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

p. 165. 47 Pashkov, "Letter to the Editor," Novoe Vremva . 25 September (old style) 1884. See also Pashkov Papers, 4/1 pp. 42-43. 74 leaders came from prosperous Molokan backgrounds. As has been noted, to Klibanov, Baptism was bourgeois in nature and was a product of the increasing capitalist structure of the regions in which its spread was most rapid. "Baptism existed where capitalism existed, where the countryside gave rise to a kulak elite at the expense of the impoverishment and pauperization of a large part of the peasantry." 48 Yet in 1879, V. G. Pavlov accused another early Baptist leader, N. I. Voronin, of hypocrisy because of his shares in a money-lending firm. Five years later, the Baptists decided on a usury ruling, which permitted interest of 6% at most and forbade the charging of interest to the poor. They also formed a Church-Economic Council whose purpose was to keep members from financial ruin. 49 Communal undertakings were proposed by the Baptist leader Ivanov in 1910 and by the Evangelical leader I. S. Prokhanov (an engineer with the Westinghouse firm in Russia), who was drawing up plans for a city of believers. 50 Prokhanov had earlier begun a communal agricultural community on a Crimean estate with the widow of the poet Nekrasov and several others (ca. 1894). 51 There was thus no uniform prescription for economic organization and practice among all evangelical sectarians. Class differences and the prevalence of the communal ideal 48 Klibanov, p. 237. See also pp. 236; 254-55. 49 For these examples see Klibanov, pp. 260-62. 50 Klibanov, pp. 297-98; Durasoff, pp. 57-8. Prokhanov, pp. 87-91. 51 75 both were causes of this disparity. 52 Like Pashkov, however, their religious convictions influenced their.economic practices. And for many, this influence enhanced their chances of prosperity in an increasingly capitalist order. While some may have favored voluntary communal arrangements, the evangelical sectarians for the most part shunned participation in the radical revolutionary movements of Imperial Russia's final decades. The populists' attempts in the 1870's to arouse sectarian peasants to an awareness of their oppressed lives seem to have borne little fruit. 53 As revolutionary tensions increased, Klibanov finds only minimal evidence of Baptist participation in risings in Khar'kov and Poltava in 1901-02 and a strike in Rostov in 1902. In the revolutionary years of 1905-06, he asserts that anti¬ government meetings were held in Baptist buildings in Odessa. 54 Under the Duma and Provisional governments the evangelicals continued to promote class reconciliation and reform through legal channels and were generally in sympathy with liberal policies. 55 This abstinence from radical political activities 52 These class differences were among the reasons for some dissension between the evangelical groups, "frustrat[ing] organic union ... of the Protestant sects."