Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

he postwar AUCECB evangelical body disclaims a russification policy. But already in 1948 an article praising the great Russian language appeared in Bratskii Vestnik. It urged all ECB members to strive 256 P3 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il to speak a good Russian. “Love of the Russian language is one of the manifestations of our love to our great motherland.”4 The Russian language is the official language of the Soviet Union, but more than 20 percent of the population is unable to speak Russian. That includes some of the AUCECB leaders. At the 1974 congress, quite a few delegates expressed a wish to read the Bible and even Bratskii Vestnik in their mother tongue. The Ukraine At least 46 percent (some experts argue it is over 50 percent) of the AUCECB membership is in the Ukraine. When delegates met for the All- Union congress in 1974, the 213 Ukrainian representatives completely filled one side of the church, a visible expression of their influence. In 1960 the Moscow leadership had thought that the only way to survive was for them to issue a church statute dictated by the state. But the survival of: Soviet evangelicals was in essence due much more to its great strength in the Ukraine. This was the area where Stundism had begun and it was an area of rapid growth during the 1920s. The western parts of present-day Ukraine had been. outside Soviet territory during the inter-war period and had been spared Stalinist persecutions. When these territories were incorporated, it ‘meant that well-organized churches, often led by presbyters with Bible school training received in Danzig (Pentecostal) or Lodz (Baptist), could now help their weaker brothers in the east. Between 1952. and 1965 the evangelicals in the Ukraine increased by 47 percent, with over half of these representing converts from Orthodoxy, and possibly also from the Uniate Church that was violently suppressed after the war.® The Soviet state fully recognized the importance of the Ukraine, and its influence is apparent in the appointment of two key church officials to lead the Ukrainian church. Metropolitan Nikolai, often more powerful than the patriarch himself, headed up postwar reconstruction efforts for the Or- thodox Church in the Ukraine. A. L. Andreev performed a parallel role as AUCECB senior presbyter for the Ukraine. Andreev was a Russian, an Evangelical Christian, who reigned for twenty-one years over a membership that was more Baptist than Evangelical Christian. From the beginning he usually had several assistants. His first assistant was F. G, Patkovskii, a major Baptist representative in the union. When the Pentecos- tals, joined the union a year later, D. I. Ponomarchuk became a second assistant senior. presbyter to represent Pentecostal interests or,-more ac- curately, to persuade Pentecostals to join the union.7 Andreev was already sixty years of age in 1945, so. that it soon became Lif