Walter Sawatsky. The Evangelical Movement in the USSR after World War II
Excerpts from Walter Sawatsky’s book on the history of the Baptist church of the former USSR and the movement of the Initiativniki within it.
What actually happened?
Had the Baptist union changed that much (by 1961)? Its leadership, in Kiev and in Moscow, remained practically the same. Thus the elite that had formed in 1945 managed to hold onto power for 15 years. Yakov Zhidkov was seventy-five, his deputy A. L. Andreev was sixty-four and his heart was starting to act up, Alexander Karev was already sixty-seven. Before the war they had all been extremely forceful and influential, and they had worked tirelessly to create the new union.
But before this union could even become a reality, it immediately began to split. A small group of Pentecostals left it almost at once after joining, and already in 1948 it became necessary to issue an additional, extremely strict instruction regarding the Pentecostals. In 1957–1959 cooperation with them improved again. Almost every year the AUCECB leadership held meetings with leading Pentecostal leaders who traveled between churches and congregations, ironing out differences and trying to persuade those who still stubbornly refused to take advantage of the benefits that joining the union offered. Fraternal Herald repeatedly issued appeals to the Pentecostals, while urging union members not to be afraid to elect former Pentecostals as presbyters if they had sincerely joined the union. The impression is that against a backdrop of heightened concern about how to retain the Pentecostals, and the ever‑increasing amount of time and energy devoted to participation in international peace conferences, the dissident movement within Baptist ranks came as a complete surprise to the union leadership.
Truth be told, the dissident leaders never quite summoned the courage to admit that one of the primary factors behind the emergence of their movement was that from 1945 onward the situation of Evangelical Christians had changed very little. Their former spiritual leaders, at least some of them, had been broken by Stalin’s terror and were released from imprisonment precisely in order to create an officially registered union of Evangelical Christians. Stalin eased the pressure on some confessions, but the Evangelical movement’s leaders knew that in any negotiations they had no more rights than mere observers. They were reminded of this repeatedly. By 1948, when the campaign for official registration of churches was basically completed, only about a third of the congregations had acquired legal status. Then pastors began to be arrested again. Many leading Pentecostal leaders, such as Ivan Panko, were caught in this wave of repression, and some Evangelical Christian spiritual leaders remained imprisoned until the mid‑1950s. Everyone knew they had to watch their tongue carefully, and not just because the apostle James advises it. I. I. Motorin, who became a member of the presidium in 1958, was once deprived of his preacher’s license for six months merely because in a sermon on the cross he had mentioned in passing the crosses on the Kremlin cathedrals.
The Soviet historian Mitrokhin quite rightly noted that the very structure of the AUCECB strengthened the centralization that was already traditional among Russian Baptists. Without a doubt, this was a new concern of Soviet religious policy. Zhidkov and his deputies, chiefly A. L. Andreev, controlled all the activity of the union. True, for the most part this amounted to a kind of “patronage,” but from the very beginning the authorities made it emphatically clear that at the request of official state bodies any local spiritual leader must be removed from office. To justify such harsh authoritarianism, it was asserted that the majority of believers were at best semi‑literate, so a few wise leaders were needed to guide such people.
In fact, all the changes boiled down to the state somewhat relaxing its pressure. In the mid‑1950s many former preachers were released from imprisonment. These were people who had never bent the knee to “Caesar” and were ready to return to their pastoral work. But even earlier they had kept even more to themselves than Soviet society as a whole, so the spirit of ecumenism and détente was a new and unfamiliar phenomenon for them. The more they learned about the AUCECB, the less they liked it. Anyone who received permission to travel abroad they immediately began to suspect of collaborating with the KGB. And when Alexander Karev and Mikhail Orlov received government awards for peacemaking activity in the early 1950s, their suspicions turned into certainty.
The main split that occurred in 1955‑1957 was the work of former prisoners. Several attempts were made to create independent church associations in the North and Central regions of the Russian Federation, in Baku, in Novosibirsk, in the Donbass, in the North Caucasus, in the Crimea, and in Central Asia. Mennonites and Pentecostals also tried to unite their churches. In the Donetsk region the so‑called “true Baptists,” who insisted that all ministers must be ordained, created a union, which twenty‑two churches joined. Evangelical Christians in the Sumy region of Ukraine succeeded in doing the same. Moreover, both of these unions were opposed to uniting with the Pentecostals.10
Since the first leader of the “Initiative Group” was Alexei F. Prokofiev, the atheist press initially dubbed the entire movement “Prokofievites.” Prokofiev was born in 1915 in Ishim (Western Siberia). His biography is much less known than those of his colleagues. He came to believe in God only in 1945 while in prison (in 1941 he was convicted under Article 58 for anti-Soviet activity). Before that he worked as a teacher, and in 1940 he entered the University to study geology. Back in 1937 he married, but soon parted from his wife, and in 1939 he remarried to Praskovia Markovna; in 1940 they had a daughter. In the post-war years, having become a believer, he joined the Evangelical Christians Baptists, and in 1954 he again ended up in prison. This time he was sentenced to twenty-five years of imprisonment for missionary activity. However, the sentence was subsequently reviewed, and in 1958 Prokofiev was released. Upon his release, he devoted himself to the ministry of an evangelist. He was the first to lead the “Initiative Group” movement, but in 1962 his activity was interrupted by a new arrest. Here his trail is lost. Only in the 1970s did a vague rumor circulate that supposedly in 1969 the AUCECB excommunicated him for immoral behavior.
Two years passed, and the undisputed leaders of the movement became Gennady Konstantinovich Kryuchkov and Georgy Petrovich Vins. Kryuchkov was born in Tula, not far from Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana. He turned to God in 1951 and became a presbyter in an unregistered church in the town of Uzlovaya. Georgy Vins was a native of Kiev. He moved to Kiev with his Ukrainian mother after his Siberian father, a Baptist preacher from a family of German Mennonites, perished in the camps. Having become a believer in 1945, he joined one of the officially registered churches in Kiev. When the “Initiative Group” formed, Kryuchkov and Vins were thirty-four and thirty-two years old respectively. The overwhelming majority of their like-minded associates were also young. Prokofiev, however, was forty-five and had already been in prison. Many of the leading figures of the “Initiative Group,” such as S. T. Golev (1896–1976), S. Kh. Tsurkan, and A. S. Goncharov (1895), were older than their comrades and had considerable experience in church leadership. But none of them had ever led a church belonging to the AUCECB. Thus, the “Initiative Group” movement was formed by people of different generations, united by only one thing — they were all newcomers to the officially registered church. Therefore, the new 1960 charter plunged them into a state of shock.
The Stumbling Block: Separation of Church and State
All sources agree that the new AUCECB charter, copies of which were sent out to all churches in 1960 together with a secret instruction addressed to senior presbyters, provoked the schism. The accompanying letter urged avoidance of “unhealthy missionary tendencies” and stressed that the influx of new members into the churches “must be decisively stopped.” The baptism of young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty was ordered to be “reduced to a minimum.” Believers were to be persuaded to abandon their negative views on art, literature, radio, cinema, and television. The instruction also advised ensuring that children no longer attended worship services.
To be sure, those several thousand people who regularly received the “Bratsky Vestnik” (which naturally included all the senior presbyters) were not as deeply shaken by all these innovations. As early as 1948, Yakov Zhidkov stated quite clearly that the number of baptisms was declining. This meant that congregations were training neophytes more thoroughly, and there was hope that as a result the number of those falling away from the church would also decrease. That same year he again urged not to rush baptism; having become a Christian, a candidate must undergo a trial period of no less than a year. In 1949 he condemned “those who admit people who have not yet converted to the faith into the choir, since this reduces the spirituality of the singing.” In 1955 the AUCECB again expressed concern about overly hasty baptism of new converts. At the beginning of 1959, in his programmatic article, Sergei P. Fadyukhin declared that the main area where the Church could be useful was the struggle against the development and deployment of new types of weapons of mass destruction. The author goes so far as to proclaim the dawn of a third era in the history of Christianity — an era of the cessation of persecutions — but cautions that precisely at this moment many unworthy people might hastily join the church. Therefore, the council of churches decided that the trial period for those wishing to be baptized should be extended from one to three years.
At the congress in 1963, N. A. Levindanto attempted a revision of recent history, arguing to the assembled that the draft charter of 1960 had been presented for discussion by the AUCECB and that it had repeatedly appealed to its members to send in their comments and suggestions. However, the secret instruction explicitly stated that the charter should be tightened even further. Even the first charter of 1948 had been unilaterally approved by the AUCECB, although Zhidkov then acknowledged: “We cannot force anyone to recognize and submit to the Union’s charter,” and thereafter tried to avoid even mentioning it. And at the same time he declared: “those believers who do not want to submit to the charter have no place among the members of congregations belonging to the Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists.” The position of the AUCECB in 1960 was no less rigid.
Members of some churches knew nothing at all about the statute, because local presbyters, and sometimes senior presbyters, considered it best not to make it public. In other congregations, on the contrary, all the provisions of the statute were discussed at meetings and a collective tactic for resisting this pressure was chosen — sometimes quite effective. In some churches, a decision was made not to bring children to the service for several months, in order, following Job’s example, to wait out the storm and then return to normal life. But there were also churches where, before the service began, the presbyter stood at the door and simply did not let children in. In Novosibirsk, for instance, active Christians were simply excommunicated. Moreover, the authorities often neutralized the efforts of those who resisted with the help of not-too-courageous believers and even pseudo-Christians.
Such relations with the state were extremely painful. A massive propaganda attack on religion began in 1959, and churches started to be closed. The new statute, although not greatly different from the 1949 statute, required community leaders to cooperate directly with the authorities in their activities aimed at destroying the church.
The movement of the “Initsiativniki” officially began on 13 August 1961, when an initiative group lodged a protest with the Moscow leadership. The founders of this movement met with Prokofiev and Kryuchkov in the settlement of Uzlovaya, Tula Oblast. For many years, the leaders of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB) paid no attention to Tula, where Kryuchkov lived. Prokofiev lived in the village of Volnovakha, Donetsk Oblast, a stronghold of “true Baptists.” At that time, B.A. Rusanov had just been replaced as senior presbyter by I.Ya. Tarasenko.
Twelve days later, after the initiative group had handed its protest to the Moscow leadership of the Council, Prokofiev and Kryuchkov addressed an open letter to all congregations of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, composed in extremely harsh terms. “In our days, the figures of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists are carrying out the will of Stalin,” it said. The authors accused the 1960 statute of being an “anti-evangelical” document and called for a special congress to be convened to discuss and adopt a new statute. Moreover, in addition to criticizing the statute, they demanded that the Council leadership renounce its sinful practice of collaboration with Stalinists.
For the first time, criticism was directed not only against the Moscow leaders of the movement but also against community leaders who accepted anti-evangelical documents as a guide to action. Therefore, the appeals to all churches were, in essence, a call for a general renewal and a new sanctification of church life. The initiative group sent out more and more letters, full of calls for “transformation,” “sanctification,” “church reform,” a “change of leadership,” and, most importantly, for the convening of an “all-people’s congress of representatives of all churches.” All of this, although seemingly related to purely religious issues, at the same time emphasized the need this time for a real and complete separation of Church and State. And to begin with, the Church was called upon to distance itself from the State and return to its own historical roots.
From the Organizing Committee to the AUCECB
The initiative group, which first visited the AUCECB headquarters on 13 August 1961, demanded an official response from the Council leadership, but never received one. Having sent another official statement on 23 August, which also remained unanswered, they decided to make a public appeal to the authorities. The fact that they did not wait very long for an official response indicates that they had little hope of receiving one and were only looking for a pretext to take the initiative into their own hands. The Reformers immediately stipulated that they did not intend to participate in a power struggle and that, if only a new congress were convened, they would submit all their grievances to it and submit to its decision. However, the consistent actions of the Reformers themselves showed that they were doing everything necessary to officially create a new society that would replace the AUCECB. In February, an expanded conference decided to establish an Organizing Committee, which was charged with carrying out the preparatory work for convening an All-Union Congress of all Evangelical Christian-Baptist churches.
At its meeting on 25 February 1962, this Organizing Committee made two major decisions. A revised draft of the 1960 statute was presented, and the anti-church activities of the AUCECB were openly condemned. The Organizing Committee accused the AUCECB of adopting anti-evangelical documents, of the fact that only one third of the actually existing congregations were represented in the Union only because they were officially registered, and of “deliberate actions aimed at wrecking the all-union congress.” The Organizing Committee warned all members of the AUCECB, as well as regional and local presbyters holding their own positions, that they might well be excommunicated for this. The Organizing Committee declared 6 May 1962 a day of common prayer, giving the AUCECB time for reflection.
But instead of reconsidering its decision, on 2 June 1962, the AUCECB addressed all the churches with an open letter stating that the actions of the “Initsiativniki” were inspired by the “enemy of God.” An expanded meeting of the Organizing Committee, which opened in Moscow three days later, decided to excommunicate the AUCECB leadership. In the official document adopted at this meeting, known as Protocol No. 7, the AUCECB and its official representatives were deprived of the right to conduct services and to represent the Evangelical Christian-Baptist Churches within the country and abroad. Protocol No. 7 listed twenty-seven names and stipulated that this list would be supplemented in the future. As for the local presbyters, the right to excommunicate them remained with the local congregations.
The Organizing Committee explained that the right to make such an unusual decision was granted by written declarations collected from churches across the country, “giving an impartial assessment of the activities of AUCECB representatives, who had long forfeited the right to be considered members of the Church of Christ.” Letters received by the Organizing Committee from various churches confirmed that they recognized it as their sole governing body. Thus, Protocol No. 7 had every ground to declare that, until a congress was convened, the Organizing Committee would take over the leadership of all ECB churches, and that henceforth the only guide in the life of the churches must be the Word of God. Previously adopted resolutions were also reaffirmed, according to which all AUCECB meetings and the documents adopted at them concerning the congress would be considered invalid unless the Organizing Committee was involved. And finally, the excommunication of believers who had taken part in the movement aimed at restoring lost spirituality to church life was declared null and void. This document was signed by G. K. Kryuchkov, A. A. Shalashov, and I. G. Baturin.
The AUCECB naturally did not recognize this excommunication as lawful. As a result, many churches that had initially sided with the reformers stopped supporting them, taking a position of neutral observers or remaining members of the AUCECB. The procedure for excommunication accepted among Baptists implies that this is the prerogative of the local congregation. Levindanto repeatedly stressed in his articles that a presbyter could be excommunicated only in the presence of the senior presbyter or presbyters of neighboring congregations, so as to prevent excommunication from becoming an instrument of pressure. However, judging by numerous testimonies from the localities, AUCECB functionaries themselves, starting in 1959, repeatedly violated this order, sending their commissioners to organize the excommunication of those presbyters and preachers who refused to adopt the new statute. But the Organizing Committee also used this tactic to exert pressure, trampling on the right of congregations independently to excommunicate their members who had fallen away from the faith. Most AUCECB leaders lived in Moscow, and the Moscow congregation refused to excommunicate them. A similar situation prevailed in Kiev. Those churches that acted more consistently, refusing to recognize the Moscow leadership, withdrew from the union but were in no hurry to join the new union.
There was an obvious contradiction in the reformers’ actions, a consequence of their inexperience and the result of internal disagreements among them over methods of struggle. Without intending to, they became entangled in power politics. In August 1963, they sent a letter to Khrushchev that began by recalling that they were already appealing to the government for the seventh time with a request to permit a congress, but had so far received no answer, and therefore found themselves in a rather difficult position. The letter was long but sincere, especially when the church acknowledged itself obliged “to submit legally in full to state authorities.” The letter proposed that the government use local church councils as a connecting link and appoint senior presbyters “from among those who enjoy their confidence and recognize the authority of the AUCECB.” After touching briefly on some details, the authors concluded the letter by asserting that “despite all disagreements, such contact has been established between the AUCECB and state representatives that any clash with the AUCECB was regarded as an act against the authorities.”
Aware that both state structures and AUCECB leaders would inevitably fall upon them, they tried to draw Khrushchev’s attention to the fact that such actions were unlawful. And in an earlier message addressed to the churches, they blamed the AUCECB for the fact that the new statute was based on Soviet legislation on cults. Analyzing many articles of the 1960 statute, relying on an official legal commentary of 1961, they argued that religious centers had no right to select ministers independently — this prerogative belonged exclusively to local congregations; that local executive bodies had no right to make decisions, they could only implement them, and making them was a matter for the members of the congregation; and that if the law allowed becoming a church member after the age of eighteen, the statute forbade performing baptism before the age of fifteen. In this critique, the legislation was interpreted in various ways, but the essence was not this at all, but that the law had changed. But since this was kept secret, the reformers protested in vain against the terrible lawlessness being committed. In effect, groups and local congregations were deprived of the right to convene a congress. Only the AUCECB could do that.
In their official statements, the leaders of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB) maintained complete silence about the excommunications, even though these were most likely the reason for the reshuffling of senior presbyters. Articles on the theme of spiritual renewal in church life, albeit without specific reference to the “initiative group,” began appearing in Bratsky Vestnik right after the “initiative group’s” first visit to Moscow in 1961. The first was an article by S. P. Fadyukhin, which described spiritual renewal as a prolonged process that the author defined as “knowing the will of God and embodying it in life.” This touched not only on a person’s personal “relationship” with God but also on relationships between people. Fadyukhin argued that our dealings with others must be governed by two laws: “the law of the state and the law of God.” He cited the Apostle Paul’s letters to the Romans (13:1-4) and to Titus (3:1,2), emphasizing the need to obey the laws of the state. As for the law of God, the author turned to Psalm 17:8 and the general epistle of James (1:25). In conclusion, Fadyukhin asserted that for the Apostle Paul the evidence of the highest spirituality was “a person’s striving with all his might to preserve peace in his soul.” He constantly stresses this emphasis on peace and tranquility, even quoting the book of the prophet Isaiah (30:15): “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” Thus, spiritual renewal was reduced to pacification and unquestioning submission to the authorities. That was the response of the AUCECB’s official leaders to the reformers.
The pages of Bratsky Vestnik never contained a reference to Peter and John, who in chapter 5 of the Acts of the Apostles explicitly say: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” Ironically, it was precisely at this time that Mitskevich was writing a commentary on the book of Acts. But he chose to focus on the story of Ananias and Sapphira, in order to stress that the church can only develop by purifying itself from within. Otherwise, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “For ‘the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you’” (Rom. 2:24). Mitskevich passes over in silence the confrontation between Peter and John and the authorities, and immediately moves on to the appointment of deacons described in the sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.
Bargaining Between the Authorities, the Reformers, and the AUCECB
“If the state had not interfered, if it had not once again declared war on the believers, if it had not been planting its own people throughout the Church everywhere, the Church would have quickly, painlessly and without any particular difficulty restored internal order by removing those who were not coping with their duties. This would have severed the criminal link between the Church leadership and the state, and all illegal relations between them would have ceased—with no pain whatsoever.”
That was the wish expressed in the declaration sent to Khrushchev. The state had declared that the goal of its policy was the destruction of the Church, but the church leadership could not acknowledge this publicly. It was under intense pressure from the authorities, who were forcing it to cooperate in its own destruction. The Church’s leaders were left with only one hope: that if they participated in the campaign conducted by the authorities, at least some part of the Church would survive. By its uncompromising stance, the Initiative Group was forcing the state to demonstrate its strength. Those who disagreed had to be locked away in prison, and for that they had to be charged with something in order to hold a trial. The “initiative group” helpers managed to obtain transcripts of court sessions and photocopies of the official charges. In many cases the initial charge boiled down to the fact that the leaders of local congregations refused to adopt the AUCECB charter.
The hardest times came after the 1963 congress. During the Christmas holidays, the Altai regional court heard the cases of four defendants and found them guilty of reactionary activity that harmed society, “since, by analyzing various biblical texts, they allowed deliberately false interpretations of them, seeking to provide a basis for their criticism and their unwillingness to accept the new AUCECB charter.” The presbyter of the local church received five years, the brothers Nikolai and Vasily Khmara three years each, and Lyubov Khmara was given a suspended sentence. Nikolai Khmara’s name soon became widely known, because two weeks later he died in prison, unable to endure the torture.
This was the most flagrant example of what the zeal of local authorities led to when they undertook anti-religious propaganda, inflamed by instructions from Moscow. This time the blow was aimed at an unregistered Baptist community in Barnaul, which had many courageous young people, thanks to whom the community was distinguished by such profound faith and cohesion that even the authorities were forced to tolerate it. The Barnaul community was among the first in 1961 to take part in preparing “samizdat” documents, after the officially registered church in Barnaul was closed because the parishioners refused to accept a presbyter imposed on them by the authorities, a man known for his immoral conduct. Now they had in their hands photocopies of authentic documents which, thanks to them, became known to the whole world, and they sent a delegation of twenty-one people to Moscow to demand an official investigation. To begin with, in February the AUCECB sent I. I. Motorin to Barnaul to persuade the believers to join a newly officially registered community. At the end of May, a special commission was finally sent to investigate the matter on the spot. Simultaneously with it, Alexander Karev arrived in Barnaul. Local believers long remembered how, in the presence of representatives of the authorities, he unleashed a flood of questions on them, trying to find out why they did not wish to obey the legislation in force in the country. All this did nothing to improve relations between Barnaul and Moscow. On the other hand, the commission confirmed the fact that torture had been used and charged the prison administration with murder, but although the chief of the prison himself came under suspicion, none of the prison staff personally suffered. The authorities generally refused to officially acknowledge that a crime had been committed.
And yet the more common methods of state interference in internal church affairs were not so crude. In their letter to Khrushchev, the reformers complained about the KGB and other government bodies constantly conducting interrogations during which believers were forced to answer:
When will the next service take place? Who will preach? Are people who are not members of the community preaching? Who has gone away and where? Who has called for spiritual revival? Who prayed for the brothers who are in prison?
The reformers viewed such questions as unlawful interference in internal church affairs. They were particularly outraged that Karev advised Barnaul believers not to pray for their fellow-believers who were in prison. As the schism deepened, the number of people supporting the reformers grew. The movement reached its peak in 1966.
From the very beginning, clashes like the one in Barnaul erupted locally, but the first attempt at an open dialogue between the leaders of both sides was undertaken only in 1965. Yet all attempts to reach an agreement foundered on a strange coincidence: whatever a reformer said to his brother from the officially registered community, the very next day it became known to state security officials, who summoned the dissenter for interrogation and repeated to him his own words spoken the day before. Some members of the officially registered communities and their leaders helped the authorities get rid of dissidents by putting them in prison; others broke under the most intense pressure and gave the authorities the information they were demanding. In both cases the result was the same: the persecution continued, the number of prisoners kept growing. At best, the leadership of the AUCECB once again acknowledged its helplessness—at times out of cowardice, at times out of servility, and sometimes simply out of personal vengeance.
The only force capable of opposing the state proved to be the courage of believing women. Six weeks after the death of Nikolai Khmara, the first secret meeting of the council of prisoners’ relatives took place, and the first detailed lists of the repressed began to be compiled. The history of this remarkable organization is closely linked with the names of Lydia Vins and Galina Rytikova, and its founders were: Lydia K. Govorun from Smolensk, Nina P. Yastrebova from Kharkov, and Rudneva from Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan). Rudneva’s husband, Viktor, was sentenced to twenty-five years, and she was left alone with eight children. N. Yastrebova’s husband received five years in prison and five years in exile. They had four children. Lydia K. Govorun herself was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in 1966. All the participants in this movement were over thirty.
Influence of the Dissidents
After the emergence in 1965 of the CCECB, the reformers shifted their criticism from the AUCECB to the state. Drawing ever more forces into their movement, they concentrated their attention on unregistered communities. Throughout the whole of the next decade both Councils fought for the support of these very communities, which the schism had not touched.
Theoretically, the state’s campaign of closing churches should have hit the AUCECB hardest, since all registered churches belonged to it, but in practice the situation was quite different. While in some places houses of prayer were sealed up or razed to the ground with bulldozers, in others private homes where believers gathered were used. But closure of a church rarely meant the end of religious activity. At first, cautious believers tried not to gather in groups of more than three, but a few months passed and they again began meeting in small groups in homes. It soon became clear that especially fierce persecution fell upon the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, whereas in Kirghizia and the semi-Muslim republics the authorities turned a blind eye to the believers. This led to believers from other regions moving into these republics. Not all, of course, moved to Kirghizia; some went to the Baltic, where repression was likewise weaker.
From the very beginning, the reformers everywhere were treated with great sympathy. Statistical data presents a rather contradictory picture, since one side clearly sought to minimize its guilt, while the other sought to exaggerate its popularity. The “Initiative-takers” claimed that the AUCECB represented only one-third of believers, while two-thirds of congregations remained unregistered and, consequently, by their logic, supported the reformers. According to statements by Soviet sociologists, in reality, up to half of the unregistered congregations supported them. However, it should be noted that, as a rule, unregistered congregations were less populous than registered ones. In 1958, before the beginning of Khrushchev’s persecutions, according to Baptist leadership data, there were 530,000 believers. In 1966, Karev cited the figure of 250,000. Official statistics, however, were closer to the first figure – taking into account unregistered congregations, they count 500,000 believers. According to the most reliable Soviet sources, by the end of 1965, 13% of believers from unregistered congregations supported the reformers. In large cities, their number reached 19.4%. This means that the supporters of the “Initiative-takers” included between 30,000 and 80,000 members of congregations belonging to the AUCECB, and half of the approximately 250,000 members of unregistered Baptist congregations. Thus, at its peak in 1966, the reform movement numbered about 155,000 supporters.
However, whatever the statistics may be, one cannot but acknowledge that in this confrontation, the AUCECB found itself in a less than favorable position, especially in the early years, when, according to one state official, the reformers had a chance to win over more than half of the believers. The hysterical persecution of the “Initiative-takers” that began in the Soviet press after 1966 clearly testified that the authorities were alarmed. By 1963, some unregistered congregations had joined the AUCECB, but there were also those who left it, although their voice never proved decisive.
As an increasing number of Christians ended up behind bars, the authorities began to discover that they managed to convert people to the faith even in prison. When the spiritual leaders of Christian communities were sent into exile, this often proved tantamount to opening a new mission. In many places, no sooner had the authorities exiled all the leaders of a church than others would be sent to take their places within a few weeks. Witnesses to how candidates were chosen to replace arrested community leaders testified that often the most unlikely people would suddenly reveal a gift for preaching, which no one had previously suspected. However, in parallel, more and more self-taught preachers appeared.
The testimonies of believers like the members of the Barnaul congregation made a strong impression on the general public. People began to wonder why the morally irreproachable leaders of believers were turned into monsters, scoundrels, extortionists, parasites, and bloodsuckers. Beginning to look into this, many turned to faith.
However, the strongest emotional impact was that of the dissident movement. How could the sufferings of people, accepted by them for the sake of striving at any cost to remain faithful to their God, leave anyone indifferent? Was not the impotence of the authorities obvious, as they vainly tried to eradicate a religion that stubbornly refused to disappear, and that, to their shame, in this struggle against religion, the authorities only demeaned themselves, instead of countering Christian teaching with the heights of communist morality? And how can one fail to recognize the feelings of the AUCECB Leaders and their silently suffering supporters? After all, many of them hoped that their unofficial negotiations with the authorities would benefit believers, even if in the eyes of the reformers they themselves would not look good. There were also those who suffered from their own internal division, recognizing that the reformers were absolutely right, but not finding the courage within themselves to take their side.
What exactly did the reformers want? Both a negative and a positive impulse could always be felt in their appeals.
In their denial, the “Initiative-takers” were extremely attractive, since it was they who finally gave verbal form to the suspicions of many AUCECB members regarding the organization’s leadership. At last, someone was found who dared to oppose state persecution and state interference in the affairs of the church. People were found who had the courage to look danger in the eye, “drawing the fire upon themselves.”
The positive charge of their appeals consisted in prompting many to renew their spiritual life, to sanctify it. The charisma that attracted people to them lay in their active missionary spirit. Moreover, they gave first place to work with children and youth. Therefore, even quite law-abiding members of the AUCECB could not hold out when their children were barred from official services, while various youth programs were being carried out in the congregations of the “Initiative-takers” at that time. In the end, parents justified themselves, saying their first duty was to raise their children as Christians.
Regarding the negotiations for reunification
During the period from 1963 to 1969, the AUCECB held three all-union congresses, at which it was asserted that the causes of the split had been eliminated. But reunification with the CCECB did not happen. Why?
The delegates to the 1963 congress were chosen on a geographical basis, whereas at subsequent congresses each delegate represented about 500 church members. The stumbling block was that the Organizing Committee was not officially represented at the 1963 congress; even simply reading out its statement before those gathered was a problem. The Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (SCEKhB) decided to decline the invitations to the 1966 and 1969 congresses, since its representatives were offered only guest status with no voting rights. For this reason the reformers accused the first congress of being simply a fabrication, since the whole fullness of the church was not represented at it. In part they also implied that the delegates were far from being apostles so as to represent Christ’s church fully. But the most serious charge was that the delegates represented only officially registered congregations—in other words, in their estimation, only about a third of church members.
By 1966, however, when the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (VSEKhB) adopted a constitution that took into account all the reformers’ demands, events had turned in such a way that the reformers could no longer recognize all these changes. Although no official statements were published in the press, the VSEKhB leaders put pressure on local congregations, compelling them to hold conferences and condemn the Organizing Committee’s statement. On their trips abroad they always emphasized that believers were imprisoned only because they broke the law. A second serious problem was that whenever favorable situations arose for trying to come to an agreement (as, for example, at the 1963 and 1966 congresses), they were somehow inevitably missed: during the first congress the reform leader Prokofiev was in prison, and in 1966 the trial of Kryuchkov and Vins was under way. To be sure, the VSEKhB leadership could have made a bold gesture and postponed the congress until these men were able to attend. Instead, they elected a reunification commission, which included respected people known for their desire to restore unity in the union.
The reunification commission held four consultations, addressed the churches with two open letters in which it advised striving to restore unity on the local level, and in addition the commission members personally visited 200 local churches. V. I. Lebedev accused them of denouncing local churches that supported the SCEKhB as fallen away from Christ in some officially registered congregations, and of declaring that there was no forgiveness for them. Another problem was the local presbyters, who in their pride were completely unwilling to acknowledge their mistakes. No less difficulty was created by the SCEKhB leaders, who advised members of the churches that supported them not to enter into negotiations with the commission’s members. One Moscow observer noted another weak point of the reunification commission: it mistakenly considered itself “some kind of neutral organization, independent of the VSEKhB,” and as a result became involved in activities doomed to failure from the outset. Fulfilling this aspiration—to preserve its neutrality—was particularly difficult, because the commission was composed of trusted persons from both sides, yet they were vested with no authority. Moreover, the observer was never able to explain why the commission, which had elected twelve members, eventually grew to fifteen, three of whom represented Moscow.
With each passing year reunification became more and more difficult for two reasons. With each new arrest, with each new scandalous newspaper article, especially if they reported the VSEKhB’s readiness to cooperate with the state, new barriers to unity were erected. When the SCEKhB supporter M. I. Lazarev asked Karev at the 1966 congress whether they would pray for and help brothers in the faith who were in prison, Karev replied that, having been imprisoned himself, he had never forgotten prisoners and always prayed for them. For many, these words formed a saving bridge, but there was another, more serious obstacle.
The fact is that both councils became more and more aware of how deep their differences were on the most fundamental questions, despite both sides’ verbal assertion that there were no dogmatic differences between them. All this became clear only at the last stage, when in 1969 the final attempt to reach an agreement was made.
To be sure, the first meeting between representatives of both sides took place as early as 1966 in Moscow. Five SCEKhB representatives (Gennady Kryuchkov, S. G. Dubovoy, M. P. Kondrashov, N. G. Baturin, and N. P. Khrapov) met with nine Moscow leaders. The negotiations lasted four hours and, judging from the reformers’ stenographic record, the exchange of views was surprisingly frank. In fact, the meeting nearly ended before it began because the reformers refused to greet their opponents with a brotherly kiss. When Karev inquired as to the reason for such estrangement, Gennady Kryuchkov said that they had not yet rescinded their decision to excommunicate the VSEKhB leadership, and therefore they did not regard them as brothers in the faith.
The reformers had planned the forthcoming discussion in advance, so they simply proceeded through the main points on the agenda without entering into a dialogue with their opponents. Their sole aim was to ascertain whether the VSEKhB was prepared to remove the causes of the schism. In other words, would its leaders repudiate what they had written in 1960 and their cooperation with the state? Karev and his like-minded colleagues said that the 1960 constitution had never been adopted, yet at the same time insisted that it had been an absolutely necessary action. Karev declared that the authorities had deliberately brought about a schism among Evangelical Christians in order to sow enmity between registered and unregistered groups, and that therefore the constitution for registered congregations had been based not only on official legislation but also on secret instructions.
Karev went on to recall that the Bible speaks of open and closed doors. Throughout the history of the atheist state, there had also been moments when the doors for Christian activity suddenly swung wide open. Then, in 1929, they slammed shut completely. “Only one path was open to all of us—to prison. When Stalin died, the door began to crack open again, but this did not last long. In 1959, the Twenty-First Congress of the CPSU decided to put an end to all forms of organized religiosity. Only a tiny crack remained ajar… and it was in this situation that in 1960 we had to ‘materialize’ these closed doors into the Statute and the accompanying Instruction.” To this, Kryuchkov objected that Christ never closes the door to anyone, and that circumstances must not be allowed to get the upper hand. Karev, for his part, said that perhaps the very doors that kept closing before him prompted the Apostle Paul’s missionary journey across Europe.
The discussion then touched on the differing approaches to relations with the state. The Reformers constantly stated that the leaders who insisted on cooperation with the state were, in practice, in league with them, even though they kept insisting on total separation from it. On one occasion, Karev sent his opponents a copy of the 1918 declaration on the separation of church from state, emphasizing: “But not of the state from the church! That is what all believers must remember!” For Karev, this was an expression of political realism, but he also understood that it meant the church must submit to the state. This is how he interpreted Romans 13.
We cannot dwell on the exchange of views in greater detail. One thing was clear: from the very beginning, the parties found no common ground. Nikolai Baturin, a member of the STsEKhB, continued the meeting by reading a favorite Reformist quotation from 2 Corinthians 6: “Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.” In the Reformers’ opinion, that meeting once again confirmed the fact that “the figures of the VSEKhB have strayed far from God, and all of them justify their sins and continue to wallow in them.”
The leaders of the VSEKhB considered these negotiations, and the subsequent discussion during the 1966 congress, to be a serious step forward toward reunification. In reality, all these “summit meetings” yielded little until 1969, when a whole series of four rounds of talks was held. During the first two meetings, sober-minded representatives of both sides sought common ground, and each side drafted its own version of a Declaration, which, in their view, the opposite side was supposed to sign.
Final Round of Negotiations
The first two meetings, held on April 19 and May 17, did not include the principal leaders. Gennadiy Kryuchkov and Georgiy Vins were still in prison, so the chief representative of the Reformers was M.T. Shaptala, who led the STsEKhB in their absence. The VSEKhB representative expressed the view that the reunification talks were a logical consequence of the adoption of the revised Statute at the two latest congresses and of mutual acknowledgment of mistakes. However, for the Reformers this was only an opportunity to stir up yet another stormy debate by putting forward their four main questions.
First, they wanted to know how the VSEKhB assessed the affair of the 1960 documents: as a necessity, as a mistake, or as a sin? After addresses by several representatives of the Moscow leadership, the Reformers concluded that few in the VSEKhB, hand on heart, were ready to admit that it was a “sinful mistake”; the overwhelming majority of the members of that organization simply noted that the adoption of those documents had provoked a schism. Even that, however, was already great progress.
Second, the Reformers wanted to be certain that the Organizing Committee’s activity was no longer regarded as a “diabolical obsession.” The Moscow leadership assured them that they looked upon the supporters of the STsEKhB as beloved brothers with whom they wished to establish fellowship. But, judging by their report, the Reformers expected more, for they lamented the fact that the VSEKhB leadership still had not recognized the “initiators’” action as fulfilling God’s will for the benefit of all believers.
Third, the Reformers sought to clarify the VSEKhB’s attitude toward the imprisoned. The VSEKhB was ready to admit that the majority of the prisoners were suffering for their religious convictions, even though among them there were also simply victims of their own recklessness. All of them, of course, had zealously “worked for the Lord,” but often this was “zeal without knowledge.” The Reformers, on the other hand, rejected even the possibility of supposing that any of them had been arrested for coming into conflict with the authorities, insisting that all had been imprisoned simply because they were believers.
And finally, the last question that interested them exposed deep-rooted mutual distrust. The Reformers wanted to be assured that during their trips abroad, the VSEKhB would not present the “initiators” in a false light. The VSEKhB refused to provide a documentary report of what its representatives had said at the latest WBA conferences.
At the first meeting, the STsEKhB representative read out a letter that the leaders of the VSEKhB were supposed to sign. The essence of that document boiled down to the VSEKhB leadership acknowledging its guilt, asking forgiveness for adopting anti-evangelical documents, as well as for maintaining fellowship only with those churches that were officially registered. In fact, the STsEKhB representative asserted that only after the VSEKhB leadership had brought forth full public repentance could the Reformers discuss with them the question of holding a joint congress and reunification. The VSEKhB representative promised that a penitential letter would be written, after which it was decided to hold another meeting at a later date.
At the next round of negotiations, held on 17 May 1969, the AUCECB representatives seized the initiative, reporting on the decisions taken ten days earlier at the AUCECB plenum. It was confirmed that in their daily lives all members of the ECB churches must be guided solely by the Word of God and the constitution adopted at the 1966 congress, and the decision on union adopted at the 1963 and 1966 congresses should become the basis for reunification. The third point they insisted on was building the community on principles that correspond to the legislation on worship. Finally, they handed the reformers a statement that spoke of their repentance and asked them to sign it. However, the reformers refused, proposing instead that AUCECB sign a declaration of mutual recognition of faults and apologies to each other, rather than a repentance statement. Yet, if they had carefully reread their own report of the previous meeting, they would have seen that the AUCECB representatives had spoken of mutual repentance from the very beginning.
But far more significant was that both sides sought to win public support by publishing their own versions of the negotiation report. The “Initiators,” having described the first meeting of rivals in their journal, called on all participants to try to prevent further condemnation of the unity issue at the local level, in other words, to leave the resolution of this matter to the CCECB alone. Shortly after the second meeting, AUCECB published the necessary, from its standpoint, conditions for reunification. AUCECB acknowledged that both sides had written a host of very unpleasant things about each other, even excommunicated one another, and therefore the first step toward reunification must be for both sides to abandon mutual accusations and, to begin with, forgive each other. It was necessary to continue negotiations on reunification, and reports on them must be made public so that all members of the community could evaluate them.
When Georgy Vins was released, Alexander Karev proposed to him that negotiations be resumed, but Vins insisted on a formal invitation from the CCECB. For him this was tantamount to official recognition of the CCECB as a full-fledged participant in the talks. President Ilya G. Ivanov sent them such a letter, after which two more meetings took place, on 29 October and 4 December 1969. At all four rounds of negotiations there were only four persons present, who had the opportunity to fully grasp the depths of the problem and assess the positions of the negotiating parties, as well as the personalities representing them. At the last two meetings serious clashes occurred between the old leadership (Ivanov, Karev, and Motorin) and the reformers Kryuchkov and Vins. Moreover, both sides again exchanged versions of a repentance declaration which they never signed.
It appears that AUCECB hoped that its concessions and highly publicized repentance statement would finally lead to reunification, whereas the CCECB leaders viewed the negotiations primarily as an opportunity to receive the opponent’s surrender. In addition, they faced all sorts of problems. Judging by the reports, both sides constantly emphasized the difference in their positions, which greatly complicated the negotiations. Furthermore, both sides were under pressure of another kind. Immediately after the first two meetings, S. T. Golev was convicted. Throughout the discussion, the reformers kept in mind that some of their leaders were in prison and could not be left in distress. On the other hand, the AUCECB delegates and the state, while striving to bring the CCECB’s “stray sheep” back into the fold, were not willing to do so at the price of total capitulation. The very fact that these negotiations were held in Moscow, on AUCECB territory, created a host of problems, for the walls could have ears. No one trusted the other: there were plenty of Judases among both negotiating parties.
What Kind of Union Should It Be?
The negotiations and exchange of documents revealed yet another fundamental problem: the parties had in mind two completely different concepts of church unity. A year later, the CCECB, summarizing the negotiation materials, stated that one could not “unite with AUCECB while remaining faithful to the Lord.” Already in their letter of 22 September 1962, they said they were in favor of union in Christ, but union with “the faithful, not with sinners.” This implied that church members must take on the role of judges and assess their brothers. Furthermore, Kryuchkov declared that while each individual Christian, as a citizen, must submit to the state, nowhere in the Bible does it say that the church as a whole must also submit to the state.
AUCECB constantly emphasized that restoring unity was its top priority, but by that it meant a purely organizational unification. However, it soon became clear that restoring the union would require a unified position, an official renunciation of one’s own viewpoint. Yet AUCECB supporters believed that evangelical commandments themselves demanded unity, and therefore true evangelical Christians, in their opinion, absolutely had to work out a unified position. Moreover, once united, both unions would be twice as strong, especially in controversial situations. Another reason why AUCECB placed such high hopes on reunification with the reformers was that it coincided with the state’s desire. Thus, the contradiction lay in the approach: should it be a spiritual union or merely an organizational unification.
Behind this lay a fundamental contradiction between two concepts of the church. True, both sides agreed that the church should consist only of people who came into it voluntarily, obeying their convictions, it should be a ‘church of the faithful’, but in practice they understood this differently. For example, the reformers placed holiness above unity, asserting that they would joyfully wait until they attained full unity in God in heaven. ‘Our main goal is purity of faith and unity, but faith above all,’ they said. Members of the AUCECB, on the contrary, were prepared to recognize for church members the right to numerous falls. They believed that the acquisition of holiness is a lengthy process during which one’s whole life is gradually sanctified. Of course, this conceptual divergence is perhaps not deep enough to assert that the schism is rooted in a dogmatic clash, but it is serious enough to require every church member to define his position on this issue. In addition, the heightened attention of the ‘initiativniks’ to holiness explains why Pentecostals did not fit into their concept of the church and why they rejected ecumenism altogether.
From the very beginning, representatives of the AUCECB constantly emphasized that the main obstacle to unification was pride. The documents of the ‘initiativniks’, they claimed, are filled with arrogance, composed by people who consider themselves sinless and who concentrate all their attention on the sins of the AUCECB leadership. Perhaps this was only a tactical maneuver, by which they wanted to divert the public eye, hide their own mistakes, but be that as it may, by 1966 it became obvious that the endless accusations against the AUCECB and its supporters were not followed by a humble recognition of their own wrongdoing. But even if the initiativnik leaders had managed to prove that in all their actions they were guided by the highest motives, completely excluding any base considerations, New Testament morality demanded repentance from them. A Christian must always seek the highest good not for himself, but for another. Consequently, Karev and his like-minded people had every reason to accuse the reformers of pride, although the fact that they themselves so desperately clung to their own official status also testified that they were inclined to overestimate their own importance. The leaders of the AUCECB considered themselves irreplaceable and believed that the future of the union of evangelical Christians depended on whether they remained in their posts.
So, we have touched upon the most obvious and at the same time the most painful cause of the collapse of the union of evangelical Christians. And if the apostle Paul asserted that the great mystery that the church was to visibly demonstrate to the state lies in the fact that many people can truly become one in Christ, the Soviet evangelical Christians were forced to set a contrary example. This could not help but cause them pain. Throughout the entire history of the negotiations, each side expected greater loyalty from its opponents than it showed to them itself. It seems that neither side inherited from their predecessors the spiritual values of the 1920s, when faith was expressed in a love that did not resist evil. Granted, by that time all those pacifist non-resisters had completely sunk into oblivion. Only among Pentecostals and Mennonites could one find people who held these convictions, and even then only with respect to military service. Incidentally, this explains their agreement to join the union, in which they were destined always to remain in secondary roles. Shortly before his death, I. K. Panko again called on Pentecostals not to leave the union, since the New Testament teaches a Christian always to consider others better than himself.
Development of the Second Union — CC ECB
The AUCECB agreed to participate in official discussions with the leaders of the Organizing Committee only after the reformers announced the creation of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (CC ECB) in September 1965. As soon as this body was established, it immediately began to develop its own organizational structure, so that Soviet Evangelical Christians-Baptists now effectively had two unions.
The first leader of the reformers, A. F. Prokofiev, played a leading role in the new organization until his arrest in May 1962. Then this man, about whom relatively little is known, unexpectedly became a hindrance to the reformers. During his time in exile (1967-72), he wrote an open letter in which he completely shifted the emphasis in the interpretation of spiritual revival, and later was convicted of adultery and excommunicated from the CC ECB church. Another gifted but far more peaceable leader, Boris M. Zdorovets, also lost his influence over time. After ten years of imprisonment and exile (1962-72), he spent ten months at liberty and was again arrested and sentenced to another four years of imprisonment.
Gennady K. Kryuchkov and Georgy P. Vins (from August 1963) were very quickly recognized as the main leaders of the movement. Both were relatively well educated: Kryuchkov was a specialist in electricity, and Vins was an electrical engineer. Both were young and assertive, both were in prison for the first time. Vins’s father was an active member of the evangelical movement in Siberia and the Far East, first arrested in Moscow in 1930 at a Baptist conference. Georgy was only two years old at the time. In his youth, Georgy saw his father only during short (just a few years) intervals between arrests. The last time he was taken away was in 1937; nothing more is known of him.
Georgy began attending church back in Siberia in 1944. Soon afterward he was converted and baptized on June 5, 1945. He was only seventeen at the time. In 1946 he moved with his mother to Kiev, where he soon became a preacher in the officially registered church on Spasskaya Street. All these years he continued his education. In 1954 he graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute with a diploma as an electrical engineer. In January 1952 he married Nadezhda Ivanovna Lazaruk. Nadezhda had been baptized at the age of fifteen. By October 1961 Georgy Vins, together with other members of the local AUCECB branch, joined the reformers’ call to convene a congress. In May 1962 he attended a plenary meeting of the Organizing Committee for the first time. A month later the Kiev congregation excommunicated him. Then Vins and his like‑minded friends formed their own unregistered church, in which from October 1962 he served as an evangelist. One of the senior “Initsiativniki,” A. A. Shalashov, ordained him for ministry. Finally, in August 1963, Georgy Vins left his scientific work at the institute and devoted himself entirely to the work of the Organizing Committee. In September 1963 he was elected its secretary.
Gennady Kryuchkov’s father, Konstantin Pavlovich, was a member of the Moscow Evangelical Christian community and the choir director. In 1929 he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Gennady was three years old at the time. There were five children in the family; without their father life was extremely difficult. In 1933 Konstantin Pavlovich was expelled from Moscow. The family began to wander from place to place; although the father’s health deteriorated, he was sent to Donbass to work in a mine, then to Uzlovaya (Tula region), again as a miner. In 1955 Gennady’s mother died, leaving twelve children orphaned. Konstantin Pavlovich returned with the family to Moscow, married a second time, and became an active church member. In 1961 he and his son joined the “Initsiativniki”; he served as an elder in the Moscow community of Baptist‑reformers until his death in 1976.
Having spent his childhood and youth in such remote places as Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Astrakhan, and among the Kalmyk nomads, Gennady Kryuchkov served in the Soviet Army from 1944 to 1950 and, returning home to Uzlovaya (Tula region), in 1950 began working at the mine as an electrician. In 1951 he turned to God, was baptized in the Tula Evangelical Church, and married Lidiya Vasilievna. At the same time he began preaching. Soon he was elected choir director, then deacon, and finally became an elder in the officially unregistered church in Uzlovaya. In 1959 the state began to severely persecute unregistered communities in the Tula region, and in 1961, at a meeting with representatives from Ukraine, Kryuchkov proposed creating an initiative group. Shortly afterward, a fortunate coincidence saved him from arrest: at the very moment he was to be taken, he was at a meeting in Moscow. As a result he lost his job and was forced to go into hiding. From then on all his time belonged to the Organizing Committee.
In the early years of the reform movement, Kryuchkov and Vins remained free, but the local elders who supported them were arrested one after another and sentenced to imprisonment. Both leaders were young, easy‑going, and always managed to stay one step ahead of the authorities. During interrogations their supporters refused to testify against them. However, after the mass demonstration in Moscow in May 1966 the situation changed. Within a few months Vins and Kryuchkov found themselves behind bars along with other movement leaders. The two leaders were tried together, and they managed to defend themselves quite successfully, even though the outcome of the trial was predetermined. The three years spent in prison undermined the health of both, especially that of Vins. Kryuchkov used this time for intensive reading, delving into the study of Soviet law and philosophy in order to lead the reformers more effectively afterwards. Vins, for his part, wrote poems that were destined to touch the hearts of thousands of people around the world.
The Council
Becoming a member of the leadership of the reformers (the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists, CCECB) was far more dangerous than being elected to the AUCECB. Perhaps this explains why the CCECB was never elected with fifteen or seventeen members, as provided for by the charter adopted in November 1965. Nonetheless, eleven members were constantly elected to the council, even though a considerable portion of the council members periodically (during their time in prison) moved to the status of “Honorary” members. And those who remained free were constantly travelling: together with a small group of evangelists they journeyed all over the Soviet Union, visiting local congregations, seeking to win more supporters, revive weakening ties, and check the work of the local leadership.
The leaders of the CCECB demonstrated enviable organizational abilities. They successfully launched an excellently designed multinational church program. Yet it seems that it was not these qualities that attracted those who supported them. The majority of the CCECB members, especially the eldest among them, were elected because of their spiritual authority. Initially the leading figure on the council was A. A. Shalashov, who died in 1963 at the age of seventy‑three.
He was born in 1890, turned to God in 1914, and immediately became an evangelist in the Evangelical Church of Volga‑Kama. In total he spent nineteen years in prison suffering for his faith, and until his death he was an elder of the unregistered church in Chelyabinsk. He was one of those through whose efforts the Evangelical Christian‑Baptist movement managed to survive in the 1950s.
Ivan Yakovlevich Antonov was a little younger. He was born in the Tver region into an Orthodox family in 1919. In 1938, Antonov enrolled in a medical school in Moscow, but the war that began three years later interrupted his studies. In the summer of 1941, a Bible fell into his hands. He read it for a month and then removed all the icons from his home. In the army, he developed a drinking habit, but in June 1944 he met a young woman whose personal testimony finally turned him to God. Soon he managed, in his turn, to convert several more soldiers to the faith. For this, in November 1944 a military tribunal sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment, which he served in camps in the Far North. Immediately after his release in August 1954, he was baptized, and in December 1955 he married Lina Korolkova, who had been released from prison and rehabilitated in June of that same year (in 1950 she had been sentenced to twenty-five years of deprivation of freedom). The couple moved to Kirovograd (in Ukraine) and became members of one of the churches belonging to the AUCECB, where Antonov served as the presbyter’s secretary. However, after speaking out against state interference in church affairs and the compiling of lists of those being baptized, he lost his position as secretary and began secretly baptizing young people himself. Despite this conflict, in 1960 the congregation elected him presbyter. From 1962 to 1965 he devoted all his time to work in the Organizing Committee.
Dmitry Vasilievich Minyakov (born 1922) went through an even harsher school of life. He first encountered believing Christians in 1944, when he ended up behind bars. He himself turned to God in 1949 while in a camp, and was baptized there: the prisoners created their own congregation. When the presbyter of that congregation was transferred to another camp in 1950, the believers elected Minyakov as presbyter, and one of the prisoners—a deported presbyter—performed the ordination! Minyakov was released in 1952 and came to the town of Mariinsk (Kemerovo region), where he became the local presbyter. In 1958 he moved with his family (he had married in 1953) to Barnaul (in Siberia) and again became an active preacher. In 1960 the members of the local congregation attempted to exclude the presbyter Ya. F. Sablin from the church for his close cooperation with the authorities, but Sablin appealed to his patrons and the church was closed. Minyakov then became the presbyter of an unregistered congregation that met in homes. When Gennady Kryuchkov visited the congregation in the autumn of 1961, Minyakov was elected their representative to the Organizing Committee. But after becoming involved in the dramatic events that unfolded soon afterward in Barnaul, he again ended up in prison, where he remained from 1962 to 1965 and from 1967 to 1970.
Another gifted leader, Korniliy Korneevich Kreker (Kroker), was born in 1920 into a Mennonite family in the Altai. He was raised a Christian (his father had been arrested for his faith in 1938 and never returned from the camp), but he consciously turned to God only in 1943 in Osinniki (Kemerovo region), after having graduated from a pedagogical institute and arrived there to work as a teacher in the labor army in 1942. In 1944 he was baptized in a local evangelical church and almost immediately was summoned for a conversation by official bodies, which, as always, expressed surprise that an educated person could become religious. Nevertheless, Kreker remained a member of the congregation, which, when the authorities began to oppress it, split into groups. In 1958 he was ordained as a presbyter, served five years (1962–67) of exile in the taiga, and after that was elected by the “initiative-takers” to the CCECB. Having served his sentence (1968–71), he became a full member of the CCECB.
Another major leader was the young Iosif D. Bondarenko (though he did not remain on the council for long), who became a veritable Russian Billy Graham (in those periods when he was free). Bondarenko was born in 1947. He was first arrested in Odessa in 1962 and sentenced to three years of deprivation of freedom. After a short respite he received a new three-year term (1966–69), which he served in a strict-regime camp. Upon his release, he got married. The wedding was grandiose: 2,000 people attended the ceremony. This, naturally, could not please the authorities—the wedding too closely resembled a congress or demonstration of evangelical Christians—and as a result the newlywed had to go into hiding for several years until finally, in May 1978, he was arrested in Riga, where he had led the local church for three years. After a successful evangelistic campaign in the spring of 1978, he again ended up behind bars for three years. By that time he had four children and a heart condition that he had developed after his second arrest.
Some time later, the responsibility placed on the council was shared with newly formed religious associations. Properly speaking, the originally created structure could not develop successfully because it had no official status. By 1976 the internal contradiction led to a rupture between those who advocated a federative structure and greater powers for regional unions. These regional unions, in turn, were to be created on the initiative of believers locally.
We have too little data to judge how many regional unions existed by that time, but we know that in the mid-sixties such unions existed in the Caucasus, Siberia, Northern Kazakhstan, the Baltic region, Moldavia, Leningrad Oblast, and one or even several in Ukraine. The Baltic union represented eighteen congregations, which elected a presbytery council of seven members, whose meetings were held monthly. The Siberian regional union (including Northern Kazakhstan) comprised nine oblasts, in each of which the senior presbyter was elected by representatives of the local churches. The Siberian union itself met twice a year, and these meetings were usually attended by two or three members of the SCEKhB. These meetings were held secretly, lasted from one to three days (with almost no break for sleep), and were attended by forty-five to sixty people. After a general sermon, representatives of local congregations reported on their literature needs, how many believers had been arrested and convicted, the financial difficulties of their members, and matters concerning church life in general, while representatives of the SCEKhB gave an account of their work.
However, all this church work was carried out secretly, because there was a constant danger from the authorities. Therefore, participants in this program at all levels recognized the need for a clear organization of their work, and all financial transactions had to be recorded and appear in reports. At the regional level, churches’ activities were organized quite satisfactorily: one person oversaw youth work, another organized transportation, there were those responsible for communications, choral singing, evangelism, and finances. The SCEKhB charter stated that the council should have an evangelism department and a publishing department, as well as other subdivisions whose functions were not separately specified. Other provisions of the charter regulated a wide variety of activities. And the SCEKhB tried, as far as possible, to follow the letter of the charter. But its main problem was the difficulties associated with holding all-union congresses and reaching consensus. A year after the creation of the SCEKhB, a most important event occurred which, according to Gennady Kryuchkov, although not organized by the council, was rooted in the soil it had loosened.
The May Demonstration
On May 16, 1966, people who happened to be near the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow witnessed a mass demonstration not authorized by the authorities. Congregations of Evangelical Christian-Baptists from 130 cities sent their representatives to Moscow to deliver a petition to General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev. Five hundred delegates elected a delegation, but it never succeeded in meeting with Brezhnev. However, they did deliver the petition. It contained requests for permission to hold a congress, for recognition of the SCEKhB, for an end to persecution of believers and state interference in internal church affairs, and for the realization of the right to religious education. At first, the authorities did not react at all to this “demarche,” but a day later a demonstration took place in which 600 people participated, together with members of the Moscow congregation who had joined them. In the end, army, militia, and KGB forces dispersed the demonstration, beat the participants, shoved them into buses, and took them to prison. True, most of them were released the next day; others were given fifteen-day sentences. A week later, a similar demonstration took place in Kiev. Georgi Vins and Mikhail I. Khorev, who were authorized by the SCEKhB to inquire about the further fate of the believers, went to the Reception Office of the CPSU Central Committee. They were told to come back in an hour and a half; when they returned to the Reception Office, they were immediately shoved into a “Black Maria” and sent to prison.
These mass demonstrations were a public expression of protest against a new wave of anti-religious persecution that had begun that winter. Soon the West learned of this, although the press was not admitted to the trial in this case, just as they were not allowed at the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. In addition to most of the demonstration participants, who received fifteen-day sentences for hooliganism, the authorities tracked down all the local leaders of the Baptist reformists. Thirty-one people were arrested. Arrests continued already in May and throughout the summer; another 128 people were put behind bars, and the total number of those arrested in this case reached 202. Arrests continued into the following year, until August 1968. In all, 240 people ended up in prison.
The Council of Prisoners’ Relatives
But even if there were weak points in the work of the SCEKhB, they were in no way connected with the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives (SRZ). The first meeting of this remarkable organization took place in February 1964. In all likelihood, the May demonstration was organized not without its participation. We know nothing of the organization’s first leaders, but after the arrest of Georgi Vins, his mother Lydia became the number one figure in the SRZ. Lydia Vins had to endure not only the tragedy of losing her husband, who died in prison, not only the hardships of raising a son alone; her brother and sister‑in‑law also fell under the wheel of Stalinist repressions. Now she displayed indomitable courage, organizational talent, and an ability to harness world public opinion. Under her leadership, letters of protest began to be sent to the governments of many countries and to major religious organizations. These letters, modeled on a document adopted at the all‑union congress of prisoners’ relatives, provided a historical overview and, to illustrate the charges against the authorities, offered testimonies of those who had suffered from persecution. Since 1961, 524 people alone had ended up behind bars (44 of them women), while another 391 people had served 15‑day sentences, and a total of 8,648 people, including children, had been subjected to various types of penalties. Church members paid a total of 94,300 rubles in fines. Other social letters included a bibliography of propaganda articles published in the central, regional, and district press, in which, in violation of the law, the feelings of believers were insulted and believers were turned by the authors into fanatics, barbarians, pigs, drugged sectarians, hypocrites, and obscurantists.
In 1965–1970 the SRZ collected data on prisoners, helped send out various appeals, dispatched countless telegrams and letters to different recipients, and addressed the country’s leadership on behalf of believers. Finally, in 1969 the council succeeded in holding its first all‑union congress, which played a major role in organizing and systematizing the information obtained. The second congress took place a year later, on 12–13 December 1970, and, like the first, was held in secret from the authorities. By that time all the council’s leaders were either in prison or living underground, hiding from persecution. But what shook the members of the organization most was the arrest of Lydia Vins on 1 December 1969. No appeals to the authorities helped, and Lydia Vins, despite her advanced age and weak heart, had to spend three years behind bars.
After the arrest of Lydia Vins, the leadership of the SRZ was assumed by a younger woman—Galina Rytikova. Her husband Peter was an evangelical Christian and a candidate for membership in the SCEKhB. When he went to prison, she had to shoulder the care not only of herself but also of their six children. Rytikova remained the head of the organization for a long time, and under her the SRZ began publishing its own Bulletin.
This was a periodical that the organizers tried to issue quarterly. From the very beginning the reformers had published their own magazine “Vestnik Spaseniya” (Herald of Salvation), but it came out extremely irregularly, with long gaps, and, moreover, the fact that its main authors and inspirers were in prison could not fail to affect it. Beginning in 1965, the SCEKhB published its own newspaper “Bratsky Listok” (Brotherly Leaflet), but it appeared only once every two months. At first the Bulletin managed to be published fairly regularly, but by 1974 it too was appearing no more often than once every two months.
In its early years the Bulletin contained from twenty‑five to eighty pages of informational material, the text initially being handwritten and the original then duplicated on a hectograph. In addition, each issue was repeatedly copied by hand by distributors. Later the majority of materials began to be typed, but duplication still posed a serious problem. Almost all issues of the Bulletin (No. 72 appeared at the end of 1979) were successfully sent to the West. They became an invaluable and almost the only source of information on the history of the movement. The Bulletin published prisoners’ letters, copies of appeals to the authorities, biographical data, and, at regular intervals, lists of prisoners at a given moment.
Thus, with the help of the Bulletin, the SRZ became the mouthpiece of the SCEKhB, and it could even allow itself to speak in a sharper tone. True, a serious problem for the reformers was the fact that the SRZ was dominated by women, whereas the reformist Baptists were even more zealous proponents of subordination than the members of the VSEKhB and felt extremely uncomfortable realizing that women were de facto leaders of their movement.
Congress in Tula
So, the reunification negotiations conducted in 1969 produced no results, yet the optimistic mood of their participants persisted and even intensified after many of them were released from prison. Official representatives of the SCEKhB appealed to the authorities of Tula with a request to allow them to hold a congress in that city and, to their greatest surprise, received consent. Three days later in December the congress was opened. Perhaps all this happened because of some oversight by the Tula city council, or perhaps the Moscow leadership pinned its hopes on it as a final attempt to unite the two unions, since the last round of negotiations took place on 4 December. It is also possible that the state’s desire to obtain more detailed information about the activities of the “initiativniki” played a role. Be that as it may, soon after receiving official permission to hold the congress, the SCEKhB virtually went underground.
So, one hundred and twenty representatives from Central Russia, the Urals, Siberia, the North Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldavia, Belorussia, the Baltic states, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Azerbaijan and Georgia gathered in Tula, in the prayer house of the unregistered evangelical community, which at this meeting was represented by N. I. Vladykin. Kryuchkov opened the congress with a general prayer. The agenda was not too large, since it was meant for only one day. The session lasted from 10 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. The report of the SCEKhB was divided into two parts. Presbyter from Khartsyzsk (Donetsk region) M. T. Shaptala was elected temporary head of the organization while its main leaders are in prison. He informed those assembled that since 1966 there had been only one meeting with representatives of the Council for Religious Affairs, which was immediately reported in the “Brotherly Leaflet.” In April and May 1969, two meetings took place with representatives of the AUCECB. Moreover, Shaptala noted that members of their communities had been informed about the shortcomings in the work of some local presbyters.
Then Gennady Kryuchkov, whom those gathered elected chairman, reported on the work done over the short period from May to December 1969. Practically, this was a report on the completed negotiations about reunification with the AUCECB. The congress unanimously resolved to decline the invitation to send their representatives to the congress of the SCEKhB, since they were invited only as guests.
The third agenda item was relations with the AUCECB, but here, after the decision to decline the invitation to the congress, there was practically nothing to discuss. The declaration adopted by the SCEKhB not only accused the Moscow leadership of the AUCECB of remaining faithful to past errors and delusions, but also warned local communities of the danger, calling on them to sever all ties with the AUCECB. Moreover, in Tula an attempt was made to clear up a misunderstanding that had given the uninitiated the impression that the SCEKhB was fundamentally opposed to the official registration of communities.
Representatives of six officially registered communities were present at the congress. An appeal to all churches was adopted, in which all communities were urged to register, using the new form of declaration developed by the SCEKhB leadership. A year later, the SCEKhB adopted a policy document stating that almost all communities supporting the SCEKhB had submitted registration requests to official bodies, and the council itself had submitted to the authorities a report on that meeting and a list of the council members elected there. “After this, would there be even a single lawyer who would call the activities of the communities belonging to the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists illegal?” they asked. Moreover, the document stated that recently the SCEKhB had been paying far less attention to the persecution of believers by the authorities, even though the persecution continues, and generally had been taking a variety of steps aimed at settling relations with the state, even informing the authorities of the time and place of believers’ meetings.
The general mood of hope for improvement was reflected in the election results. All members of the council, except S. Kh. Tsurkan and A. S. Goncharov, who withdrew their candidacies due to advanced age and health, were re-elected for a new term. But three council members (I. Ya. Antonov, D. V. Minyakov and S. T. Golev) were still in prison, so Gennady Kryuchkov proposed electing to the council TWO temporary members, elected shortly before. The congress approved the candidacies of M. T. Shaptala and P. V. Rumachik. In its optimistic mood, the congress even sent a letter to Kosygin, in which the names of the elected members of the Council (except for the three who were in prison) were reported and it said:
“In view of the fact that these persons are legally elected representatives of our organization, we request that the said figures of the SCEKhB be regarded as having the legal right to be released from work in the national economy. We ask you to give corresponding instructions to lower-level bodies, so that they do not hinder these persons in the performance of the functions assigned to them.”
Stressing that this concerns exclusively the exercise of their civil rights, the authors of the letter underscored:
“The activities of the SCEKhB are not accompanied by violation of public order or infringement of the rights of citizens and have nothing in common with socio-political and the like issues. They concern exclusively internal church problems.”
The authors of the letter also asked that similar rights be granted to evangelists.
Kosygin did not respond to it personally. However, soon the authorities’ answer became quite evident. Kryuchkov and Vins were sentenced to forced labor at national economy enterprises, and Vins’s salary was stipulated in the court ruling. A few days after the congress, M. I. Khorev was arrested, who later, at a closed trial, was sentenced to three years in prison. Many other members of the SCEKhB followed. By the end of the year, Kryuchkov and Vins went underground. Vins managed to successfully evade the authorities until March 1974. And Kryuchkov never got caught. His portrait was published in a special bulletin together with a description of other especially dangerous wanted criminals. In 1974, his wife discovered listening devices in her apartment, and Kryuchkov had to move.
Main Activities
Despite constant harassment by the authorities that began in 1969, the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (SCTsEKhB) managed to launch a broad program of activities. The council members tried to meet regularly once a year, although sometimes these gatherings had to be interrupted several times as they moved from one house to another, to a safer location. In 1972, when all council members except P. G. Rumachik were at liberty, a decision was made to increase the number of members. In May 1976, at an illegal congress, Gennadiy Kryuchkov delivered a report that was recorded on tape. At a repeat meeting in December, the de facto general secretary I. Ya. Antonov gave a report (Vins had been arrested again).
One thing the SCTsEKhB representatives clearly failed at: they vainly demanded a revision of religious legislation and sought state guarantees for freedom of conscience, promised by Lenin as early as 1918. Beginning on April 14, 1965, the council repeatedly submitted detailed proposals on this issue to the authorities. These documents were sent to the commission preparing the draft of a new constitution. Even more proposals poured in after the draft of the “Brezhnev” constitution was published in the spring of 1977. However, all of this came to nothing.
More successful was the work of evangelism. The SCTsEKhB specifically appointed several evangelists, supported them financially, and organized special trips for them across the country. Gerhard Hamm, the leader of the Baltic reformers, was one of these evangelists. He had to work illegally, hiding from the authorities. A believer who owned a car would drive him to a train station in another city to throw the police off his trail, who were already waiting for him at the place where he was meeting with a congregation. When he arrived at a new location and found that, in addition to believers, other people were there to meet him, he traveled on to the next station, where someone from the congregation would find him and take him to the meeting. The place where the meeting with the evangelist was to be held was kept in the strictest secrecy; it was determined just a few hours before his arrival, so that by the time the authorities learned about it, Gerhard Hamm was already home. Young Peter Peters worked especially successfully with young people and often attended youth conferences held twice a year. The authorities knew that on the May and November holidays, the young reformer Baptists would always gather somewhere “in the forest.” They usually tried to disrupt these meetings. Once, for this purpose, they “blockaded” an entire city in Kazakhstan, but the assembled young people refused to let the representatives of the authorities into the house when they came to arrest their leaders, and in the evening, under cover of darkness, they led them to a safe place. At these youth gatherings, dozens of young people, as a rule, turned to God.
Another area of SCTsEKhB activity pleased the authorities even less. One researcher noted that all the court cases against the “Initsiativniki” in 1966 (when the wave of arrests peaked) were in one way or another connected with the upbringing of children. Samizdat supplied believers with a wide variety of literature needed for the religious education of children. One rather sad case is known, when two young women, Maria Braun and Elena Chernetskaya, decided to continue their work in a Sunday school despite ever-increasing pressure from the authorities. Maria declared that if necessary, they would start classes at five o’clock in the morning. Both girls were arrested and sentenced to five years of imprisonment. After three years in the terrible conditions of a women’s prison, the effects took their toll. Maria Braun announced that she was renouncing her faith, and moreover, she became an active propagandist of atheism, for which she received all kinds of encouragement.
Less visible was financial assistance to prisoners’ families. Like the families of the unemployed, they received no state assistance, and the absence of a breadwinner put them in the most difficult circumstances. Often a person was sentenced not only to prison but also to the confiscation of all his movable property. In such cases, the Council of Relatives of Prisoners (SRZ) was the only support for the destitute, and the funds needed for this kind of help came mainly from abroad.
During one of her visits to Germany, Lydia Vins recalled how dramatically the situation had changed compared to the 1930s, when her husband perished somewhere in Stalin’s camps. Back then, the authorities confiscated their house, poverty was all around, and as relatives of a prisoner they did not even receive ration cards. But she placed all her trust in Christ, for He had promised not to leave the orphans. And then, from time to time in the evenings, there began to be a knock at the window, and food appeared on the window sill. Who was this unseen benefactor? It turned out to be the deputy director of the state bank. As it turned out, he helped them because his own wife was also a believer.
Now that the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives had been formed, information about prisoners and their families quickly became known to all members of the church. Although Soviet law prohibited the church from providing direct assistance to the prisoners themselves, the CCECB (Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists) informed the government that it would support their relatives. As Lydia Vins acknowledged, this was quite a bold promise, yet it was kept. The Council of Prisoners’ Relatives’ primary task was to ensure that no one in a family that had lost its breadwinner (whether imprisoned or in hiding from the authorities) went hungry. They also saw to it that all schoolchildren had school uniforms. Then they made sure every family member had something to sleep on and that their living space was adequately heated. When financial help from the West began to arrive, it finally became possible to provide the prisoners’ families with normal living conditions, no worse than those of other Soviet citizens. But a serious problem remained: helping people coming out of prison find work, because most enterprise managers were afraid to have anything to do with them, fearing they would anger their superiors.
Without doubt, however, the authorities were most irritated by another activity of the CCECB that they simply could not stop. In 1971, the CCECB’s magazine Bratsky Listok (Fraternal Leaflet) reported that since 1966 they had repeatedly applied to various authorities for permission to print 10,000 Bibles, 5,000 collections of spiritual hymns, and other literature at a state printing house, and had invariably been refused. The Council then began to develop its own publishing programme. The publishing house was named “Khristianin” (The Christian). From 1971 onwards, the bulk of Bratsky Listok was printed on its presses, and it soon became clear that one of the printing machines could easily print text on both sides of a sheet of paper. This was truly a landmark achievement, for the reformers not only had to conceal their activity by every possible means, but also had to build the printing presses themselves — in the Soviet Union all copying and duplicating equipment had to be registered, and the supply of paper was carefully monitored.
The Khristianin publishing house was semi‑independent. It was linked more to the CCECB than to the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives, but it also fulfilled orders from other evangelical organisations. The authorities soon noticed that no sooner had they confiscated one printing press than the work continued on others. In 1974, for example, after a lengthy and thorough search they managed to find a printing machine in Latvia. Seven people who operated it were arrested. Yet two days after their arrest, Khristianin had already printed photographs of those arrested and the whole story of their arrest. In 1977 another printing press was discovered, but the publishing work went on.
Khristianin’s viability was due not only to an unprecedented hunger for religious literature; it also bore witness to the fraternal mutual support of Christians under the most difficult conditions. The printing press was driven by a small motor that did not require too much electricity, so that large electricity bills would not lead the authorities to an underground print shop. As a rule, these were hand‑operated presses: the initial inertia was given to the machine by hand, and then the motor kept it going. Such machines were built using two rollers from a washing machine, bicycle pedals and chain, and other improvised materials. A press of this kind could be dismantled and stored in five small suitcases and, without attracting attention, quietly carried from place to place. The only thing was that in order to use it, believers all over the country stripped bark from trees, burned rubber tyres, and collected metal shavings, so that by mixing all the necessary ingredients they could produce printer’s ink. There were no typesetters in these print shops, but some workers who lived quite literally underground handled this job splendidly, picking a suitable typeface from various publications and re‑photographing it. Because one person could not buy more than one ream of paper without being noticed, hundreds of people were involved in buying and transporting paper.
It is difficult to find reliable statistics showing the true scale of Khristianin’s activity. The publishing house produced several books, including The Pilgrim’s Progress, the New Testament, hymnbooks, and several works by Charles Spurgeon. The first print run of the Gospel of John came off the press in 1968; each local church received fifteen copies. And in the spring of 1978, at last, the first edition of the Bible was published.
The publishing work was organised by Georgiy Vins (until his arrest in 1974) and Gennady Kryuchkov. Many other prominent figures in the movement devoted their lives to publishing, though as a rule their names became known only after their arrest. Local congregations of the AUCECB (All‑Union Council of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists) secretly supported this activity and took part in distributing the literature produced by Khristianin — but all this was done in secrecy and silence.
The Gloomy Seventies
After 1969, the AUCECB finally abandoned all attempts at formal reunification, shifting its attention to local congregations and trying to win them over from the “initiative‑takers.” They also stepped up efforts to draw unregistered congregations to their side; consequently, during the 1970s more and more local churches obtained official registration year by year.
It became evident that state policy was also changing. After 1966, many congregations discovered that official bodies were once again carrying out registration. By 1969, the authorities themselves began offering registration to local churches, although only a short time before they had vainly demanded it. Their purpose was clear, which is why the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (CCECB) tirelessly warned believers of the danger. It realized that the authorities were not without reason eager to give as many congregations as possible the chance to register. This opened up the prospect of creating a new, legal, and law‑abiding Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists, thereby depriving the already existing CCECB of support. It seems, though, that the authorities overestimated their capabilities here; registration was taken mainly by Pentecostal and Mennonite congregations.
In the 1970s, all reports on the situation in Evangelical Christian‑Baptist churches testified to an intensification of contradictions. Congregations belonging to the All‑Union Council of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists (AUCECB) reported greater freedom, but the information coming from the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives sounded discouraging. Despite the demands of world public opinion, Georgi Vins was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and five years’ exile. Toward the end of his prison term it was decided to send him to America in exchange for a Soviet spy caught by the Americans, thereby depriving him of the possibility of influencing the church. Kryuchkov and other leaders of the movement were hunted like criminals.
Believing mothers had every reason to fear that the authorities might deprive them of their parental rights and forcibly take away their children in order to raise them as true “builders of communism.” For the CCECB, all these contradictions were evidence that the AUCECB leadership was still helping the state to destroy the church. The CCECB itself no longer sought opportunities for reunification, for one cannot unite light with darkness. But its local supporters were beginning to grow weary of the constant harassment that members of congregations supporting the CCECB were doomed to endure; moreover, they did not like how the union’s leaders behaved.
Questions That Remained Unanswered
After 1969, it became clear that the schism could no longer be eliminated. The conditions in which the supporters of the CCECB found themselves were so severe that the very continued existence of this organization became questionable. Under the “wing” of the AUCECB returned not only the “moderates” and those who had grown tired of difficulties from local churches in Siberia, the North Caucasus, and the Baltic region, but many leaders of the movement, sensing that the state would pose too many obstacles, emigrated to West Germany. Each of them, as he left, prepared a replacement and promised without fail to help his brothers in faith from abroad, but this was already “not the same thing” – the decline in the quality of leadership began to affect the organization.
Were the appeals of the reform Baptists realistic? Could the authorities ever bring themselves to change the law so that citizens would be granted freedom of religion in the classical liberal sense of that concept? How likely was it that the CCECB would attain legal status?
But there were other, more serious questions. Did the reformers have grounds to expect broad support from brothers in Christ for their uncompromising stance, which stemmed from the conviction that the church must be completely separate from the state? If the “Initsiativniki” had been able to carry out their program in full, how many supporters would they have found in North America? Or did they know from the very beginning that they would be stopped halfway?
Did the AUCECB genuinely seek to overcome the split? Could their slogans calling for unity – “The main thing is unity, then freedom, but behind all this there must be love” – ever become anything more than an attempt to preserve a disintegrating unity? Did this provide a basis for going on the offensive, or was this assertive stance due to the fact that at some point those holding a specific Baptist viewpoint had come to dominate?
Perhaps continued Baptist discussion of the problem of unity no longer made any sense, at least for ordinary believers in the hinterland; for them it was far more important to resolve questions that were more pressing for a Christian.
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