Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ne of two ways. According to the law, a soldier refusing in- duction can be punished with a four-year loss of freedom.® Beginning in 1976, the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives of the Reform Baptist movement officially recognized imprisoned conscientious objectors from its ranks as le- gitimately suffering for their faith. Thirteen individuals have been included on their prisoner list.67 Many more young people in the Reform Baptist union are conscientious objectors who have benefited from a second al- ternative state response. By indicating that they are believers, they im- mediately become suspicious characters in the eyes of the state and are transferred to working brigades where they do not need to bear weapons. In fact, as numerous individuals have assured this writer, this is also a widespread practice among AUCECB Baptists. Pacifism is not yet a majority position in the Christian church in general, but in recent years leading theologians have reached broad agreement that the thrust of the New Testament message is unquestionably pacifist in both a personal and a social sense. Most theologians and churchmen, however, argue that the New Testament emphasis is too idealistic and opt for a Niebuhrian ethic.® But the Russian Baptist union, with its strong claim to reject all modernism and its assertion of an unques- tioning commitment to the Bible as the source of truth, should logically re- ject the war theology espoused by Zhidkov and Mitskevich. The Peace Offensive and the Evangelicals If the Second World War resulted in the emergence of the new Soviet evangelicals, the Cold War significantly influenced the shape of their development. In March 1947 Winston Churchill summed up the Western attitude to postwar Soviet foreign policy by declaring that an Iron Curtain Preaching and Peace 121 had descended across the continent. Behind that curtain lay the Soviet sphere and all the ancient capitals and states of Central and Eastern Europe were coming under increasing control from Moscow. “This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up,” he declared, “nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”® Simultaneously the counsels of the young George F. Kennan gained attention in the American State Department, and the Americans announced a policy of “containing” the Soviet advance. Similar warlike language from the Cominform spoke of two camps: the “imperialist anti-democratic camp” over against the “anti- imperialist democratic camp.” Historians are not yet agreed on assigning appropriate blame, but it is probably accurate to say that the Cold War developed through a chain of actions and reactions reflecting the growing distrust that the two camps had of each other. The Cold War forced Russian Baptists into isolation inside the Soviet camp. They genuinely shared the fearful distrust of the capitalist world with its “terrible atomic bomb.” AUCECB leadership had fully ex