Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

emselves still asking the question—‘Who are the Mennonites?” —be- cause it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain this convincingly to their young people. The problem appears to be a lack of vision for the possi- bility that non-German Mennonites could become Mennonites. Soviet his- torian A. N. Ipatov’s advice to atheist activists was that those who persisted in speaking German were the older, incorrigible ones, but that the younger people were becoming Russianized. Rather than training atheist workers to learn Low German, he urged that they concentrate on winning away those who spoke Russian. This indeed is the Mennonites’ greatest fear, yet the lessons of acculturation for Mennonites who came to Canada and Brazil was that those who adopted the new national language were also those most ac- tive in revivifying the doctrine and renewing the missionary expansion.*4 Will Pentecostals Leave? A Ukrainian atheist journal declared in October 1974 that research had shown that the majority of all Pentecostal leaders had at some time been sentenced for breaking Soviet law.®> The writers saw this as proof that the Pentecostals were a harmful phenomenon; but from another perspective it is a dramatic demonstration of the problems which have confronted the Pentecostals in their struggle to survive in the Soviet Union. It is not simply a case of a small sect being unwilling to unite with other evangelical sects. Some extreme Pentecostal groups are outrightly banned by law, and their The Movement Toward Autonomy 285 well-known emphasis on glossalalia (speaking in tongues) is freely referred to in the Soviet press as superstitious rituals which are harmful to health.56 Refusal to bear arms in military service has also been a major cause for im- prisonment. Neither the AUCECB nor the Pentecostals particularly desired the union that was forced on them in 1945. The subsequent history of the rela- tionship has been a history of dissatisfaction from the perspective of the Pentecostals. Baptists regarded it as “a long and still unfinished story of em- barrassment.’’5? Although Ernest Payne’s sensitivity to embarrassment is typically British, it shows the insensitivity many Russian Baptists displayed toward the deeply felt convictions of the Pentecostals.%8 In 1948 and 1949 increasingly tough measures were taken by the Moscow leadership to stop all aspects of emotionalism in worship services; Pentecostals in the union must now worship just like Baptists. A. N. Bidash, one of the four leaders who had signed the unity agreement, left during these years. Renewed attempts at a separate organization began. About thirty-eight percent of the Pentecostals in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast left the union and were followed by many Pentecostals in the Western Ukraine.® In 1948 Bidash and others met in Dneprodzerzhinsk to form the union of Voronaev Pentecostals.® This failed because most of the leaders were im- prisoned, but