Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ans and Baptists were predominantly poor peasants, Sixty percent were classified as poor peasants (bedniaki), 30 percent as middle peasants (seredniaki), and 10 percent were well-to-do peasants (kulaki),58 Other Tributary Streams Important for the post-World War II era was the growth of evangel- icals in two other areas. In 1921 a former Russian Baptist who had become a Pentecostal in New York returned as missionary to Odessa. Ivan Voronaev was an aggressive preacher and organizer and had considerable success, Beginnings and Patterns 43 Part of the reason for his success was that initially at least half of the converts, according to his own admission, came from persons leaving Baptist and Evangelical Christian churches. In 1924 the Union of Chris- tians of Evangelical Faith (Pentecostal) was organized in the Odessa Oblast Two years later, the union had been extended to the entire Ukraine. In 1928, Voronaey, in his own newspaper The Evangelist, listed 350 assemblies with a membership of over 17,000.60 Another important factor to remember is that not all Soviet evangel- icals are Russian. Walter Kolarz estimated in 1960 that 50 percent of the were simply annexed. This meant that the inter-war period was a period of unprecedented personal freedom for the population in this region. Therefore, in all these areas, the evangelical movement, including that of the Pentecostals, experienced rapid growth during the 1920s, In the Volhynia and Brest regions, a separate denomination known as the Church of Christ was organized in 192], By 1928 there were 35 such Unity Struggles The search for unity had dominated the evangelical movement from the beginning. It seemed obvious to those leaders with vision that if the 44 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il older confessions and Protestants were in any case in the majority. If the Protestant West could account for a 400-year history, these new Protestants of Russia needed to rush through all the developments in the much shorter space of a few decades. One observer remarked that the resultant tensions that developed were due largely to the absence of history and tradition.*4 The first official attempt to unite Russian evangelicals occurred at two conferences held in 1884. Colonel Pashkov and Baron Modest Korf invited believers from the Stundists, Baptists, Mennonite Brethren, Molokans, and Dukhobors to discuss unity. Seventy representatives met on April 1 in St. Petersburg, but the projected eight-day conference was broken up by the authorities on the fourth day. The sought-for unity would in all likelihood not have been achieved, since during the first four days numerous dif- ferences became evident. For example, some of the Pashkovites still ad- hered to paedobaptism and the Baptists from the south refused to begin the conference with a communion service once they discovered that not everyone present had undergone believer's baptis