrichten von den Feldern der Verfolgung, Nov.-Dec./78, pp. 9-10. 954 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il We want to remind you, brothers, of the troubles we had in the province of Asia. The burdens laid upon us were so heavy that we gave up all hope of being alive. We felt that the death 77. BL, 1-8/75; 4/75 reprinted in RCDA, 4-9/75, pp. 114-20. sentence had been passed on us. But this happened so that : 78. For a more detailed recent assessment see my article, “The Reform we should rely not on ourselves, but only on God, who raises Baptists Today,” RCL, 1/80. pp. 28-38. the dead. —2 Corinthians 1:8-10 9 Life in the Provinces: Moscow Is Not Asia, Siberia, nor Even Kiev Moscow is not the Soviet Union. It may be the capital of a highly . centralized state and the headquarters of a highly centralized evangelical union, but life in the provinces is often very different. In fact, the word province ’is inadequate to suggest the differences between the different re- publics that make up the Soviet Union. A tour of the Baltic, the Ukraine, Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia is like visiting that many different worlds. Already in 1947 President Zhidkov had claimed that twelve nationality groupings were included in their union.! There were Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians (White Russians), Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Karelo- | Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Moldavians, Georgians, and Armenians. At the All-Union congress in 1974, an additional five nationalities were represented: Germans, Poles, Bulgarians, Mordvinians, and Gagaus.? A handy, widely accepted name for this motley group is Russian Baptists. But we do them an injustice if we assume that they are all Russians and that they are all Baptists. Already in the 1920s, non-Russian evangelicals complained about a russification tendency which they detected in Prokhanov’s Evangelical Christian Union.’ The statute of that union, in fact, stipulated that the World Alliance of Evangelical Christians could become a reality only under ° Russian leadership. T