Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

a member of the Orgkomitet in 1962.2 He and a younger associate, | M. I. Khorev, regularly organized large meetings in the forest near Kishinev. An atheist source claims that the reformers established twenty congregations totalling no more than 400 persons, but that appears to be a major understatement considering the attention paid to the movement in Moldavia. Moldavia had the unhappy distinction of becoming another Barnaul when a young twenty-one-year-old Moldavian soldier was tortured to death in 1970. The story of Ivan Moiseev was circulated in CPR Bulletin No. 9 and in other Samizdat. The authorities rendered their account absurd by changing the official version several times. Registered churches as far away as Central Asia were fined fifty rubles for mentioning Moiseev in the service. The torture of this soldier appears to have been unusually severe. But the major impact of Moiseev’s story is the picture it gives of the re- markable faith and witness of a simple peasant, while the miracles he expe- rienced forced some of the medical doctors to begin to wonder about God.3! Baltic Baptists Whereas Belorussia and the Ukraine are Slavic, Estonia and Latvia have a West European culture. Not only do the medieval city centers ap- pear German, the European culture is evident in the more restrained wor- ship style, the performance of oratorios and also less crowded church services. At the 1963 congress Senior Presbyter P. G. Egle of Latvia com- plained that they were losing membership and were in sore need of younger ministers.°2 Till then Latvian membership had actually been growing. By 1954 ‘there were ninety-one churches with 6,600 baptized members and two years later Senior Presbyter Friedrich E. Khuns referred to 100 congrega- tions with 9,000 members. Yet, when they celebrated their hundredth an- niversary in 1960, Khuns declared that there were eighty churches, while in 1963 Baltic Senior Presbyter Levindanto reported that Latvia had sixty- seven congregations with 6,488 members. The drop had been sudden and 264 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II appeared to be directly linked to the antireligious policy under Khrushchev. Since then, Latvians have held their own, and at present they represent about 6,000 members.38 Estonia, the neighboring republic, has its own unique history and unique language. Estonian evangelicals celebrated their seventy-fifth an- niversary in 1959. At that time Senior Presbyter Johannes Lipstok, stated that the gradual decline had been stopped. Whereas there had been 100 congregations in 1949, there were now eighty-eight congregations with 9,000 ‘persons. Their massive church in Tallinn had 1,800 members, but otherwise each local church averaged 100 members. The membership de- cline did not stop, and there are at present seventy-eight congregations with 7,500 members. The puzzle behind this decline, which was artificially induced, at least