Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2017

the Russian Orthodox Church and the AUCECB went so far as to associate their own histories with that of the Soviet State: The sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet State is in some way also a jubilee of the Russian Orthodox Church... May the humane, just and peace-loving national and foreign policy of the Soviet State be triumphant! 43 ...Our wannest congratulations on the sixtieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. This year, the Evangelical Christians-Baptists observe their 110 th anniversary [in Russia]; and the greater part of the brotherhood history falls in the period when our country, for the first time in the history of mankind, chose the road of building the Socialist society. 44 41 Patriarch Pimen, ‘Recti’ na Zasedanii Sovetskogo Komiteta Zashchity Mira’ [Soviet Peace Committee Meeting Speech], Zhurnal Moskovskoy Patriarkhii [Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate; below - ZhMP ], no. 11 (1977), pp. 36-7. 42 A. Bychkov, ‘Doklad Plenumu VSECB’ [Report to the Plenum of the AUCECB], BV, no. 5 (1981), p. 53. 43 N. Zabolotsky, ‘K Shestidesyatiletiyu Sotsialisticheskoy Otchizny’ [In Commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Socialist Homeland], ZhMP , no. 11 (1977), pp. 38-41. 44 ‘Predsedatelyu Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR Leonidu ll’ichu Brezhnevu’ [To the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev], BV , no. 6 (1977), p. 8. 34 Journal of European Baptist Studies 17:1 (2017) It is interesting to note how closely some Orthodox Christians and Baptists linked their church history to the anniversary of the Soviet state. And if sixty years of socialism in Russia (in 1977) could be at a stretch to correlate with the 110-year anniversary of the emergence of the Russian Baptist brotherhood, the 1000 year history of the Russian Orthodox Church in this historical period does not fit at all. However, from another point of view, such an approach had a right to exist. If behind the puzzling emphasis on the words ‘Soviet state’ in the context one can see what many Russian Christians (both the Orthodox and Baptists) actually saw, it would surely be: the Russian state. A parallel might be the way in which the majority of White Guard emigrants, for all their anti-communism, fervently desired the victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany, as General A.I. Denikin put it: ‘We felt a pain during the days of defeat of the Army, even though it is called the ‘Red’ [Army] and not the ‘Russian’, and - joy during the days of its victories... ,45 Zhurnal Moskovskoy Patriarkhii and Bratsky Vestnik, as spiritual editions, were not confined to the usual pro-Soviet (political) rhetoric of their time. They went further: The Russian Orthodox Church is showing concern over the alarming news about the Western European rearmament programme... In spite of the healthy and long- awaited process of ‘East - West’ policies of detente... the antagonism between goo