Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

Baptists decided to shelve further unity negotiations, In 1925 came the final break. In December the Baptist plenum listed 80 instances in the past six months alone, of local conflict with Evangelical Christians and decided to issue a formal statement severing relations with the Evangelical Chris- tians.* This statement contained particularly harsh accusations against Ivan Prokhanoy. It advised local churches to avoid all links with the Evangelical Christians, even refusing to allow their ministers access to Baptist pulpits. The Baptist Union now gained the support of the Baptist World Alliance which did not reelect Prokhanov as a vice-president in 1928, The Stalinist Persecutions An evaluation of the postwar situation and its development to the present day must always include the consideration that evangelicals experienced unprecedented persecutions during the 1930s. Beginning ap- proximately in 1929 (somewhat earlier or later in different regions), state of- ficials together with so-called voluntary organizations of militant godless launched ani all-out attack on religion, utilizing mammoth amounts of propaganda and liberally applying “administrative measures,” Virtually everyone was affected somehow. The war on the churches was related to 46 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il the general purges and one can speak of similar waves of arrests. Evangel- ical leaders who survived to resume their posts later often listed in their published biographies their activities and positions before this period, as well as the period after 1944, and either omitted the 1980s or spoke obliquely about hard times in their lives or a “severe illness. Already in 1928 there were increasing signs of new pressures on the evangelicals. Prokhanov was advised not to return to the Soviet Union after attending the World Baptist Congress in Toronto, lest he be arrested. The issues of their denominational newspapers got thinner and there were more articles warning obliquely about dark days ahead. The Bible school in Moscow had to shut down after only four years of operation. The official in- dication that the situation had changed came with the promulgation of the Jaw on religious cults of April 1929. -_ This law introduced detailed regulations for controlling the activities of all religious bodies.” But the list of activities forbidden to the religious bodies appears to be a list of the techniques evangelicals had introduced for expanding and strengthening their movement Participation of minors was again severely restricted, clergymen and preachers had to limit their activities to the area of residence of their members, and elaborate registra- tion procedures were introduced. All nonregistered activity was forbidden. Article .17 of the law forbade creation of any mutual credit societies or cooperative commercial undertakings; giving material aid to members; and a