Introduction: Public Theology after Maidan

Published in Theological Reflections. Euro-Asian Theological Journal 3 (2004), 161-213 (in Russian, English, and Lithuanian), with Parush R Parushev.

Religion, State and Society, 1994

SZRKG/RSHRC/RSSRC, 115 (2021), 57–79, 2021

This article focuses on the tendencies and trends in the development of international contacts of Soviet evangelicals at the turn of the 1960s–1970s. The 1970s are a special period in the history of Cold War communications, when the number of actors increases, and the international public human rights organizations acquire a new meaning. The focus of this study will be aimed at examining at the formation of a «response» to anti-communist initiatives from the intra-Soviet context of church-state relations. Based on the analysis of reports compiled by the staff of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists (AUCECB), we will show how the Baptist leaders in the USSR sought to win over the interest of the Soviet leadership with their international activities. We suggest that the struggle against the anti-communist movement (literally personified, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, by the figure of Richard Wurmbrand, reflected in the Soviet Baptist sources) was an important pretext, thanks to which the international contacts of Soviet Baptists were activated. Moreover, thanks to the struggle against the concept of the «underground church» within the USSR, the geographical area open to visits by evangelical delegations expanded, and the number of registered ECB communities that were meant to be «shown» to foreigners noticeably increased.

Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2020

After some preliminary remarks about the ongoing legacy of the Soviet system, this article opens with a sketch of church-state relations from a biblical and theological perspective. The article concludes with some observations about how a ‘baptist vision’ (McClendon) of a free church in a free state could provoke new thinking about the renewal of church and society in the post-Soviet era. My argument is that a baptistic vision of peace, justice and freedom in Christ, could help the church in Eastern Europe to drive a wooden stake through the heart of the Soviet system and help the people of the former USSR to emerge from the difficult travails of the post-Soviet transition.

Journal of Church & State, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer 2005): 545-561.

As the Soviet Union began to experiment with policies of liberal-ization under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the church was one of the first social institutions to benefit from the Kremlin’s new policies. By 1988, Gorbachev had agreed to grant the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) the status of a legitimate public institution, thus ending the policy of militant atheism that had stood for almost seventy years. From that point on, official persecution came to an end and religion in Russia underwent a renaissance.1 The new religious environment was soon codified with the 1990 “Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Belief,” a very liberal document that introduced legal religious equality and the separation of church and state for the first time in Russian history.