Russian Evangelicals — Stundists to the Baptist Union

In the 1860s Ukrainian peasants working alongside German colonists in the southern provinces began meeting for the Bible studies their neighbours called Stunden, hours — reading the Scriptures for themselves in the Russian translation then appearing. Reading became conversion, and conversion became congregations. The movement then met a second one coming from the opposite end of society. From 1874 in St Petersburg, aristocrats converted under the preaching of the English evangelist Lord Radstock gathered around Colonel Vasily Pashkov, who opened his house for meetings that servants and nobles attended together. The strands joined in a Russian Baptist Union in 1884, and the state answered with everything it had — Pashkov exiled, meetings broken up, children removed from Stundist parents, families deported. Since leaving the Orthodox Church was a crime as well as a sin. The toleration decree of 1905 gave them their first legal breathing space in forty years.