Three periods of persecution of Evangelical Christian-Baptists

· Baptists, AUCECB, History, KGB, USSR

Based on archival documents, the causes of the spiritual crisis of the ECB church in the 1920s–30s of the last century are analyzed.

From the Word of God we know that the Church of Jesus Christ will not be overcome by all the powers of hell (Matthew 16:18). But the church, structurally organized into the All-Russian Union of Evangelical Christians and the All-Russian Union of Baptists, was overthrown in the 1930s.

The unions, which by 1928 numbered about 600,000 members in their ranks, were liquidated, the believers scattered. The persecutors anticipated complete victory. Why?

This question compels us to return to the origins of the formation of the ECB church in Russia and carefully examine its tortuous, in many respects thorny path.

The First Period of Persecution (1860–1917)

Under the conditions of nearly 50 years of relentless repression by the historical church and the autocracy, the brotherhood of born-again Christians was born and multiplied. The first confessors of living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ in Russia:

Fedor Onishchenko, V. G. Pavlov, I. G. Ryaboshapka, and also many sufferers in the infamous natural prison in Giryusy endured beatings, exile, deprivation of property, and arrests.

In 1891, in tsarist Russia, the “Resolution of the Conference of Orthodox Clergy” was adopted under the chairmanship of the Chief Procurator of the Synod, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (Chief Procurator from 1880 to 1905, played a significant role in determining government policy in the field of education, in the national question, etc. One of the initiators of the policy of counter-reforms):

“The rapid growth of these sects (Baptists and others) is a serious danger to the state. All sectarians must be forbidden to leave their places of residence. The passports of sectarians must be marked in a special way so that they are not accepted anywhere for work or residence, UNTIL LIFE IN RUSSIA BECOMES UNBEARABLE FOR THEM. THEIR CHILDREN MUST BE TAKEN AWAY BY FORCE and brought up in the Orthodox faith.” (Moscow, August 1891).

After this conference, in 1891, the following articles were included in the Russian Criminal Code:

Article 189: “For propagating or composing religious books with the aim of seducing others: for the first offense — deprivation of certain personal rights and imprisonment from 8 to 16 months, for a repeat offense — imprisonment in a fortress from 32 to 48 months, for a third offense — exile.”

Article 196: “For spreading heretical or sectarian teachings or aiding in this — exile to Siberia, the Transcaucasus, or other remote places of the state.”

On the basis of these restrictions, preachers of the Gospel were imprisoned in fortresses, sent in chains with their families to Siberia, to Giryusy (a natural prison in Transcaucasia). But these sufferings only hardened their faith, and the awakening begun by the Holy Spirit in the Russian Empire by 1917 multiplied the brotherhood to 100,000.

In that period the church was an impregnable fortress against the world. This is convincingly attested by the reports of the persecutors, characterizing the Evangelical Christians-Baptists of that time as…

“(…) a structure adapted to periodic withdrawals underground, a crystallization of composition on the basis of actual conviction, very significant cohesion and striving for unity, numerous everyday, outwardly attractive features and, in the end, an extraordinary vitality that successfully withstood the energetic double pressure: the ‘missionary’ activity of the official church and government persecution. (…)

An analysis of the historical data on the emergence, existence, and development of the ECB church… leads to the conviction that the struggle against its harmful influence by means of administrative pressure alone and, even more so, through the missionary activity of a more ‘tranquil’ Orthodox church, does not and, apparently, cannot yield positive results. On the contrary, Baptistism grows and gains new positions almost in direct proportion to the degree of pressure.” (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 506, ll. 17–22)

This good testimony about the church from a secret report of the deputy chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1947 indicates that the persecutors clearly recognized: brute pressure cannot overcome the living church. She, by their own admission, “grows almost in direct proportion to the degree of pressure.”

The faithfulness to the Lord of the born-again Christians prompted the persecutors to acknowledge such an obvious truth.

The Second Period of Persecution (1928–1960)

The years of persecution of these decades brought the brotherhood not edification, not strengthening, but the destruction of unions, the ruin of church property, a reduction in the number of believers, and the spiritual enslavement of the church for many decades, to the “triumph of the wicked” and the “uprooting of the righteous.”

According to statistical data, the ECB brotherhood on the territory of the USSR by 1928 numbered up to 600,000 people, of whom about 200,000 were in the Baptist union.

The Evangelical Christians and Baptists had:

by 1917 — 4,521 prayer buildings;
in 1928 — about 8,000 congregations.

Thus, by 1926 the structure of the ECB brotherhood had reached organizational completion, and the ministers expected a “great awakening.” But instead, just 10 years later the activity of the unions was paralyzed: Bible courses were closed, publishing activity was banned, prayer houses were turned into clubs, dormitories, granaries, warehouses (out of the thousands of legally existing ECB congregations by the beginning of the war in 1941 fewer than 10 remained for the entire country), — and long trains of prisoners stretched out to the remote places of the North and Siberia.

After the rapid growth in the number of believers in the 1920s, a wave of destruction of enormous scale swept across the country: not a stone was left upon a stone of the pre-war unions, and the united VSEKhB, formed during the war “in the mysterious depths” of the security services, became a convenient tool in the hands of outsiders for the spiritual enslavement and final disintegration of the ECB congregations through the hands of ministers. [In 1947, the VSEKhB numbered 2,669 official congregations, i.e., approximately 30% of those existing in 1928 and 60% of those existing before 1917.]

At the same time, it should be taken into account that the post-war Union represented a merger of three streams: Baptists, Evangelical Christians, and Christians of the Evangelical Faith (Pentecostals). Yet even so, the total number of ECB congregations, including unregistered ones, had more than halved compared with 1928.]

In the above-mentioned secret report by the deputy chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs sent to the Central Committee (1947), there is a striking admission: “Baptism … is relatively easy to eradicate provided it is targeted with well-organized mass-political and educational work.”

This refers to the sorrowful 1920s–1930s for the ECB brotherhood, when both unions were overthrown. Building on its success, atheism now saw its task as continuing in subsequent years to “use the hands of the governing centre to reduce to a minimum” the life of the church:

“Proceeding from this, the Council for Religious Cults has seen and still sees its task as being, using specifically Baptist means and through the hands of its governing centre, to reduce to a minimum the above-mentioned extravagant peculiarities of the church and, as far as possible, to level it with other cults.

The Council takes into account the theoretical possibility that a new splinter group might arise on this ground, striving to preserve the ‘purity’ of ‘orthodox’ Baptism, but considers it possible to ignore this supposed schism, bearing in mind that it cannot arise in the near future and, if it did arise, would represent a very negligible force.

As a result of the activity, on the above-mentioned foundations, of the religious centre of Baptism — the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB) — the most characteristic features of the ECB church at the present time are the following:

The so-called ‘anti-war’ attitudes that previously reigned, i.e., refusal to serve in the army bearing arms, have been almost completely eliminated. The almost universal participation of Baptist conscripts in the Patriotic War, along with the fairly extensive patriotic activity in the congregations that continues even now, illustrates this point. (…)
Likewise, all the extravagant peculiarities of evangelical congregations are being gradually reduced to a minimum. (…)
This course, which is fundamentally changing and has already changed the face of the former sectarianism, is being pursued fairly consistently and clearly by the AUCECB through its republican and provincial ‘senior presbyters’ (analogous to metropolitans and bishops of the Orthodox Church), through the AUCECB’s periodical — the journal Bratsky Vestnik — and by means of AUCECB circular letters addressed to local congregations…” (RGASPI, fond no. 17, opis’ no. 125, d. 506, ll. 17–22).

The document sums up 20 years of special-service activity aimed at overthrowing the ECB brotherhood (1926 – 1946). It indicates the fundamental changes in the principles of church order which, starting from the 1920s, were successfully introduced into the church “through the hands of the governing centre.”

Thus, 1926 marked the beginning of “fundamental changes” in the history of the ECB church, lasting until 1961.

The third period of persecution (1961–1989)

This 30-year journey of persecution was traversed victoriously by the awakened and revived church, preserved by the Lord. The path of revival brought the brotherhood an increase in its ranks, the restoration of the lost principle of the separation of church from state, and the restoration of Christ’s authority over the church.

The call to universal sanctification found a response in the hearts of God’s people, which helped to restore the principles of true church order. Under prolonged persecution, the brotherhood once again gained independence from the world and passed entirely under the authority of the Head of the Church — Christ.

Thus, from 1961 the second stage of fundamental changes in the life of the ECB church of the twentieth century began.

In 1965, the chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs wrote in a secret report to the head of state, A. I. Mikoyan:

“The schismatics did not appear by chance; this is a regular phenomenon in the sectarian movement. High-handed administration, the AUCECB statute, persecution — as a catalyst — only accelerate the process, helping to bring all this to the surface.

What does the Baptist church represent? Let us look at its composition. There are no children there, no young people, few men, and those are deep old men. There are only women, and they are widows. It is, I would say, like a dying tribe; they have no strength, they are exhausted. With them everything is defective, fading, perishing. (…)

But everywhere there are fanatics, and here too there were people who do not want the church to die. They want to save the sectarian movement as well. They want to rejuvenate its composition, they try to lean on young people.

Their main task is the propaganda of religion, travelling around congregations, recruiting new supporters. The Soviet way of life hinders them. The Soviet way of life itself pushes people towards atheism, and they are afraid of contacts with the world.

Hence the non-recognition of the authorities, calls to disobey the laws, refusal of registration.” (GARF, f. 6991, op. 4, d. 169) (…)

The Organizing Committee calls on believers to refuse to register religious associations with the organs of power. ‘Your salvation,’ they say, ‘does not depend on registration.

Only unregistered congregations put into practice the principle of the separation of church from state and do not enter into bonds with worldly authority.

The link of criminal connection between state and church must be broken.’ Naturally, state bodies cannot recognize as lawful the activity of Baptist schismatics who have such a programme.

Generally speaking, we are not against schisms in religious organizations. That is their internal affair. The whole question is what the causes of the schism are and what aims are being set. The Baptist schismatics, as the facts show, set aims with which one can in no way agree.

The persons who now head the Organizing Committee of the schismatics do not enjoy our political trust and therefore cannot occupy leading posts in religious organizations until they change their way of thinking and renounce illegal activity. (…)

The local bodies and the Council for Religious Cults under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, in accordance with the directives of the CPSU Central Committee, are taking measures to suppress the illegal activity of the Baptist organizations.

The growth in the number of Baptist schismatics has halted… However, the activities of the Organizing Committee have not ceased… The Council warned them of liability for continuing illegal activities. But this warning is being ignored by the Organizing Committee.

Persecution of religion and persecution of believers, as is known, have never led to a decline in the religiosity of the population, but rather the opposite. This is especially true regarding sectarians, who know how to adapt to activity under any conditions.

They learned this already in tsarist times, under conditions of severe persecution from the Russian Orthodox Church and the tsarist government.

One must also take into account the fact that sectarian preachers are preparing their members in advance for activity under conditions of persecution: “From now on, the church must be organized on a different principle,” they say. “These new principles are designed to make the life of the church invulnerable to any persecution and the closure of prayer houses.

With the new organization of the church, persecution will not harm it, but on the contrary, will strengthen the power of its spirit. Under conditions of persecution, there will be no churches or prayer houses. Under such conditions, the church will live like this: where two or three believers gather together, there will be the church.

They must choose one from among themselves to serve as a shepherd, to whom the rest must be obedient. And such a church will be pleasing to God a thousand times more than one that has churches and prayer houses. ‘For what credit is it, if when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.’ Be courageous during the forthcoming persecutions.”

All this compels us to reflect on the methods of struggle against sectarian beliefs. Undoubtedly, it is easier to strike at church buildings and bearers of religious ideas than to defeat the ideas themselves.

We hold power in our hands, we have the apparatus of coercion, and it would probably be possible, in a relatively short time, to close all churches and prayer houses, only people’s religious beliefs will not die out from this.” (March 27, 1965). (ГАРФ, ф. 7523, оп. 109, д. 417, л. 79-142)

TACTICS OF CORRUPTING THE CHURCH

In the early 1920s, the atheist authorities decided to defeat the ECB brotherhood by the quiet method of corrupting it from within:

“To stop the system of administrative repressions on the ground, not to hinder the registration of sectarian communities, giving them an opportunity to legalize, so that they are within our field of vision.

The center of attention in the work of party organizations and GPU organs should be directed towards the work of their internal decomposition, fragmentation into separate groups, and intensification of the internal struggle within sectarianism itself.”

(Circular No. 673/s of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) on the new tactics of struggle against sectarianism, dated July 16, 1923) (ГАНО, ф.п. 1, оп. 2, д. 245, л. 188)

“The struggle against sectarianism and the growth of its influence … has taken on such a character of repressions, as a result of which we see the going underground of sectarianism. (…)

In this way, an aura of martyrdom is created around sectarianism of those persecuted and oppressed by Soviet power (…)

Direct our work in the struggle against sectarianism towards their internal decomposition and fragmentation into small groups, which, of course, can be carried out only with the presence of a solidly organized influential intelligence network.”

(Directive No. 476/s of the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU in Siberia to the heads of GPU provincial departments, dated June 28, 1923) (ГАНО, ф. п. 1, оп. 2, д. 372, л. 24)

The faithfulness to God demonstrated in the past by persecuted Christians kept the atheists from using repressive tactics, because the ECB brotherhood had 50 years of experience in clandestine activity.

Persecution is a familiar environment for Christians. Truly, “repressions will not help here.” Therefore, a decision was made to use the tactics of internal corruption of the church.

“Top Secret. Keep Confidential”

One can partly judge the disastrous results for the church of this work by reading the minutes of the Anti-Religious Commission under the Central Committee of the RCP(b) stamped “Top Secret. Keep Confidential”: [June 26, 1923:

a) Entrust N. POPOV to use in the press all materials compromising sectarians from the point of view of their anti-militarism.

b) Entrust the GPU to intensify work on the decomposition of sectarianism.

November 22, 1924: HEARD: On sectarianism. RESOLVED: <…>

c) Entrust the OGPU to carry out work among sectarians along the line of their class decomposition <…>

e) Entrust the OGPU to take measures to dissolve and prevent sectarian religious youth circles.

h) Recognize that the activity of religious preachers, including sectarian ones, without appropriate permission may be conducted only within the boundaries of their own parish. For conducting sermons, special talks, etc., outside the boundaries of their parish, preachers must have the corresponding permission <…>

Let us pay attention to just one point of the programmed corruption of the church:

“Entrust the OGPU to carry out work among sectarians along the line of their class decomposition” (November 22, 1924).

Into the environment of the ECB brotherhood, outsiders introduced the principle of restricted admission to church membership: it was possible to baptize workers and peasants, but if a candidate for church membership had been a merchant or an aristocrat in the past – it was forbidden, otherwise they would be deprived of registration.

Building the church according to “class criteria” destroyed its spiritual essence – to be the Body of Christ, in which: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

In a statement from the 3rd Moscow Baptist Community to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR regarding the confiscated prayer premises it is written:

“The absence of bourgeois elements in the community can serve as full proof that people who cling to religion and support it from a tightly stuffed wallet for the sake of legal opposition to Soviet power do not gather in this church” (November 28, 1928).

Ivan Veniaminovich Kargel in 1931 wrote to Ya. I. Zhidkov:

“I will explain to you why I dare not sign the questionnaires offered to me… They are steeped in the spirit of our time. They seek to uncover who you were, my dear friend, before your spiritual rebirth, and who your parents were. If by chance your father was a merchant, or you yourself were, then your membership instantly loses all value, no matter how devoted to the Lord you may now be; and woe to you, son, if your father was an officer in the former armies—but, on the contrary, blessed are you if it happens that your father served in the Red Army. Yet infinite grief if your parents or you yourselves were landowners. That is an unforgivable sin. You are an unhappy member of such an Evangelical community.

I ask you before the face of God: is this that Church of which her Head says that even if someone formerly had sins and foul deeds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more’ (Heb. 8:12)?”

ECB communities grew rapidly in the 1920s, but not only through evangelism. The “growth” of the communities was to a considerable degree artificial; new “brothers” did not always meet the standards of holiness.

“Godless activists documented facts of the ‘secularisation’ of congregations in order to underscore the effectiveness of their own work, and used this to explain the subsequent collapse of religious communities, a collapse the

Antireligious Commission

was feverishly working to engineer.

“The Church began to give way to betrayal; it was destroyed from within…

Among other things, in the 1920s the composition of ECB congregations was renewed, so that believers of the older generation, who had withstood harsh conditions under tsarist persecution, already made up an insignificant portion and could no longer determine the overall atmosphere in the communities.

Instead, a growing proportion were advocates of ‘comfortable Christianity,’ the so-called ‘economists,’ who rarely attended meetings, read the Word of God formally and without any reverence, and showed no missionary zeal. A powerful stream flowed ‘from below,’ eroding the firm boundaries of ECB faith and organisation and pushing it toward conformity with purely earthly concerns.” (L. M. Mitrokhin, Baptists in Soviet Society, p. 10)

In 1923–24, the recruitment of ministers for “more influential intelligence-gathering” began. Numerically the church grew, but within its bosom, through entanglement in cooperation with the state, an internal decay was growing unobtrusively yet irresistibly, like cancer cells.

The fact that outsiders dominated spiritual affairs was acknowledged by I. S. Prokhanov in a statement to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR in December 1927, when widespread harassment and fines of believers for missionary activity began: “The last two All‑Union Congresses of Evangelical Christians—the Ninth and the Tenth, in 1923 and 1926—were conducted according to a program approved in advance by the central authorities. And although evangelical Christians, in their convictions, are thoroughly loyal citizens of the Soviet government and are altogether alien to any politics, nevertheless, for one reason or another, at their All‑Union Congresses they had to discuss their attitude toward the Soviet State and toward military service, even though this question is political in nature.

Therefore, in order to implement this matter in the practice of local communities, it is necessary to speak about it and to pass resolutions at local congresses.

The same holds true for economic questions. These were on the agenda and in the discussions of the All‑Union Congresses, both the Ninth and the Tenth, for quite understandable reasons. (…) And of course, once this has been introduced by the All‑Union Congresses, in the localities evangelical Christians must likewise have the opportunity to speak about it at their congresses and meetings and to pass corresponding resolutions.” (GARF, f. 5263, op. 2, d. 5, l. 92-104)

Congresses “conducted according to a program approved in advance by the central authorities”?! Who, then, was governing the church? How did the Lord, her Head, regard this?! In the early 1920s the free ECB church was an impregnable fortress for the world, like an eagle soaring at unattainable heights.

But, sadly, by the end of the 1920s the evangelical unions had become “caged eagles,” caught in the nets of cooperation. The church lost its independence, became like a fortress without walls, like a ravaged vineyard without a hedge, like a besieged city (Isa. 1:8). Repressions swept in, and the church proved defenceless.

The set goal of its internal decay, pursued patiently and methodically, had been attained…

firstly, through enticing believers with legislative privileges in order to draw the church into deciding civic, political, economic and social questions;

secondly, through the infiltration of the brotherhood by “solidly placed influential intelligence” and the recruitment of ministers who had become entangled in the nets of the GPU–NKVD–KGB.

From 1905 onward, these bitter roots of non‑evangelical house‑building began to be planted in the field of the evangelical movement in Russia, and this contributed to the deterioration of the brotherhood.

Therefore the Lord permitted in our country, which occupies one‑sixth of the earth’s land and is a mighty superpower, the insane experiment of constructing an atheistic state, as a result of which society fell into decline and the church became spiritually corrupted.

Persecution at that time reached its highest intensity. The people of God proved unprepared and fragmented. If God’s mercy had not touched us all, if He had not knocked on our hearts, then, I repeat, many young Christians here today would not exist.

And now our ministers, who have spent almost their entire adult lives in chains and have no experience other than prison, can bless the young heritage with joy to follow the Lord uncompromisingly.

Print, Save, Letter .pdf

Appeal of G.G. Ponurko and S.M. But to all brothers and sisters from Christians of Evangelical Faith who did not join the United Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists A letter of renunciation by the first “bishop” of the Pentecostals, Gavriil Ponurko, approved by the Reich Commissioner of Ukraine Erich Koch and another Pentecostal presbyter…
Letter from the clergy of Christians of Evangelical Faith to the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists October 19, 1956. In addition to the 1945 agreement, the Christians of Evangelical Faith and we, …
Appeal of the assistants to the senior presbyter of the AUCECB for the Dnepropetrovsk region N.K. Akritov, G.G. Ponurko and M.S. But to the communities of Evangelical Christians-Baptists and Christians of Evangelical Faith December 18, 1956. Dear brothers and sisters! The year 1956 was marked by abundant Lord’s blessings in…
The resumption of persecution of believers in the Russian Federation is one of the symptoms of this state’s return to the totalitarianism of the USSR period DOCUMENT Appeal of the Synod of Bishops of the ROCOR(A) The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia expresses its concern over…
A Brief History of the AUCECB — the Brotherhood of Evangelical Christians “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God…
Vasily Pashkov, organizer of the Evangelical Christians 1874-1884 The name of Colonel Pashkov signifies the beginning of a completely new era in the religious life of Russia and its center…
Inna Zagrebina. The campaign to discredit evangelical Christians is gaining momentum “Most of the ministers of evangelical churches are at children’s camps in the summer, but judging by recent events, in the fall…
Ukrainian Party of Regions deputy called Baptists sectarians People’s Deputy of Ukraine from the Party of Regions Inna Bohoslovska called a political opponent, the first deputy chairman of the party…
Executions of Christian martyrs in the Kolyma camps of Dalstroy in 1937 …On October 25, 1937, 1950 people were sentenced to execution: for sectarian activities — 628…
Video: The Suffering of Christians in the USSR Documentary film “The Suffering of Christians in the USSR” (Overcoming All by the Power of the One Who Loved) about the persecuted Baptist brotherhood of the CC…
In Turkmenistan, Bibles are confiscated from Baptists and statements of refusal to attend meetings are demanded The authorities of Turkmenistan continue to inspect Protestant prayer meetings in various parts of the country, reports Forum 18. One such…
Record of the reception at the Council for Religious Cults under the Council of Ministers of the USSR of Bishop A.I. Bidash of the Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith and his accompanying persons October 13, 1956. Bidash, who arrived from Pyatikhatka, introduced himself as the bishop of the Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith, and Levchuk and…