Pre-war exodus of Pentecostals from the USSR through China to America
During the time of the struggle of Christians in the USSR for the exodus from the land of God’s enemies in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, there existed a Pentecostal evangelical diaspora in America and, to a lesser extent, in Argentina and Australia. That diaspora had believed the revelations of the Holy Spirit in the 1920s in Ukraine about the coming destruction of the people and the church, and had gone out under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to the east, into China. The vicissitudes of this first exodus of Pentecostals (there were also other exoduses from the Russian plains: Mennonites, Jews, Dukhobors, Molokans, Protestants under the tsars, through Germany during World War II) are touched upon in historical documents and testimonies. In America, representatives of this first exodus are well known: Ilyin, Ionko, Shevchenko Sr. and many others.
One day in the late autumn of 1998, in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, with the kind permission of the pastor of the “church on 7th Street,” as it is called, Yaroslav Pristatsky, in the cozy silence of the church I spent long hours in complete solitude, with excitement and reverence turning the pages of old Christian magazines, which truly constitute a precious pearl of the heritage of this church. It was damp outside, and a piercing north wind had been blowing for days. Inside the church building it was more than cool, but with great joy I was digging in the golden vein of the history of our movement that I had found here. And suddenly I was thrown into a heat — I found something about which I had previously heard only vague echoes and had been utterly unable to connect those echoes into a unified whole. Before me was a rather inconspicuous publication in the magazine Christian Herald No. 140–141 from the long-ago year 1949, where the following was literally written:
PHILIPPINES. Island of Samar. News from the brothers in far-off Asia
Dear in the Lord brother and sister Zub‑Zolotarev! Greetings!
We received your letter, for which we thank you. Although we know that you are busy, we are glad to receive news from you.
At present we are about to pass the Paraguayan commission, where the government of Paraguay wishes to take up to 500 persons, mostly farmers. We have decided to sign up, but we ask your advice regarding departure for Paraguay. It is impossible for us to stay here any longer. We hold meetings here.
We have received the magazines “Christian Herald,” for which we thank you; if possible, please send more copies. There is a great need for them here.
Awaiting your answer and advice, your brother A. E. Shevchenko. 462
Ukrainians in the Philippines! At last, by God’s mercy, I had stumbled upon the trail of those people, reliable information about whom I had vainly sought for many years. I remembered how in the summer of 1989, as a delegate to the Second Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, which took place in Manila, while still in Moscow, just before flying out to the Philippines, I was still trying to find some information about my fellow countrymen who at the end of the 1920s had left Ukraine and made the incredible migratory journey to America via China and the Philippines. No reliable testimonies, names, addresses, or the like had I, of course, been able to obtain. I found nothing during my stay at the Congress in that exotic country either. I also, unfortunately, found nothing when, on missionary business for our mission “Possibility,” I was in China — in Kulja (Yining), Urumqi, and Kashgar, having made an exhausting and long journey through the environs of the sultry Taklamakan desert in September 1998. And now, with excitement in my heart, I began to untangle the fine threads of this incredible story that had begun in one of the Pentecostal communities of the Odessa region. It was the story of an extraordinary “bridge” between Odessa and San Francisco.
My further searches soon led me to a curious publication by the Pentecostal pastor Zabronsky, entitled “A Group of 135 Russian Xinjiang Pentecostals Arrives in San Francisco.”
On January 25, 1951, the naval transport General Haan arrived in San Francisco with 1,127 Russian refugees from the IRO camp on Tubabao, Samar Island, Philippines. With this transport arrived a group of 135 Russian Xinjiang Pentecostals, whose sponsor is the San Francisco Russian Pentecostal Church, operating through the Assemblies of God and Church World Service.
From the Assemblies of God, the reception of this group of Pentecostals was led by the pastor of the New York church, A. A. Gurov; he was assisted on shore in locating those they had sponsored, in transporting them from the dock to the city, and in placing them in apartments of the San Francisco church. Specifically to meet the group of 135 Russian Xinjiang Pentecostals, G. Kinderman, a representative of the General Council of the Assemblies of God in the USA, also arrived.
To accommodate the arrivals in San Francisco, a large house with two apartments was rented on Gary Street, in which 80 people were placed; the remaining members of the group were taken in by brethren and sisters into their own homes on Russian Hill, and some were temporarily lodged in facilities adjacent to the congregation’s prayer house. All of the arriving Xinjiang Pentecostals were brought by car to Russian Hill and first taken to the prayer house, where the pastor of the San Francisco church, V. M. Zabronsky, greeted them with the warm words “Welcome” and heartily congratulated them on their safe arrival in America. Here a meal was offered to all the Xinjiang people, although by this moment evening twilight had already set in.
After the meal, the Xinjiang people went up the stairs to the prayer hall and took their seats, where the brothers and sisters of the local congregation had already assembled for the evening service that was to be held. After the opening of the evening meeting with prayer and the singing of general psalms and a song by the local church choir under the direction of Brother I. M. Karpov, the pastor of the San Francisco church, V. M. Zabronsky, read Psalm 32:1‑22 and delivered a message.
This group of 135 Russian Xinjiang Pentecostals draws special interest because they made a journey on foot and in carts from Xinjiang, Chinese Turkestan, to Urumqi, and arrived in Shanghai at the end of the Second World War, in 1945. Their refugee wandering began with the revolution, over 30 years earlier. The majority fled through Siberia. Others crossed the Gobi Desert into central China. After the peace, the Reds once again seized China, and these people had to flee once more to save their lives. Then they found refuge on the island of Samar in the Philippines, where they lived in the tropical jungle, and only now has the opportunity arisen to bring them to the USA. Their trek across the whole of China from Xinjiang was described in its time by the press in Shanghai and the USA. In the group of Xinjiang residents, the Russian Pentecostals include men, women, and children — for the most part farmers and artisans, accustomed to a harsh life from their journey across the whole vast expanse of China.
On Sunday, 28 January 1951, in the premises of Neighborhood House, on Russian Hill, Potrero Hill, a large solemn assembly took place, organized by the San Francisco Russian Pentecostal community, with the participation of a representative of the Assemblies of God, in honor of the 135 Xinjiang Pentecostals who had arrived in San Francisco on the transport General Haan.
The worship gathering was led by the pastor of the San Francisco Pentecostal church, V. M. Zabronsky, and the representative of the Assemblies of God, pastor A. A. Gurov. The honored group of Xinjiang Pentecostals was present at the assembly. Speeches were delivered by pastor V. M. Zabronsky, by the presbyter of the Xinjiang group G. I. Avramenko, and by the representative of the Assemblies of God, pastor A. A. Gurov. T. V. Mogno led the congregational singing of religious psalms; I. M. Karpov directed the splendid singing of the local church choir, with the participation of the pianist, sister M. M. Karpova.
In a fine speech, presbyter G. I. Avramenko expressed gratitude on behalf of the entire group to God that, after many years of wandering, they had at last arrived in America for permanent residence. He thanked the local Pentecostal church and the General Council of the Assemblies of God for all their labors and help in arranging their transfer from Tubabao to San Francisco. Between the speeches, singing of religious hymns and psalms took place. The singing of the Xinjiang group was led by their choir director I. Loktev.
After a break, beginning at 7 o’clock in the evening in Neighborhood House, a Sunday evening solemn and blessed worship was again held, which was just as crowded as the morning meeting.
The Xinjiang people are temporarily accommodated in a house on Geary Street and in the homes of their fellow Pentecostals. The Assemblies of God and the Pentecostal community are making efforts for their permanent placement and for finding employment for them. May the Lord be of help to all in this great and good work, a work of love and mercy in the name and for the glory of Jesus Christ, our God and Savior. Amen.
Pastor of the Russian San Francisco Pentecostal Church V. M. Zabronsky.[463]
It was precisely about the fates of these people that I tried to learn something; and a few months before the joy-filled shock in Philadelphia — in September 1998 — I was on a mission trip in the northern part of China that is called Xinjiang, walking through the modern streets and lanes of low adobe houses with flat roofs overgrown with grass, in Kulja, Urumqi, in scorching Kashgar on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert… In a renewing China that has undergone so much upheaval over recent decades, nothing today remains to recall the unusual community of Slav Pentecostals…
Happily for us, they themselves managed to tell about their fate. There is an authentic historical document — the account of an eyewitness and participant in those events, Alexander Efremovich Shevchenko, who later for many years led the Slavic Pentecostal Church in the picturesque city of San Francisco. (He retired in 1987, passing on the ministry to his son.)[464] And this account was published by Ivan Zub-Zolotarev in his magazine Christian Herald in Argentina. Shevchenko wrote:
Dear brother in Christ I. S. Zub-Zolotarev!
Peace and love to you from the Lord, and to all the children of God who are with you. Accept fraternal greetings from me, my family, and also from all the brothers and sisters.
When we turned to the Lord in Ukraine in 1925 and 1926, soon after coming to faith we received a revelation from the Lord that we were to take the road to China. It was hard to imagine, because Ukraine lies many thousands of kilometers from China, and we knew little about China.
The time came — in 1928 the Lord, through the Holy Spirit, appointed the day of our departure, and we said goodbye to our relatives and friends, to the places where we were born and raised, as well as to our property, and, obeying God’s calling, we set out on the road.
Our first stop was in Nizhny Uralsk; some stopped in the city of Uralsk, while most stayed in its outskirts. In all the places where we stopped, worship services were held, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.
The Lord abundantly blessed the work; in a short period of time many souls turned to the Lord, and power from on high was manifested, so that many received the baptism of the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands. Glory to the Lord for everything!
In Nizhny Uralsk we received a great revelation from the Lord. One evening, as we were returning from a meeting, suddenly in the sky, in the west, a fiery star attracted our attention, flickering in a wondrous way. We stopped. A small circle opens in the sky, and a sister sees how in this circle troops pass by: cannons, tanks, all kinds of equipment, and above everything sits a woman with a scythe in her hands — a symbol of death. At the same time it was spoken by the Holy Spirit: “A great bloodshed is coming upon Ukraine and Russia.”
It is very important to note that this revelation was fulfilled 11 years later, when the Second World War came. We only heard about the destruction and mass extermination that took place, especially in Ukraine.
Then we heartily thanked the Lord that He had brought us out of there in good time. Although we are not better than others, yet His scepter of favor was stretched out toward us. May there be eternal glory and thanksgiving to our Deliverer![465]
A participant in this exodus from Ukraine, Vera Efremovna Ilyina (mother of the well-known servant of the Gospel, leader of the Christian mission “Every Home for Christ” in the CIS countries, Pavel Kirillovich Ilyin), whom the Lord granted me to meet in the spring of 2001 in San Francisco, was at that time a young girl — she was 17 years old. In her work “A Brief Description of Guidance by the Holy Spirit” she writes that the departure from their church, located in the Aleksandrovka area at the junction of the Kherson, Nikolaev and Kirovograd regions, occurred at the beginning of summer, «when the barley had just begun to ripen, while the other grains were still green, for already in the spring it was prophetically said: «Do not sow, for you will not reap!».466
Alexander Shevchenko in his work “A Brief History of Christians of Evangelical Faith-Pentecostals” writes that there were many such families. Having reached the nearest railway station, they also paid a farewell visit to the local community of Evangelical Christians of the Pentecostal faith, whose presbyter was Brother Rotaryuk (possibly it was the union evangelist I. S. Rotaryuk, whose name often appears in the documents of the Union of Evangelical Christians and who labored specifically in the Nikolaev district). At the farewell service during the Lord’s Supper, Rotaryuk washed the feet of all the departing brothers and gave a charge based on the text from Phil. 1:27, which the pilgrims remembered forever,467
Having traveled 2,000 kilometers, the Ukrainian settlers reached Uralsk.
During their stay in Uralsk and its environs, this large group of wandering Ukrainian Pentecostals not only became acquainted with the local population but also led a significant number of people to a knowledge of living faith in the Lord.
The Ural Cossacks were quite hardworking and prosperous people. Having large land allotments, in good harvest years they sent wagon trains with wheat to Uralsk and Orenburg, and from there their grain was shipped to Europe, buying with the proceeds European agricultural machinery, equipment, clothing, footwear, and other necessities of life.
They lived in good houses; in the stanitsas and settlements they mostly built two-story houses. Already at that time, houses were papered inside with wallpaper, and stoves (Dutch ovens) were faced with tiles. In every yard, a bathhouse was built at the back.
Could these Ural grain growers have thought that for their faithful service to their mother — the Motherland, for their heavy and noble peasant labor, they would one day be numbered among the enemies of the people; they, who never straightened their backs during sowing and harvest, would suddenly be declared kulaks and be dekulakized, and their peasant families would be sent on their own carts into exile (or rather, simply to perdition!) to a place from which there is no return?!.
They did not think. And could not have thought.
Just like the Ukrainian peasant grain growers.
But the tragedy and horror of collectivization in Ukraine began earlier. It was from this that, step by step deeper into Russia, the group of wandering Ukrainian Pentecostals moved, probably without even fully realizing what the Lord was leading them away from.
One of the most notable converts in that area was G. I. Loktev, who in the future was destined to become one of the main leaders of this movement.
Georgy Ivanovich Loktev (Drozdov) was born on November 3, 1902, in the village of Rannye, Ural Region, which was situated on the bank of the famous Ural River.
In Rannye there were two churches — an Orthodox one and an Old Believer church of the Austrian concord, to which the zealous Loktev family belonged. In his old age in Adelaide, Australia, he wrote his well-known work “My Memoirs,” in which he recounted not only his own life, but also the fate of this entire movement, which had become inseparable from his own fate.
Georgy Ivanovich recalled:
In our family there was a strictly religious Old Believer upbringing. Family members never used foul language. They greatly respected their elders.
Every evening before bed all family members were to ask one another’s forgiveness, beginning with the youngest. I liked to run around to everyone, starting with the very oldest, ask their forgiveness, kiss them, and go to bed. On Sundays everyone tried to attend church. Daily morning and evening prayers at home were mandatory. Without them the day was not begun and no one went to sleep.
In the village of Rannye, our house stood opposite the church, and we were accustomed to the ringing of bells. At school I did well. I finished 3 grades with a commendation letter. My joy was indescribable. My grandmother taught me to read Slavonic, and I read prayers to all the saints. Of course, Grandpa and Grandma were very glad. I diligently attended church.468
Like all the boys of that generation, Georgy also lived through the difficult war years, remaining in the family as the senior worker when his father was called up for the army, and through the years of great turmoil and confusion in Russia, when the revolution broke out and the civil war that followed. Thanks be to God — everyone survived these cataclysms. Only Georgy’s uncles, who had survived the war, died in the typhus and cholera epidemic that struck the country in the post-war years of devastation.
In 1919 the harvest was good, but nobody harvested it. All the grain remained standing — civil war was going on. In 1920 few sowed. And if anyone did sow, nothing came up. There was a drought. In the summer of 1920 the new government took grain from the peasants. A terrible famine began. In 1921, in the village of Rannye, half the village died of hunger, including many of the Loktev relatives.
In 1925 Georgy Loktev married Praskovya Isaakovna Pustobayeva. By that time she was a complete orphan; all her relatives had perished during the civil war. Her father, together with other Cossacks, was arrested by the Reds on Easter in 1919. At that time a Cossack uprising took place in the stanitsa. The guards, fearing that the prisoners might escape, decided to hack them to death with sabers, making them kneel down bound.
The Cossacks, before death, began to sing the Paschal canon. And so they perished, bound, kneeling and singing the Paschal canon, hacked down by the sabers of the Red guards.
Three years later, her mother also died.469
Praskovya was brought up in the fear of God; her parents belonged to the priestless Old Believers.
Such are the ordinary fates of ordinary Russian people. The life of that generation fully reflected the well-known bitter saying of those years: “War, revolution — and then a truncated freedom.”
In August 1928 several families of Ukrainian Pentecostals arrived in the village of Rannee, whom the local population began to call “Stundists.” Finding an empty two-story house, they began to gather on Sundays for their services. At first they thought there were about twenty of them, but then it turned out that similar Ukrainians had also settled in neighboring villages and hamlets.
Once the whole Drozdov family decided to go and see this service. Praskovya later recalled:
The singing continued. They sang not in Slavonic but in Russian. Everything was clear, though we did not understand the meaning. Then the preacher stood up, went to the table and began to read from the Bible in Russian. It was as if a heat rushed over me. Then everyone knelt down and began to pray loudly. We sat, listening. I hear — they are praying for our village, for the people. They ask God to bless this place and the people, so that the truth may be revealed to many. I don’t know how I didn’t break down sobbing.470
It turned out that among the newcomers there were many craftsmen, jacks-of-all-trades. The Drozdovs once hired one of them — a stove-setter, to build a stove in the house. Brother Bazaley — that was the stove-setter’s name — was not only a good stove-setter but also turned out to be a good preacher.
Georgy Loktev wrote about his conversion as follows:
During the meal we sat down at the table. According to the Orthodox custom, I turned to the icons, crossed myself and sat down. But the brother stood up, prayed as all believers do. And from that our conversation began.
We began to gather and talk with them, and we tried to prove to them that they were praying incorrectly. There are no saints (i.e. icons), so to whom are they praying? Especially we argued with them: I, uncle Stakhey Valshev, and Makey Mikhailovich Zemlyanushin. What questions we didn’t prepare for them! What didn’t we argue about! And of course, we have traditions! On them we based ourselves. How else? And we could not convince them of anything. On the contrary, we were convinced that we “do not know what we worship…” (John 4:22).
This was an encounter with Christ, when He touched our hearts, when tears flowed from our eyes, tears of repentance, tears of relief, tears of joy…
A desire to pray was kindled in the heart.
There is no need to convince us, no need to force us…
These brothers gathered for prayer every morning. And we three joined them. This was in October 1928.471
Some time later, on January 11, 1929, Georgy Loktev heard a prophetic word that spoke personally to him about the way to China.472 This happened under the following circumstances:
One day during prayer a sister, Lesofenkova Efrosinya, began to pray loudly in German. After the prayer we asked: “Is this sister German?” They answered: “No.” “Then why did she speak in German?” we continued to ask.
And then the brothers began to explain what the baptism of the Holy Spirit means. At the end of the conversation Uncle Stakhey said:
“Let us pray that the Lord would baptize one of us with the Holy Spirit. We old people have more sins than he does,” — he pointed to me, — “let us pray for him.” The brothers agreed. Almost all of us lived on the same street, so it was easy to gather us. Every morning and evening we gathered for prayer.
One day the presbyter of the Ukrainians arrived, who lived in another hamlet six versts away from us. His name was Seliverst Mikhailovich Kurennoye, and he was about sixty years old. Early in the morning, as usual, we gathered for prayer at Uncle Stakhey’s.
My parents also came. Father sat in the corner behind the stove. Mother and Aunt Vera stood by the door all the time. The prayer was fervent. We had two prayer sessions. At the end of the third prayer I felt as if I was raised a meter above the floor. I became hot, despite the fact that it was severely frosty outside, and the room was not warm either.
Suddenly my tongue ceased to obey me, and I began to speak in an unknown language. At that moment Presbyter Seliverst Mikhailovich, filled with the Holy Spirit, took the Bible in his hands, went up to my father sitting in the corner, and revealed the secrets of his heart. Father fell to his knees, began to weep and repent. My mother and Aunt Vera, seeing all that was happening, also fell to their knees.
At that time the Holy Spirit said to me: “You will go to a distant land!”
And I thought: “Where, Lord, will You lead me? And alone, or what?”
And the Holy Spirit says: “You will not go alone, but with your relatives to the distant land of China. There I will appoint you as a minister over My people. Then you will go even further and see many foreign brothers and sisters.”
All this, spoken at the dawn of my faith, came to pass.
After the prayer I ran home. My wife looks at me and does not understand what is the matter. And I speak to her in an unknown language and rejoice.
And this spiritual rain began — as a stream. The Lord began to baptize with the Holy Spirit. It was said: “Here I will pour out a river of grace.” And indeed, all this was fulfilled before our eyes. Later many specially came to our hamlet to pray for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The Ukrainian brothers were glad, because the prediction of the Holy Spirit was fulfilled. After all, they had been sent to us in the Urals by the Holy Spirit, according to the direction of the Holy Spirit. To some of them even our locality had been shown in a vision. The Lord fulfilled everything that had been spoken by the Holy Spirit to Brother Seliverst.
Now life began to pass under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Lord began to instruct in every matter.473
In Australia I also managed to find a manuscript of the memoirs of Mikhail Drozdov, born in 1905, who was also a participant in the exodus. At that time he lived in the hamlet of Chuvelev, not far from the village. Telling about the spiritual life of the newly formed church in Rannee, he, in particular, cited some rather interesting cases. Here is an excerpt from his memoirs:
Father, mother, uncle with his wife, a neighbor with his wife began to visit the believers more often, and they talked about it all the time. My wife heard all of this. One evening, father and mother went to the believers’ prayer meeting. My wife took the baby in her arms to nurse him, and quietly, to herself, she said: “Lord! If this is the truth, then bring us too… Open it to us, for we are afraid.”
Suddenly, a strong desire came over her, drawing her to kneel down and pray. She did just that: she laid the child on the bed and fell to her knees. She had barely spoken a few words when she began to speak in other tongues! She began to sing—some words in Russian, and some in another language. The melody was the same. The words were: “Bless the Lord, O my soul!” Afterwards we all learned that these words are written in Psalm 102, but my wife had never read it, nor had my father, nor my uncle… When this happened to my wife, father and mother were returning home from the prayer meeting and heard my wife singing in the house—and she had a beautiful voice!
Mother said to father: “You see, our daughter-in-law is praying and singing even without us, but when we are here she is always silent…”
News of the powerful awakening in our house spread through the farmsteads. People began to arrive: some thirsting for spiritual baptism, others out of curiosity. And then from the village of Ranniy came a woman named Sonya. Her husband was Russian, but she herself was Jewish by nationality. The events in our house interested her, and she came to see.
At that time we were all joyful and zealous, afraid of nothing, and ashamed before no one. Every evening, and sometimes even during the day, we held prayers, because people came thirsting for spiritual baptism, and almost all left baptized with the Holy Spirit. When this Jewish woman arrived, the prayer meeting was taking place during the day. During the prayer, the Holy Spirit filled my wife, and she prayed in another tongue. My wife did not know that she was praying in Hebrew, but Sonya the Jew understood everything that was said. My wife knew nothing of this. When the prayer ended, Sonya approached my wife and began to speak to her in Hebrew. My wife replied that she did not understand anything. “How can you not understand?” said Sonya, now in Russian, “you were just now praying in pure Hebrew… I understood perfectly how you prayed to God!” Then my uncle said to her: “Citizen! She truly does not know the Hebrew language. It was not she who prayed, but the Holy Spirit praying through her, as in the days of the Apostles, on the day of Pentecost.” When Sonya heard this, she said: “Now I understand. I will go home, bake bread for my husband, and return. Let God also baptize me with the Holy Spirit.”
And so she did. She went home, and after two days she returned and began to pray for the baptism of the Spirit. The Lord baptized her with the Holy Spirit. How joyful that woman was!
I also want to recall one more event. In a neighboring farmstead, a water baptism was to take place. We had not yet seen how this act was performed. This took place in early spring. About ten of us gathered, setting out on two one-horse carts. We left in the morning at about seven o’clock. My wife also very much wanted to go, but since we had a small child, and father, mother, and I were going, and my little sister was still small, we could entrust the child to no one, so she stayed behind. It took an hour and a half to travel to the farmstead where we were going. An hour had passed since we left. In our yard lived another believing sister who had not gone to the baptism. She said to my wife: “Do you want to go see the water baptism? Go, I’ll stay with the child.”
My wife got ready instantly. “I will go,” she thought, “though our people are probably already nearing the farmstead.”
She left the house and began to pray…
We had not yet entered the farmstead when we looked: someone is walking behind us and catching up. In five minutes, my wife reached us…
We were all amazed and asked her:
“Did you milk the cows?”
“Yes, I let them out to the herd…”
“And the child, with whom did you leave him?”
“With the neighbor lady…”
“How is that possible? We left no less than an hour ago, and you set out and caught up with us? That is impossible!”
Then my wife began to tell us: “When I left, I began to pray, was filled with the Holy Spirit, and did not walk, but flew through the air. My feet did not touch the ground. I look: I am already catching up with you.” And she herself was so joyful, radiant. This happened to her just as it did with Philip (Acts 8:39-40).474
That from which freedom-loving peasants had fled Ukraine began to reach the Urals as well. In his memoirs, Georgy Loktev recounts:
At the end of 1929, they began to organize artels. At first, they did not want to accept us believers into the artel, even if we had wanted to join. But two months later, they sent another commissioner, and he overturned the initial decision and forced us by power to sign up for the collective farm. In the winter of that same year, yet a third cadre of commissioners arrived and, under threat, forced us to sign up for a commune. But we, the believers, flatly refused to enter the commune and organized an artel. We were allotted arable land, and we sowed it with wheat.
It must be remembered that the Holy Spirit guided us in all things, and we sought counsel even on everyday matters.
Every peasant wants to plow as much land as possible. But the times were no longer the same. Taxes began to be levied not on the harvest, but on the sown area. The inhabitants of the farmstead, seeing that the weather was favorable to them, decided to plow and sow even more. But we sought the Lord’s counsel, and the Holy Spirit told us: “My children, this much will be enough for you.” We obeyed. And here is what happened in the autumn. The authorities mercilessly collected the tax based on the sown area. But the peasants did not get a harvest from those fields they had plowed in the spring. And the farmstead residents spoke out at collective meetings: “You see, the Stundists are wiser than us; they did not plow in the spring, so they have less taxes. And what about us? There is no harvest, yet you must pay the tax? We laughed at them, but they turned out wiser than us.”475
Presbyter Seliverst Mikhailovich Kurennoy, who had come from Ukraine, was a highly respected man in the community and became a great authority for the new converts as well. Visiting them often, he established them in the faith, taught them the truth of God, including explaining to them how to use the gifts of the Holy Spirit. He himself possessed the gift of prophecy and the gift of discerning spirits. He also instructed the young Christians in ordinary, everyday matters.
After some time, he was arrested by the authorities and sent to prison in the city of Uralsk. Later it became known that he was sentenced to 10 years and exiled to Kazakhstan. Having served his term, S.M. Kurennov emerged from prison with frostbitten feet and settled with his son in Fergana, where he died. Georgy Loktev wrote about him with love and gratitude:
I am very grateful to God for such brothers who sacrificed themselves for the cause of the Gospel. Glory to the Lord for such bearers of Christ’s Truth! In eternity, Brother Selivyorst Mikhailovich will see the fruits of his labors and the fruits of the brothers who came with him from faraway Ukraine.476
In January 1930, they began dekulakizing and exiling the peaceful grain growers of the Urals to remote places; this wave also reached the village of Ranneye. By a miracle of God, the Drozdyovs and Loktevs escaped eviction, as did many other believers. But by that time, the community already knew—by the command of the Holy Spirit they were to leave for China.
Mikhail Drozdyov writes in his memoirs:
The Lord began to speak: “Children! Prepare yourselves; I will lead you out of your locality first to Frunze, then to China for a short time. From China—to the east, to plentiful lands flowing with milk and honey. Only do not change your service, for in those countries there are many of my children, different colors of people and different languages, but they are also my children, though they have not known Me as well.”
“Your route: the station Pishpek, the city Frunze, the village Pokrovka; you will be there a short time,” said the Holy Spirit. We look at the map. “Why the station Pishpek, but the city Frunze?” we wondered. It turned out that on the old map under the tsar, the city was Pishpek, and the station as well, but under Soviet power, the city was renamed Frunze, while the station remained as it was. “But why the settlement Pokrovka?” we wondered, “it’s only 40 km from us to the settlement Pokrovka.” We could not understand what this might mean. We decided: perhaps there is also a Pokrovka there; God would not speak in vain.477
(Later, the astonished travelers would have to stop for a time with Christian families in the village of Pokrovka, which turned out to be 15 kilometers from Frunze.)
Families that had come out of Ukraine (these were the large families of Efrem Shevchenko, Pyotr Timofeevich Ionko, and many others), as well as newly converted families of Ural Cossacks, prepared for a long journey, relying only on God’s mercy.
It was decided to travel in separate groups. Some Ukrainian families set out and headed for Alma-Ata. And on August 24, 1930, the time came for the Ural relatives to set off on the long journey: the Drozdyovs, Pustobaevs, Valshevs, joined by the family of the Ukrainian Andrey Yakovlev and the family of Arkhimetiy Zemlyanushin. About sixty souls gathered in all: eight families on ten wagons.
Georgy Ivanovich later recalled:
Uncle Stakhey hired a driver, a Kazakh by nationality. They agreed where and at what place to meet, and in which direction to travel afterward. From our khutor to the railway station there were two roads. One to the west, an old road that went roundabout. The other road—a new one—to the north. As always, any undertaking must begin with prayer. And behold, the Holy Spirit filled Sister Maria Valsheva and she said: “Take the road that leads west.” And the Holy Spirit said to me: “And you, son, will go to China and will cross a little river—the prophet stood up and showed with his hand above the knee—like this.” Then a prayer poured forth in some Asian dialect. The driver—a Kazakh—apparently understood something; he only sighed and marveled. And this strengthened us in faith.478
Later they learned that the authorities, discovering their departure, sent a pursuit which rushed after them along the new road. Of course, it never occurred to them that the fugitives would go to the station by the old, abandoned road, which was 50 kilometers longer than the new one. The pursuit found nothing and returned empty-handed.
Having finally arrived at the Sorochinskaya railway station, the brothers learned that obtaining any tickets was a very big problem, and even then, no more than 2‑3 tickets per day. However, by God’s mercy, they obtained two freight cars fitted with plank beds. In the time remaining before the train’s departure, they managed to sell their wagons and horses, even though at that time of the beginning of collectivization, no one usually bought such things.
Soon the freight train slowly pulled south. After six days of travel, they arrived at the Pishpek station not far from Frunze, where they found a house of prayer of brothers in faith, who gave them shelter. This was a Pentecostal community of about 60 members under the leadership of presbyter Bezrodnykh, who a year later was arrested by the Chekists. His further fate remained unknown.
The Loktev family settled in the neighboring village of Pokrovka and often attended the local church. From the migrants, the brothers in Frunze for the first time heard with astonishment and even some disbelief about the famine, epidemics, dekulakization, and confiscation of property, of which they then had no idea. The wave of sorrows reached that region rather soon.
In the early days of March 1931, local residents who had their own carts, including Brother Fyodor Mestelenko from the church, with whom the Loktev family lived in Pokrovka, received an order from the authorities to prepare horses with wagons, take provisions for themselves and fodder for the horses for 5 days. Upon returning home, Brother Fyodor related with horror where he had been, where he had traveled, and what he had seen. Here is a fragment of his account:
They gathered 80 wagons, and we arrived at the Bishkek railway station. A whole train stood in a siding, packed with families of the dekulakized. People from the cars shouted: “Water! Water! Give us water!” Of course, they were given none. The windows had iron bars. The train was surrounded by soldiers. The doors of the cars were opened, and people poured out—adults, children, teenagers, exhausted by thirst and the hard journey. Parents sent teenagers with vessels in their hands for water. The convoy roughly knocked the vessels out of their hands with rifle butts and kicks. Noise and uproar arose. People were like sheep. They were driven, everyone shouted, searching for their children, as sheep search for their lambs. Nothing could be understood. We were ordered to bring up our wagons, and we began to load their belongings. Children and the elderly were placed on the wagons, as well as women with nursing infants. They loaded up, and the wagon train set off. Ahead of the train, those who were able to walk were driven. Those who fell behind were mercilessly prodded by the convoy. They traveled this way for two days. Everyone was brought to a sandy steppe. Not exactly a desert—a steppe overgrown with bushes. They stopped. There were no buildings, nothing, not a single thing. They dumped their belongings, and we returned.479
From everything he saw and experienced, Fyodor Mestelenko fell ill and lay in bed for a whole week. How those dekulakized people settled, who survived there, is unknown. That event was only a tiny fragment of the great sufferings of our long-suffering people.
Working with their hands, running a subsistence farm as best they could, the resettlers lived near Frunze until May 1, 1931. Then they bought covered wagons and horses, and during the spring days moved to Alma-Ata. There they again met Efrem Andreevich Shevchenko, Pyotr Timofeevich Ionko, Andrey Zakharovich Demchenko, Leonty Dumanovsky, Iosif Zabrodin, Pavel Sizintsov, and their families. In all, a group of over 110 people gathered, who, remembering the prophecy, decided to make their way toward the Chinese border.
Not everyone shared this vision. Some of the brethren decided to move to Fergana, where, it seemed to them, life was rather good. Under their influence, others also agreed to live there. However, after three months of living in Fergana, it became clear to many that they needed to leave. Some of the believers remained in Fergana. As it turned out later, they got stuck there and stayed forever. Others managed with difficulty to return to Alma-Ata and from there continued their journey toward China.
The next stop was the town of Zharkent on the Chinese border. It was here that all the resettler families flocked, found work, and secured housing. Actually, finding housing was very simple—there were many empty houses in the town, for the inhabitants had long since gone to China. This was not an extraordinary phenomenon—out of Zharkent, various groups of people left for China every night, just as in other parts of the border. People were fleeing hunger however they could, moving from town to town, and also crossing the border.
At that time, the Soviet authorities still did not have enough strength to fully seal the border, to lock it down. The Iron Curtain was only just being created. Naturally, patrols of border guards from both sides ruthlessly hunted down the fugitives, who were thrown into prison, and some were exiled to Siberia. Yet many simply “turned out to be lucky” and got across to the Chinese side. The weakness of the border guard was also evidenced by the presence of numerous Chinese goods in the market, which were supplied without interruption by groups of smugglers.
The Drozdov family, having safely covered the 300-kilometer journey from Alma-Ata, arrived in Zharkent on October 8, 1931. To their great joy, they met many of their acquaintances there—both Ukrainians and fellow countrymen from the Urals. Forty-five kilometers remained to the Chinese border, but winter was coming, and under these conditions they had to wait for the warm season. Meanwhile, they gathered daily for common prayers.
Soon they officially registered the congregation.
Georgy Ivanovich wrote:
Once the Holy Spirit warned us to register our church. This seemed strange to us. We were living temporarily, unsettled, and suddenly—registering a church. But a week later the Holy Spirit again warned us about registering the church. Then, after consulting with the brethren, we went and registered the congregation.480
Gavriil Ivanovich Avramenko was chosen as the presbyter of the church. He had been ordained in 1927 for the ministry of a traveling evangelist by I. E. Voronaev, as attested by his surviving certificate issued by the All-Ukrainian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith. He had also been in the Urals among other Ukrainian brethren; through his testimony, some Ural Cossacks were converted. Mikhail Kurennov was chosen as the chairman of the congregation, Alexander Efremovich Shevchenko as secretary. Samuil Guba was registered as deacon. A list of all families and children was drawn up. During registration, the address of the prayer house was provided. The house was on one of the central streets in Zharkent. The house had apparently previously belonged to Dungans who had fled to China. When they conducted the first worship service, the police came at the sound of singing. They demanded documents, and after they were shown, the policemen calmly left.481
Once a group of brethren were caught in a raid and had to spend about a month in prison. But since the church was registered, they were all released.
With the coming of warmth, family after family, group after group, the brethren with their families began to leave across the border. By that time the Loktevs had settled on a state farm that was 4 kilometers closer to the border. Their house became a staging post for those departing. Once, in order to scout the way, Georgy Ivanovich also went with them and reached the Chinese village of Chimpandzy, where he was simply amazed by the abundance of goods at the bazaar. He returned home with bread. On the way back he came upon a sleeping border guard. He was sitting asleep, holding his horse by the rein.
July 6, 1932, the hour came for the whole family to leave for China. They decided to go with horses, which was far more complicated and dangerous. They sewed large saddlebags out of felt matting, so they could be slung over the horse’s saddle. They placed a few belongings at the bottom of the bags and sat the children on top. One child in one bag, the other in the other. The nursing infant was carried in arms. They traveled by night; by day they hid from the merciless heat and the border guards in the bushes. It took three nights to pass the border posts of both states. The border river divided into several branches and was shallow. This reminded Loktev of the prophetic word he had heard back in Ranniy, that he was to cross into China by wading through a shallow river. Once on the other side, they barely managed to hide from a Chinese border patrol that galloped past ten meters away in the darkness.
In the village of Chimpandzy they joined the families of Pavel Sizintsov and Grigory Gaiduk, who had crossed the border earlier and had already managed to settle in.
After the years of famine in the Soviet Union, where they had grown unaccustomed even to bread and vegetables, where hungry people, it seemed, had caught all the animals and birds, life in China was astonishing in its abundance.
Georgy Loktev wrote:
We went to the bazaar and were amazed. There was plenty of food, plenty of goods, bread—as much as you could wish. They carry half a sheep or half a side of beef on poles, shouting: “Gushch! Gushch!”, which means “Meat! Meat! Cheap meat!” And there, they carry bread in baskets on their heads and shout: “Issyk nan! Issyk nan! — ‘Warm bread! Bread!’” Vegetable oil is sold in jars. The bazaar is noisy. Sellers offer their wares. This is what freedom means!
We went to the flour market. And there were pigeons… hundreds of them. They walk among the people. Nobody touches them, because pigeons are considered a noble bird.
So now we had to set up housekeeping again, to acquire furniture. We had brought with us an axe, a hand saw, a chisel, and two blades for a plane—that was all the tools. I went out of the yard into the bushes, cut down a few poles, and gathered grass. I returned to the house, drove four legs into the ground, laid the poles on them, and spread grass on top—and that was a bed. And our belongings—under the bed. That’s how we began to live. We found work as carpenters. Five lan a day. By local standards it wasn’t much. But by Soviet standards it was a very high rate. With that money I could buy 50 flatbreads of 200 grams each.482
In short, a single day’s wages were enough to feed the family for a week.483
Now the journey lay further—deep into the territory of Xinjiang, to Kuldja. By October 1932, more than 20 pilgrim families had already gathered in this city, including the Drozdovs, Loktevs, Sizintsovs, Gaiduks, Lizogubovs, Yakovlevs. A community formed, and Gavriil Ivanovich Avramenko was again elected as elder, and Dmitry Lizogubov as chairman. G. I. Loktev was elected treasurer and steward. Thus regular worship services began in Kuldja: on Sunday morning and evening, and on Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Monthly, at the beginning of the month, they celebrated the Lord’s Supper with foot washing, as they had received from the Ukrainian brethren.
There were about 40 members, and together with children the community numbered about 75 people.
At that time, there were already Russian old-settlers in Kuldja, who were called “old emigrants.” The Chinese authorities treated the Russians rather favorably and created no obstacles, either in social or in religious life. They only asked the church ministers to specify the order of services and the procedure for forming a family, to indicate the age of those entering marriage, and set the condition that newlyweds first register with the state office and then be married in the church.
By that time, there was also an Orthodox church in Kuldja and a fairly large Baptist church, to which the Russian population belonged.
In April-May 1933, Petr Ionko, Efrem Shevchenko, Alexey Dumanovsky, Ivan Porkhulov, Mikhail Kurennov, Mikhail Drozdov, David Pustobaev and others arrived in Kuldja with their families. The church grew to 100 souls.
Recalling this border crossing, Alexander Shevchenko later wrote:
The families had to gather in the prayer house. You couldn’t go empty-handed: everyone had children, you had to bring at least the bare necessities to clothe yourselves, food. And so each one took their sack or bundle, the children, and they set out. The town was constantly under police surveillance, and also those eager to inform. Every suspicious person was subject to questioning or arrest, but there was nothing to be done; the Lord had promised to preserve them, so everything would be fine. In the courtyard where they held their prayer meeting, there lived a family completely unconnected to them. And they see how, gradually, these people with bundles fill the room where they had held their prayer meetings. Perhaps more than once they called them fools in their minds, fanatics—in their opinion, nothing more foolish could be imagined; but the Lord always wants to establish our faith in His power, protecting us where we see no possibility.
Everyone who came tried to put the children to rest, and to rest themselves. There was no lack of noise: the half-starved children cried, and each mother, with her heart in her throat, offered a fervent prayer to the Lord. And the cries of the children did not reach the ears of those who so greedily sought new victims.
They were to set out at midnight. It was the moment when everyone was still on the alert! The moment when any noise, any rustle, made the dogs bark! And at their barking, like kites on prey, the guards would come galloping. But it was the Lord’s will, so all waited for the appointed time. Most settled down to rest on the benches, only a few remained on watch so as not to miss the appointed time.
The Lord also made provision for a place for each family; someone was chosen to lead the people—a brother who was the least conspicuous, not distinguished from others in intellect, knowledge, or resourcefulness, having no idea of the country to which the Lord was directing them; only, perhaps, in meekness and humility. Also, a few people were appointed for constant prayer and communion with the Lord.
Time passes very slowly; the clock hand seems not to move at all. The silence is broken by the crying or moaning of children. Many sleep peacefully, having entrusted themselves to the Lord—to the amazement of those who cannot calm down. Midnight… The watchmen brothers wake everyone without turning on the light. Mothers calm their children, give them drink and feed them. But the children do not understand their parents’ anxieties: they raise a cry (especially the little ones)—they were woken at the wrong time, and besides, the beds were uncomfortable. All their discontent pours out in weeping.
A chill runs through the bodies of those of little faith. The children’s crying seems to presage swift destruction… The devil vividly paints a picture in their imagination: at the noise, border guards come running; seeing the bundles, sacks, and so many people in one room, they lead them off to prison without interrogation. And then Siberia appears, hard labor, separation from one’s family, or execution… They listen with bated breath, but nothing of the sort is heard, and seeing the steadfastness and faith of others, they gradually calm down and begin to pray.
It is time… Everyone bows in fervent prayer, committing themselves and their children into the hands of Almighty God.
The brothers give final instructions; each family takes its proper place as the Lord indicated, and they go out…
Before them is impenetrable night, but suddenly the treetops rustled, the wind rose and carried dust along the road. A strong gust of wind struck instantly, and the little town was filled with various sounds. The whistling of the wind mingled with the cries of the children, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief…
So this was the protection the Lord had prepared for them! And they had racked their brains over how impossible it would be for such a large group to pass through the town and across the border unnoticed. But now, holding on to one another so as not to get separated, one family after another set out.
Yes, this was a wonderful school, and it was engraved on their memory for life. Indescribable joy filled every heart. Each soul sang, rejoiced, and glorified the Lord for His marvelous deliverance… No one doubted any longer; each one saw a safe outcome. The Lord richly filled their hearts with His presence, gave them wings, inspired them, and they freely passed through everything that had recently frightened and terrified them with its uncertainty.
The town was passed, and finding themselves in the open field, they all stopped; the storm subsided. It had done the work entrusted to it: it had dust-blinded more than one guard, driven dogs into their hiding corners, and scattered all the cries of the children. And so the group of believers, led by the Lord, emerged freely. The terrible danger was past. But there, in a country unknown to them, the Lord promised to give them drink, to feed them, to send everything necessary for life, and to give them work.484
The crossing of this group of 45 people from Zharkent to Kulja (a distance of 130 kilometers on an unfamiliar road, mostly through sandy deserts) was especially difficult and took 12 nights. Along the way, in an unknown little Chinese cemetery, they had to bury Yakov Ilin, who died on the journey.485
Here is another fragment of memories from that crossing:
In one place we walked day and night without water. Morning came, and there was no water; the children begged to drink, and the parents answered with tears that there was no water. Yes, this was truly a tragedy that cannot be forgotten. We all began to pray, crying out fervently to the Lord, and the little children with tears shouted for the Lord to give them water. And He did not delay; it was said: “Turn to the left, go a little way, and I will give you water.” And indeed, after going a little further, we went down into a small valley where, in the middle of the sandy desert, it was hard to imagine that there could be water. There we drank our fill, and with renewed strength we continued on our way, and having completed the journey, we came to the city of Kulja, in western China.
We are now convinced that not only in the days of Israel’s wanderings and the early apostolic Church, but also in our days, the Lord works miracles, leads by the Holy Spirit, heals and saves. Hallelujah!486
Besides the two above-mentioned groups (those who had come from Ukraine and the Ural Cossacks who had come to faith through them), in Kulja in May 1933 the paths of yet another, third organized group of pilgrims crossed—under the leadership of Mikhail Vasilyevich Danchenko. This group had come from Rostov-on-Don independently, by an entirely different route, but with the same goal—to hide in China from the coming calamities. Having left their native places, they also made a long and arduous journey, about which later, in her declining years in prosperous and quiet Canada, one of the most active participants of this incredible crossing, Anna Bagdasaryan, wrote a book of memoirs—which, to great regret, has not been published to this day. I brought the precious manuscript of this book out of Australia in the autumn of 2002, thanks to the kindness of the brothers and sisters of the Slavic Pentecostal church in Adelaide. The present account of this group’s amazing and difficult journey to China is built mainly on the material of that manuscript and on notes from conversations with Nikolai Mikhailovich Danchenko, with whom I had long talks in Australia.
From reliable sources it is known that the Pentecostal church in Rostov-on-Don was founded in 1926 through the preaching ministry of Voronaev’s coworker, the union evangelist B. S. Pavlov. K. S. Klochkov also actively participated in the building up of the church of God, and he was later ordained by Pavlov to the presbyteral ministry in that church.
Anna Bagdasaryan came from a fairly well-to-do Armenian family, of which there were many (and still are) in the vicinity of Rostov-on-Don. As she reports, it was a “provincial town of Nakhichevan,” and the family was “patriarchal, where there were grandmothers, grandfathers, and we were taught to honor elders, respect the old.”487
Her grandmother was distinguished by special religious piety, and she instilled in them a love for the church and good works. Anna’s mother came to faith in February 1928, when Voronaev’s first deputy, V. R. Koltovich, who had come from Odessa, was preaching in Rostov. His preaching was in the power of the Holy Spirit, accompanied by miracles and healings of the sick. Having come to the Bagdasaryans’ home, Koltovich prayed and anointed with oil in the name of the Lord Anna’s sister Liza, who was ill with tuberculosis. She was instantly healed. After this, Anna also sincerely and deeply turned to God. Later she served as secretary and treasurer of the Rostov church of Evangelical Christian faith.
In the twilight of her years, she wrote about the unforgettable days of spiritual awakening in Rostov as follows:
Apostolic days came upon us. The Lord worked miracles. In the morning I would run to my neighbour, who had not eaten or slept for SO days, and she had more ailments than one could count: pulmonary tuberculosis, a heart defect, kidney disease, gynaecological illnesses, and on top of all that, her legs were paralysed at the knees, with excruciating pain in them; they could neither be touched nor moved in the slightest. She had been given up for death; the doctor merely came to visit her.
In joy I announced to them the great miracle God had worked in our home. I asked whether she wished us to pray for her, and whether she believed the Lord could heal her. She agreed.
In the evening, before the meeting, as soon as Brother Koltovich arrived, I invited him to go to the neighbour’s to pray for her — and we went. The house was full of sorrow and weeping; everyone tried to make not a single knock or clatter. Every sound intensified the sick woman’s suffering. We knelt beside her bed, and prayer from five voices rose to the throne of grace.
The Heavenly Father granted her healing in the name of His Son Jesus Christ. The Lord revealed His power wondrously; we were to see many healings and the casting out of demons. Oh, what a heavy prayer is the prayer for the expulsion of demons!
About twenty souls were ready for water baptism. Our entire family received baptism together. Brother Koltovich baptised us in the River Don in May 1929.
We left the meeting in orderly rows, walked through the streets singing psalms, and a vast multitude gathered at the river. That was the last open water baptism. Afterwards, only secret baptisms took place, at night. After the water baptism, returning to the meeting, we held the foot washing, the Lord’s Supper, and tea.488
In that same year, 1929, a union evangelist, Polina Vasilievna Kushnereva, a board member of the All-Ukrainian Union of Churches of Christians of Evangelical Faith, was sent from Odessa to serve in Rostov-on-Don and the North Caucasus. V.S. Pavlov also continued to visit the congregation regularly with his family.
Anna Bagdasaryan wrote:
The Lord acted wonderfully through Brother Pavlov. He had a wonderful gift of visions. He lived with our family for a time, and in the autumn he moved to a rented room. Every day at dawn in the summer, we would go to the meeting to pray; worldly people also came — I don’t know why — out of curiosity, I think. Once a young woman came in and knelt like everyone else; the prayer was fervent. After rising from his knees, Brother Pavlov went up to this woman and asked her to step outside with him. When they returned, the woman fell to her knees and prayed: “Truly, this is of God! Lord, only You knew, and I — no one else!” It turned out that the brother had seen a vision that she had wrapped something up, taken it to the cellar, and buried it: she had performed an abortion on herself. Another time an old woman came in; after the prayer, the brother said to her: “What is it that your son brings home and you hide in the chest?” Terrified, she confirmed that, indeed, her son was stealing and his mother was hiding the stolen goods. After that, they stopped coming. A rumour reached us that some were saying: “Don’t go there; they will uncover all your sins.”489
Nevertheless, the church soon grew to 250 members, and “in the surrounding villages and hamlets, little groups sprang up like mushrooms.”490
In June 1929, on assignment from the Union, Pavlov, Kushnereva, and Voronaev’s son Alexander toured the churches of the North Caucasus. They invited the Bagdasaryan sisters — Anna and Liza — to accompany them on the trip. Pavlov and the younger Voronaev stayed in Armavir with the church of Assyrian Pentecostals, while the three sisters continued on through villages and towns, visiting many churches of the Union of CEF, preaching the Word of God and edifying the believers.
Over the course of their three-month journey along rutted roads in jolting carts, they visited fifteen congregations. They slept “on beds as dusty as a travelled road.” They bathed and did their laundry in the river, sitting in the bushes while their clothes dried. They saw both the stingy and the generous, met believers from the most diverse denominations; in some places, the authorities were well-disposed toward them, in others they drove them out with threats.
The Cossack stanitsa of Batalbashinskaya, Essentuki, Kislovodsk… Then the Bagdasaryan sisters returned home to Rostov, while Polina Kushnereva visited another fifteen churches in the North Caucasus and then set off on assignment to far-away Siberia, to Omsk. They were never fated to see one another again on this earth…
Shortly before his own arrest, the chairman of the Union, Ivan Efimovich Voronaev, also came to Rostov-on-Don en route to the Caucasus, accompanied by Union evangelist Mikhail Sidorovich Buta. They stayed in the hospitable home of the Bagdasaryans.
And all this time, the Bagdasaryans’ sense of wonder never left them: in the winter of early 1929 they had heard a prophecy from Sister Obukhova that foretold a coming journey to an unknown China.
By that time, a large group of Ukrainian Pentecostal believers had joined the Rostov church. Soon after their conversion to the Lord, they had left their homes and possessions in the Nikolaev region and resettled in the settlement of Kamenolomnya near Rostov, where they registered a church through which many people came to faith and found salvation.
The leader of this Ukrainian group was Mikhail Vasilievich Danchenko.
In October 1929, the congregation received a prophetic word that the time had come to leave that place. Understandably, not everyone agreed to leave, and not everyone had the possibility, for they had unbelieving families.
Those who remained managed within one week to sell their belongings, pack their loads, and prepare for the long journey.
On 29 November 1929, a steamer departed from Rostov for Batumi. Among the many other passengers, one could notice an orderly company: it consisted of 59 members of the Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith who had set out on their way “not knowing where they were going.” After a calm voyage across the Sea of Azov, a storm broke out beyond the Kerch Strait that severely battered the old steamer. By God’s mercy, the vessel safely made it to Batumi, where the wandering Pentecostals made their first stop.
In Batumi it was warm and green even in early December, when the settlers arrived there. They settled in Kobuleti, in a picturesque mountainous area, and hired themselves out as seasonal workers on local state farms. Working on the terraces of the mandarin plantations, among trees that seemed golden, they felt as if they were in the Garden of Eden.
Here, gathering daily for worship services and prayer, the settlers discovered a strange fact — almost every day Pentecostal believers arrived here from many parts of Russia. Soon a large community formed, numbering around a thousand members. Brother Egor, who had previously been one of the leaders of the church in Rostov-on-Don, became the head of this community. Of course, the community was not homogeneous; some were very happy to have come here, while others returned home to their former places of residence.491 Some had a premonition that this would not end well.
The premonition turned out to be correct. On one rainy February morning in 1930, the state‑farm dachas where the settlers lived were surrounded, all the heads of families were lined up in rows, driven to the farm office, where high authorities awaited them: having questioned some widows and single women, they were sent home, but almost all the men were loaded onto trucks and sent to Batumi to the customs house. There they were placed in sheds on cobblestones, where goods had previously been stored.
The cheerful hive of the community fell silent. The joyful psalms, the happy hubbub to which everyone had grown accustomed, were gone. Yet groups of Pentecostals continued to arrive from various places. The authorities already hunted for them right at the pier, rounding up all the men “for checking.” Women and children joined the community.
One day the customs‑house sheds emptied. With great difficulty the women managed to find out that several brothers had been sent to Tiflis, and the rest had been exiled to the construction of the Char‑Dara state farm in Turkmenistan.
What was to be done? All the more strange was the prophecy about a journey to China and through China.
Some courageous women decided to follow their husbands and move to Central Asia to be near them. The community, deprived not only of its leaders but also of the heads of families, could no longer remain a unified whole: its subsequent history is a migration of separate groups and families, each with its own destiny. As for the core of the group that had left Rostov, working with their hands in order each time to be able to move on, numbering about sixty people, with children and old people (one grandmother was a hundred years old!), enduring great hardships and sorrows, they set out in October 1930 to Tiflis, Baku, and then by steamer along the Kura River to Vasilyevka, where there was a Pentecostal church established in its time by the same tireless union evangelist Pavlov. With the help of the local church they found shelter in Vasilyevka for some time, resting from the difficult journey and once again earning some means to continue the road. Having warmly bid farewell to the church, they again boarded a river steamer that took them to Baku.
Ahead lay the stormy and treacherous Caspian Sea — and complete uncertainty.
A description of all the adventures the believers experienced on their long journey would probably fill several books. Only by God’s miracle can one explain many astonishing things that happened to them.
Having crossed the Caspian Sea, they disembarked in Krasnovodsk. After certain ordeals with the railway and the ubiquitous GPU, they managed to buy train tickets to Tashkent, for which a special extra carriage was provided. The trip to Tashkent took nearly four days.
There, literally on the station square, they had to live for a whole month. They also made contact with the local church. The church was already suffering persecution; its prayer house had been seized.
Finally the exhausted travelers received permission to travel to Char‑Dara, where their men, whom they had last seen in Batumi, were laboring hard. The journey to the place of their exile proved to be far from short. With great difficulty they traveled by overcrowded train to Syr‑Darya station, spent three days soaking in the rain on a deserted pier, and then had to spend yet another whole day sailing by motorboat along the famous Asian river of the same name.
It is difficult to describe the joy of families who had little hope left of seeing one another again here on earth.
From this camp, people later made their way out as best they could, as individual families. The meeting point for those who managed to escape was set as Tashkent. The presbyter of the church in Tashkent offered them hospitality and helped in whatever way he could, but dark clouds were also gathering over him, and some Tashkent brothers had already been arrested. At last, several families gathered in Tashkent — 45 people, a small group from that community of 1,000 that had once formed in Batumi.
And again, by God’s miracle, having obtained 45 tickets, they departed for Alma‑Ata.
What to do next? No one knew. They stood and prayed.
And there, at the station, they were unmistakably recognized by a local sister from Alma‑Ata, who for two days had been trying to go somewhere and was therefore sitting at the station. She told them that on the outskirts of Alma‑Ata there was an entire transit camp where Pentecostals were gathering from all sides. These dwellings, which the brothers had built for themselves and for the pilgrims that would follow, were like swallows’ nests clinging to the mountain. Many, many children of God found rest under the roof of these little huts. This camp was located at the end of Alma‑Atinka Street. There, blessed worship services took place in a makeshift tent made of reed mats. It is also known that many souls turned to the Lord, water baptisms were performed more than once, and there were cases of miraculous healings. At times the number of members of this church on the way reached 300.492
Here in Alma‑Ata the last pitiful remnants of their possessions were sold. Everyone remained with only the lightest of belongings. With difficulty they scraped together money to continue the journey. Ahead lay the final goal on Soviet territory — Zharkent. There was no bread left.
It was impossible to get to Zharkent without passes.
They had no passes.
But on that very day, perhaps the only such day, no one checked the passes.
Anna Bagdasaryan writes in her memoirs:
Having taken our suitcases, we went out and settled in empty houses, of which there were so many in this town.
The next morning, having prayed, we went to look for work at the nearest state farm, about ten versts from the town toward the Chinese border. As the Father had promised us, so He provided. Work was found on the state farm for everyone. Some were taken into the office, some to the fields — this farm was a cotton-growing one. We arrived on a cart, collected all our belongings, came to the state farm, and there the rooms were already ready. Life flowed on in its own course, but we did not cease our prayers. The Father gave much instruction, warning, and promised to lead us away.
I did not know that we had come so close to the Chinese border. Once, a crowd came by, surrounded by soldiers. “They’re leading the border-crossers,” said one woman standing nearby, “they fled to China.”
And in the spring, the Lord began to lead His people out.493
At the beginning of May 1933, twenty people from the Rostov group, including three children aged five, six, and seven, prepared to cross the border. The children were sent during the day to the edge of the state farm, from where it would be easier to leave. At night, they went out with songs on their lips. Suddenly they stumbled upon smugglers, both sides scaring each other quite a bit. “Don’t sing,” the smugglers reasonably noted, “or the border guards will catch you — they patrol here on horseback.”
On the second night, praying, they approached the border. By the border river, Mikhail Danchenko proposed kneeling for the last time and praying on their native soil.494 Indeed, they were never destined to return to their native land again.
One more night — and they were out of danger, deep in the territory of Xinjiang.
Soon they found themselves in Kulja.
But the next group was caught at the border and driven back to the Soviet Union.
The Rostov group organically merged into the fellowship of Slavic Pentecostals.
Georgy Ivanovich Loktev later recounted in his memoirs:
We and our community in Kulja did not know Brother Danchenko and his group, nor had we even heard of him. At the beginning of May 1933, after the evening service, we gathered for prayer in my apartment, as usual. The Holy Spirit spoke: “Behold, son Mikhail and his people are coming; they are flaming in spirit but weak in flesh. They will come and go on to Tekes, while you will remain.” We thought and reasoned about my brother Mikhail Drozdov, whom we were expecting from the Union, but this was spoken about Mikhail Danchenko and his group from the city of Rostov. We had never heard of Mikhail Danchenko, and had never been to the city of Rostov-on-Don.
On Saturday, with Brother Pavel Sizintsov, we were going to work. An unknown woman approached us (we later learned that it was Maria Ilyina, a Ukrainian), and she said: “We are looking for our brothers.” We answered: “Yes, that’s us.” We took our tools and led her to our apartment. And around the corner we saw a group of about twenty people. They told us about their journey.
It turned out that when the Lord spoke to us about brother Mikhail, they were at that time leaving Zharkent. They had left home at night, without extinguishing the kerosene lamp, so as not to arouse suspicion. Having walked all night, they sat among the sand dunes by day, hungry and without water. It was pitiful to see the distress of the children. One little girl was already dying of thirst. They cried out to God in prayer. The Holy Spirit, through a prophet, showed the direction where there was water. They went and saw a puddle of water among the dunes, and thus saved the child.
They had been told, “I will preserve you on the way.” And the Lord fulfilled His word. Glory to Him! He is true. When they were leaving Zharkent, as always, they prayed. It was told them: “At 12 o’clock you will cross the river at the border.”
When they approached the river at the border, they carefully lit up their watch — it was exactly 12! What joy and exultation. After living in Kulja for some time, they began to disperse — some to the villages, while this group gathered and went on to Tekes. What had been told to us came to pass. On Tekes, they lived and held services. Thanks to them, Avram Makarovich Tarasenko, his wife, and their daughter-in-law believed in the Lord. In the winter, Brother Mikhail Danchenko administered water baptism to them.
Glory to the Lord! Thus the Word of God was sown among their relatives — and there are very many of the Tarasenkos. This was in the winter of 1933.
In July 1933, to assist the church elder, two deacons were elected and ordained — Pyotr Timofeevich Ionko and Georgy Ivanovich Loktev.495 And in 1938, when G.I. Avramenko fell ill, G.I. Loktev was ordained to pastoral ministry.496
Some families moved to the surrounding Chinese villages and settlements, but the majority of the migrants remained in Kulja for a long time. Practically everyone found suitable work and settled fairly well into life.
Kulja became a crossroads for the various groups of Pentecostals — and not only Pentecostals — who had come out of the Soviet Union. As already mentioned, Kulja also had a Russian-speaking Baptist church, as well as an Orthodox church. One must understand that, driven out of their settled homeland by collectivization, famine, and savage lawlessness, a huge mass of Russian people, migrating from place to place, finally found themselves forced to flee to China — and Kulja in Xinjiang truly became a city of migrants. The Russian population here was so large that a Soviet consulate was later opened in Kulja, which, among its other activities (both legal and illegal under the cover of diplomatic agency), regularly held free showings of Soviet films that sang the praises of paradise life in the USSR, and also actively campaigned for all those who had fled to return to the “Soviet Motherland,” where they were promised mountains of gold.
Initially, such propaganda appeals were unsuccessful — the memories of those who had fled to China during those terrible years of great hardship were still too fresh. However, as the years passed, the youth grew up, knowing about Russia only from the stories of their parents and relatives, interest in the land of their ancestors increased — and some of the unbelieving people nevertheless bit on the cleverly packaged Soviet bait, began to return, which they later bitterly regretted, but could change nothing. The tightly closed border had indeed become an iron curtain.
The Dungan war that erupted in Xinjiang in 1934, under the popular slogan of creating a Free Turkestan, also played a special role in the return of some people back to the USSR. The true causes and hidden driving forces behind this brutal war have not been adequately uncovered by official history to this day. There is no doubt that the war itself was provoked by a clash of geopolitical interests between the Soviet Union and Japan, both of which used their powerful intelligence networks to escalate the conflict. And although the Russian population of Xinjiang largely tried to remain neutral between the Dungans and the Chinese, who mercilessly annihilated each other and, in the heat of the moment, anyone else who came to hand, the Russians also fully experienced all the horrors of this incomprehensible and, for China, entirely unnecessary civil war. Kulja itself changed hands repeatedly, bringing inevitable casualties, suffering, and losses.
In 1944, bloody events began again, escalating by 1948 into the so-called “people’s revolution,” which led to the establishment of the short-lived “Free Eastern Turkestan.” One autumn day in 1944, four Chinese brothers attended a prayer meeting. (At that time, the church had eight Chinese believers as members.) During prayer, the Holy Spirit filled a sister, and she began to speak in Chinese, a language she naturally did not know. However, few people in Kulja spoke Chinese, as the population consisted mainly of Uyghurs. Georgy Loktev related that at that moment he sensed God was speaking something very important to the alert Chinese brethren. Later, the Chinese believers translated to him that it was a prophecy about coming calamities in China. Soon, war came to Kulja. Many Slavs perished, especially young people, including the church deacon Dubenko. The Chinese brethren also lost their lives.
The period from 1944 to 1948 is notable in that the weak, not yet firmly established authorities freely allowed anyone who wished to leave to do so, issuing exit permits. Taking advantage of this, almost half of the church in Kulja departed for central parts of China, and from there to various countries around the world. Very soon this path closed, and all who were late to leave were “shut in” China for many long years, although back in 1947 practically all the families of Pentecostals who wished to emigrate had submitted their names to the British consulate in Urumqi, and from that time on the international community was aware of this group of people. 497
In the 1950s, comprehensive pressure was exerted on the leadership of the Baptist church in Kulja, both by Soviet intelligence and by the communist regime of Mao Zedong established in China after 1949, with the aim of forcing the Baptist church members to return to the Soviet Union. Portraits of communist leaders of the USSR were even hung in the prayer house. Ultimately, the congregation was not so much persuaded as compelled to accept Soviet passports, and they were all transported, as Soviet citizens, to the virgin lands. By that time, the believers well understood that there was no longer any difference between the way of life in the Soviet Union and in communist China.
However, under the same conditions, the Pentecostal church took a completely different stance. Rightly understanding that there was no point in “trading a poke for a bag” in any socialist-bloc country equally intolerant toward Christians, and recalling all the earlier prophetic utterances that China was not their final refuge but only a long-term, though temporary, stop along the way, they firmly, jointly, and unanimously petitioned to emigrate to free Western countries.
Their faith was strengthened by a new prophetic revelation that they would “face a long sailing journey” aboard ships and would “sing on great waters.” 498
Thus began a further movement eastward – toward the distant sea. The first group set out as early as October 1946, the second a month later. Among the third group, which departed from Kulja on December 19, 1946, were the elderly presbyter Gavril Ivanovich Avramenko, the large families of Efrem Shevchenko and Kirill Ilyin, who had left Ukraine in 1928. Consequently, by that time they had already been on the road for more than 18 years… They were joined by the Pustobayevs, who had come to faith in the Urals, and others. And then this door slammed shut for a long time…
Only after many years, following the unheard-of tyranny of Chinese communism – which even Soviet communists considered a great perversion of socialist construction – did other groups of emigrants begin, one after another in the 1960s, to make their way to the free world.
On the whole, this exodus from Kulja would take many more years and would be accomplished amidst great hardships.
Some families who had managed to leave Kulja from 1946 onward settled for a time in Shanghai. From there they had the opportunity to contact the Christian world; in particular, they established a connection with the Slavic Pentecostal movement in Argentina, which actively began helping them to emigrate from China.
Here is one of the letters written by I. E. Kishko that reached Argentina from Shanghai and was published in the pages of the magazine “Christian Herald”:
Dear brother in the Lord, I. Zub-Zolotarev! Peace be with you!
We sincerely rejoice and thank God that He has stirred your heart to assist in organizing an institution that could handle our documents.
The refugee brethren have a great need for Christian literature. For decades they have not had the joy of seeing Christian magazines, let alone songbooks. You cannot imagine their heartfelt gratitude, coming from a pure, simple heart sanctified by the Holy Spirit, when I gave them your first magazine, “Christian Herald.”
Here a pound of bread costs one million one hundred thousand Chinese yuan. Hard to believe, but it is a fact.
In our prayers we will ask the Lord God for help in finding a way to bring another 200–300 souls to your meeting. I think that the joy will be great, both for those arriving and those welcoming them, when all these hundreds of souls lift up gratitude to the great Creator of heaven and earth for deliverance from wanderings and for the God-given meeting with brothers in the faith.499
In the same issue of the magazine was also published a letter from Alexander Shevchenko, in which he wrote: “We only recently arrived in Shanghai, and soon after I came across the magazine Christian Herald, from which I, to my great joy, see and hear that in Argentina there are many of our Pentecostal brothers and that the Lord is also awakening there and baptizing the thirsty with the Holy Spirit. This is great joy. Alleluia!
“We, cut off from our fraternal Union, organized in 1924 in Ukraine in the city of Odessa by brothers Voropaev and Koltovich, who came from America, and the Lord blessed their work, so that in Ukraine in the course of 5½ years 350 communities were formed with a membership of 17,000 souls. In 1928 the Lord through the Holy Spirit blessed us on the journey; we traveled extensively and along the way the Lord awakened many and added them to His church.
“Here in Shanghai our group numbers about one hundred souls. The larger part of the community is still in Lanzhou, Gansu province, China. There are 145 souls there: all are striving forward, but lack the means to do so.
“Now, dear brother, although I do not know you personally—only by the magazine—I ask you to describe the spiritual and material life in more detail, for we also have a desire to go to Argentina.”500
The needs of suffering fellow believers met with a response in many countries of the Slavic dispersion. Some donations for them began to arrive at the editorial office of the magazine Christian Herald, first of all to supply them with spiritual literature, which was the main priority.
Touched by the needs of Christians in China, the former chairman of the All-Poland Union of Churches of Christians of Evangelical Faith, Arthur Bergolts, who by that time was living in the USA, wrote: “How much bread we have, material and spiritual. Not so long ago we too were in the same condition. O God, how we hungered! We suffered! Now, however, everyone has forgotten. How many refugees at that time believed and began to serve the Lord. But how many of them, when they arrived here, had their fill and forgot everything, abandoned their Creator and Savior. O God, preserve us!
“I send you from a grateful heart a modest mite for the magazine Christian Herald for the needy brothers in China. I pray that the Lord has touched many more readers, so that they too may respond to the needs and that you might supply the entire community in Shanghai with your magazine.
“We also send them heartfelt greetings. We, refugees, sympathize with them.”501
Spiritual books: Bibles, New Testaments, Concordances, songbooks, and other Christian literature, including books for preachers, which began to arrive regularly for the believers, became a great blessing for them.
Many people in the world have heard about the famous Great Silk Road from ancient China to Europe. However, most people have a completely wrong impression that this ancient route was a single road, a single highway. In fact, the Silk Road was—and this is an obvious and proven historical fact!—a significantly ramified network of trade routes, and these branches of the Silk Road sometimes lay quite far apart from each other and often not even parallel. The only thing they had in common was direction.
When on long evenings I listened in Canada, the United States of America, Australia to the excited accounts of participants in this incredible journey, when I reread my hurried notes—so as not to miss anything!—of our conversations, when I pored over magazine articles, published and unpublished books and manuscripts of memoirs of participants in this movement, the image of the Silk Road began to arise in my mind.
Unlike the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, where all the Jews were welded together by a common history, close family and tribal ties, shared life events, and common leadership in the person of Moses, as well as a common route of the Exodus to Palestine, this Pentecostal exodus from the Soviet Union represents a completely different, a completely astonishing type of migration. It is a story of families and separate groups from different places who, unguided by anyone, having no central leadership, went by different routes, heeding only the guidance of the Holy Spirit in their hearts as the sole compass of their journey. And at times, as on the Silk Road, these were very different roads. But there was one thing in common—direction.
They came to China from various places: from Ukraine, the Urals, Rostov-on-Don; among them were believers from Georgia and Azerbaijan who joined along the way. They scattered to different places. Participants in this exodus and their descendants today live in Australia, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Israel… But they all had one common crossroads in their history.
That crossroads was the church in Kulja.
They will tell about their further journey in different ways, depending on the time and events of their departure from China. Here is an excerpt from the account of Alexander Shevchenko:
“The Lord blessed us on the long journey. It was said: ‘A difficult road, but on the way I will provide help, and they will send you by trucks and give you everything necessary.’ Then the Holy Spirit revealed about the further journey; it was said that there would be ‘a great voyage, and on the great waters you will sing.’
“It was difficult for the human mind to comprehend how all this could happen, but trusting in God’s command we set out on the journey on December 19, 1946. We hired carts to the city of Urumqi (the capital of Xinjiang) and with small children set out on this harsh journey, as there was a lot of snow and severe frost, and the journey ahead to the city of Urumqi was 650 kilometers.”
Indeed, there were very many difficulties on the way. At one point they were detained by the authorities for 18 days; they had to live in unheated sheds, two or four families together, and almost every day they went to the police for a pass. But each time there was a refusal, so that many began to doubt whether they would move forward or not. But when they turned to the Lord, they received strength; it was said: “You will go forward, have faith.” Indeed, on the 18th day they received the pass and set off on their further journey, arriving safely in the city of Urumqi.502
Here they stayed for 4 months. Together with other believers they formed a community; a large choir was organized. They found work while waiting to move further east. Sometimes the American consul and his wife attended the services of this church. He was so touched by the inspired singing of the choir that one day he invited them to the consulate, where over a cup of tea he asked them to sing several Russian Christian hymns. The consul had a tape recorder. One could imagine the astonishment of the believers in 1949, when the consul then turned on the device for playback, and they heard their own singing from a machine whose existence they had never before suspected.503 The consul enthusiastically promised them that soon all of America would hear this singing on the radio.504
After 4 months they again set out in groups on their further journey. In Shevchenko’s group there were 153 people.505 Traveling through desert areas for about 700 kilometers, they were again detained in the city of Hami for 3 months. There they had to endure very meager material conditions, as well as threats from the Chinese authorities that there was no way forward and would not be. But they turned to the Rock of life, the Lord, who comforted and strengthened them, saying that soon they would go further, and that “the treasury is prepared, and they will give into your hands, for My granaries are rich.”506
In his memories, which have not faded over the years, Alexander Shevchenko also spoke of God’s great faithfulness to His promises:
When the hour came, Almighty God moved the hearts of those in authority; they provided us with vehicles for the further journey, completely free of charge, gave money according to the size of each family for the road, and also provided a general, several officers, and a truck full of armed soldiers for escort and protection, and we hastily set out.
Then we remembered that revelation, which had been spoken back in that place: “I will send help, and you will be sent on trucks, and they will give you everything you need.” And with great joy we heartily thanked the Lord for these wonderful deeds of His, which can never be forgotten.507
I am very sorry that I have to interrupt quoting this authentic historical document—the account of an eyewitness and participant in those events, Alexander Efremovich Shevchenko, who would later lead the Slavic Pentecostal church in the picturesque city of San Francisco for many years. In his further memoirs, he tells how 153 people traveled from Kulja to Lanzhou (Gansu Province), a year later to Shanghai (it was already 1948, and they lived there for 7 months). Then—to the island of Samar in the Philippines, where an American base was located. There, in the Philippines, in February 1949, Anna Bagdasaryan with her relatives, and the Frolov family—Pentecostals from Shanghai—and many others also ended up.
Anna Bagdasaryan shared her impressions about the island of Samar, where the American military took care of the pilgrims:
Samar is a small island, deserted, jungle, almost without inhabitants. They divided us into areas, set up food distribution points, kitchens, water boilers, a hospital, a school, churches, and a power station. Light in all the tents. The streets were covered with sand and pebbles. We settled in. The following year we rebuilt our tent. We put up rafters, covered it with another tent on top, and now the sun doesn’t beat down on our heads. We made a shower: we carry water, pour it into a tank, it warms in the sun, warm water; we laid floors, arranged a dining room, and planted a garden around the tent. When a typhoon came, it was frightening; the rain was warm but came down in sheets, and the winds blow everything, but they caused us no harm.509
The then young future radio missionary Alexander Shevchuk also ended up on the island of Samar. Of course, at that time no one could have imagined that years would pass—and after the war, a Christian mission from the USA would buy, at a laughably low price—just 1,000 dollars—a complex of a powerful military radio station in the outskirts of Manila, which during the war had provided communication between U.S. Navy ships in that region.509 After the war, this complex lost its significance and was slated for dismantling and destruction. The mission decided to buy the radio station in order to broadcast Christian radio programs to many countries in Asia in a multitude of languages. This vision became a great blessing in God’s work for many nations.
In particular, the broadcasts of this station reached not only the Far Eastern region but the entire Asian part of the former USSR, and in good weather — all the way to the Urals. From 1989 to 1993, when I still had time for this, I made my own radio programs in Finland. Specifically, they were broadcast to the Far East and Siberia from this very station. I consider it a great privilege and joy that I had the opportunity to visit this station together with radio preacher Rudi Vins in August 1989 and pray to God a prayer of thanksgiving, laying hands on the massive base of the grand antenna. (Incidentally, it was from this station that, from 1968 to 1991, the children’s Christian “Radio Broadcasts of Aunt Fenya” were aired, hosted by Georgy Yakovlevich and Feodosia Ivanovna Orlov, whom I also met in Australia. The Orlovs turned out to be descendants of those Molokan-Jumpers who emigrated from the Caucasus together with Armenians to Los Angeles at the beginning of the 20th century. There, in one courtyard, they lived next door to Ekaterina Voronayeva, who spent the last years of her life in Los Angeles. They accompanied her on her final earthly journey in 1965. Somewhat later, they moved with many other Molokan families to Australia and joined a Pentecostal church in Adelaide. At present, there are four communities of Russian Molokan-Jumpers in Australia. All of them are in Adelaide. My wife and I found it very interesting and pleasant to attend their Sunday service, which, without any changes, precisely follows the order established by the prophet Maxim Rudometkin back in the mid-19th century.)
In October 1965, Alexander Shevchuk and his family arrived in Manila and began their blessed labor at this station. A few weeks later, Shevchuk wrote in a letter to Ivan Zub-Zolotarev the following:
My wife and I are from that group of displaced persons from northern China who were evacuated in 1948 from Shanghai to the island of Tubabao (Samar), the Philippines. After some time, together with our parents and a group of believers, we left our little island that had given us shelter and refuge for eight and a half months, and sailed towards South America.
After a long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, we were greeted by the beautiful city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Having rested a little, we were transported from São Paulo on two motor airplanes to the central part of Paraguay, to the town of Carmen del Paraná. We were joyfully and open-heartedly received by our brothers and sisters in faith, who showed us great love, morally and with good advice on how to live on a farm (chacra), what to sow and when to harvest. We were encouraged by the lively meetings at Colonia Fram, where we came to live. With a group of young people who came to know the Lord as their personal Savior, I received water baptism, administered by Brother Onisim Koval. In 1951, I moved to the capital city, where my two older brothers were already living. At that time, missionary Antony Giordano came to our city, and through his ministry and exemplary life, the Lord spoke to my heart to also go forth into spiritual work. My desire was fulfilled when my whole family could leave for North America and, after some time, enroll in a Bible school in California. We arrived to settle in San Francisco the day before the New Year of 1955.
After graduating from Bible school in 1959, I traveled to Canada and visited all our Slavic churches, and also those in the eastern part of America. Since that time, I have made several such visits bearing a word of testimony about our Lord Jesus Christ. The Pentecostal church in San Francisco (my home church) asked me to stay on as assistant pastor almost until the time when it pleased the Lord to call us to missionary broadcasting work in the Philippines. The pastor of our home church is Brother A. E. Shevchenko, who united us in marriage before the dedication of our new house of prayer in 1962. This church of Christians of Evangelical Faith “Temple of the Good News” sent us here as its missionaries.
We appeal to all brothers and sisters in faith—pray to God for us, that He would give us inspiration to proclaim His Word with boldness, to transmit the Word of Life to our fellow countrymen in Russia through the powerful stations of the Far East in Manila, Philippines. Many of us now have good equipment. Well-recorded sermons, songs, poems, and testimonies sent to us at the station, we promise to play, to the best of our ability, directed toward Russia. This will be a great encouragement to our brothers and sisters back home.
We never thought we would return to the Philippines, having been here as teenagers, but we did not want to resist the voice and call of God to His harvest field. We arrived during the rice harvest—rice being the bread of Eastern countries. May God grant that our labor here and your prayers will bring forth sheaves for the Lord.510
The group, which included the Ilyin and Shevchuk families, on their way to Paraguay had the opportunity to see many wonderful countries of the world. The steamship arrived in Australia, in Sydney, where some families disembarked, having chosen Australia for residence; then the route lay past the island of Ceylon, past Africa through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, with stops in Italy and France. Then there was Dakar on the west coast of Africa, then they crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and finally docked in Brazil. In view of the length of the journey, with the captain’s permission they constantly held their worship services in a spacious hall on the ship, literally “singing upon the great waters” their gratitude to the Lord. From there, airplanes transported them to Paraguay. They saw the land of Paraguay for the first time on December 19, 1949—exactly three years after leaving Ghulja.
And Vera Ilyina moved to San Francisco in 1957, when she turned 46. She had left her village in Ukraine as a 17-year-old girl. Thirty years of life—thirty years of journey. Such was the exodus of Ukrainian Pentecostals.
As for Anna Bagdasaryan, she first heard of San Francisco, a city unknown to her, in a prophetic word spoken in the church.5” At that moment, they even became frightened, wondering whether the prophet had fallen into temptation by mentioning some Catholic saints…
On Russian Christmas, January 6, 1951, on Samar Island, another 1,127 Russian refugees, including Anna Bagdasaryan, the large Shevchenko family, the elderly presbyter Avramenko — in all 135 Xinjiang Pentecostals — boarded the military transport “General Haan,” which set course for San Francisco.
Late at night on January 25, the ship majestically passed under the brightly lit Golden Gate Bridge, approaching the pier.
The journey of these Pentecostal migrants from the Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith of Ukraine began near Odessa in 1928. In January 1951, their feet stepped onto the famous piers of the seaport of the snow-white city of San Francisco.
You know, I fell in love with this beautiful city. And if you ever happen to be in San Francisco, follow my lead and visit a little café on the waterfront. The café is located very close to the famous Pier 39 and is called by the Russian word “Babushka.” Only it is unlikely that the Russian-speaking Jews from Odessa, who will treat you to excellent ice cream there and will urge you to buy a “real Russian matryoshka,” know this incredible story.
That is why I wrote this book.
Besides the countries of South and North America, by September 1956 part of the community was in Shanghai, others were in Hong Kong, some had already reached Australia, where 24 families — 115 people — had arrived. They were received by Slavic Pentecostal congregations in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Newcastle.512 These congregations had recently formed from immigrants from Europe — post-war refugees from Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia. (Some of them, such as the pastor of the church in Adelaide, Nikolai Klemenok, had experience in practical spiritual ministry in the churches of the All-Polish Union of Churches of Christians of the Evangelical Faith even before the war).
The church in Shanghai also labored actively for the glory of God — “the church of migrants on the way.” The believers rejoiced greatly that after long years of spiritual hunger, they finally had obtained enough spiritual literature sent by fellow believers from abroad. This joy can easily be noticed in their enthusiastic letters of thanks.513
Intensive correspondence with Ivan Zub-Zolotarev was also conducted by the then young Pavel Petrovich Ionko, who was already born in China and led the Sunday school in Shanghai. In particular, he wrote in 1958:
We report that by God’s mercy we have a Sunday school consisting of 92 souls. Until 1957, the Sunday school had great difficulties due to the premises. We had to conduct services with the children under the rain and endure hurricanes. But God saw to it and rewarded in his appointed time. God moved the heart of the brother pastor of the Chinese congregation to release the premises for holding meetings and the Sunday school. In this house of prayer, fathers, mothers, and their children all joyfully glorify the Lord.
I ask you, dear brother, on behalf of the Sunday school, do not forget us in your prayers and, as much as you are able, help us with spiritual literature.514
And here is another letter from Pavel Ionko on this subject, sent to Argentina a few months later:
I sincerely thank you on behalf of the entire Sunday school and their leaders for the songbooks, the magazine “Christian Herald,” and other books received. Undoubtedly, it is impossible to describe the feelings of joy when we received these parcels. May the Lord himself reward you a hundredfold! We ask you further, if possible, not to abandon us, but to continue sending spiritual literature.515
Meanwhile, repression fell upon the church in Kulja. The persecuted brothers, using Aesopian language, reported that “our city has changed, the main streets have been paved, the buildings are large, so that now the city resembles Rome.” They wrote that “many brothers and sisters changed their former apartments, 28 souls in all; it is possible that others will do so soon.”516
Kulja, indeed, at times resembled Rome during the persecution of early Christians: in just three April nights in 1958, another 60 people belonging to different denominations were thrown into prison. All their money was confiscated, leaving large families without means of subsistence. They were tortured, tied up under the scorching sun, and demanded that they renounce their faith. They stopped receiving spiritual literature, and postal communication with fellow believers abroad was cut off.517
All these years, Georgy Ivanovich Loktev would faithfully stand in pastoral ministry. He would leave Kulja and move to Australia only many years later, in March 1965, among the very last migrants, having faithfully fulfilled the immutable law of the sea that the captain is the last to leave the ship, having sacredly fulfilled his captain’s duty to the end.
So, in the brief period of political off-season in 1946, almost half of the members of the Pentecostal church left Kulja. Practically all those who left, sooner or later, ended up far beyond China. As for those who remained, they continued to live a pious church life under the increasingly severe oppression of the totalitarian state. At first they were very despondent that so few of them were left, but a prophetic word became a comfort to them, that the house of prayer would again be filled. In 1948, 70 members of the Baptist church (and with them 2 choir directors) transferred to the Pentecostal community, expressing disagreement with the leadership of their church, which had begun to agitate them to return to the USSR. Some believers living in nearby villages also moved to Kulja. And, of course, all this time the church preached the Word of God, so many people came to faith. Among the new converts there were also some Chinese.
The prayer house had to be urgently expanded, a magnificent choir was formed again, and Bible courses began to operate in the church. Yet the theme of a further exodus did not exhaust itself — everyone lived in expectation of further movement out of China.
Probably the largest baptism by number took place on April 15, 1956, when 58 people were baptized. A week later, another 7 souls entered into covenant with the Lord.518 As the magazine “Christian Herald” reported, “during this baptism the Lord touched many hearts, which wept and lamented, and this echo resounded throughout the city, and the people were seized with fear.”519 In the church, various kinds of divine services were held every evening with abundant blessings from God. The youth meetings were especially crowded.
All this time, pressure continued to be exerted on Georgy Loktev to convince him to persuade the church members to take Soviet citizenship and to return the community members to the USSR. Mikhail Drozdov recalled:
They call our pastor to the Soviet consulate and ask:
“Why do your members not take passports? You must tell them to return to the Motherland…”
And the pastor says:
“I was chosen not for agitation, but to serve God, so it is not my business to suggest to people whether to take passports or not. This is a personal matter for everyone; we have no coercion, everything is voluntary. Whoever desires the salvation of his soul—he believes; and whoever does not wish it—that is his will. So it is with passports—their business, not mine.”
“But you must advise them, as the Baptists do. They all took them,” the consul pressed the pastor.
“That is their business,” answered the pastor.
“Well, just you watch!” threatened the consul, and sent him away.
However, half a year later, through the Chinese General Police, having found a false pretext, our pastor was put in prison, charged with “raising the youth in a religious spirit, not allowing the youth to go to the cinema, to dances, etc.” He was sentenced to 7 years of labor camps. But the Holy Spirit had already warned him beforehand that he would be imprisoned, and afterward he would go East.520
This was already Georgiy Ivanovich’s second imprisonment. (He received his first sentence at the beginning of 1952 and was in prison for the Word of God for six months—until July 31. And in 1958 he was sentenced to seven years of deprivation of freedom, having been held in prison under investigation for about a year before the trial).521
Interrogations began, usually conducted at night, for many nights in a row. Loktev was accused of being an American and English spy.
Finally, the day of the court arrived. Four of them were tried—G. I. Loktev, M. I. Chernyshev, V. A. Batalygin, and F. M. Sorokin. The judge began reading the charge, which was reduced to foolish and absurd exaggerations. They were charged with being “spies who carried out agitation work among workers, persuaded believers to flee to a capitalist country, set the youth against Marxism-Leninism, and did not submit to state authority,” and also “did not allow their children to study at school.” Meanwhile, the imperturbable court did not even heed the testimony that, for example, Loktev’s son Alexander had just finished secondary school, and his daughter was working… as a schoolteacher! Markel Ivanovich Chernyshev and Vladimir Alekseyevich Batalygin were sentenced to 10 years, Georgiy Ivanovich Loktev to 7 years, and Filipp Sorokin, who did not belong to the church, was sentenced to “only” five years of deprivation of freedom.
Afterward, they were driven away to camps, and a hard camp life began, including penal labor in primitive mines.
Many other brethren in that same year 1958 were also thrown into prisons: Ivan Drozdov, Andrei Ivashchenko. Lyubov Ionko was also tried. They went the same road of suffering as those arrested earlier in 1952: Nikolai Semenyutin, Konstantin Golin, and others, who in chains for the Word of God met with fellow prisoners from the Baptist church, for the presbyter Arsenty Kirillovich Karakayev and his three sons-in-law, the choir director Grigory Taranov, and also the brothers Ivan Golubenko, Afanasy Kalachev, Stepan Myagky, and Matvey Tkachenko were arrested. The difference was that now the sentences of deprivation of freedom were no longer six months, as in 1952, but long years.
In 1961, the ranks of prisoners were swelled by Fedor Tenikov, Ivan Lutsenko, Anatoly Drozdov, Mikhail Pustobaev, Stepan Vorotyansky, Pavel Denisov, Sergei Zozulin, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Nikolai Mogilin, Grigory Minchenko, Ivan Averkin, and other brethren. Deacon Savostey Zakharovich Demchenko was arrested right in the church.
The conditions of detention in Chinese prisons and camps were simply terrible, as described in detail by the former prisoner for the Word of God, Fedor Afanasyevich Tenikov, in his book of memoirs “The Path Traversed,” which was published in Adelaide in 1997.
The orphaned Pentecostal church at that time was led by one of Loktev’s assistants, the aged minister Pyotr Podkovzin, whom even the Chinese authorities, usually knowing no mercy, did not put in prison because of his advanced old age.522
All this time, the brethren who had managed to leave Kulja for the free world, having caught a “crack” in the Iron Curtain in 1946, endeavored to ease the lot of the suffering native church in China, petitioning all instances for help in getting this community out of the country of the communist regime. As far as possible, they also maintained contact with the church in Kulja.
In 1954, due to an unusual combination of circumstances, Yakov Vasilyevich Tarasenko played a special role in the matter of further emigration from China. During our stay in Orange, my wife and I stayed at the house of Yakov and Anastasia Tarasenko and, communicating with them daily, we never ceased to marvel at God’s miracles in the life of this family. At that time, in 1954, Anastasia fell seriously ill; there was very little hope left for her life. On the doctors’ recommendation, Yakov Tarasenko obtained permission to take his wife to Shanghai for treatment.
The treatment did not help. She continued to suffer and grew weaker with each week until the day when the Lord one day simply healed her miraculously. She became completely healthy. Later, in Australia, doctors refused to believe that the skillfully performed operation visible on X-rays was the work of God’s own hands. At the same time, they could not possibly explain how such an operation could have been done without any external incisions or stitches.523
Yet his stay in Shanghai was tremendously significant for an entirely different purpose—all that time Yakov Vasilyevich was purposefully working with the British consulate, which forwarded all the necessary documents to various international organizations, including in Geneva. In large measure, this later determined the Chinese government’s permission to go abroad. As for the Tarasenkos themselves, they left for Hong Kong as early as 1 May 1958.524 (To some readers in the former Soviet Union and abroad, the name Y. V. Tarasenko is familiar from the magazine I Am the Way, which he published in Melbourne in the mid-1980s.)
Some of the brethren tried by various means to make their way to eastern China, to Shanghai, hoping to reach Hong Kong and go abroad. Georgy Loktev remembered that one day some elderly brothers and sisters from the church—those who could not flee anywhere, who had neither the strength nor the money for it—came to talk with their pastor. They asked him what would become of them if everyone left. “I will stay with you,” the pastor replied. “I will be the last to leave, after I have seen you off. And do not worry about money—our Heavenly Father’s treasury is great, and He will provide everything that anyone in need requires.”525
The Chinese authorities grew alarmed. Pastor Loktev relates:
In September 1956, I was summoned from home at night to the main police headquarters. The questioning was conducted—as I learned later, when he introduced himself—by the Minister of Internal Affairs of Xinjiang. He had just arrived from Beijing. First, he questioned me about our doctrine, the order of our services, then about the laws of family life and the responsibilities of those entering marriage. I told him about everything in great detail. He also took an interest in how marriages were registered. The young couple had to register first with the local authorities in the presence of witnesses, and only then be married in church. He also asked questions about some of the brethren who had gone to Shanghai. I answered that the local authorities knew about that. I do not decide matters of departure for each church member; it is each person’s personal choice: whoever wishes to go to the USSR—let them go; whoever wishes to go east—that, too, is each person’s own business.
Then the minister asked me personally: “And what about you?” I replied that I wished to leave legally for some capitalist country. He said that whether I would be allowed to go or not would be decided at the government’s discretion.
With that our conversation ended. I expected that they would lead me to a cell. But he ordered me to be taken out, and I returned home.526
Georgy Loktev, as already mentioned, would be arrested later, in 1958.
However, due to the changing political situation, the believers who had been incessantly petitioning to leave China for the free countries were initially allowed to depart from Kulja for Shanghai, from where they were gradually moved on to Hong Kong—family by family. Moreover, this entire departure was now being carried out at the expense of the Chinese government, so that even the poorest families encountered no financial difficulties whatsoever.
Mikhail Drozdov writes in his memoirs:
In 1960, the Chinese government expelled the Soviet consulate from Xinjiang and from the cities of Urumchi and Kulja, accusing them of having widely distributed false passports. We breathed a sigh of relief, and the government began to treat us well. That same year, 1960, we Russian Pentecostals were permitted to leave Kulja for Shanghai. From Kulja two groups of people left, but the departure of the third group to Shanghai was delayed because the Soviet consulate was still in Shanghai and claimed that many people with Soviet passports had gotten into the third group. The departure came to a halt again, but when the Soviet consul was expelled from Shanghai in 1964, everyone from Kulja who had papers showing they were on the refugee register in Hong Kong was released. We were divided into several groups. We were in the first group. Our group comprised 22 families, 124 souls.
To process the documents we had to travel to Shanghai, because the British consulate was there. The completed documents went from Hong Kong to the British embassy in Shanghai, and from there they were sent out to each person’s place of residence.
When we received permission in the city of Kulja to proceed with the paperwork, we chose two elders: one to go to Shanghai, and the other to stay in the city to prepare for the departure. We needed to arrange the transport, how much the bus ticket would cost, and many other things. I started going every day to the office that was handling the dispatch of emigrants. They gave me the task of listing how many souls were in each family, how much cash they had, what each one could sell, who needed clothing; and also of noting who owed how much to whom and for what. When I had written it all down, it turned out that, out of the 22 families, 7 had no money either for the journey or for provisions, and they also lacked clothing. Three times they made me rewrite the list of those in need, without saying why. When they had determined exactly that these 7 families had money neither for the journey nor for food, the official in charge of the dispatch said to me that those 7 families should come to the office in the morning. After calculating how much money each family needed, they summoned bank clerks with money and placed it directly into the hands of each family: to some 10,000, to others 7,000—each received as much as was needed. It was then that I recalled what the Lord had said: “You will receive financial help, and they will escort you with honor.” And my eyes saw all of it—how the money was handed out—and if none of us had had any money, the government would have provided everything necessary for everyone. How can we not thank the Lord? All this had been foretold by the Holy Spirit several years before.
And so all the paperwork was completed, the time came to depart… They gave us a guide, an interpreter, a doctor… They brought four covered vehicles and one bus. All the sick and elderly were to be taken in the bus, while the rest were to travel in the vehicles. So that no one would get lost, they ordered everyone the evening before to gather in the town square, where meetings usually took place. There were many empty houses there in which they placed us. For those with small children, they brought iron stoves and coal into those houses for heating. In general, they provided every comfort, but one thing they told me—to watch over everyone so that no one fell ill.
On the morning of April 1, 1964, we left Kuldzha for Urumqi. How many local people came to see us off! Many wept as we parted; after all, we had lived there for more than 35 years, and many knew that we had always been preparing to go east. They said, “Happy people you are, good is your God who leads you out!”
We had waited for what the Lord had told us back in the Urals.
Along the way, whichever hotel we arrived at, everything was ready, they were waiting for us.
We were offered to buy necessary items in local shops for those who still had money, because it was forbidden to take money out of the country. Also, those who had extra things were told to leave them and give an address to whom they should be given; for example, we were told that warm clothes would not be needed because we were going to warm countries.
Then they led us to the border, checked everyone’s belongings, formed us up by families, and brought us to a bridge. Here we said farewell to the interpreter, who at the last said: “Happy people you are! Goodbye! You will live yet in peace.”
We went across the bridge. The Chinese authorities handed over each family by count to the representatives of Hong Kong.
We stayed in Hong Kong for 35 days—and then they sent us to Australia. We sailed by steamer to Sydney for 13 days. The weather was very calm. In Sydney we were met by our brethren who had arrived there earlier in 1960. We arrived in Sydney on June 7, 1964. First of all we thanked the Lord for His mercy and for the fulfillment of what He had told us back in Russia when we believed, that “from China you will go east to abundant countries.” We saw everything the Lord had spoken to us.527
The community elected a man whom they sent to Shanghai to obtain visas at the British consulate. This man was Fedor Tenikov. In his memoirs, he tells about the meeting with the British consul as follows:
A tall man of about forty was surprised that China was releasing such a large group of people for the first time. He said: “In order not to keep you long, our office will set aside all other business and print only your visas; that will take perhaps three days, and you may rest or walk around the city.” Two days later the interpreter called me at the hotel and said: “The visas are all ready.” So I received in my hands all the documents, that is, visas for 90 families, comprising 498 souls, of whom 278 were adults and 220 children.528
The next large group, which included Fedor Tenikov, departed Kuldzha on May 15, 1964. Before leaving, Tenikov secured a meeting with the imprisoned pastor Loktev to bid him farewell and to inform him that he had left another 43 visas with the Chinese authorities for the departure of the last group. Among them was a visa also for Georgy Ivanovich, whom the Chinese continued to hold in prison.
Pastor Georgy Loktev was released unexpectedly early from prison on November 29, 1964. At 10 o’clock in the evening, they simply told him to hurry home and get ready to leave the country with his family. The next day he walked through Kuldzha, saying goodbye to the city where he had lived for almost 30 years. On December 1, with the few remaining brothers and sisters, he celebrated the Breaking of Bread for the last time in the departing church. But the last service in the church—and this is very symbolic!—was a wedding service: the pastor united one young couple in a happy married life…
At 6 o’clock in the morning on December 3, 1964, they left Kuldzha. Along with the Loktev family, the families of Vladimir Batalygin, Filipp Sorokin, and others released from prisons departed—32 people in all.
On December 15, after a long journey across China, they saw for the first time in their lives tall English border guards, who welcomed them in the territory of Hong Kong. They lived in Hong Kong for several months.
Afterwards, Georgy Ivanovich recalled:
The time also came for us to depart for Australia.
On March 21, 1965, the steamer on board which we were departed the shores of Asia and headed for Australia. We sailed for 12 days. The weather was splendid. No rolling, no winds. We safely reached the shores of Australia. The first stop was in the city of Sydney. Almost the entire community from the Lidcombe area met us. These were almost all who had left China. I had not seen some of them for more than 10 years. They had changed, of course, so that some were unrecognizable.
We stayed in Sydney for three days. The brethren handed me an invitation and a request that I remain in Sydney and take up the post of presbyter. I warmly thanked them for their heartfelt love, and wished them that Brother Zhak, who was serving among them, would continue in his post. From Sydney the steamer went to Melbourne. Here lived my two blood brothers—Ivan and Mikhail, who had come to Australia a year earlier. They met us with joy. We stayed in Melbourne for seven days and then went by train to Adelaide.
On April 12 at 9 o’clock in the morning we arrived in Adelaide.
The community is large, some of the brethren came from China. There are also Europeans who went through the horrors of the Second World War. Pavel Stupkin leads the community. At the annual meeting, Brother Pavel requested to be released from his service. The brotherhood began to ask me to take this post. I gave my consent.529
Soon, without outside help, they built a house of prayer, which was dedicated on December 24, 1965. In this building they would experience great God’s blessings and the joy of fellowship with God. Here outstanding Slavic evangelists from Canada, Alexey Moskalenko and Dmitry Kirich, would preach, about whose blessed ministry they enthusiastically told me during my stay in Australian churches in the autumn of 2002.
Georgy Loktev was the pastor of the church in Adelaide and a recognized leader of Slavic Pentecostals, who later formed a small union of Evangelical Christian churches that united the churches in Adelaide, Sydney, and Orange. He also actively maintained contact with former members of the church in Kulja, who had scattered to many countries around the world, and visited them in the United States and Canada in 1968. At his request, Valentin Golin organized choir-director courses, and new choir directors appeared in the church, and a new large choir was formed. The Sunday school became very large and blessed. Much assistance in ministry was given to him by the church deacon Savostey Demchenko.
Savostey Zakharovich Demchenko was born in Ukraine in 1906 in the city of Vinnitsa. While still a child, he became a half-orphan, left without a mother. He left Ukraine in 1928, and together with many other believers ended up in Kulja. In the 1930s he was chosen by the church to serve as a deacon and faithfully carried out this ministry all his life. In 1958, right from the church, he was taken by the police. He also had to spend three long and difficult years in Chinese prisons and camps for his testimony about Jesus Christ. Upon gaining freedom in 1961, he fearlessly performed the duties of pastoral ministry, since Georgy Ivanovich was still in bonds. He arrived in Australia on July 1, 1964, where he fell asleep in the Lord on October 11, 2000.
His faithful children Samuel, Vera, Nadezhda, and Alexander, as well as 30 grandchildren and 34 great-grandchildren, bade him farewell until that hour when all Christians are destined to gather in eternity. In the obituary published by the magazine “Herald of Salvation,” a poem was placed, which is addressed not only to Savostey Demchenko but to all brothers who have fallen asleep in the Lord.
Sleep, O beloved brother, sleep! Lay your head on Jesus’ breast! And peacefully rest, embraced by the Savior, Good night, dear brother!
We love you with the faithfulness of friends, But Christ loves more firmly and tenderly, He rests His gentle gaze on you, Good night, dear brother!
You rest, brother, calm and quiet; You will not wake for earthly labors, And the storms of life will not trouble your sleep. Good night, dear brother!
While the cloud hangs over the earth, While sinful darkness reigns, And tears glisten on people’s eyes, Good night, dear brother!
Until the day when all who now repose Shall suddenly awake for God, And He will come, abounding in love, Good night, dear brother!
Until the day when, adorned with a crown Given by Christ the Savior, You will be renewed and pure and holy, Good night, dear brother!
Until the day when, with palm branches in hand, We meet the Lord in heaven, And meet you at the eternal gates, Good night, dear brother!530
In place of the older generation, the Lord raised up other workers. Valentin Golin and Alexander Shchigrov were ordained to serve in the church.
Brother Loktev served as pastor of the church until 1975, then asked the church to release him to retirement due to age. With a prayer of gratitude on his lips to his dear Lord for all His blessings, Georgy Ivanovich died on Saturday, March 7, 1998, at the age of 96, leaving 6 children, 42 grandchildren, and 56 great-grandchildren. As stated in the obituary, the last thing for which he thanked God was death, which for him was simply the threshold of transition to a new quality of existence.531 He continually repeated that everything that had happened in his long life was the fulfillment of that prophetic word which God had spoken to him in his youth, in the early days of his conversion—at 6 in the morning on January 11, 1929, in the Urals.532
For many years, Alexander Nikolayevich Shchigrov worked blessedly as the pastor of the church in Adelaide, combining pastoral ministry in the church with leadership of a small Slavic union of Evangelical Christian churches in Australia. After his well-deserved retirement, the church was served as pastors at different times by Samuel Savosteyevich Demchenko and Anatoly Georgievich Loktev, the son and faithful assistant of Georgy Loktev. At present, this relay of ministry is being continued by Pastor Ivan Danilovich Vinayev.
As for the church in Sydney, according to the testimony of Alexander Minchenko, its long-time pastor was Efim Zhak, whom the hardships of war carried from his native Belarus to forced labor in Germany, from where, later, in the stream of post-war refugees, he came to unknown Australia with thousands of other Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Poles. Some of them became believers, and thus Slavic churches were formed in Australia not long before the arrival of a group of believers from China, who joined them. Brother Zhak served as pastor from 1954 to 1974. On December 28, 1957, the house of prayer in Sydney, in the Lidcombe area, was dedicated. Subsequently, the house of prayer was added to and reconstructed.533
Many brothers who came from China entered into the work of this church. Thus, in 1964, Dmitry Mikhailovich Chirkov, Vasily Stepanovich Minchenko, and Vasily Arsentievich Baryshev were ordained as presbyters, and Lukyan Abramovich Tarasenko was ordained as a deacon. These brothers labored blessedly and zealously in God’s field until their departure for Canada, where they later continued to work in the church in the city of Vernon.
Before many members of the Sydney congregation moved their residence partly to Canada and partly to the Australian city of Orange in the early 1970s, the congregation numbered about 300 members and almost as many children in the Sunday school.534 A large part of the church relocated to Canada and Orange, leaving fewer than 90 members in Sydney at that time.535
In 1971, the young brother Alexander Pavlovich Minchenko, at the age of 27, was elected to the pastorate of the Sydney church. He was ordained for this ministry by the “patriarch” of the emigration via China, G. I. Loktev, the evangelist from Canada, A. Moskalenko, and local ministers. After graduating from Bible college, Alexander Minchenko worked as a radio preacher, taught at Bible courses, and preached extensively both in Australia and in other countries.536 Under his successful and competent leadership, the church grew continuously—both quantitatively and qualitatively. Today Pastor Minchenko serves as president of the Union of Slavic Pentecostal Churches of Australia.
Pavel Konstantinovich Kositsyn and Viktor Pavlovich Gilev were ordained as deacons of the Sydney church, and they too made an enormous contribution to the church’s music and singing ministry, serving as choir directors and composers.537 It is gratifying and joyful to see today that a new generation of Slavic young people is growing up in this church—and that they continue to sing, as part of the children’s choir, the beloved and unforgettable Russian Christian hymns of their fathers and grandfathers under the inspired and virtuoso direction of the ever-radiant and universally loved “Susie,” whom adults respectfully call Svetlana Grebenshchikova.
Deacon Grigory Nikolaevich Tarasenko has been the permanent and recognized youth leader for many years, not only in the Sydney church but also as a respected leader of the Slavic Pentecostal youth of Australia. His wife Irina is an acclaimed and popular poetess of the Slavic fellowship—the sweet voice of Slavic Sydney.
In recent years, the fellowship has also endeavored to establish new Slavic groups and churches, including in Brisbane, where the ever-youthful 90-year-old minister Pyotr Semenovich Klokov labors tirelessly.
The Adelaide church serves as the base for publishing the union magazine Vestnik Spaseniya (Herald of Salvation). Its first issues appeared back in 1960, when its editor was the very young Pavel Petrovich Ionko. Later, at various times, the magazine was edited by Alexey Nikolaevich Temnov, Grigory Mikhailovich Mikhailov, and Ivan Danilovich Vinaev. Today Vestnik Spaseniya appears regularly under the leadership of Pavel Konstantinovich Kositsyn (after relocating from Sydney, he continues his diaconal ministry in the Adelaide church). Active in the magazine’s production are also the young and energetic Pyotr Tarasenko and his wife Natalia, as well as Anatoly Mikhailovich Drozdov, Vlas Ivanovich Korentsov, Ivan Nikolaevich Temnov, and former editor Grigory Mikhailovich Mikhailov, who assists with word and deed as he is able. Magazine distribution and correspondence with numerous subscribers from various countries are handled by Lyubov Grigorievna Klimentenok.
Here in Adelaide, regular Christian radio broadcasts in Russian, under the title “Voice of the Gospel,” are also produced; they first went on the air in 1971. Initially they were produced by the Sydney church under the leadership of A. P. Minchenko and were transmitted via a radio station in Manila, Philippines—to the Far East and Eastern Siberia. Then, through the combined efforts of the churches in Sydney, Orange, and Adelaide, shortwave broadcasts in the 25- and 31-meter bands began from a radio station on the island of Saipan. Yuri Ivanovich Vinaev and Anatoly Pavlovich Denisov continue to produce these programs to this day. In addition, these same brothers prepare a weekly one-hour spiritual radio program for Adelaide called “The Spiritual Word.”
It must be noted that for believers who came out of China, and perhaps even more so for those who were born in China during that exodus, Ghulja will always remain a very dear place on earth. That is why, as soon as it became possible, certain brotherly ministers, with the prayerful blessing of the local churches, were sent once again to labor for God in that region—to preach the Word of God and to baptize new converts, both from the small remaining Slavic population and from among the Chinese.
This missionary work, according to a decision of the congress, was entrusted by the churches of Australia to Fyodor Afanasyevich Tenikov, who was fluent in Chinese. The first such missionary trip took place in the summer of 1988, when he baptized a group of people in Ghulja.538 In 1991, he undertook another missionary journey together with Anatoly Loktev, who, after preaching God’s Word and providing abundant instruction in the faith, also administered baptism. In addition, they visited Urumqi for spiritual work.539 For the third time, Fyodor Tenikov visited Xinjiang in 1993 and worked there the entire summer, traveling to many places, everywhere strengthening believers and performing water baptisms.540 The preacher Ivan Tishchenko from Canada visited this region multiple times and spoke to me at length and with great joy about his labors in China during our meeting in Vernon in the winter of 2001.541 The well-known minister of the Gospel, Pavel Ionko from the USA, also labored considerably here.542 Both of them are former residents of Ghulja and participants in the exodus to Australia who later moved to North America.
Brothers from Australia are welcome guests in Russia and Ukraine. Many believers in these countries cherish the warmest memories of the visits of ministers from Australia, including trips by Alexander Nikolaevich Shchigrov, Nikolai Mikhailovich Danchenko, Alexander Pavlovich Minchenko, Ivan Danilovich Vinaev, Alexander Vladimirovich Batalygin, and Viktor Vasilievich Nenashev. It is heartening to see that young brothers from Australia, whom I had occasion to meet—Sergei Kuskov, Ivan Zaitsev, and David Skrynnikov—willingly devote their time to such missionary journeys to Russia and Ukraine.
I would like to wholeheartedly thank the Lord that the Slavic Pentecostal churches of Australia, in the most difficult hour of economic devastation, extended help—and continue to do so!—to those in need, remembering how they themselves once lacked bread in that country from which the Lord led them out to rivers of abundance.
On the evening of November 3, 2002, Lydia and I arrived safely home after six wonderful weeks in Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Orange, Canberra, and Melbourne. We shall always remember this trip to Australia with a deep sense of gratitude to the Lord and to each of our new friends in that beautiful country, who did so much for us during our stay there.
After an unforgettable flight via exotic Kuala Lumpur in fabulously beautiful tropical Malaysia and businesslike, majestic Amsterdam with its cold, richly blue sky, we were transported from the lush, blooming spring of Australia to rainy autumnal Ukraine. Unlike the heroes of the present narrative, we made our journey in 40 hours.
Our trip confirmed in every respect the fact that the very emergence in Australia of Slavic Pentecostal churches from groups of believers who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, fled hunger and persecution from Ukraine and Russia across the border into China, into Xinjiang, and from there moved on to Canada, the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Australia—is a truly fascinating chapter in our Pentecostal movement. As a result of our meetings and conversations, interviews and personal interaction, a great deal of very interesting information was gathered; I also brought back some curious materials and books, as well as precious old magazines from various Christian publications—above all, several issues of the Pentecostal magazine “Christian Herald,” published for more than 40 years in Argentina under the editorship of the well-known minister in all the Slavic world, Ivan Zub-Zolotarev.
Now we are listening with great interest to recordings of Molokan hymns on discs that the Molokans kindly gave us, and I must say that Molokan melodies are also a very intriguing layer of the culture of religious worship for the study of the history of the Russian people’s spiritual quest. (It is also a miracle of God that in Australia there are four churches of Russian Molokans—the very same whose ancestors are those “muzhiks who came from beyond the mountains” to the Armenians in Kara-Kala, as described by Demos Shakarian! Lydia and I greatly appreciated being invited to attend their worship service—and we afterward had a long conversation with their elders.) And, of course, our Christian hymns that we have sung since childhood remain forever in our memory—in Australia we sang them together with our churches to the same melodies, which they have wonderfully preserved through decades of emigration.
On returning from Australia, I visited the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. About ten professors and researchers gathered. They listened with great interest to my account of the extraordinary journey of the Slavic Pentecostals into China and their subsequent relocation to Australia and other countries of the world. The deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy, Professor Anatoly Nikolaevich Kolodny, also came; we have worked together quite a bit in shedding light on the history of the Pentecostal movement in our country. They were especially interested when I told them that many families have roots of Ukrainian origin, and that some of the migrants actually came out of Ukraine. And when I was invited to make a special program for Ukraine’s central television on this topic, to give several interviews for the mass media, and even to hold a special scholarly seminar—since all this is of great scientific interest for studying the Ukrainian diaspora—I again recalled the prophetic word that Brother Anatoly Loktev conveyed to me in Australia: “A great story will be told about you.” (This prophetic word had been spoken about them in the mid-1980s in Australia, and simultaneously God awakened in their hearts a strong desire to write an account of the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit in their so extraordinary lives.)
We spent much time in Australia with families who had been participants in this exodus. Long evenings we sat conversing with Anatoly Georgievich and Alexandra Nikolaevna Loktev, who became very dear and close to us, about every small detail of these events. We listened intently to the filigree, precise formulations and measured assessments of the former schoolteacher and former church pastor Alexander Shchigrov. We also visited the grave of Georgy Loktev, the “patriarch” of the exodus from China. We tried not to miss anything essential. We now have a clear picture of the family lines and no longer confuse the Demchenko and Danchenko families. The study of all the records and materials is complete. It is time to move on to drawing conclusions.
In summing up this narrative, it would be correct to say that this migration from Ukraine and Russia via China to many countries of the world not only saved many pilgrims from death by starvation or perishing in Soviet prisons and camps, not only enriched the diaspora, not only created the preconditions for cooperation between churches of the former USSR and their fellow Slavic believers today at the most difficult hour for our society—which is, of course, also very significant. It is extremely important to understand that, along the way, the migrants carried out a great evangelistic project. Moving from place to place, they proclaimed everywhere the holy Word of God, were witnesses to salvation through Jesus Christ. This was the only form of Christian mission possible at that time and in those circumstances—bringing the Gospel to new territories and establishing churches along the route. And even their further movement and subsequent departure from China, for the thousands of people with whom they came into contact, was a powerful testimony that these people, driven by faith in a prophetic word, accomplished something that cannot be explained by natural causes. Those who remained behind, watching the departed from a distance, recalling their faith that came into inconceivable contradiction with the realities of everyday natural life—they had to ponder that there is room for miracles in life, and they themselves, the onlookers, were witnesses of such a miracle.
It is interesting that the churches the migrants founded along the way did not at all teach departure abroad — that was each person’s private affair. They taught, Christocentrically, the knowledge of a personal Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Not all Ukrainians reached China. Not all converts along the way joined them. The fate of one individual and the fate of the movement as a whole are not the same thing.
Another very important circumstance. The church in Kulja, China, truly became a beacon of hope for the mass of destitute Russian-speaking people who had fled hunger, collectivization, and persecution from the territory of the USSR. For most of them, having lost everything in their homeland — loved ones, property, faith in the future, peace of heart, and even their homeland itself — there was no longer any hope or purpose in life. Only by coming to know God through the preaching of this group of Christians did they again find peace and quiet of God’s grace, felt the happiness of being forgiven sinners, received a new vision of life, and gained Christian hope.
For many years, these evangelical churches in the diaspora served as a similar beacon for people who, for various reasons, found themselves swept by the wind far from their homeland. And was it not through them that the few Soviet tourists and overseas sailors of former times often first encountered evangelical preaching and received as a gift Bibles and New Testaments they had never seen before?! This ministry of preaching to sailors was carried out for many years by ordinary believers from the Pentecostal churches of the Slavic dispersion.
Samuel Demchenko also greatly loved this ministry, having worked for many years as a diver in the port of Adelaide, often meeting Soviet people. Today he is retired, but he is still remembered at the port. Once, in his car, we drove up to the port gates, which were tightly shut. “This is Samuel,” he said quietly into the intercom without getting out of the car. A few seconds later, the massive gates opened. We drove into the port area. In the distance, at the dock, stood a large dry-cargo ship under the Russian flag. Adelaide dockers were unhurriedly and busily loading Australian grain bound for far-off Russia.
“Well, there will be bread in the Motherland,” Samuel said with satisfaction.
The country from which they were swept by the wind remains their Motherland. Even for those who were born in China and never laid eyes on Russia.
Is that not why they pray together with us, crying out to the open heavens, and ask the Lord for rain for Russia?!
The Slavic Pentecostal Church in Adelaide was formed by a group of migrants from Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine who, after the war, moved to Australia as refugees, even before the group from China relocated. Among them was Lidia Mazalo, the widow of the great Slavic preacher and servant of God Onufriy Mazalo, who died in the prime of life at age 29 in 1936. After the war, Lidia remarried. Her husband became Nikolai Klyemenok, with whom she moved from war-torn Europe to Australia.
Here, in Adelaide, Anita Mazalo grew up. When I tracked her down and we finally met in the hospitable and bright home of Anatoly and Alexandra Loktev, where we were staying, she said with tears that she knew very little about her father — only that he was a great preacher and that he died when she was six months old.
And so I opened my book, and page after page, I began translating into her native English my account of her father, who stood at the origins of the Pentecostal movement in Belarus.
Children should know about their fathers, whom the Holy Spirit used mightily — used both in the homeland and far beyond its borders. Children must know, those who live in the homeland of their fathers and far beyond it.
And so I wrote this book.
Vladimir Franchuk.
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