Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2017

vinsky, Istoriya evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov Ukraini, Rossii, Belorussii [History of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists of the Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia] (1867 - 1917) (SPb.: Biblia dlya Vsekh, 1999), pp. 160-8. 26 For the first time this argument was used by Russian Baptists before the Bolshevik Revolution. See, for instance, G. Mazaev, Vospominaniya [Memories] (Korntal: Svet na Vostoke, 1992), pp. 71-2. 27 See, for instance, A. Vlasov, Ot Izbytka Serdtsa [Out of That Fills the Heart] (Idar-Oberstein, Germany: TitelVerlag, 2000), p. 157. 28 See, for instance, Savinsky, Istoriya, pp. 26-53; Mazaev, Vospominaniya, p. 71. 29 See Yu. Kuksenko, ‘Nashi Besedy’ [Our Conversations] (typescript), Kazakhstan’s Baptist Union Archives (2002), pp. 144-5. 30 Journal of European Baptist Studies 17:1 (2017) In parallel with the discussions about spiritual identity which took place in publications, ideas about the self-sufficiency of the Russian Baptists and the independence from the West of their way of life were common among many ministers within Russian Baptist congregations in the Soviet period. 30 The following story told by the former senior presbyter of the Kazakhstan Union of Baptist churches, V.V. Gorelov, illustrates this theme well and reproduces his context and the spirit of his time. In the mid-1970s, a group of Baptists from Austria came to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. There was a warm meeting with local Baptist pastors and the visitors took part in a church service in the Central Baptist Church in Alma-Ata. However, shortly after their departure, the leading ministers of the church were required to meet with a regional Soviet Religious Affairs officer who started to lecture them for allowing foreigners to preach at the church. V.V. Gorelov replied to the charge with words that indicated his ability in diplomacy: You know that all frontier posts, customs, the whole Soviet Anny are in your power. So, please, do not let any foreigners into this country at all! We will get by somehow without them. But if you let foreigners into the country, we should entertain them freely, so that later they do not speak badly of us... We have received the visitors as our brothers in faith... If we were wrong, please, do not let foreigners in at all! 31 The use by Gorelov of a Slavophile motif that was traditional for Russia (‘we will get by somehow without foreigners’) disarmed the Religious Affairs officer. Nor was this an isolated incident. When the Communists portrayed Soviet Baptists as German or American spies, 32 as they often did, the genuine Russian-ness of the Soviet Baptists was the strongest counter-evidence. This was particularly evident during the 1960s and 1970s when it was often alleged that Baptists were political suspects, related to the West, and especially to America. The response of one ordinary Baptist believer, who responded to this accusation at his works meeting, became well known amo