Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ely 20,000 emigrated to Canada and South America, an immigration that included a disproportionately large number of their most able leaders. Collectivization or dekulakization, as it was experienced by many Mennonites, changed the shape of their large colonies in South Russia and on the Volga. ‘ The Mennonite remnant now had several important features. A high percentage of the families ‘consisted of mothers with children whose fathers had disappeared while they were small. The children, due to the upheavals of the war and the subsequent ten years in the camps, had received almost no education, and an educated Mennonite became a rarity. Mennonites were labeled as Germans and fascists and indeed retained a strong sense of identity as Germans, even though a recent Soviet scholar argues that their roots were more Dutch than German. Mennonites had refused to issue an official declaration of loyalty and therefore became an illegal denomination after the war. This meant there was no central church headquarters to provide leadership. Their chief doctrinal distinctive, pacifism, had been beaten out of them. Individual Mennonites lost contact with each other, and the result was that the religious meaning behind the term Mennonite had been virtually obliterated, The Mennonite church very slowly began to re-emerge in the mid- fifties. The role of the released prisoners in fostering the revival was described earlier.54 In 1956 two North American Mennonites, Harold S. Bender and David P. Wiens, reestablished contact on a visit and gained an insight into the seriousness of the problem. A few leaders, such as Heinrich Voth, Philip Cornies, and Franz Pauls managed to meet them at some of the hotels, but these men experienced serious difficulties with the state sub- sequently, Harold Bender, on his own initiative, urged the Mennonites to try to seek shelter under the Baptist umbrella and did his part to seek out AUCECB leaders and ask their assistance.35 Many Mennonites had found their way to a registered Baptist church while many others shared in the fellowship groupings which emerged dur- ing the revivals, in which denominational affiliation was initially secondary, When the Baptists finally succeeded in calling a congress in 1963, there The Movement Toward Autonomy 281 were three Mennonites with full voting rights and one with advisory rights among those attending.%* All represented AUCECB member churches, that is, they represented Russians, Ukrainians, as well as Germans, Heinrich K. Allert, a preacher from Karaganda, was persuaded to ask the delegates to accept the Mennonites into the union. Although 1963 has since been claimed as the year when the union took place, 1966 would be more ac- curate. Bratskii Vestnik had mentioned that Harold Bender met the Baptists in London in 1955, but did not mention the first Mennonite visit to the Soviet Union, and it was only in 1958 when the Germans in Novosibirsk or-