Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

rs were imprisoned. During 1923, Prokhanov, for example, was im- prisoned till he agreed to reverse himself and wrote a letter to the congrega- tions urging them to do their military duty. But the issue of military service remained a point of conflict inside both unions.29 _ According to one expert, the Russian evangelicals were most Russian in their social and economic emphasis. A good number of the leaders, of which I. S. Prokhanov was perhaps the most outstanding, were advocates of Christian socialism. Not only did they approve of socialism, but during the twenties they established a number of communes in all parts of the Soviet Union and experienced remarkable success. When the Soviet authorities began to clamp down on this activity, it was obviously due to a growing fear that the Christian communes might be more successful than the Soviet ones and would embarrass them. Prokhanov also had a vision for building a “City in the Sun” to be named “Evangelsk.” It was to be a model city for brotherly love. The plans were approved and local Soviet officials even promised the necessary financial aid and participated in the initial tree- planting ceremony. A year later in 1928 they were overruled and Evangelsk never became more than an ambitious promise.“ 38 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il A Growth Decade During those first twelve years of Soviet rule the Russian evangelicals had experienced truly phenomenal growth. Exiled leaders had returned and new freedoms had permitted increased activity. In addition, the evangel- icals benefited from a corps of newly trained missionaries. Several alert evangelical leaders, particularly Jakob Kroeker and Walter Jack, seized the opportunities provided by World War I to engage in evangelistic work among Russian prisoners of war. They formed a mission named Light in the East (Licht im Osten) and set about distributing Russian New Testaments and other literature in the camps. When they noted the warm response as well as the concern of prisoners returning to a land of Bible scarcity, they or- ganized a Bible school and correspondence classes. There were about 2,000 such converts among the POWs returning to the Soviet Union.*! Vasili G. Pavlov, who became the leading Baptist during the twenties, dated the great religious awakening in Russia from the return of the Russian POWs. They held religious meetings in tents, under the open sky, or in large rented halls. The boldness of the Russian evangelicals was due in part to their at- titude to the law. In local areas they experienced “excesses” or mistreat- ment by local authorities but they were not defeated by this because they believed that the 1918 decree had provided them with religious toleration. “The Baptists took the laws at face value. Since the legal documents declared religious freedom, the Baptists assumed that there existed in Russia the kind of freedom that they had advocated for y