Colonel V. A. Pashkov and the Late Nineteenth-Century Protestant Movement in Russia, Jan M. Surer, 1999

ed to arrange their lives in accordance with it. 15 They are often compared to Quakers. This thorough knowledge of the Bible helped to make the Molokans a ready source for many conversions to Baptism. This was the case for N. I. Voronin, a Molokan merchant, whose study of the Bible prompted him to realize the need for an individual's salvation. 16 Other Molokans who came to a similar evangelical understanding regarding salvation were known as New Molokans. 17 Their geographical distribution, based upon Ministry of Internal Affairs statistics, included the Transcaucasian regions of Tiflis and Erivan provinces and the Kars oblast, the black soil provinces of Tambov, Voronezh, and Riazan, and the steppe provinces of Samara, Saratov, and Astrakhan. They were also represented in the Middle Volga provinces of Penza and Simbirsk. 16 The Stundists and Baptists were doctrinally closer than the Molokans to the Pashkovites' emphasis on salvation as an unmerited gift of God, and thus can most fully be described as "evangelical." There is some disagreement in the literature regarding the Stundists' views on this matter, however. One early writer on the movement claimed that the Stundists, 15 Pollock, pp. 62-3. 16 Pollock, p. 63. 17 Brandenburg, p. 62; Klibanov, pp. 210-13. 18 Klibanov, p. 222. 66 unlike the Baptists, were unclear on the Gospel message. 19 Yet Prugavin describes them as recognizing and preaching only the Gospel. 20 This disagreement may arise from a confusion of terms which occurs in the discussion of Stundists and Baptists. 21 Blane also notes that "for many years the movement remained diffuse and chaotic in character." 22 The early Stundists were a Bible-based movement which, at least in Leskov's description of them, seems not to have emphasized consistently the gospel message in the way the Pashkovites did. There was certainly a definite evangelical emphasis, however, on the part of the German pastor, Karl Bonekemper, who is credited with helping to initiate the Stundist movement. It was under his influence in the German colonists' community of Rohrbach, near Odessa, that two Ukrainian peasants, Mikhail Ratushny and one Onishchenko, were inspired to found a stunde (Bible study hour) of their own in their nearby village of Osnova. This may have occurred as 19 "A Short History of the Stundists," By a Stundist Lady, 1895, Pashkov Papers 1/6, p. 5. 20 Prugavin, p. 68. 21 The merging of the Stundists and Baptists creates some confusion regarding the use of the term "Stundist." Initially it meant those groups of peasants who copied the German colonists' custom of having a Bible-study hour (stunde). As the generally Ukrainian Stundists (by adopting the sacrament of baptism for believing adults) merged with the Baptist movement which had originated in the Caucasus, at times the Orthodox press referred to them collectively as "Stundo-Baptists." "Stundist" will be used in this pape