Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

and membership in a few oblasts or the number of presbyters under a specific senior presbyter) resulted in the following general esti- mates: RSFSR—24,471 (390 con regations); Ukraine—54,17] (1,081 cong.); Be- avin 8 788 (88 cong.): Baltic Republics—8,720 (163 cong. ); Caucasus—3,500 (14 cong.); Kazakh SSR—4,000 (25 cong. ); Central Asia—8,800 (23 cong.). A corrected total using additional data suggested a membership of 148,213 in 2,600 congregations in 1948, 748, p. 87, stated that the statute “consists of 44 points regularizing the work of the AUCECB, senior presbyters, presbyters, dea- cons, Brothathaad councils, revision commissions, choirs, etc.”; the next issue an- nounced that congregations were receiving copies of the organizational structure, as well as certain guidelines (6/48, p. 67), 23. When Bratskii Vestnik renewed publication in 1953 a list of all the foreign Denmark and a Baptist pastor from Philadelphia. - 24. BV, 5-6/54, p. 114. P the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, established in 1926 and repealed in December 1958, is printed in English in Conquest, The Great Terror, 76 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II pp. 741-46, It permitted charges against anyone who might represent a threat to the regime; that is, all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. 26. Interview data including court sentence. For certain details I am indebted to Dr. Cornelius Krahn, 27. Bernard Feron, Gott in Sowjetrussland (Essen, 1963), pp. 56-60. Cf. Struve, p. 269; Robert C. Tucker, “Party and Church in the Soviet Union—Travel Notes,” The Russian Review, 1959, p. 285. 28. But a decade later a Soviet writer ublicly acknowledged this when, in connection with the Mennonites, he reset that “a new wave a activity began in the sect in 1956-57, when active preachers began to return from prison” (F. Fedo- renko, Sekty ikh vera i dela [Moscow, 1965], p. 153). 29. Major research on this subject is in progress but a useful survey is Adam Giesinger, From Catharine to Khrushchev: The Story of Russia’s Germans (Win- nipeg, 1974), chaps. 16 and 17, 30. On_the politics of repatriation see Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta (London, 1978), and Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret (London, 1974). What hap- pened to those who returned is a story told in semiautobiographical form in Walter Wedel, Nur zwanzig Kilometer (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1979). 31. Quoted in Giesinger, p. 317. ia For a general survey see Conquest, The Great Terror, Chap. 10, especially p. 481f. 38. Due to a more tolerant treatment under the tsars, German Mennonites and Baptists had a more developed church organization including seminaries, Many of them also attended German theological schools in Eads (Poland), Dorpat University, or even St. Chrischona seminary in Basel. 34, Licht im Osten, Korntal files, 35. Interview with Evgenii Bresenden, Pasadena, Calif., November 1977. 36. BV, 3-4/54, p. 91; 2/5