Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ears.”4 Vasili Pavlov, writing during the early twenties, observed that millions of their fellow believers abroad “‘are interested in how we breathe under Soviet power. And since religious freedom is most important to us and we turn lit- tle attention to material (concerns), we have hitherto consistently answered: “Well.” 48 Their single-minded concern for the religious task is illustrated by the way they submitted to the Soviet authorities. First, they believed that it was God’s will to submit to the established government. Second, however, they were convinced that ‘God's will was for them to preach the Baptist Gospel in the Soviet Union.”“4 They hoped to maintain the freedom to evangelize by submitting to the Soviet regime. This was also the logic behind those Baptists such as V. V. Ivanov-Klyshnikov who was prepared to reject pac- ifism because, as he reported to the 1926 congress, “in the interest of retain- ing for the Baptist Union its freedom of activity it was necessary for the congress to reject pacifism forthrightly.”4° Later they were to discover that Beginnings and Patterns 39 they had misjudged Soviet promises and had been too naive, but to the present day this has been the approach of the AUCECB. Entirely accurate statistics do not exist, but by 1917 the evangelical movement had grown to about 150,000. During the next seven years both Evangelical: Christians and Baptists increased their number almost five- fold.46 It was reported in 1924 that in Siberia they were maintaining a growth rate of 10 percent annually. In the Ukraine the rate was up to 15 percent. Some local congregations were especially active. The seven Evan- gelical Christian congregations in Leningrad in 1926 had a combined membership of 392, of which only 165 had been members before the Revo- lution. By 1930 the membership numbered 900. The Baptist congregation in Leningrad in 1924 had 372 members of which only 92 had joined before 1917. This too was the period of greatest increase in the Far East in the Amur, Primore’, and Zabaikal oblasts, where between 1921 and 1927 the number of believers increased 2.5 times. Jakob Wiens, earlier a key leader in the Siberian Union, had arrived in Blagoveshchensk in 1919 following a seven-year stay in the USA and be- came president of the Far Eastern Baptist Union. This union had been or- ganized only six years earlier when V. G. Pavlov was exiled there.47 In the oldest congregations in the Ukrainian union, whose histories went back to the seventies and eighties of the previous century, the growth was dramatic. In the village of Novo-Vasil’evka, for example, membership increased from 130 in 1922 to 315 in 1926. In the village of Astrakhanka membership increased from 100 in 1924 to 189 in 1926. One of the primary reasons for this rapid growth was surely the role of the evangelists. The central Baptist and Evangelical Christian unions sent out evangelists to start new churches. Th