Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

to ask who was missing. That is, who were the last members of the councils of the two unions before their dissolution? Had they not been invited or were they no longer living? Of the nine members elected at the last Evangelical Christian congress in 1926, only two, Jacob Zhidkov and Alexander Karev, were present. Three had died (Ivan Prokhanov, Ivan Kargel, and G. N. Piiparinan, but V. I. Bykov, V. A. Dumbrovksii, and P. S. Kapolygin remain unaccounted for. All three had been in the upper echelons of leadership since the Revolution and may have died for reasons of age. The other absentee, Prokhanov’s brother-in- law N. A. Kazakov, later resumed his career as musician and composer for the AUCECB.%8 On the Baptist side, the missing are more difficult to identify. Because of the organizational changes during the 1920s, due to the conflict between old and new Baptists, it is not fair to ask simply where were the persons elected as leaders at the last congress, in 1926. Of these, only Patkovskii was now present and some claim that he therefore provided the tenuous link to the earlier Baptist Union.*4 The last elected president, N. V. Odintsov, had died in prison in 1938 as had also the last elected secretary, Pavel Ivanov- Klyshnikov, who failed to return from a ten-year sentence imposed in 1932.95 Council member P. V. Datsko died in 1941 as did also alternate V. S. 88 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il Stepanov. The old Baptists with state aid had managed to oust the new Baptists, and the latter’s two key leaders from 1920 through 1926, P. V. Pavlov and Michael Timoshenko, were also missing. The former had died in prison in 1938; the latter was not yet released in 1944. But of the four Baptists elected to the All-Union Council, three of them (Malin, Levin- danto, and Goliaev), had all served at the All-Union level before 1926.%6 That the Soviet prison-death system had swallowed up so many key leaders must have placed a pall on the proceedings, but the claim that the most experienced representative leaders were present appears to be true. Al- though Michael Orlov and A. L. Andreev, who had remained at liberty through the most difficult years, are not named as members of the 1926 Evangelical Christian council, still they, together with Zhidkov, had long worked with Prokhanov on tasks which indicated Prokhanov’s deep trust in them.®7 There was, however, a major disconcerting factor. Were the par- ticipants free agents, or were they forced to consent to policies dictated by the state? Was it possible that these earlier heroes including all the new council members had been broken by their prison experience? Were Orlov and Andreev to be trusted? This watchful distrust of the leaders by the rank and file remains and still plagues the leadership of today. Nature of Union Achieved After the usual opening formalities, the congress heard speeches on the work of the union d