Alexey Glushaev1 ANTI-religious propaganda called them "sectarians", and the authorities very carefully reported on the presence of Baptists, Pentecostals, and Adventists in the life of Soviet society, without fail placing them on the side of the "road of communist construction". But gone are the days when evangelical believers were called "sectarian kulak Petrushka", depicting on anti-religious posters a puppet pink-cheeked Petrushka, from behind which the "enemy" face of the rural kulak peeked out. The creation in 1944 of the united Union of Evangelical Christians and Baptists, to which a part of the Pentecostals later joined, was supposed to indicate, according to the political calculations of the Stalinist leadership, that "The Soviet state considers the existence of religious ideas and... does not restrict the freedom to perform religious rites." 1However, in practice, the legal activity of Protestant associations was significantly limited by the control of state structures and depended on the changing political situation. In contrast to metropolitan cities (Moscow, Leningrad) and some regional centers2, where evangelical Baptist Christian prayer houses operated, in towns and villages- 1. Religion and Church//The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia./Edited by S. I. Vavilov, K. E. Voroshilov, P. I. Lebedev-Polyansky, A. Lozovsky, F. N. Petrov, F. A. Rotstein, O. Yu. Schmidt. Moscow: OGIZ SSSR, 1947. Stb. 1782. 2. In the cities of Izhevsk and Kirov, the administrative centers of the regions bordering the Molotov region, ECB communities were registered by the bodies of local executive committees in 1945-1948. See: Yarygin N. N. Evangelical movement in the Volga-Vyatka region. Moscow: Akademicheskiy Proekt Publ., 2004, p. 110. page 257Until the mid-1950s, there were no officially registered communities of evangelical believers in the Kakheti region. That didn't mean they weren't there. In the first post-war year of 1946, a group of Ev ... Читать далее