Baptist beginnings in Russia and Ukraine.

In the 1860s and 1870s, religious communities of Russians and Ukrainians that would later identify themselves as Baptists first arose in unrelated strains in three widely separated regions of the Russian Empire.

The history of the first decades of the Russian Baptists is the story of groups in Transcaucasia, Ukraine, and St. Petersburg, gradually finding one another, acknowledging their spiritual kinship, and, by the early 1880s, seeking paths to joint activity. This process of mutual discovery and preliminary organizing was also one of denominational self-definition. The combined force of non-Russian models of evangelicalism, the pronouncements of outside observers, and the responses of the state and its established Orthodox Church continually pushed these communities to clarify who they were and what they believed, transforming them from informal sectarian groups into Baptists. (1)

The question of the origins of Baptist work among Russians and Ukrainians was, from the first conversions in the Russian Empire, a hotly debated one. It remains so to this day. (2) For the issue quickly became intimately intertwined with that of the national legitimacy of believers' spiritual choices. Did Slavic evangelicalism arise from local conditions and aspirations or was it a completely foreign import? Thus, in his excellent recent history of Russian Baptists from 1867 to 1917, S. N. Savinskii repeatedly emphasized to his fellow believers the "originality" [sarnobytnost'] of their movement and its suitability for Russians. "It is very significant," he wrote, "that congregations of Lutherans, Reformers, or Mennonites did not arise among Ukrainians. Before the evangelical awakening, the Ukrainians always had a negative attitude towards everything that came from the German colonists.... But they had always been seekers of living contact with God.... The evangelical awakening of the mid-nineteenth century, which began among the Russian Germans, responded to this particularity of the Russian [sic] soul." (3) In fact, from the movement's inception, the foreign aspect of their faith was a subject of pride and anxiety for Russia's Baptists. They would seek to create a Russian version of a foreign faith and demonstrate its affinity to the Slavic soul.

An American reader will be surprised at this emphasis on the German origins of the Baptists. Certainly, from its emergence in England in the seventeenth century to its later flowering in the United States, the Baptist faith is usually considered a product of the English-speaking world. But from the very start, in Russia, the Baptist faith would be associated with Germans. The first subjects of the Russian Empire to be baptized in 1858 in the Russian Polish city of Adamow were ethnic Germans. They had encountered Baptist ideas through the missionary work of German Baptists from East Prussia. (4) The Baptist movement at that time was relatively new to the European continent. Already well established in Britain and the United States, Johann Oncken, a German who had been raised, educated, and converted in England, brought the Baptist faith to Hamburg in the 1830s. In its first years, the "new English religion," as it was popularly dubbed, was subject to fierce persecution from German governments. From the mid-1850s, these attacks abated somewhat, and, with some English and American financial assistance, the German Baptists began to take their campaign for the souls of Europe abroad. Taking advantage of the large number of German speakers who lived scattered across Eastern Europe, they focused their attentions there. (5)

In the Russian Empire, the movement spread quickly from the first congregation in Poland through the German communities in the Baltic, Ukrainian, and Volga provinces, among the Latvians and Estonians, and, eventually, to the Slavic peoples of the Empire. Groups of Germans influenced by pietistic and Baptist ideas soon were shaking up their own officially-approved Lutheran, Reformed, and Mennonite communities with hour-long meetings of Bible reading, prayer, and song. Eventually, breakaway congregations of converts formed. Those who broke with the first two traditions called themselves Baptists, but former Mennonites became known as Mennonite Brethren. Although they retained several Mennonite practices, they embraced the central tenets of the Baptist faith. (6) These German-speaking converts would play a crucial role in spreading that faith to their Orthodox neighbors, both through personal evangelism and by providing a model for religious seekers.

First Conversions

The first Russians to call themselves Baptists lived in Transcaucasia, in what is today the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi (then Tiflis). In August 1867, the first Russian convert, Nikita Voronin, was baptized in the Kura River near Tiflis by Martin Kalweit, a German Baptist from the Baltic provinces who had settled recently in Tiflis. Voronin had been a member of the Molokan sect, an indigenous Russian sect with Quaker-like beliefs. By the late 1860s, a growing number of Molokans had begun to have doubts about the Molokan teaching that baptism and other sacraments were to be understood in a purely spiritual sense and to suggest that the physical ritual of water baptism was, in fact, essential to salvation. (7) After intensive study of the Bible, Voronin experienced conversion and became convinced of the need for the sacraments of water baptism and communion, but he did not know where to find a congregation that shared his views. Eventually, Voronin met Kalweit, the leader of a tiny group of German Baptists in Tiflis. Lengthy discussion with Kalweit convinced Voronin that he had at last found a like-minded community, and he asked Kalweit to baptize him. (8) Within a few years, Voronin, in turn, inducted several other Russian converts and formed the first Russian Baptist congregation, in Tiflis. In 1871, two young Molokans who were to be great pioneers of the Russian Baptist movement, Vasilii Vasil'evich Ivanov and Vasilii Gur'vich Pavlov, joined the small group. For the next few decades, Ivanov and Pavlov would preach the Baptist faith in the Molokan villages of Transcaucasia and across southern Russia and the Volga region.

Around the same time, in southern Ukraine, a new religious movement known as shtundizm was appearing among Orthodox peasants. Local Ukrainian or Russian peasants, who worked for the German colonists who had settled in this region from the time of Catherine the Great, began to attend the revivalistic religious meetings occurring in their employers' communities. When they turned to organizing such Bible hours among their own people, the Slavic faithful were soon nicknamed shtundisty, after the German word for hour, Stunde. (9)

The shtundists did not start out to separate from the Orthodox Church. Rather, their own spiritual quests and the definitions and actions of outsiders eventually worked together to make of them an independent sect. Contact with German Protestants forced early shtundists to ask themselves new questions about the path to salvation. The negative reaction of local Orthodox priests to their interest in the Germans' beliefs also contributed to their gradual rejection of Orthodoxy. (10) Although the German colonists were eager to answer questions about their faith and welcomed the local Slavic peasantry to their meetings, they held back from actually baptizing these new converts, fearing punishment for the illegal act of converting the Orthodox away from the official church. However, on June 11, 1869, Efim Tsymbal, a peasant from the Ukrainian village of Karlovka, in Kherson province, persuaded the Mennonite Brethren preacher Abraham Unger to baptize him along with thirty converts in the nearby German colony of Staryi Dantsig. Tsymbal thus became the first South Russian shtundist formally to join the Baptist faith. The act of rebaptism constituted the final break with Orthodoxy for him. Some shtundists refused the rituals and structure of the Baptist faith, but many would follow Tsymbal's lead. He soon traveled to the settlement of Liubomirka (also in Kherson province) where he baptized a future leading shtundist, Ivan Grigor'evich Riaboshapka. In turn, Riaboshapka baptized the shtundist pioneer, Mikhailo Ratushnyi, along with forty-eight of his followers from Odessa district, in 1871. (11) By then, the movement had spread beyond Kherson province to Kiev province and throughout south Russia, thanks in large part to peasants' seasonal labor migration. (12)

Meanwhile, Protestant ideas were also making themselves felt in distant St. Petersburg, and in a very different social milieu. The movement in the north originated with what Edmund Heier described as a "drawing room revival." This revival began in 1874, when the Russian noblewoman Elizaveta I. Chertkova invited the well-known English preacher, Granville A. W. Waldegrave, Lord Radstock, to lead evangelistic meetings in the salons of the capital. Radstock was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a Calvinistic offshoot of the low Anglican church. He had converted Chertkova by his ardent preaching when she was on a trip abroad. Radstock was a huge hit in that season of 1874 and during his return visits in 1875 and 1878. Several leading members of St. Petersburg high society were converted, and the phenomenon of Radstockism was widely discussed in the press and in literature. Those who opened their palaces to Radstock and were converted included Count Modest M. Korf, Count Aleksei R Bobrinskii, Princess Vera Lieven, her sister Princess Natalia Gagarina, and Colonel Vasilii A. Pashkov. (13)

Pashkov soon emerged as the leading light of this movement and guided it toward a philanthropic and social program. He and his noble followers took their message of the need for personal religious conversion and the development of the inner spiritual life through prayer and Bible-reading to the peasants on their estates in the provinces of northern and central Russia. There they formed literacy circles and initiated classes to teach various skills. For the poor of St. Petersburg, they established tea rooms, a shelter for homeless children, work projects for the unemployed, a campaign against alcoholism, and hospital and prison visiting programs. In 1876, Korf founded the "Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading" that published a wide variety of religious books and brochures, as well as Russkii rabochii [Russian Worker], a weekly newspaper aimed at a popular audience. These new religious ideas filtered back to the villages of migrant workers who encountered them in the capital.

The movement became known as Pashkovisrn. Pashkovite leaders originally envisaged a renewal of Orthodoxy, rather than the founding of a new denomination. They did not preach a formal creed, instead leaving their worker and peasant followers to elaborate their own interpretations of Scripture. Eventually, however, as a result of the directions this popular thinking took, Korfs own conversion to the Baptist faith while in Switzerland in 1879, and persecution as shtundists, the Pashkovites drew closer to the shtundists and Baptists, adopting many of their worship patterns and doctrines. (14)

Early Organizational Steps

Baptists, shtundists, and Pashkovites gradually became aware of one another through newspaper reports, travel, and the distribution of Pashkovite publications. By 1884, informal connections took formal shape. Two conferences brought together groups that shared evangelicalism's Bible-based and conversion-driven tenets to discuss common interests and began to give structure to the movement. The first took place in St. Petersburg. At Pashkov's invitation, seventy delegates representing groups of shtundists, Pashkovites, Baptists (German and Russian), Mennonite Brethren, and an evangelical stream of Molokanism traveled to the capital in early April, where they met in the palaces of various Pashkovite sponsors. However, by that time, the powerful head of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, was ensuring that the law forbidding conversions from Orthodoxy was enforced. It was fine for Russian Germans to become Baptists, he had written in 1881, but "there are and must be no Russian Baptists." (15) Thus, halfway through the conference, police arrested all the Russian delegates, imprisoned them overnight, and sent them back to their home provinces. Soon thereafter, the "Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading" was closed down and Pashkovite meetings prohibited. When Pashkov and Korf refused formally to agree not to preach, hold meetings, or meet with other evangelical sectarians, they were expelled from Russia. (16)

Soon after their return home from St. Petersburg that spring of 1884, Russian Baptists from the south held a conference of their own in the village of Novo-Vasil'evka, Taurida province, on April 30 and May 1, 1884. This gathering, described as a meeting of "believing baptized Christians or so-called Baptists" in the protocol, brought together representatives from the Ukrainian provinces of Kherson, Kiev, Ektaterinoslav, and Taurida, a delegate from the Pashkovites, and six local Mennonite Brethren envoys. The Caucasian Baptists were unable to attend but sent letters outlining their views on the issues to be discussed. The agenda dealt primarily with the tasks of agreeing on doctrinal and behavioral standards that would unify these disparate groups and establishing a network of missionaries. Because it set up the first permanent organization among Slavic Baptists and made binding decisions about doctrine, this conference is considered the founding gathering of the Union of Russian Baptists.

Participants at the gathering concentrated on organizing missionary work among Russians, by Russians. At this stage, Germans seem to have played a crucial role in providing advice on organization and doctrine, although their views were not necessarily adopted. Mennonite Johann Wieler chaired the meeting. All the missionaries appointed were Russians or Ukrainians, but two Mennonite Brethren, Wieler and I. F. Isaak, became president and treasurer. The participants also formally thanked the German congregations for their financial aid and noted that the itinerant preaching of Vasilii Pavlov of Tiflis was funded by the German-American Missionary Committee, which sponsored Baptist missions from Germany. (17)

By 1890, although some interaction naturally remained, the German-speaking Baptists and the Russian Baptists developed into two very separate organizations. This process was aided both by cultural differences, and by the contrast between the German Baptists' legal status and the persecution increasingly suffered by the Slavs. In fact, in 1894 the Committee of Ministers declared the shtundist sect to be especially harmful and prohibited its meetings. The government circular announcing this policy declared that "their teaching undermines the fundamental bases of the Orthodox faith and Russian national character [narodnost]...." (18) Accused of being shtundists, evangelical believers pointed to the 1879 law that had legalized the Baptist faith for Russian Germans and insisted that they too were Baptists.

Foreign Models and Russian Baptists

As the denomination formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, believers struggled to deal with their common heritage of foreign ideas and people. The English example, brought by Lord Radstock or filtered through Russian nobles who had been abroad, dominated in St. Petersburg. The Evangelical Christian leader, Ivan Prokhanov, and the Baptist pastor in St. Petersburg, Vil'gel'm Fetler, had both studied at Baptist colleges in England before 1905. (19) The English example also penetrated the country through the British and Foreign Bible Society, which had a large network to distribute Bibles in Russia, and whose agents often (illegally) provided future Baptists with their first exposure to Protestant ideas. (20) In most of the Empire, by contrast, the German model, by way of the Russian Germans, provided the most immediate pattern for organizing scattered groups of believers into a budding denomination. Early leaders from south Russia also traveled to Oncken's mission school in Hamburg and looked to his many publications for guidance.

With the founding of the British- and American-dominated Baptist World Alliance in 1905, Britain and the United States became competing sources of ideas, moral support, and, occasionally, money. Virtually all activists, however, were Russian subjects. In fact, although Russian Baptists constantly engaged foreign ideas and models, these were not accepted without challenge, and, indeed, much soul-searching. Despite their strong conviction that truth knew no human borders, the question of national character continually vexed the Russian Baptists. As they sought to establish a network of congregations and develop music and liturgies to celebrate their faith, Russian evangelicals repeatedly confronted the problem of establishing a native Russian version of an imported Baptist faith.

Indeed, the Russian believers could not even agree on whether to call themselves by the foreign word "Baptist." When communities first formed, they used a variety of names, such as Christians baptized in faith, Gospel Christians, the society of friends of God, Christians of evangelical faith, the society of converts to the new Russian brotherhood, or Baptists. (21) As these groups began to form associations, the issue of a standard term arose. The Baptist Union had long acknowledged variations in how its members designated themselves; in an effort to address the problem, it even adopted the name, "Union of Russian Evangelical Christians-Baptists," in 1903. Many believers, however, remained unconvinced. At the first congress of the Union, after the Revolution of 1905 made conversion to other Christian faiths legal, one of the delegates asked whether all members were required to call themselves "Baptist." He explained that there were many believers who were eager to form a union of all Russian Baptists but regarded the term "Baptist" itself as "non-Biblical and non-Russian." (22) After all, the term bore no relation to the Russian word for baptism, kreshchenie. In fact, it took both believers and the government quite a while consistently to spell "Baptists" properly--and not as "babtisty!"

The chief alternative to the name "Baptists" came to be evangel'skie khristiane (Gospel or Evangelical Christians). (23) Yet, an editorial in the first issue of Baptist magazine in 1907 pleaded that it would be a shame if "we [were] forced for the sake of some one or more hundred uneasy and feeble of our brothers to break the link and destroy our unity with ten million foreign Baptists who make up with us one body and one soul...." (24) And, indeed, although believers would divide themselves into two rival unions, one "Baptist," the other "Evangelical Christian" in the early twentieth century, both would be affiliated with the Baptist World Alliance. In fact, the BWA elected the Evangelical Christian leader, Prokhanov, a vice-president in 1911.

Whether they called themselves Evangelical Christians or Baptists, the problem of reconciling the craving for spiritual and organizational autonomy that underlay the movement with the drive to organize and expand according to foreign models loomed large. Russian evangelicals expressed pride in belonging to an international communion and tended to be quite candid about the part that non-Russians had played in the evolution of their church. They insisted, however, that this role was primarily catalytic. Foreigners or Russian Germans had provided language and forms that systematized already existing ideas and aspirations. Nevertheless, the memoirs and personal correspondence of early leaders reveal the practical and intellectual difficulties of reconciling borrowed structures with popular native aspirations. For example, the influential Baptist missionary and later pastor of Baku, Vasilii Ivanov, described the tension between Russians and Germans over liturgical practices in his unpublished recollections of the early days of the Tiflis congregation. Although the faith was the same, he explained, "the nation and habits were different." "The Russian Baptists," he elaborated, "wanted to hold to many Molokan practices...." The Germans, by contrast, "wanted to toss out everything Russian and Molokan from the service and set up everything in the German manner...." (25) The former Molokans were not the only new Baptists who initially included aspects of their previous traditions in their services: the first converts in the Odessa area started out by singing Orthodox prayers and songs and retained many Orthodox tunes even after they had begun either to compose their own hymns or to borrow words and melodies from German ones. (26)

The issue was not simply one of Germans against Russians, however. The Russians themselves were divided over which path to take. For example, disagreements over strategy often surfaced in the memoirs and life-long correspondence of Ivanov and another Russian Baptist pioneer, Vasilii Pavlov. Ivanov remained preoccupied with the problem of finding a distinctively Russian path. For example, he repeatedly expressed anxiety about Pavlov's dedication to standardizing the movement by translating German statements of faith, such as the Hamburg confession of the German Baptists, and adopting German organizational methods. (27) In an 1899 letter to Union president Dei I. Mazaev, Ivanov wrote passionately that "our Russian brotherhood has nothing to learn from scholars, and, therefore, we have to take a different direction in our spiritual life, in order that we not fall into lifelessness, as other Christians have. That we might have less formality and more spiritual life...." (28) And yet this Russian lack of formality also troubled him. In a letter the following year, Ivanov wrote of the mixed feelings he had had upon observing German Baptists in Poland. He had found orderliness in their congregations, but also what seemed to him to be "cold formality." Nevertheless, he confessed, he was discouraged by the Russian believers' inability to achieve the organization of the Germans. Instead of practical advice, the Russians were interested in borrowing from the Germans only "all that gratifies bodily feeling, bare phrases such as 'My sins are forgiven'." (29) In this way, Ivanov expressed a broader conflict between admiration of German organization and the conviction that free, unstructured religious expression was more in the nature of the Russian soul. His writings evoke the considerable ambivalence about the "Western" model in a movement accused of being "Western."

A fine example of the challenge of meshing the local with the borrowed in Russian Baptist culture can be found in the history of Baptist music in Russia. The need for hymns preoccupied Russian Baptists from the start. For a long time, local practice seems to have combined Orthodox or Molokan favorites with borrowed Western spiritual music. One prominent Orthodox expert on the Baptists contended that it was when the shtundists switched from singing Orthodox hymns to using a popular collection of translated religious verse titled An Offering to Orthodox Christians that they took the first step in their decisive separation from the faith and the liturgy of the Russian church. Moreover, just as the Russian Baptists abandoned the Orthodox habit of standing for services, they also introduced instrumental music into their worship, including balalaika, guitar, or violin ensembles and, in a few affluent congregations, pump organs. Then, in 1902, the emerging Evangelical Christian leader, Prokhanov, was able to slip past the censor a thick volume of spiritual songs called Gusli [Psaltery], subtitled "collected verse of some Russian writers." Composed, in fact, mostly of translations of foreign verse, it nevertheless became the most popular hymnal among all branches of the evangelical movement for decades. (30)

Russian Baptists and Evangelical Christians continued to grope for a distinctively Russian evangelical style of music. In the memoirs he wrote for an American audience in 1933, Prokhanov recalled how, after the 1905 revolution, "While highly appreciating the translation of Western hymns, I thought that the Russian Evangelical Christianity should produce hymns according to the character of the Russian people and their tastes." Prokhanov went on to write or translate many hundreds of hymns. (31)

The problem that Prokhanov described was highlighted at the Baptists' national congress in St. Petersburg in 1910, when a heated debate broke out about the contents of a proposed hymn book. One representative complained that Protestant melodies did not satisfy him compared with the singing he heard in Orthodox or Catholic churches. Others disagreed, saying that the tone of the music suited them fine and pointed out that Orthodox missionaries attributed sectarians' success precisely to their music. Elena Beklemisheva, representing Stavropol' province, suggested that, in compiling the new hymnal, the Baptists ought to transcribe the tunes composed by local congregations in Kiev and Khar'kov provinces. Delegates eventually elected a commission of choir directors and presbyters to begin work on the volume. (32) Although, in the end, Baptists do not seem to have published their own new hymnal before 1917, and the collection and dissemination of local musical compositions would be an important project for both branches of the evangelical movement before and especially after the 1917 revolution. (33)

The story of Baptist beginnings in Russia illustrates how no faith can be transferred intact from one culture to another. The impetus for Baptist conversions in the Russian Empire came from abroad, from the still fragmented German lands, but that drive was directed at ethnic Germans. The faith's spread to Russians and Ukrainians reflects the significance of the multi-ethnic character of Imperial Russia. The conviction of having found the true faith made Russian evangelicals into internationalists, more concerned with spiritual than ethnic kinship. Yet, from the village to the church to the government department, the Baptists were surrounded by people who cared deeply about ethnicity and who questioned the suitability of their spiritual choices.

(1.) Many of the ideas presented here are elaborated in: Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). See also Andrew Blane, "Protestant Sects in Late Imperial Russia," in The Religious World of Russian Culture, vol. 2, ed. Andrew Blane (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1975), 267-86; A. I. Klibanov, History of Religious Sectarianism in Russia (1860s-1917), trans. Ethel Dunn, ed. Stephen P Dunn (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982), 229-93; Samuel John Nesdoly, "Evangelical Sectarianism in Russia" (Ph.D. diss., Queen's University, 1971); and Paul D. Steeves, "The Russian Baptist Union" (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1976).

(2.) For a review of the contemporary debate, see: P. Kozitskii, "Vopros o proiskhozhdenii iuzhnorusskago shtundizma v nashei literaturie," Missionerskoe obozrienie no. 11 (November 1908): 1460-74 and no. 12 (December 1908): 1709-30. A recent study emphasizes how shtundism grew out of older Russian sectarianism: Sergei Zhuk, Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004).

(3.) S. N. Savinskii, Istoriia evangel'skikh khristian-baptistov Ukrainy, Rossii, Belorussii (1867-1917) (St. Petersburg: "Bibliia dlia vsekh," 1999), 17-18.

(4.) Albert W. Wardin, Jr., "Baptists (German) in Russia and USSR," in Modern Encyclopedia of Religion in Russia and the Soviet Union, 3 (1991): 192-93. See also: William L. Wagner, New Move Forward in Europe (South Pasadena, CA: William Casey Library, 1978), 7, 107-09.

(5.) J. H. Rushbrooke, The Baptist Movernent in the Continent of Europe, 2nd ed. (London: The Carey Press, 1923), 35-36; Wagner, New Move, 15-17, 30-31.

(6.) Wagner, New Move, 197.

(7). GMIR [State Museum of the History of Religion], Koll. 1, op. 8, d. 516, ll. 1-10ob.

(8.) V. P., "Pravda o baptistakh," Baptist, no. 43 (19 October 1911): 337.

(9.) Blane, "Protestant Sects," 270-71.

(10.) A. Rozhdestvenskii, Iuzhno-russkii shtundizm (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Departamenta Udelov, 1889), ch. 2.

(11.) V. P., "Pravda o baptistakh," Baptist no. 42 (October 12, 1911): 332.

(12.) A. Voronov, "Shtundizm," Russkii Viestnik 170 (March 1884): 15-16. Rozhdestvenskii, Iuzhnorusskii, 75-78, 174-76.

(13.) Edmund Heiet; Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy (The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff, 1970), viii, 57-105. See also Mark Myers McCarthy, "Religious Conflict and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Orthodoxy and the Protestant Challenge, 1812-1905" (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2004).

(14.) Heier, Religious Schism, 107-24, 145-46.

(15.) Robert F. Byrnes, Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 182.

(16.) Blane, "Protestant Sects," 279; Istoriia evangel'skikh khristian-baptistov v SSSR (Moscow: Izdanie Vsesoiuznogo Soveta Evangel'skikh Khristian-Baptistov, 1989), 98-102.

(17.) See the conference protocol in Episkop Aleksii (Dorodnitsyn), Materialy dlia istorii religioznoratsionalisticheskago dvizheniia na iugie Rossii (Kazan', 1908), 569-84; Wagner, New Move, 30.

(18.) V. I. Iasevich-Borodaevskaia, Bor'ba za vieru (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1912), 560.

(19.) I. S. Prokhanoff, In the Cauldron of Russia 1869-1933 (New York: All-Russian Evangelical Christian Union, 1933), 97-100; RGIA [Russian State Historical Archive] f. 821, op. 133, d. 298, l. 353.

(20.) Stephen K. Batalden, "Colportage and the Distribution of Holy Scripture in Late Imperial Russia," in California Slavic Studies XVII. Christianity and the Eastern Slavs. Volume II, eds. Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 86-87.

(21.) Rozhdestvenskii, Iuzhno-russkii, 2.

(22.) GMIR, Koll. 1, op. 8, d. 32, folder 10, l. 3.

(23.) Although I follow the practice of previous English-language studies that have translated evangel'skie khristiane as "Evangelical Christians," the term evangel'skie is more properly translated as "gospel" and its use reflects the aim of some Russian believers to emphasize that the source of authority for them was the Bible alone, and not also the "holy tradition" of the Orthodox Church.

(24.) "Nazvanie 'Baptisty'," Baptist no. 1 (June 1907): 3.

(25.) GMIR, Koll. 1, op. 8, d. 516, l. 24ob.

(26.) Rozhdestvenskii, 244-47.

(27.) GMIR, Koll. 1, op. 8, folder 1, l. 34; V. P., "Pravda o baptistakh," Baptist no. 46 (9 November 1911): 362.

(28.) GMIR, Koll. 1, op. 8, folder of letters to D. I. Mazaev, l. 26.

(29.) GMIR, Koll. 1, op. 8, folder 1, l. 287.

(30.) M. A. Kal'nev, Istoriia sektantskikh molitvennykh piesnopienii i razbor ikh soderzhaniia, 3d ed. (Odessa, 1911), 28-29, 7, 24-27.

(31.) Prokhanoff, In the Cauldron of Russia, 143-4, 148.

(32.) Bratskii listok (October 1910): 12-13.

(33.) A. I. K., "Evangel'skaia pesn'," Utrenniaia Zviezda no. 3-4-5 (1922): 15-16; "K vykhodu Ukrainskogo sbornika pesen 'Arfa'," Baptist no. 3 (1925): 15-16.

Heather J. Coleman holds the Canada Research Chair in Imperial Russian History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.