Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

head of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs, to Patriarch Alexei soon became known, This letter permitted the pa- triarchate to own property and otherwise function as a legal entity even though the legislation forbade this.!®> The emphasis that Karpov and his colleague Polianskii tried to give was that their councils were serving largely a liaisonary function. It was immediately apparent that churches registered by the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults were left relatively undisturbed in their conduct of worship services, whereas the unregistered groups experienced considerable harshness from local authorities. The legislation of 1929 stated that a minimum of twenty persons was required before a congregation or “society,” to use the Soviet terminology, could be registered.” All had to be over eighteen years of age. Twenty persons therefore had to sign the request for initial registration and a list of all the members was maintained by the local state authorities. The law specified that a three-member execu- tive body elected by the society should represent it. The law further specified that the state registration agencies were entitled to remove indi- vidual members from the executive council of a local religious society. All meetings additional to regular worship services required special permission. No criteria for registration were established but the law did list a good number of activities which were violations of the law—any violation of the law was sufficient ground for removal of registration. According to the law, Renewal and Church Growth, 1944-1957 61 P was itself a major problem, Unof- ficial restrictions specified that a prayer house must not be located too close to a school or public building. (The public must be protected from harmful influences! ) Sometimes the building had to be purchased and usually it had to be remodeled. If the previous owner discovered the potential purpose of the building, he might decide not to sell, buckling to pressure from un- friendly authorities, The risk of sudden revocation of registration was always present. ; The second issue of Bratskii Vestnik requested the churches to send all registration materials to Moscow, where the work of registering the churches was being conducted. That soon changed, and it became the task of the senior presbyter to assist local congregations with the registration central areas of the Russian F ederation (RSFSR), as well as further east in. Siberia and the Far East, probably because the state administrative ma- chinery for carrying this through was undeveloped. !8 No statistics exist to indicate exactly how many received registration and how many were refused. The scattered sources available suggest that initially registration was granted with little difficulty to urban churches but it was more difficult for village churches. Often several village congrega- tions were combined in order to pro