Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ll auxiliary activities such as special meetings for children, youth, and women, excursions, children’s playgrounds, libraries, and so forth) This law and the official instruction for its execution which followed shortly thereafter7! served as the pretext for closing most of the churches, arresting the ministers, and bringing evangelical church life to a standstill. A cor- responding change in the constitution(in_1930 still granted believers the right to practice religious ritual but withdrew_the sight to religious propa- ganda. ~~ The changed situation became evident in numerous ways. Both unions were temporarily liquidated in 1929. They received no Permission to publish and it became increasingly difficult to obtain permission to hold na- tional conferences. The Baptists, for example, were forced to remove P. V. Pavlov and M. D. Timoshenko, both pacifists, as leaders, and a more tradi- tional Baptist, Nikolai Odintsov, took over the leadership.” N. V. Odintsov, president since 1926, was himself arrested November 5, 1933, and received a three-year sentence. Subsequently, Odintsov was exiled to Eastern Si- beria. Rearrested in 1938, he died shortly thereafter.73 The secretary of the Beginnings and Patterns 47 Baptist Union, P. V. Ivanov-Klyshnikov, was given a 10-year sentence in 1932 and did not live to complete it. Another board member, P. V. Datsko, was home briefly in 1938 after exile, was rearrested in 1939, and served only two years of his 10-year sentence before he died. Vasili Stepanov, alternate member of the Federal Council, had been exiled following a camp experience that broke his spirit so that he would not go to church. Neverthe- less, he was arrested again in 1937 and died in prison.” Il'ia Goliaev suc- ceeded to Odintsov’s post as president in 1983, but apparently went into hiding in 1935 and eventually died in Tashkent in 1949, The authorities had managed to exert their influence on the union by officially sponsoring two candidates for membership: I. I. Bondarenko and V. I. Kolesnikov. The reasons for their treachery are unclear, but they ap- parently gave evidence for the state at Odintsov’s trial and in other ways cooperated.” Both of them, however, also fell victim to the wave of arrests following the assassination of Kirov and both received five-year sentences, The date of their arrest, March 1935, can be regarded as the date when the Baptist Union ceased to exist. Although temporarily closed in 1930, the Evangelical Christian Union never ceased to exist entirely. Prokhanov failed to return to the Soviet Union in 1928 and the leadership passed to Jacob Zhidkov. At a meeting of the council plenum in 1931 Prokhanov was elected honorary president (he died in 1985 in Berlin) and Zhidkov, the previous vice-chairman, was elected chairman. Since 1929 the central office had been forced to move to Moscow. In mid-1935 the Evangelical Christian Council consisted of JL Zhidkov