Baptists vs. the Soviets: Church Freedom Without Compromise
On July 15, 2007, Gennady Kryuchkov died – one of the most courageous Christian leaders who did not bow before the repressive machine of the communist state. In our time of moral and religious relativism and opportunism, Kryuchkov and the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, in whose creation he played a huge role, remain rare and still unheeded examples of deep faith, principle, and courage.
Soviet policy in the religious sphere was full of contradictions and the most astonishing situations that would have been impossible in a normal free democratic society. Sometimes it is completely impossible to understand what gain the builders of communism were pursuing when they staged some incredible operation.
Within the framework of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), through the efforts of Soviet officials from the Council for Religious Affairs and the state security organs, believers were united who could never have imagined themselves in one union. In order to create a loyal union, the authorities forced Pentecostals to renounce foot washing, speaking in other tongues, and prophecies. And Christians in the spirit of the apostles (Oneness believers), who believe in baptism only in Jesus Christ and reject the dogma of the Holy Trinity, upon joining the AUCECB gave up their doctrinal principle and also began to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The authorities succeeded in bringing together Baptists and Evangelical Christians, who since the beginning of the 20th century had been unable to agree on unity, despite liturgical differences and differences in church governance. At the same time, while forcing them to renounce their convictions, the Soviet authorities also forbade preaching.
One of the most powerful movements that arose in Russia and set itself in opposition to this Soviet theater of the absurd was the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists – a church of believers who refused registration with the authorities and are often called Initsiativnik Baptists or Reformists. The personification of this movement and its leader was Gennady Konstantinovich Kryuchkov. He was born on October 20, 1926, and died on July 15, 2007.
The history of the split of the AUCECB began in early 1960, when all the senior presbyters of the AUCECB received an “Instructional Letter” from the Council of the Union. The letter was inspired by the Soviet authorities with the aim of further suppressing the religious activity of members of AUCECB communities. The letter clearly set forth principles contrary to the Protestant way of thinking. Missionary activity, religious education, and any forms of religious activity apart from participation in worship services were forbidden. Senior presbyters were ordered to stop attracting new members into the community, not to get carried away with preaching, to curb “unhealthy missionary manifestations,” not to conduct work outside the community, to reduce the baptism of young people, not to baptize schoolchildren, students, soldiers, categorically not to admit children of preschool and school age to meetings, etc. The instruction contained literally the following words, which could naturally outrage any believer: «In the past, some of our communities violated Soviet legislation on religious cults only because they knew it poorly. Thus, there were cases of baptizing people under 18, providing material assistance from the community treasury, conducting Bible study classes and other thematic meetings, recitation of verses was allowed, excursions were organized for believing youth, mutual aid funds were created, meetings of preachers and sessions with choir directors were held… All this must now be excluded from our activities and brought into line with existing legislation.»
Officially, the initiative movement began on August 13, 1961, when an initiative group lodged a protest with the Moscow leadership. It stated in sharp terms that the 1960 charter reflected anti-evangelical principles. The authors of the protest wrote: “In our day, the leaders of the AUCECB are carrying out Stalin’s will.” In April 1961, the so-called Initiative Group for convening a congress was organized in the Uzlovaya church (Tula region). The first meeting of the Initiative Group took place in Moscow on August 10, 1961, with only four people participating. Armed with the first message of the Initiative Group about convening a Congress of ECB, the participants of this meeting dispersed throughout the country to discuss the issue locally. Initially, the leaders of the initiative movement were A. F. Prokofiev and his assistant Boris Zdorovets. After their arrest in 1962, the group was led by Gennady Kryuchkov and Georgy Vins (Vins was soon convicted and then, following international protests, sent directly from the camp to America). The initiative members expressed dissatisfaction with the actions of the AUCECB leadership and demanded the holding of an all-Union congress, which was not provided for by the 1944 Statute on the AUCECB. When repeated appeals to the AUCECB brought no results, the group began to act independently and sent messages of critical content to all congregations. The Initiative Group proposed that all who, along with the AUCECB, had not departed from the truth, separate from the Union. In February 1962, the initiative group formed an Organizing Committee for convening a congress, which repeatedly petitioned the Council for Religious Affairs under the USSR Council of Ministers. On February 25, 1962, the Organizing Committee of the initiative members issued a warning message to the AUCECB leadership, giving them time for reflection. However, on June 2, 1962, the AUCECB responded with an open letter stating that the actions of the initiative members were inspired by “the enemy of God.” After this, the Organizing Committee, by Protocol No. 7, excommunicated the AUCECB leadership from the church. This protocol was signed by G. K. Kryuchkov, A. A. Shalashov, and N. G. Baturin.
By 1965, about 100 congregations, that is, more than 10,000 believers, had left the AUCECB and joined the Union of Churches of ECB (CC ECB) formed by the initiative members. The 39th All-Union Congress of the AUCECB, held in October 1966, could not change the situation. Despite the repeal of the Instruction Letter, the adoption of another Union Statute, and the actual repentance and admission by the leaders of the official Union of ECB of the error of submitting to the authorities’ pressure in 1961, the CC ECB declared that cooperating with the AUCECB meant cooperating with atheists. In 1966, Yakov Zhidkov spoke before the AUCECB congress and asked forgiveness for his participation in preparing the 1961 charter and the secret instruction, but the initiative members made no concessions. The initiative union began to live an independent life and categorically refused to register its congregations. As an embodiment of its desire for preaching, the CC ECB published and continues to publish literature, which the initiative members distribute for free, organizing evangelistic tents.
In May 1966, the initiative members staged a public demonstration in Moscow in front of the CPSU Central Committee building to attract the authorities’ attention, for which all its participants, including Gennady Kryuchkov and Georgy Vins, were arrested. The most well-known ministers of the CC ECB (virtually the entire leadership), who were constantly monitored by the police and security organs, went underground and traveled around the country, visiting and shepherding the congregations. For teaching children, publishing literature, and holding prayer meetings, the security organs repressed about a thousand people. People belonging to the Council of Churches became accustomed to holding prayer meetings in forests, vacant lots, and other deserted places, hiding from prying eyes. Over the years of Soviet power, the initiative members’ congregations acquired a closed character. Pastors protected congregation members not only from the punitive actions of the state but also from the influence of secular culture. Almost everything was controlled: behavior and dress style. Strict moral standards and careful attention to compliance with all requirements of the Council of Churches by the brethren in the congregation sharply distinguished the initiative members from the Union Baptists.
The intransigent position of the initiative members provoked persecution against them by the authorities. The Council of Churches produced many uncompromising martyrs for the faith, unwilling to submit to the diktat of the state. In Tashkent, one of the leaders of the initiative members, Nikolai Khrapov, who had previously served 25 years for his faith, received another seven-year sentence in 1961. He published in the samizdat journal Vestnik Spaseniya (Herald of Salvation). In Barnaul (Altai Krai), presbyter Nikolai Khmara was brutally tortured to death. It was after his death in 1963 that the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives was created, associated with the names of Lydia Vins and Galina Rytikova. During the existence of the Council of Churches, about 30 brethren died in confinement, among them N. P. Khrapov, B. T. Artyushchenko, Ya. F. Dirksen, and I. M. Ostapenko. Even very elderly initiative members (S. T. Golev, P. A. Serebrennikov) were held in prison. After prison, P. F. Zakharov, N. G. Baturin, the poet Nikolai Melnikov, and others worked again in the brotherhood.
The initiative Baptists quickly became part of the general dissident movement of the Soviet Union, one of the first manifestations of protest against the Soviet system. The initiative members began to maintain constant contacts with human rights activists. In 1976, immediately after the creation of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the Baptists appealed to the group with a complaint about the removal of children from believing parents. The MHG issued a document on this matter, “On the Persecution of Religious Families.” On December 5, 1976, the son of Pastor G. Vins, who had been expelled from the USSR, Pyotr Vins, together with a group of young people, took part in the traditional human rights demonstration on Pushkin Square in Moscow. They threw a bouquet of red carnations to A. D. Sakharov, who was surrounded by a cordon of volunteer militiamen. In 1977, Pyotr Vins became a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
Until 1988, the SC ECB operated illegally. Gennady Kryuchkov openly appeared at the SC ECB congress only in 1989 in Rostov-on-Don. Until then, believers feared new persecution and considered that only a temporary, ostensible freedom had come. According to one of Kryuchkov’s associates, Mikhail Khorev, who spoke at his funeral in Uzlovaya (Tula region), Kryuchkov lived “in a small inconspicuous house, in the attic, from 1970 to 1989. I visited him there. There were 4-5 sisters with him engaged in publishing work. And he had 9 children! His daughter said yesterday at the funeral: ‘I envied those children whose fathers were in prison. They could be seen, coming for a visit. But we couldn’t — because of surveillance. They thought we would go to our father.’ Some go abroad, emigrate where it is better. But one must be where there is greater need, where God has placed you. The great warfare begun in 1961 is not finished. But just as God began it, He will also bring it to completion.”
It was precisely thanks to Gennady Kryuchkov that the SC ECB, even after perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, remained an extremely conservative movement, closed off from the world and refusing state registration. In the 1990s, new converts joined the congregations, as in Soviet times, through preaching on the streets, in schools and hospitals, and the distribution of free Bibles and SC ECB magazines in evangelistic tents. The Council of Churches launched a broad missionary campaign in most regions of Russia; it even established its own national mission among the peoples of the Far North.
When encountering liberal and modernized (both in ideology and methods) American evangelical missions and preachers, the Initsiativniki feel distrust and antipathy toward Western missions in general. They are even afraid to send their representatives to study abroad. According to the Initsiativniki’s conviction, Western Protestants are connected with the depraved culture flourishing in this world. At the same time, they do cooperate with certain conservative Western organizations. For example, with the West German mission Fridenstimme, which invites the Initsiativniki to its conferences and provides literature aid. For the same reason, the Initsiativniki have a negative attitude toward the ecumenical movement.
A distinctive trait of SC ECB followers has been, and remains, their rejection of any contacts with the state and interference in any political matters, because, in their view, this would inevitably confront believers with the problem of submitting to lawless, if not godless, demands of the state. The Baptists of the Council of Churches believe that the AUCECB was created precisely with the help of the authorities on the basis of a criminal agreement of those brothers who were specially released from prison for that purpose. Since Soviet times, the Initsiativniki have not allowed their congregations to undergo state registration. They have a firm conviction that this is a means by which the state exerts pressure on a congregation. Separation from the world was also facilitated by another trait inherited from the Soviet period. Literally from 1961, the Initsiativniki had to observe secrecy and hide from the authorities. To strengthen their own confidence, to strengthen simple believers, ordinary working people sustained by faith in God, the Initsiativniki cultivated the conviction that they alone live a true life according to the Word of God, and that cooperation with the authorities and the world is base and unworthy of a Christian. This was necessary for life underground, in illegal conditions, and also, perhaps most importantly, to endure persecution from the authorities. Many deliberately provoked conflicts with police representatives and went to prison several times. Now the Initsiativniki declare that they are ready for new persecution, should it come. Some of them neither expect nor seek it, while others say that the truce with the authorities has lasted too long.
The refusal of state registration has acquired a mystical theological significance for the church’s activities. The same thing happened in another Protestant movement that refused registration, the United Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith (OC KhVE, Pentecostals). Unregistered Pentecostals began organizing their union back in the late 1940s in Ukraine, and in Russia the organized unregistered brotherhood, represented by the OC KhVE under the leadership of Russian Bishop Ivan Fedotov, started actively operating from the early 1970s. If Gennady Kryuchkov spent 18 years hiding in the attics of believers, without seeing his family, then Ivan Fedotov served a total of 18 years in prison for his faith. In the OC KhVE, as in the SC ECB, it is believed that the church is a spiritual entity, and therefore its registration is interference in the internal life of the church and evidence of worldly conformism. However, unlike the SC ECB, where only a few dared to register against the leadership’s will, Fedotov’s church in the 1990s found its own way out — it began purposefully registering missions attached to churches.
Religious freedom, which became available to believers from the late 1980s, radically changed the fate of many religious associations: the AUCECB effectively disintegrated, and in its place emerged the Union of Baptists, the Union of Pentecostals, and independent evangelical unions not affiliated with the Baptist Union. One might have expected that the Council of Churches of the ECB, under the leadership of Gennady Kryuchkov, would also emerge from the underground and that a new stage in the history of the initiative movement would begin. However, the opening of Kryuchkov’s CC ECB to the world occurred only partially. The initiative-group believers began to carry out their missionary activities freely, although, as before—in the Soviet era—conflicts periodically arose with Union Baptists, who were unhappy with criticism directed at them and the poaching of believers, and with the authorities, who, just as under Brezhnev, unsuccessfully tried to control gatherings in private homes. It could be said that up to the present day, liberalization has not touched the CC ECB in any sense. The devout Christian must still flee from the world lying in sin and unrighteous secular authority. In the post-Soviet period, the initiative-group believers inevitably re-evaluated the history of the Baptists of the Soviet era, and moreover, the image of the AUCECB in the eyes of old-school conservatives took on even more sinister contours. The initiative-group believers do not recognize any congresses of the AUCECB and therefore believe that there has been no free congress of Baptists since 1926 (Herald of Truth, No. 3, 1996, p. 4). And the congress at which the creation of the AUCECB was announced is described in the Council of Churches Baptist journal as follows: “…the powers that be, for their own reasons, searched the prisons for surviving ministers, freed them, and proposed: create a spiritual center. They agreed and declared: The Union is organized!… and the initiator was not the Lord and not the children of God” (Herald of Truth, No. 3, 1996, pp. 29–30). On the one hand, in the 1990s the initiative-group believers poached believers from the Union of Baptists, which they still consider the heir of the criminal AUCECB. In connection with sharp criticism from the CC ECB, the leadership of the Union of Baptists circulated a statement in 2004 entitled “Concerning the Council of Churches’ Deviation from the Faith Doctrine of the Evangelical Christian-Baptists.” It noted that, while considering the believers of the CC ECB as their brothers, “with pain we are forced to state that the Council of Churches does not respond to our proposals, in many regions of Russia carries out work aimed at destroying our communities, and on certain issues has deviated from the teaching of the Bible and the fundamentals of the faith doctrine of the Evangelical Christian-Baptists.”
On the other hand, the CC ECB itself ceased to be a homogeneous association during the post-Soviet period. Some churches began to establish contacts with “union” Baptists. Thus, after the year 2000, the Rybinsk community (Yaroslavl Region), headed by presbyter Evgeny Leonidovich Kravtsov, left the CC ECB and became an autonomous church more open toward union Baptists. RSECB pastors preach in the Rybinsk church, and former initiative-group believers participate in conferences and seminars held in Yaroslavl by the RSECB association.
Gennady Konstantinovich devoted his entire life to serving God, the Church, and his family. He faced many life trials, which he overcame with honor, dignity, and deep faith in the Lord, and he remained faithful to Christ and His Church. He steadfastly and selflessly endured the terrible era of war, the years of Soviet persecution, and raised nine children… we know and testify that Gennady Konstantinovich’s life was an example of service to the Lord and will bear its fruit.
That Kryuchkov’s heroic activity ultimately led to substantial changes in the situation of Christian churches in contemporary Russia is confirmed by the obituary written by the International Council of Churches of the ECB (around 2,700 congregations across Russia and the CIS, with around 400 congregations and groups in Russia), which he led for more than 30 years. It highlights the role of the Church’s founder and the achievements made: “The words of Jesus Christ Himself were very dear to Gennady Konstantinovich: ‘If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also’ (John 15:20). To the glory of the Lord who redeemed us, the Savior’s blessed promise was fulfilled in full measure on the independent brotherhood:
- the anti-evangelical restrictions and prohibitions introduced by AUCECB workers were abolished;
- the All-Union congress of the ECB Church, which had not been permitted to convene for 36 years and for which believers had begun to petition — was held;
- the ‘Christian’ publishing house, independent from the world and organized by Gennady Konstantinovich, by printing Gospels, Bibles, and other spiritual literature, compelled the powers that be to allow the release of literature for the official AUCECB Union as well;
- the numerous free gatherings of Christian youth from persecuted churches, at which hundreds of young souls turned to God, prompted the mighty of this world to lift restrictions on youth in registered communities as well;
- the oppressive 1929 legislation on religious cults, which stood in direct contradiction to the country’s fundamental law — the Constitution, and which believers asked to be repealed — was repealed!”
Между тем, баптисты-инициативники продолжают испытывать дискриминацию со стороны властей, в основном в регионах во время проведения уличных евангелизаций в палатках и раздачи литературы. Кроме того, сотрудников правоохранительных органов часто раздражают баптисты, которые собираются в частных домах без регистрации и безо всякого уведомления властей. Безусловно, эти гонения уже не сравнятся с тем советскими репрессиями, когда у верующих отбирали детей, а их самих сажали по тюрьмам. Нынешние подозрения и попытки ограничить деятельность СЦ ЕХБ – свидетельство страха чиновников перед могущественной организацией верующих, которые не смирились с советской государственной машиной, не стали жить по правилам безбожников, сохранив уникальную для того времени степень свободы. Существование сильных самостоятельных и независимых от власти движений до сих пор воспринимается представителями государства как некая опасность, но в постсоветской России по-прежнему бояться не верующие, а их гонители. Никто из гонителей никогда не поймет, почему Геннадий Крючков предпочел 18 лет не видеть собственной семьи и детей, а методично выстраивать невидимую глазу церковную организацию с жесткой дисциплиной и благовестниками, разъезжающими по всему Советскому Союзу. Как отметил основатель Кестонского института каноник Майкл Бурдо в некрологе, посвященном Крючкову, в британской газете «The Guardian», «всю свою жизнь Геннадий Крючков был тверд в вере и оказался сильнее КГБ».
Роман Лункин
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