Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2017

d and evil continues. 46 In these days, when the cry arises in the West in support of the arms race, the words of Christ come back to our memory, ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’. 47 The ancient Russian Orthodox paradigm is evident: the confrontation of the East and the West is neither more nor less than the ‘antagonism between good and evil’. It is interesting to compare this statement with the politico- religious thesis by the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, about the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ (1983). 48 Even the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan did not make any difference to Russian Orthodox and Baptist rhetoric about the ‘peace-loving’ Soviet state. During the first half of the 1980s, assurances that the AUCECB ‘prayerfully supported’ the ‘wise policy’ of the USSR continued as before. 49 In December 1979, when the political decision to send Soviet troops to 45 “Obrashchenie Generala A. Denikina k Dobrovol’tsam” [The Appeal of General A. Denikin to the Volunteers] [1944], Rodina, nos. 6-7 (1991), p. 105. 46 Patriarch Pimen, ‘Rech’ na Sobranii Aktiva Sovetskikh Obshchestvennykh Organizatsy’ [Soviet Public Organizations Activists’ Meeting Speech], ZhMP , no. 10 (1979), pp. 41-2. 47 ‘From the Life of the Local Churches’ (editorial article), BV, no. 2 (1983), p. 76. 48 See Ronald Reagan, ‘The ‘Evil Empire’ Speech’, in The Public Diplomacy Reader , ed. by J.M. Waller (Washington, DC: Institute of World Politics Press, 2007), pp. 137-43. 49 See, for instance: BV, no. 4 (1981), p. 58; no. 2 (1983), pp. 76, 78; no. 1 (1985), p. 37. Prokhorov, Eastern Christian Self-Identification 35 Afghanistan had already been made, those present at the 42 nd Convention of AUCECB in Moscow wrote in a telegram to L.I. Brezhnev, ‘We unanimously entertain your peace-loving proposals, directed at peace and disarmament, and are asking for this in our prayers to Almighty God.’ 50 In this period, Bratsky Vestnik, strongly distancing itself from the West, at the same time willingly showed the historical closeness of Russian Baptists and Orthodoxy. This was expressed, for example, in the publication of favourable articles on the history of Russian Orthodox Church, as well as many poems and musical recordings of hymns of known Orthodox authors. In 1971 Alexei Bychkov, who became General Secretary of the AUCECB in that year, wrote an article in Bratsky Vestnik on the recent ‘Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church’. In his article, Bychkov wrote particularly about the Local Council’s lifting of the anathemas that had been pronounced on the schismatic Old Believers in Russia in the seventeenth century. Bychkov noted that the Council’s decision did away with the ‘formidable obstacles’ to unity within Russian Orthodoxy. 51 The Soviet Baptists had not been able to achieve reconciliation following the serious split of the 1960s and there had been ‘anathemas’ pronou