Boris Perchatkin

Pentecostal movement: history of development in Soviet times

January 25, 2014 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

The Pentecostal Movement: A History of its Development in the Soviet Era

This religious movement in its present form has existed in Russia since the early 20th century. A major role in the spread of Pentecostalism was played by the outstanding preacher Ivan Voronaev, an American of Russian descent, who arrived from the United States in Odessa in 1921 and began his ministry there. In the post-revolutionary years, when they were not persecuted as “sectarians,” Pentecostal teachings spread rapidly. By 1928 there were 200,000 Pentecostals in the USSR. [1] They profess salvation not only by faith but also by works, seeing the chief virtue of a Christian in honest labor and family life. The name “Pentecostals” is explained by their special attention to the event that, according to biblical history, occurred on the fiftieth day after Christ’s resurrection: on that day the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and they spoke in languages they did not know. This was understood as a sign that they were to preach Christianity to other nations.

The Pentecostal doctrine’s emphasis on preaching became the reason for constant persecution against them. In 1929 the Soviet authorities’ policy toward religion changed. Until 1941, Pentecostals were sentenced en masse to 20–25 years in camps. Executions were not uncommon. Some long-term prisoners were released from camp after Stalin’s death, but some served their full terms. Many never returned from the camps—they perished there, among them Ivan Voronaev. He fell behind a column of prisoners on the way back to camp from work due to extreme fatigue. The guards set guard dogs on him. He was mauled so badly that he died a few hours later. Only years after his death was Voronaev’s wife, with two children, able to return to the United States. [2]

Fleeing persecution, Pentecostal communities often moved from place to place. Today they exist both in the far west of the USSR—in the Baltic republics—and in the Far East—in Nakhodka and Vladivostok—as well as in many places along the path of Pentecostal expansion eastward and westward: in Rovno, Zhitomir, and Kaluga regions, in Ukraine, in Stavropol and Krasnodar krais, in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Siberia, and Central Asia.

After another shift in state policy toward religion, in 1945 Pentecostals were offered the opportunity to register with the Council for Religious Affairs and Cults. Registered Pentecostal communities were formally attached to the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB); they were not allowed to create their own religious center. Unlike Baptist communities, which the authorities registered selectively, all Pentecostal communities were offered registration and even pressured to accept it. However, the conditions of registration place vital aspects of religious life under prohibition: the upbringing of children, youth and women’s meetings, preaching, missionary, and charitable activities, and certain religious rites. For this reason, about half of Pentecostals refused to register. [3] According to Pentecostal Vasily Patrushev,

“… here there is no choice: either we become criminals before the state, refusing to submit to the requirements of the Registration Statute while keeping all the commandments of Christ, or we become criminals before God by submitting to the demands of the state.” [4]

The incompatibility of Pentecostal religious principles with official Soviet ones shapes their lives literally from childhood. Already in school, children learn first-hand the unjust hostility of those around them toward “sectarians.” Receiving a religious upbringing, children refuse to become Little Octobrists, Pioneers, and later Komsomol members. This brings persecution upon them: lowered grades, public condemnations at school meetings, beatings by other children—sometimes provoked by teachers. Teachers interrogate children about their home environment, trying to get them to accuse their parents of forcing them to perform religious rites, attend prayer meetings, etc. If children make such admissions, a criminal case may be opened against the parents. They may be stripped of parental rights and the children taken to an orphanage, where they are intensively “re-educated.”

Such trials against Pentecostals (as well as against Baptists, Adventists, and others) are known.

The lesson of injustice learned in childhood against them as “sectarians” is remembered for a lifetime, all the more so because later life teaches similar lessons.

A severe trial for young Pentecostal men is compulsory military service. Pentecostal doctrine forbids taking an oath, bearing arms, and killing people. Refusal to take the oath carries a camp term of up to 5 years. Yet such refusals are not uncommon, not only for religious reasons but again because of the unbearably oppressive atmosphere in the army, far from their fellow believers. Brutal beatings of young Pentecostal soldiers, sometimes to the point of maiming, are not rare. [5] The “Chronicle” reports that in Rovno region in May 1977, 160 Pentecostal conscripts refused to serve in any military units other than construction or medical units. [6]

Getting an education is an almost insoluble problem for young Pentecostals. Because of the difficult situation at school, most of them limit themselves to the 8-year compulsory schooling in the USSR. If any do complete the 10-year course, they receive a character reference that closes the path to higher education. “Holds active anti-Soviet views,” is the standard phrase in school references for such children. Thus, people with higher education are quite rare among Pentecostals, and even they, as a rule, do not get positions corresponding to their qualifications but are engaged in manual labor. Pentecostals are not promoted at work, no matter how well they perform.

“A foreman or an engineer is first and foremost an educator,” the head of Correctional Labor Colony No. 27 of Primorsky Krai, Bogdanovich, explained to Pentecostal Yevgeny Brisenden. “We don’t need educators who hold religious convictions, Pentecostal educators.” [7]

Pentecostals usually hold the lowest-paid and least enviable positions, for which there is great demand — construction workers, watchmen, cleaners, nurses’ aides, etc. — and yet they are frequently dismissed at the demand of party officials who safeguard the “ideological uniformity” of the collective.

Unregistered congregations are constantly subjected to persecution, most often fines, for prayer meetings. Private homes where Pentecostals gather for common prayer may be confiscated or even destroyed. In the winter of 1971 in Chernogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, the authorities dispersed the worshippers with a fire hose and then bulldozed the house. The Chronicle No. 37 carried a report about the breakup of a Pentecostal wedding, and the Chronicle No. 49 about the breakup of a funeral. [8]

Nowadays, arrest does not threaten every Pentecostal simply for belonging to this church, as it did from 1929 to 1945, yet imprisonment is not a rare measure against leaders of communities and Pentecostal presbyters. At trials they are most often charged under the article on religious propaganda, and sometimes under Articles 190 or 70, i.e., for “slander of the Soviet system” and “anti-Soviet propaganda”. Occasionally, Pentecostal ministers are accused of deranging believers’ minds through fanatical rites and even of murder for the purpose of sacrifice. In 1960, Pentecostal presbyter Ivan Fedotov was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for allegedly inducing a woman from his congregation to kill her daughter. Such trials are accompanied by unbridled slander in the press. Because of the Soviet people’s ignorance about religion and the deep-rooted prejudice against “sectarians,” even among believers—the majority being Orthodox—a fertile ground exists for the success of the most incredible calumnies. Antireligious propaganda of this sort creates an atmosphere of general wariness, and sometimes even hatred, around “sectarians.” The wife of Pentecostal Bishop Nikolai Gorety relates that in the children’s hospital where she worked as a cleaner, a doctor told her:

— We really need a kitchen worker, but I can’t transfer you there, because it’s known that you are a sectarian, and people will be afraid that you might poison the children’s food.

This was said to a woman who bore 14 children and raised them under incredibly difficult conditions. [9]

In November 1980 in Yaroslavl, a young woman named Zolotova and her one-year-old son died from a gas stove explosion. Representatives of the authorities, knowing that the Zolotovs were Pentecostals, developed two versions: Zolotova, out of religious fanaticism, killed her son and then herself; or Zolotov killed both of them—again out of fanaticism. On the night after this tragedy, militiamen burst into the home of the victim’s parents and forcibly took away the two surviving children. They were held at the police station until morning for fear that they too would be killed. [10]

An even more widespread version is that “sectarians” merely use religiosity to cover their selfish designs and “serve the West” for dollars, that among them lurk “American spies,” etc. The “dollar” version is readily absorbed by those around them, because it explains in understandable terms an alien way of life: Pentecostals, with their Protestant ethic that elevates industriousness and conscientiousness to the rank of the highest virtues, who are also total abstainers, hold together in a community founded on brotherly mutual aid, and despite huge families (often 10 or more children) live better than their neighbors. And in films they are shown praying on a deserted shore (where they withdraw in hopes of avoiding the interference of the authorities) and explained: they are waiting for the ark with American dollars.

In the town of Maloyaroslavets, Pentecostal Bishop I. Fedotov several times received from abroad packages of clothing—gifts to his congregation from fellow believers. A local newspaper ran an article about it with the headline “The Fedotovs Are Paid for Everything”:

“The packages are nothing other than an honorarium for a lampoon against one’s own homeland sent abroad, and partly also an advance that must be worked off with new slander against our reality.” [11]

Newspapers often accuse “sectarians” of walling off their young people from life, forbidding them to go to the cinema, to dances, etc. In reality, Pentecostal youth are doomed to isolation not by religious prohibition but by the prejudices of those around them: the appearance of young Pentecostals in public places often leads to their harassment, even beatings. The incitement against Pentecostals aims to neutralize their preaching activity.

Despite the severe trials awaiting anyone who becomes a “sectarian,” Pentecostal communities (like those of Baptists and other Protestants) keep growing—not only through children from Pentecostal families, who with rare exceptions all remain adherents of this teaching, but also through new converts. Catholic figures in Lithuania, in a survey report on religious life in the USSR, point to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, and Pentecostals as the most successful preachers, who

“… have found methods suitable for the Soviet Union”, “have created a steadfast organization” and have cultivated in themselves “an apostolic spirit, undeterred by suffering or death”. [12]

Amid a hostile mass of the population, Pentecostals, in their preaching fervor, constantly find people longing for a spiritual, righteous life, for human compassion, and draw them into their communities, where the moral climate stands in stark contrast to the Soviet way of life with its rampant drunkenness, disunity, and alienation.

Their differing moral standards from those generally accepted, the prejudice of others, and constant persecution have developed among Pentecostals a remarkable solidarity. They call each other brothers and sisters not just as a tradition; they feel like one big family in a hostile world, and truly help one another like siblings. Their entire life is built on mutual aid — both within a congregation and between congregations. These bonds replace all others for Pentecostals, including national ones. It is no coincidence, for example, that the numerous Protestant communities in Ukraine have no contact with participants in the national movement: national emotions are alien to Protestants, they are deaf to national problems. For them, a person of any nationality who accepts their faith becomes a brother.

Official statistics indirectly confirm the spread of Pentecostalism, now indicating the same number for them as in 1928.

This acknowledges that the losses from the total persecution that began in 1929 and cost the lives of a significant portion of the “sectarians” have already been “covered.” However, official statistics always understate figures whose growth is undesirable to the authorities. Moreover, only those registered as Pentecostals are officially counted as such. Pentecostals themselves believe that registered communities make up half of their total number. The representative of unregistered Soviet Pentecostals in the West, Arkady Polishchuk, estimates the total number of adherents of this faith in the USSR at 1 million. [13]

Perhaps constant discrimination in civic and private life contributed to the fact that soon after the war, in the late 1940s, the Pentecostal faith was supplemented with the idea of leaving the USSR. This idea is based on the belief that the cup of the Lord’s wrath is about to be poured out on this godless country. Before that, the Lord will lead the Jews, as the chosen people (their emigration has already begun!), and the righteous out of the sinful land. But His will will not be accomplished by itself; it is the duty of true Christian righteous ones to actively strive for the exodus.

In 1965, Pentecostal Vasily Patrushev compiled a list of fellow believers who wanted to emigrate, and Pentecostal Fyodor Sidenko, a plumber at the Vostok Hotel in Vladivostok, gave this list to a Japanese trade representative staying at the hotel for forwarding to the UN. Patrushev and Sidenko served camp sentences for this, and there was no response from the UN.

From the spring of 1973, a consistent movement of Pentecostals for exit from the USSR began. Members of two communities — from Nakhodka in the Far East and Chernogorsk in the Krasnoyarsk Territory — applied to the authorities for permission to leave. But they were required to provide invitations from relatives or from the governments of the countries to which they sought to go, and the authorities refused to accept their documents without such invitations.

Pentecostal Yevgeny Brisenden went to Moscow and sought out the human rights activist Pavel Litvinov, whose name he knew from foreign radio broadcasts (many Pentecostals regularly listen to foreign radio). In February 1974, Moscow human rights activists passed on to foreign correspondents a letter from Brisenden and presbyter Georgy Vashchenko, in which, on behalf of 20 of their fellow believers, they appealed to the UN to help them leave for Israel or Australia. They also appealed to the President of the United States and to Christians around the world, asking for assistance in obtaining exit permits for Soviet Pentecostals. In May 1974, human rights activists introduced Brisenden and Vashchenko to foreign correspondents, and they themselves spoke about the persecution of Pentecostals and their struggle to leave. After that, the Brisenden family was allowed to leave, and later — several more families. The rest received refusals or had no response at all. [14]

The connection of Pentecostals with Moscow human rights activists began with Brisenden’s visit. Having lived in complete isolation for decades, Pentecostals were glad to tell sympathetic people about their woes. It was from that time that Pentecostals began to issue, at first non-periodically, reports on the persecution of their communities and on the struggle for emigration. These reports were called “Information Service of Christians of Evangelical Faith — Pentecostals,” and later “Facts and Only Facts.” From 1976, these issues began appearing roughly once every two months, thanks to which information about Pentecostals in the “Chronicle of Current Events” also became a regular feature. For the first time, a report on the situation of Pentecostals appeared in the “Chronicle” in issue No. 32, i.e. in 1974, in connection with the statements of Vashchenko and Brisenden. Beginning in 1976, such reports appear in each issue of the “Chronicle” in two sections: “Persecution of Believers” and “The Right to Leave.”

In 1975, another community joined those that had declared their intention to emigrate — from the village of Starotitarovskaya in the Krasnodar Territory. The presbyter of this community, Nikolai Goretoy, became the leading figure of the Pentecostal emigration movement.

Nikolai Goretoy (born 1921) is a former front-line soldier who suffered severe wounds, a school teacher of technical drawing and art, until in 1947 he was elected presbyter of an unregistered Pentecostal community. In connection with this he was forced to leave the school and earn a living by physical labor (painter, plasterer, etc.). To save himself and the members of his community from arrests and the removal of children, Goretoy and his flock changed several towns, moving ever further east — all the way to Nakhodka on the Pacific Ocean. There in 1961 Goretoy was arrested and spent 3.5 years in a camp and 5 years in exile. After his release, in the early 1970s, he settled in Starotitarovskaya in the Krasnodar Territory. [15]

The Starotitarovskaya community numbers about 100 adult members (with children, far more; Goretoy has 11 children and 22 grandchildren). In 1975, emigration councils were formed in Starotitarovskaya, Nakhodka, Chernogorsk, and several other communities seeking emigration, to coordinate the efforts of these communities in the struggle to leave. In the summer of 1976, members of the emigration councils of Nakhodka and Starotitarovskaya appealed to the Moscow Helsinki Group for help. With the help of Muscovites, the Pentecostals compiled the collection “Come Out of Her, My People”—more than 500 typewritten pages. It is the history of Pentecostal families striving for emigration—artless accounts of the persecution of Pentecostals in the USSR spanning four generations. [16]

On December 1, 1976, the MHG introduced members of the Pentecostal emigration councils to Western correspondents, handing them the collection and its own petition asking the governments of the Soviet Union’s partner countries in the Helsinki Accords to facilitate the emigration of Pentecostals and admit them to their countries, on the basis of the USSR’s commitments under the Final Act.

The MHG recalled that

“… religious dissidents who had fled state persecution made a significant contribution to the development of such Helsinki Conference participating states as the United States and Canada.” [17]

On behalf of the MHG, Muscovite Lidiya Voronina visited the Pentecostal communities of Nakhodka and Starotitarovskaya to ascertain the situation of the Pentecostals on the ground. She spent several days in each community, spoke with representatives of nearly every family in Starotitarovskaya and with more than 40 Pentecostals in Nakhodka, attended their meetings, listened to speakers, and spoke herself, answering numerous questions. The support of the MHG made an extremely strong impression on the Pentecostals. After a decade of isolation, they met with sympathetic attention—and where?—in Moscow itself, which in the closed Soviet society is the only window to the world. This was perceived in the Pentecostal communities as a long-awaited turn for the better. Unlike the average Soviet person, who views the unknown West with suspicion, for Pentecostals (and for Protestants generally) the West is the Christian world, the world of their co-religionists.

They believed that only ignorance of their situation prevented their free and powerful fellow believers from helping them with the same selfless devotion that Pentecostal communities in the USSR help one another, and that once their isolation was broken, everything would change miraculously. These notions were reinforced by the authorities’ reaction to the Pentecostals’ contacts with the Moscow Helsinki Group.

During Voronina’s journey through the Pentecostal communities, a permanent “tail” of several KGB officers followed her. During her stay in Starotitarovskaya, Pentecostals were summoned to the village council—to determine the purpose of her visit. When Voronina was leaving Nakhodka, a stone was thrown at the car—it smashed a window but, fortunately, hit no one. Immediately upon her return to Moscow, Voronina’s home was searched, and all her notes from the trip were confiscated. Official Pentecostal ministers arrived in Nakhodka. They urged the believers not to associate with the Moscow Helsinki Group:

“We must wait for help from God, not from some left-wing forces,” they said at a meeting. [18] The Moscow Pentecostal Anatoly Vlasov, who also had contacts with the MHG, was “advised” to attend only to religious affairs and not to support human rights activists. [19] All this indicated that the authorities were alarmed by the Pentecostals’ breaking out of isolation.

In Primorsky Krai, the authorities created a Committee for the Protection of Believers’ Rights, imitating independent civic organizations. This committee included the commissioner for religious affairs, teachers, and certain individuals who did not explain who they were. Committee members went to the homes of Pentecostals, persuading them to withdraw their applications. Some were promised apartments, access to education, and good jobs; others were threatened, and were read letters from émigré Pentecostals describing the hard life of their co-religionists abroad. Such processing took place everywhere. The Pentecostal Olga Krasun from Rovno was promised that if she renounced emigration, she would be transferred to work closer to home with a raise in salary and no obstacles to admission to an institute; Pastor Nikolai Kunitsa from Dubno was offered a managerial post in the VSEKhB and trips abroad. [20]

At the same time, every conceivable method was used to hinder the processing of emigration documents. Most often, officials refused to accept applications, citing the lack of an invitation. And the invitations were intercepted at the post office. In Nakhodka, 47 Pentecostal families to whom invitations from the United States had been sent received them only after a 10-day collective hunger strike during the Belgrade meeting of the partner countries to the Helsinki Accords. Meanwhile, Bishop Nikolai Goretoy was promised permission for his family to emigrate if he submitted documents separately, without the other members of the community—he refused. [21]

The determination of the Pentecostals to seek exit in whole groups and even entire communities has deep spiritual, historical, and psychological roots and is a distinctive feature of this emigration movement, as is the fact that most Pentecostals belong to the “indigenous nations” (Russians and Ukrainians) and, unlike Jews and Germans, cannot motivate their request to leave by a desire to go to a “historic homeland.” The Pentecostals point to the true reason for emigration—the desire to escape religious persecution. The authorities, however, declare that they do not and never will recognize emigration on religious grounds.

Evidently, to prevent the expansion of the Pentecostal emigration movement, the most extreme forms of pressure were stopped: in 1976 there were no arrests, and the taking away of children for religious upbringing ceased. The pressure on unregistered congregations for holding prayer meetings also sharply declined. For the first time in 45 years, the Pentecostals were no longer tormented with fines and summonses to the police and KGB for these meetings. [22] In addition, the authorities launched a registration campaign under the slogan of creating a “union of autonomous Pentecostals” (until that time, registered Pentecostal congregations had been under the jurisdiction of the AUCECB). The plan was to hold a founding congress of the “autonomists” in October 1978.

After registration, the authorities promised to lift a significant portion of the restrictions that weighed on the Pentecostals. [23] To reinforce these promises, a registered community near Moscow was provided with a newly built prayer house, and taxes on it were not even charged. [24] However, these inducements tempted few, because

“…it was not some single recent event that pushed the Pentecostals toward emigration, but their entire life throughout the entire existence of Soviet power,”

and temporary relaxations of repression for reasons of political expediency could not make them forget the incompatibility of their faith with Soviet ideology.

“If the Party program states that communism and religion are incompatible and that the goal of this country is to build communism,” said Boris Perchatkin, a member of the emigration council in Nakhodka, “then naturally we have nothing to hope for. We do not believe in any improvement of our situation, even if we are now promised one, considering all the many years of experience of our grandfathers, our fathers, and our own. Emigration is the only way out for us.” [25]

The Pentecostals’ hopes for emigration were greatly strengthened by the election of the Baptist Carter as President of the United States. This convinced them of the influence of their fellow believers in the mightiest country of the free world. They hoped that under a Baptist president they would receive the same support from the United States as that country had for many years given to the Jewish nation. These hopes likely contributed to the growth of the Pentecostal emigration movement. In February 1977, about 1,000 Pentecostals declared their desire to leave the USSR. By May, 1,700 believers were seeking emigration (Baptists joined the Pentecostals, but Pentecostals strongly predominated on the lists of those who applied for emigration on religious grounds). A month later, the number of applicants had increased to 3,500, by September to 10,000, and by December 1977, 20,000 people had submitted applications. In 1979, their number rose to 30,000. [26]

Pentecostals from the Rivne and Brest regions, from the Caucasus and the Rostov region, from Ukraine and Estonia, from near Leningrad and from Chernogorsk wrote to “their president” Carter — they asked him to officially tell the Soviet government that they were permitted to enter the USA, and to petition Brezhnev to let them go. [27]

In June 1977, 3,500 Pentecostals and Baptists seeking emigration addressed Brezhnev with a statement listing their demands: simplify the procedure for processing exit documents; permit emigration in groups and congregations, not on an individual-family basis; not conscript into the army and grant early demobilization to those intending to emigrate; reduce the exit fees for low-income families or allow them to receive financial assistance from fellow believers abroad. [28]

The struggle for religious freedom and for the right to emigrate logically led the Pentecostals to participate in the broader human rights movement. Signatures of Pentecostal activists appear on joint appeals by the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR and the Moscow Helsinki Group on the need to create an international Helsinki commission, [29] as well as on a collective letter in defense of the arrested (February–March 1977) members of the Moscow Helsinki Group Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg, and Anatoly Shcharansky. In a separate letter signed by 500 Pentecostals, their bishop Nikolai Goretoy called on Christians around the world to pray for the arrested members of the Helsinki Group:

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down his soul for his brother. This commandment of Christ, Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Orlov, and Anatoly Shcharansky fulfilled to the end.

… In the 1960s, hundreds of trials were held in the Soviet Union against our Christian-Pentecostal brothers. We were sent to camps, psychiatric hospitals, and exile; our children were taken from us. … When in 1975 we officially refused to register our congregations, … despite pressure from the authorities and a direct threat to send us to camps, those threats would probably have been carried out if we had not turned for help to the Moscow Group for the Observance of the Helsinki Agreements. And when this Group, particularly Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoly Shcharansky, raised its noble voice in our defense, the local authorities backed off from us. If we now do not raise our voice in their defense, we will commit a crime before God and before our conscience… On March 27, ’77, thousands of our brothers and sisters in the USSR… will fast and bow their heads in prayer for Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg, and Anatoly Shcharansky.“ [30]

The Pentecostals began to contact the world community not only through the Helsinki Group, but also directly.

Since the Soviet constitution separates church from state, they consider themselves entitled to have international contacts independently of the state — they proposed to Christian organizations and government agencies of other countries, as well as to human rights institutes and organizations, cooperation on religious and legal issues. Pentecostal congregations invited like-minded state figures to visit them: Queen Elizabeth of England, Kurt Waldheim, and President Carter. [31]

Issue 48 of the Chronicle reports on the appeals of Pentecostals to the UN Human Rights Committee and to the Belgrade Conference of the countries that signed the Helsinki Accords. The senior presbyter of the Pentecostals, Nikolai Goretoy, speaking at a press conference for foreign correspondents in Moscow in March 1977, stated:

“… We are free people, not prisoners or slaves. We appeal to President Carter as brothers in Christ to help believers exercise the right to emigrate on the basis of the covenants on rights signed by the Soviet authorities and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” [32]

The Pentecostals seeking emigration authorized as their representatives in the West Evgeny Brisenden, a fellow believer who had emigrated to the USA, and Arkadi Polishchuk, who represented the Pentecostals in Moscow after L. Voronina’s emigration and who was consequently forced to emigrate as well. Polishchuk left the USSR in the autumn of 1977 and settled in the United States.

In January 1978, U.S. President Carter received the deputy senior presbyter of the Pentecostals and member of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (VSEKhB), P. Shatrov. In response to a question about Pentecostal emigration, he replied that only the unregistered—that is, those who do not recognize any authority—wanted to leave, and there were very few of them.

In the spring of 1978, members of the Pentecostal Vashchenko and Chmykhalov families from Chernogorsk burst into the American embassy in Moscow, hoping that their firsthand testimony to American diplomats would reach “their” president and that he would help these families and their fellow believers obtain permission to emigrate. However, the affinity in faith with the U.S. president only helped insofar as when persuasion to leave the embassy failed, the Pentecostals were not turned out into the street into the hands of the KGB, as happens with such “visitors” to embassies of free countries in Moscow; instead, they were given a room in the basement, where they spent five years in voluntary confinement. [33]

In 1979, the 12th World Pentecostal Conference was held in Canada. Church officials selected by the Council for Religious Affairs and Cults, as well as Nikolai Goretoy, were invited to the conference. But, of course, he could not attend, and the congress received information about the situation of Pentecostals in the USSR only from official Soviet representatives, and this information was correspondingly distorted. The leadership of the international Pentecostal community also disregarded Goretoy’s letter to the conference describing the plight of 30,000 Pentecostals seeking emigration. In order to draw the attention of the congress participants to this problem, A. Polishchuk stood for a week in front of the building where the conference was taking place, declaring a hunger strike in support of Pentecostals from unregistered communities in the USSR, and distributed letters from Pentecostals describing the persecution they were enduring. In 1980, Polishchuk traveled to the Madrid Conference of the Helsinki countries to arouse sympathy among its delegates for the problems of emigration from the USSR.

Thus, Western governments and the public, who previously received information from the USSR only through the official leadership of the AUCECB, began to receive it also from unregistered communities.

The leaders of the international Pentecostal association still recognize only the official leadership of the Pentecostals in the USSR, but among Pentecostals in the West there were individuals and even communities willing to help their persecuted fellow believers. They established correspondence with Pentecostal families from Soviet unregistered communities, began sending them parcels (mainly clothing, which was a great help for large families), and started coming as tourists to get to know their correspondents and their communities. Sometimes such tourists even managed to bring in religious literature. Receiving Bibles, children’s versions of the Gospel, etc., was a great joy for Soviet believers; these books are so scarce that sometimes they are copied by hand. With the help of fellow believers from the West, the Pentecostals set up the printing of religious literature in the USSR—using duplicating machines and photographic methods. The tourists brought not only this equipment but also films on religious themes and devices for viewing them at home.

In the summer of 1977, the Swedish Pentecostals B. Sareld and E. Engström, on behalf of the Slavic Mission, traveled to the USSR as tourists in their own car and brought in a large number of Bibles, and on their return trip they carried several hundred letters requesting invitations and documents about the Pentecostal emigration movement, in particular the collection “Come out of her, my people.” At the border, the Swedes were arrested, and very soon the Slavic Mission was declared an “anti-Soviet organization” and their activities in the USSR “criminal.” They gave extensive testimony about the believers they had met during their travels through the Soviet Union. In November 1977, the Swedes were released and sent home, but based on their testimony, numerous searches and interrogations were carried out, continuing until 1980. [34]

Contacts with the West enabled several hundred Pentecostal families to receive invitations from abroad. However, it was not hundreds but thousands of families who needed invitations. At the governmental level, no Western European country dealt with the fate of Soviet Pentecostals with any persistence at all. The mass enthusiasm of the Pentecostals did not find sufficiently firm support in the West, and this was their only chance of success.

The Soviet authorities shifted the focus from promises to persecution. From about mid-1977, fines and summons for “talks” resumed, along with the breaking up of weddings and other gatherings of Pentecostals. [35] Incitement of the local population against communities that had declared a desire to emigrate sharply intensified. In July–September 1977, public meetings about the Pentecostals were organized in the villages of Starotitarovskaya and Leningradskaya. Komsomol members and volunteer militiamen were brought in from other villages and towns, and officials from Krasnodar arrived. Those who had applied for exit were asked to come to the meeting, with a promise that they would be given an opportunity to speak on the matter. However, at the meetings, only prearranged speakers were given the floor, who called those wishing to emigrate traitors and renegades, and accused them of acting in concert with Sakharov, Orlov, and Ginzburg — “enemies of the socialist system.” From the crowd came shouts that those applying for emigration should be imprisoned, or even shot or hanged; they were insulted in every way. The meeting in Starotitarovskaya was filmed and recorded on tape, but when the believers turned on their own tape recorder, it was confiscated. [36] After these meetings, Goretoy found himself effectively under house arrest. The emigration council of Nakhodka became the leading force in the emigration movement.

The Pentecostals described the situation in Nakhodka and Vladivostok in a letter to the Belgrade meeting of the Helsinki countries: “Several times a week, lectures are given from the platforms of clubs, houses of culture, school lecture halls, and dormitories, informing the population that believers are enemies, fanatics, traitors, CIA agents, spies. Local newspapers carry articles portraying us as villains and traitors… This officially orchestrated campaign incites the population to violence against believers… The atmosphere in the city is tense; our women cannot go out on the street: they are threatened, beaten. L.I. Vasilyeva was beaten on the street. Bandits shouted: ‘Baptist (common name for Protestants in the USSR – L.A.), you work for the CIA, take that!’ In broad daylight, a pregnant Nina Mironenko was hit and dragged into a swamp, while shouting: ‘So you’re planning to go to America? We’ll show you America!’ Hooligans, with the tacit approval of the authorities, throw stones and glass into yards, and fill vegetable gardens with broken glass. On May 19, there was a gang attack on the house of the widow Chuprina, where our prayer meetings are held. The house was ransacked, the children were terrified, windows in the house and on the veranda were smashed with an axe… The police tried to force Chuprina to sign a statement that she had no claims against the attackers.” [37]

In addition to efforts to inform the international community about their situation, the Pentecostals undertook efforts to organize themselves for more effective defense of their civil rights and to coordinate the actions of communities scattered across the country.

On June 16, 1979, a congress of representatives of unregistered Pentecostal communities met in Moscow, which elected their governing body — the Brotherly Council of Christians of the Evangelical Faith (Pentecostals), modeled after the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (see the chapter “Evangelical Christians-Baptists”).

The congress took place despite the authorities doing everything in their power to disrupt it. Pentecostals traveling to the congress were taken off trains, intercepted at airports and railway stations; those detained were sent home under guard. [38]

In the summer of 1979, representatives of the Pentecostal Brotherly Council, Boris Perchatkin and Timofey Prokopchik, met in Moscow with a delegation of U.S. congressmen (R. Dornen and others). They asked them to intercede with the Soviet authorities for a resolution of the Pentecostals’ problem. [39]

From the winter of 1979, arrests of activist leaders of the Pentecostal emigration movement began. First were arrested Fedor Sidenko and Nikolai Goretoy in the village of Starotitarovskaya, then Nikolai Bobarykin (also from Starotitarovskaya), Boris Perchatkin and Vitaly Istomin from Nakhodka. [40] But the struggle for emigration continued. On May 17, 1980, a human rights group of Pentecostals was formed. However, due to intensified repressions, only the number of its members (seven) was made known, but not their names. In July 1980, the group published the almanac “The Red and the Black” — documents about the situation of Pentecostals seeking emigration and about the persecution of this church. [41] Subsequently, the group systematically transmitted such information to Moscow human rights activists, in particular about ongoing arrests among Pentecostals.

On August 18, 1980, Boris Perchatkin was arrested. The remaining free members of the Brotherly Council appealed to Brezhnev with a request for a meeting before the Madrid conference. The letter consisted of 13 questions, among them the following:

— Will Pentecostals be allowed to have their own Council of Churches?

— Will the current legislation on religious cults be repealed?

— Will public printing shops be permitted?

— Will the teaching of atheism in schools be abolished?

— Will believers and other prisoners of conscience be released and rehabilitated?

— Will freedom of emigration be implemented? [42]

Without hoping for a reply, the Pentecostals simultaneously sent a collective letter (1,310 signatures) to J. Carter. They again asked him to send a personal message to Brezhnev, since “our president does not receive us.” In addition, the Pentecostals asked that Western fellow believers be informed as widely as possible about their situation, as they feel almost no support from the West: “… we do not hear their voices, or have they believed the slander and false accusations against us?” [43]

The weakness of Western support for the Pentecostal emigration movement facilitated terror against them. During interrogations in the Perchatkin case, KGB investigator Lieutenant-Colonel Kuzmin told the Pentecostals of Nakhodka:

— Don’t compare yourselves to the Jews; they are worth a lot, while for you we get little. [44]

A large number of letters from Pentecostals—both individual and collective—were sent to the Madrid conference of the countries that signed the Helsinki Accords. From November 11, 1980 (the day the conference opened), 1,300 Pentecostals held a five‑day hunger strike, still hoping to draw attention to their problems. Yet four years of fruitless efforts had sapped their momentum. In Nakhodka, where the congregation numbered about 500 adult members, around 300 families had declared their intention to leave the USSR, but by 1980 only 100 continued to fight energetically for emigration. [45] The situation was roughly the same in the other communities. In a letter to President R. Reagan written early in 1981 on behalf of the Brethren Council of Pentecostals, despair rings out:

“To all our lawful requests the government of the USSR responds with silence or with a brief verbal answer: ‘You are going nowhere, and nobody needs you.’ Our appeals to the international public have provoked the anger of our authorities toward us… After the Madrid meeting they promise to deal with us outright. Among people we have no one to rely on—none! May the Lord stir your concern for us, Mr. President!… Accept us into your country… And while we are still in the USSR, we ask you, Mr. President, to instruct your country’s representatives in the USSR—correspondents, diplomats—not to avoid contacts with us. After all, we have neither connections, nor resources, nor sufficient freedom to communicate orally or in writing with foreigners… We suffer and cannot tell the whole world about it. We ask you, Mr. President, to please intercede publicly on our behalf, support us, and appeal to L. Brezhnev to let us go… Please answer us, Mr. President!…” [46]

But again no answer came.

Even the Vashchenkos and Chmykhalovs, who were staying in the American embassy, did not receive permission to emigrate. In negotiations about their fate, Soviet representatives demanded that the Pentecostals leave the embassy, return to Chernogorsk, and submit their documents through the normal procedure. But the embassy sit‑in participants refused, not believing that tactic could succeed. In the winter of 1981‑1982, Avgustina and Lidiya Vashchenko began an open‑ended hunger strike, demanding that their family be granted exit permission. In their statements to the press they voiced what had apparently become a bitter common discovery for Soviet Pentecostals: the West is indifferent to the fate of persecuted Protestants in the USSR. Meanwhile, a fairly active public movement in the United States supported the Vashchenkos and Chmykhalovs. Yet it was not until June 1983 that American diplomats managed to obtain a firm promise that, by submitting their documents in Chernogorsk, these families would be allowed to leave for the West—this was one of the unwritten conditions for signing the final document of the Madrid conference. But that success was a private achievement—it concerned the destiny of only two Pentecostal families. The rest remained prisoners in the USSR.

The first wave of arrests in 1979‑1981 was followed by a second wave—activists of the emigration movement who had gathered for a meeting in Rovno were arrested, along with several other people. Convictions for refusing the military oath, which had subsided, resumed, as did arrests of preachers (I. Fedotov, V. Murashkin, and others). [48]

Yet even under these conditions, after losing hope of departure, Pentecostals continue to refuse official registration, maintain an independent civic stance, do not allow the authorities to interfere in internal church life, and carry on with evangelistic preaching.

Notes

  1. Samizdat Archive, Radio Liberty, Munich (AS), no. 2684, issue 33/80, pp. 1‑2.

  2. AS no. 4277 (issue 15/81), pp. 3‑4.

  3. AS no. 770, p. 123 (vol. 14).

  4. Collection of Documents of the Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR, New York, Khronika Press, 1977, issue 3, p. 56.

  5. See, for example, Chronicle of Current Events, New York, Khronika Press (CCE), issue 46, pp. 43‑44.

  6. Ibid., p. 44.

  7. CCE, issue 32, p. 25.

  8. CCE, issue 47, pp. 60‑61; issue 49, p. 63.

  9. Collection of Documents of the Public Group…, issue 3, p. 55.

  10. AS no. 4423, issue 35/81.

  11. Ibid., p. 7 (newspaper Mayak, April 11, 1981—a district newspaper published in Maloyaroslavets, Kaluga Region).

  12. Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, New York, Khronika Press, 1979, issue 28, p. 177.

  13. Collection of Documents of the Public Group…, 1978, issue 4, p. 8.

  14. CCE, issue 32, pp. 23‑25.

  15. AS no. 2684, issue 33/80.

  16. CCE, issue 44, p. 92.

  17. Collection of Documents of the Public Group…, issue 2, p. 33.

  18. Ibid., issue 3, p. 58; CCE, issue 44, p. 28.

  19. CCE, issue 51, p. 126.

  20. CCE, issue 46, p. 49; issue 47, p. 84.

  21. Collection of Documents of the Public Group…, issue 3, p. 58.

  22. Ibid., pp. 57‑58.

  23. Ibid., issue 4, p. 8.

  24. CCE, issue 57, p. 66.

  25. Collection of Documents of the Public Group…, issue 3, p. 57.

  26. CCE, issue 46, p. 51; issue 47, p. 87; issue 48, p. 135.

  27. CCE, issue 48, p. 140; issue 49, p. 76.

  28. CCE, issue 46, pp. 51‑52.

  29. Archive of Khronika Press.

  30. CCE, issue 45, pp. 85‑86.

  31. CCE, issue 48, p. 136.

  32. CCE, issue 45, p. 68.

  33. CCE, issue 48, p. 136; issue 51, p. 141.

  34. CCE, issue 46, p. 37; issue 47, pp. 35‑37; issue 48, p. 119.

  35. CCE, issue 49, p. 63.

  36. CCE, issue 47, pp. 82‑84.

  37. CCE, issue 47, p. 78.

  38. Collection of Documents of the Public Group…, issue 7, pp. 30‑31.

  39. AS no. 4196, pp. 3, 5, issue 4/81.

  40. CCE, issue 54, p. 124; issue 55, p. 52; issue 57, p. 78; issue 63, p. 174; List of Political Prisoners, ed. Kronid Lyubarsky, Munich, 1982, issue 4.

  41. AS no. 4196, pp. 7‑8.

  42. Ibid., pp. 9‑10.

  43. Ibid., p. 9.

  44. Ibid., pp. 6‑8.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Archive of Khronika Press, New York.

  47. News from the USSR. Human Rights, 1982, issue 1, no. 4; issue 2, no. 4; issue 3, no. 7; issue 6, no. 8; issue 12, no. 33; issue 13, no. 20; 1983, issue 12‑34.

  48. List of Political Prisoners in the USSR, issue 4, 1982; issue 5, 1983.