The Global Church Era · 1945-1991 · USSR, Romania
Persecuted-Church Traditions of the Communist Era (Initsiativniki Baptists; Romania's Lord's Army)
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About This Movement
Under Communist rule, believers who would not accept the terms the state offered went underground, and left an extraordinary paper trail doing it. In the Soviet Union a group of Baptist ministers broke in 1961 with the registered union over state control of church life; they were called the Initsiativniki, after their initiative group, and they ran their own press, Khristianin. Their Council of Prisoners' Relatives — the relatives of imprisoned believers — began issuing bulletins in 1964 listing arrests, sentences, searches and confiscations, name by name. Georgi Vins's Testament from Prison reached the West in translation in 1975. In Romania the Lord's Army, founded in 1923 by the priest Iosif Trifa around his weekly paper, went on under Communist rule; Traian Dorz wrote hymns and prison memoirs. When the archives opened after 1991, the persecutors' own files could be read alongside the persecuted's.
Sources
- Initsiativniki samizdat: Council of Prisoners' Relatives bulletins (1964-); the 1961 Initiative Group letters (Prokofiev, Kryuchkov); CCECB Khristianin press; Georgi Vins, Testament from Prison (ET 1975) (primary) — First-rank grassroots persecution literature - documentation led largely by prisoners' wives and mothers.
- Romania's Lord's Army: Iosif Trifa's Oastea Domnului weekly (1923-) and books; Traian Dorz's hymns and prison memoirs; post-1948 underground records (primary) — The movement's theology expressed in song, written under persecution.
- Post-1991 archives: CARC/CRA files and court records; Securitate files on the Lord's Army (primary) — These records come from the persecuting state's own files and archives.
- Michael Bourdeaux, Religious Ferment in Russia (1968) and the Keston archive; Walter Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II (Herald, 1981) (secondary) — Outside observers writing with an advocacy position; Sawatsky is the standard scholarly account.
- Owen Chadwick, The Christian Church in the Cold War (Penguin, 1992); CHC vol. 9 (reference)