Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

he latter remaining a major state prohibition. One wonders what they really believe. Can their early pacifism be fully suppressed? Is it not the lesson of his- tory that war and violence are futile, that revolution by violence breeds more violence, more injustice and inhumanity? The biblical thrust is deeply pacifistic and the biblical Soviet evangelicals cannot escape this, even if at present they try to appease a bad conscience by separating their personal and public ethics. Living a gospel of peace has frequently proved to be yery costly—what will the pacifist message of the Bible cost in the Soviet Union? Will it result in a longer list of prisoners of conscience? Or will constructive alternative service become a possibility finally and permit Soviet evangel- icals to demonstrate their love of the motherland in something more constructive than learning to shoot guns and rockets? In the late fifties, Nikita Khrushchev began to push for a rapid transformation of the Soviet Union from the intermediate stage of socialism to full communism. That meant a major effort to eliminate religion. Of- ficially they were going to use educational methods (vospitanie), but the administrative measures (administrirovanie) remain in people’s memories more vividly. In rapid order, half of the then-existing churches were closed. Secret changes in the legislation on cults made the church life that The Evangelical in Soviet Society 467 remained exceedingly difficult. There was little legal protection for the church, since few of the new freedoms permitted after 1944 had been incor- porated into the law. As the antireligious propaganda campaign continued its embarrassingly semi-literate attack, a resistance movement developed that eventually forced the state authorities to abandon many aspects of the campaign. The first dissent came from the Baptists, whose skill in com- municating with each other through the illegal Samizdat channel soon was followed by other religious and also political dissenters. Due in large part to this Samizdat, the Western public became aware of what had happened. At present few religious persons are arrested without the Western press report- ing it. The antireligious campaign has been a costly failure. Religion did not disappear. Rather, it is now attracting increased interest in the Soviet popu- lation. The Soviet Union suffered a loss of face before its own people, as well as before world opinion, because of its penchant for crude administriro- vanie. The more recent official claims that state policy guarantees religious freedom but that overzealous local officials sometimes engage in illegality against Christians is an eloquent indication of the still-undeveloped sense of legality in the Soviet Union. Even today it is still unclear who has more power, the Council for Religious Affairs which reports directly to the Council of Ministers, or the KGB. Even vospitanie efforts have had limited