Protestantism

PROTESTANTISM

Protestantism originally derived from the sixteenth-century Reformation movement begun in western Europe by Martin Luther and John Calvin.

The Reformation, the movement that gave rise to Protestantism, was particular to western Christendom. Russia, as a part of eastern Orthodox Christendom, never experienced an analogous development. Consequently Protestantism in Russia was an imported phenomenon rather than an indigenous product.

Two forms of Protestantism in Russia can be identified. The older form was introduced to Russia by European non-Russian ethnic groups. A later form emerged in the nineteenth century when ethnically Slavic people embraced teachings of European Protestants. Converts to the older form comprised people who moved at various times from Europe to Russia or who were conquered by Russian western expansion. Converts to the later form derived from missionary activity among Russians in the aftermath of the Alexandrine reforms of the mid-nineteenth century that produced groups who were variously called Shtundists, Baptists, Evangelical Christians, Adventists, and, in the twentieth century, Pentecostals.

Protestantism entered Muscovy during the reign of Ivan IV. Initially viewing Protestants favorably, the tsar permitted building two Protestant churches, one Lutheran and one Calvinist, in Moscow. But he came to view Protestantism as heretical and in 1579 ordered both churches destroyed. Protestantism was relegated to an enclave outside the city that came to be known as the "German suburb."

Russia's Protestant population grew in the eighteenth century when Russia conquered Estonia and Latvia, where many Lutherans lived, and when German colonists of Lutheran and Mennonite persuasions settled in south Russia at the invitation of Catherine II. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Protestant notions received some high-level support from Emperor Alexander I, who was fascinated with German pietism.

Only in the aftermath of the abolition of serfdom did Protestantism win substantial adherents within the Slavic population of Russia. This was the result of preaching activity—in St. Petersburg by the English Lord Radstock and in the Caucasus by Baltic Baptists—and of the influence of German colonists in the Ukraine. Russian Protestantism was institutionalized in the Russian Baptist Union in 1884. The official response to this development was expressed in harsh persecution predicated on Chief Procurator Konstantin Pobedonostev's declaration, "there are not, and there cannot be, any Russian Baptists."

Protestants benefited from the tsarist declaration of religious tolerance of 1905 and even more from the Bolshevik declaration of separation of church and state of 1917. By 1929 there were up to one million Protestants in the Soviet Union, less than 1 percent of the population.

Communist antireligious policy limited legal protestant activity between 1929 and 1989 to one formally recognized structure, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), and scattered autonomous congregations of such denominations as Lutherans and Methodists, primarily in the Baltic republics, and German Baptists in Siberia. AUCECB claimed to comprise five thousand protestant congregations.

After 1991, Protestants expanded their activity within Russian society. At the end of 2000 the Russian Ministry of Justice reported that there were about 3,800 officially registered Protestant congregations in Russia, out of more than 20,000 religious organizations in the Russian Federation. These included 1,500 congregations of Baptists, 1,300 Pentecostals, 560 Adventists, and 200 Lutherans. Sociological surveys estimated that Protestants, at approximately one million, constituted about twothirds of one percent of the total population of the Russian Federation.

See also: catholicism; religion; russian orthodox church

bibliography

Billington, James. (1966). Icon and the Axe. New York: Random House.

Heard, Albert F. (1887). Russian Church and Russian Dissent. New York: Harper Brothers.

Heier, Edmund. (1970). Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, 1860–1900: Radstockism and Pashkovism. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff.

Sawatsky, Walter. (1981). Soviet Evangelicals since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.

Paul D. Steeves