Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

delegated into the All-Union Council. President of the council was Jacob Zhidkov and the secretary was Alexander V. Karev. “As soon.as cir- cumstances permit we intend to call a general All-Union conference of Evangelical Christians and Baptists, where the final fusion of the two orga- nizations into one union is to be accomplished.” Apparently by February 1948, ten persons had agreed on the nature of the union, had identified the president and secretary, and had left the choice of name up to the local congregations. Levindanto’s report to the 1944 congress differs slightly by failing to mention the president and secretary and listing only a nine-member council; one of them, L A. Goliaev, had died in September 1942.%8 The letter to Rushbrooke men- tioned Urstein as the fifth Evangelical Christian representative, but this in- dividual was not mentioned in 1944 and is unknown from earlier Evange- lical Christian history. Unity Congress Participants Without question, the recipients of the Bratskii Vestnik report would look closely at the list of congress participants before deciding to consider it a legitimate congress. Such an examination of participants required not only noting who was present, but also asking who was missing and why. A total of 45 persons attended.2® There were 21 Moscow representatives; seven of these were women. The next largest delegation came from the Ukraine; these numbered 11. In addition there were three from Novosibirsk, one from Kuibyshev (Levindanto), one from Leningrad, two from White A New Evangelical Union 87 Russia, and several others from the Russian Federation. A subsequent report on the congress ® claimed that representatives from Arkhangel’sk and from the Caucasus had also been present but these are not listed among the official 45, although it is easily possible that delegates came from prison camps in these areas but were officially listed as representing their former home church. Out of the 45 delegates, 28 were Evangelical Christians and 19 were Baptists. This imbalance should not necessarily call the competence of the congress into question. If there were 112 times as many Baptists as Evangel- ical Christians in 1907, by the 1930s there were three times as many Evan- gelical Christians as Baptists.3! In addition, it was the Evangelical Christian Union that had managed to maintain a form of existence including contact. with congregations so that it was in a better position to invite its local leaders to the congress. The seven women present were there because they were the ones who had signed appeals to Christian women to help the war effort with bandages and similar necessities. But a further reason was that - hereby the wife of the longtime Baptist president Mazaev could lend her prestige to the congress by her presence. Another woman, A. I. Mozgova, had served as secretary for the last Baptist president, Odintsov.” A much more interesting question is