Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

gions were not giving their fair share to Moscow and used the Ukraine as an illustration, Mel nikov was highly offended and insisted that he was sure they had given three times as much as Mitskevich said, but there have been subsequent in- dications that Kiev only follows reluctantly when Moscow calls, If the Ukraine was a revival center during the early years and again in the fifties,'3 there has also been rapid growth in the seventies. Why this should be so remains somewhat of a mystery. The Ukrainians themselves prefer to attribute this to the work of the Holy Spirit in their midst, but they do acknowledge that Ukrainians are often more ardent, emotional, perhaps also more responsive to faith. This feature also characterizes the Pentecos- tals and the Reform Baptists in the Ukraine. Yet one constant problem has been the shortage of presbyters, In 1953 N. I. Vysotskii declared that in recent years the number of ordained presbyters had nearly doubled, so that, at the moment, only one fifth of the congregations still had no ordained presbyter. Around this time there were 1,800 congregations. In 1974, even though the number of congregations had decreased through fusing local groups and closing many, still, out of the 1,033 presbyters in the Ukraine, 270 were not ordained. But the new senior presbyter Jacob Dukhonchenko did draw attention to the fact that many new, younger men had been elected to office and they were trying hard to encourage the election of younger, better educated leaders. He wished that the theological correspondence course could take more students. At that time 55 Ukrainians had completed the course. 16 It is also difficult to explain why there should be large groups of Reform Baptists!” and independent Pentecostals in the Ukraine. A possible reason for the latter phenomenon is that Pentecostals are particularly strong in those regions of the Western Ukraine, such as Rovno and Volhynia, which had close links to the Pentecostals in Poland before the war. This movement developed a Bible school in Danzig, whose students played a leading role in the Western Ukraine. '8 Perhaps, some might argue, the more ebullient Ukrainian character was especially responsive to the emo- tionalism of Pentecostalism, but this was also the area most frequently visited by foreign preachers once tourism resumed. Many of these, as well as several radio programs, were Pentecostalist in character. Belorussia and Moldavia The Belorussians speak their own language and have their own tradi- tions even though they are dwarfed by their Ukrainian neighbors. The | | | | | | Life in the Provinces 259 evangelical movement began here relatively late in the early 1920s. Stories about evangelical life in this area are attractive enough to make one want to live there, but there are also stories that one would rather not have experienced. It is indeed strange to hear about a