Oct 14, 2015
One hundred years of Adventism in Russia and the Soviet Union
Religion in Communist Lands
Volume 12 , Issue 3 , 1984
| COMMENT: This article describes two groups of Adventists in the Soviet Union, (Notice the date of the article) one registered and a number of unregistered groups. |
The Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Russia is now one hundred years old. Today there are about 30,000-40,000 members of officially registered Adventist communities in the USSR as well as an unknown number who belong to unregistered bodies such as the True and Free Seventh-Day Adventists. 1 The story of the Adventist Church's beginnings in the Russian Empire has some interesting parallels with the present. Seventh Day Adventists have never had an easy life in Russia. The state authorities were hostile to the Adventist Church before 1917 as well as after - though for different reasons. The late Vladimir Shelkov, leader of the True and Free Adventists, often referred to the pre-revolutionary period as one of persecution by "state Orthodoxy" ("gospravoslaviye"), drawing a parallel with later persecution by Soviet "state atheism" ("gosateizm").
Seventh - day Adventist ideas reached the Russian Empire in the 1880s, some twenty years after the evangelical churches, mainly Baptists, made their first converts in Russia. The first Adventist converts, like the first Baptists, were not Russians by nationality but Germans - settlers in the Volga River basin and Ukraine, who were already non-Orthodox in their religion but were tolerated by the State as long as they kept their religious beliefs within the German community. Adventists were regarded at first as a "German sect" like the Mennonites, but ran into trouble with the state authorities as soon as they began to attract Russians, members of the Orthodox state Church.
Laws passed in 1842 by Tsar Nicholas I to discourage Old Believers and Molokans – native Russian "sects" - were now applied to the new Western sectarians. Proselytizing among members of the Russian Orthodox Church was punished by fines or exile to some remote region of the Empire.
"Sectarian" meeting houses were sometimes boarded up and production of "sectarian" literature forbidden or severely restricted.
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http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09637498408431144?journalCode=crss19
