Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2017

ces [of our brotherhood]... should arouse the utmost praise and gratitude to God within the whole of Christendom, as the Russian Evangelical movement is a bearer of Apostolic Christianity. But we cannot say as much for Christian churches of the West, unfortunately. The most grievous fact in contemporary Western Christianity, including among Baptists, is their lack of the spirit of Apostolic Christianity, ... of their first love to Christ... testimony ... 34 The exceptions to the rule were perhaps ethnic German Soviet Baptists, who usually sympathised with their historical motherland, and a minor part of the CCECB which occasionally appealed to public opinion in the West in order to draw attention to the religious persecutions in the USSR. 35 See, for instance, Kuksenko, Nashi Besedy, pp. 71-2, 140. 36 Ibid., pp. 68-72. 37 Testimony of A.T. Kharchenko (1NT, Sacramento, California, USA, 2006). 38 The kernel of the problem is elucidated well by the Orthodox theologian N.M. Zernov, ‘The West, starting from the individual, sees the community as the outcome of a collective desire to live and act together. For the East the community comes first and the individual is seen as a part of the whole.’ (N.M. Zernov, Eastern Christendom (N.Y.: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961), p. 229). And A.S. Khomyakov wrote, ‘When anyone falls, he falls alone; but no one is saved alone’. (A. Khomyakov, Tserkov ’ Odna [The Church is One] (M.: Dar”, 2005), p. 37). 32 Journal of European Baptist Studies 17:1 (2017) the priesthood of all believers, and... simplicity. Therefore, anyone who would like to find the country in the world where there is a Church... with all the attributes of Apostolic Christianity should be pointed to the Soviet Union... We can say without any pride and conceit that the Evangelical-Baptist Church in the USSR is the Apostolic Church of the twentieth century. 39 This passage, though written by a Baptist, is a piece of Slavophilism of the purest hue, exhibiting the spirit of Russian messianism. Even Russian Orthodox Slavophile authors would not all have ventured to assert so openly that the church in Russia was a ‘bearer of Apostolic Christianity’ but that ‘we cannot say as much for Christian churches of the West, unfortunately’, and to declare that the church in the USSR ‘is the Apostolic Church of the twentieth century’. Although such ideas, expressed in the official periodical of the AUCECB, might well arouse the suspicion that they were said for the benefit of (or under instructions from) the Soviet censors, there is evidence that Karev was neither acting against his conscience nor simply carrying out Communist commands. Karev’s personal diary for 1959-62, published in 1999, reflects his clear perception of the anti-Christian nature of Soviet power, and yet at the same time conveys his belief in Russia’s special historical role. Russia was passing through the crucible of sufferings, like the Apostolic Ch