Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

e held between the Soviet-German leaders and the BWA leaders, and: they did manage to meet with AUCECB representatives casually. But the AUCECB demanded in a long telegram that the BWA not recognize the Germans, citing appropriate paragraphs of the BWA constitution.® Later Bratskii Vestnik reported that the German immigrants had tried to sow discord but their influence had been neutralized.®! In response to a request from a-fellow Baptist for the dates of formal appeals addressed by the Reform Baptists to the BWA, Ronald Goulding re- plied: “As far as I am able to discover there has been no direct approach from any dissident group made to the Baptist World Alliance or the Eu- ropean Baptist Federation at any time.”® He did add that in 1965 a docu- ment addressed to the UN and other organizations and also to the BWA ““was reported as being sent” but the copy that arrived in London had no address for sending a reply. Another document was received in: 1967. In their files the BWA have a copy of the 1960 Letter of Instructions (received through other channels later) and a few other materials in translation but they were generally not well informed on the issue. They had relied for advice on a man who knew the Soviet Union inti- mately. Adolphs Klaupiks had been general secretary of the Latvian Baptist Union before becoming a refugee during World War II. Later he became the relief secretary for the BWA and beginning with 1961, he made trips to the Soviet Union almost annually.* Some of the early Samizdat materials were known to him but he decided it was better not to publicize the con- flict. When he published a statement in Baptist World in 1968, the em- phasis was that the crisis had been surmounted, no longer was there a drop- off of members to the dissidents and even some of their preachers were The Foreign Connection 377 returning to the AUCECB. Klaupiks regularly emphasized that the split was an internal Baptist matter; publicity could only do harm. Klaupiks knew the situation well, probably thought that the wisest policy was to maintain silence and to try to encourage reconciliation through personal visits. But his partisan sentiments were clearly with the AUCECB, Many of those men he had known and loved personally for years. Given the difficult situations in which they lived, his natural response was to be protective. He was also heavily influenced by the personal com- ments of Moscow leaders who described Initsiativniki as extremists, typical of the quarrelsome ways of Baptists in many other countries. These typical factors were certainly present in given incidents, but the overwhelming documentation that was accumulating clearly pointed to systematic viola- tion of religious liberty. The Baptist World Alliance, which prided itself on being a spokesman for religious liberty, found itself muzzled in this case. Baptist leaders were also not free of the tendency to engage in excessive praise