Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

on the responsibilities that parents have to raise their children in the spirit of communism. In the past several years there appears to have been some relaxation in this area and the Council for 298 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il Religious Affairs chairman, Vladimir Kuroedov, wrote in Izvestia on January 28, 1978, that “children may visit church and participate in the worship service.” The CPR Bulletin, however, printed numerous letters claiming that practical experience still gave them the opposite impression.” In 1968 the fate of the Sloboda family became a matter of widespread concern because the authorities had first sent the children away to or- phanages, and when the mother still persisted in teaching religion to the other children, sent the mother to prison. Not long afterward the Reform Baptists circulated a document containing 1,433 signatures collected from forty-two different towns and villages in seven republics. All of the signators were mothers complaining about persecution because of their children.‘ They mentioned sixty-four new arrests which affected about 200 children. When the atheist journal Nauka i Religiia published an article on or- phanages in 1971, it stated that the great majority of children in orphanages were not orphans but had in fact been removed from their parents for various reasons.® The illustration given concerned a member of the True Orthodox sect. Generally speaking, however, most of the Baptist docu- mentation suggests that actual loss of parental rights has been relatively rare, but the threat to remove children has been employed with alarming frequency. In recent issues of the CPR Bulletin there is now a special sec- tion devoted to the subject of children. It was the children who were largely responsible for precipitating the split in the Russian Baptist movement. The major criticism against the 1960 statute and letter of instruction was that it advised against teaching religion to children, against permitting them in the worship services. State legisla- tion did not and still does not permit children under eighteen to be members of religious societies, As a result, the primary complaint against the Reform Baptists became that they had such an active program for children. Michael Bourdeaux has pointed out that in 1966 all the court cases emphasized this as the primary charge and it was also the primary com- plaint in newspaper articles.® Soviet atheists, committed to the theory: of social conditioning, have placed tremendous emphasis on atheist education. Soviet society has indeed become much more outrightly atheist than most other societies, yet official complaints about the insufficiency of the atheist propaganda reads like a never-ending litany. An article in Pravda (January 22, 1979) complains that many young people were not yet liberated from the religious influence of their parents and did not mind going