3

BAPTIST MISSIONARIES ON THE EDGE

Insiders and Outsiders

The Baptist brotherhood has been missionizing in the Nenets areas since the mid-1990s. Known as the International Union of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (hereafter International Union) or Unregistered Baptists (in the literature also Reform Baptists or Initsiativniki), this was the biggest illegal religious union during the Soviet period. Today it remains one of the most conservative and antiworldly Protestant movements in post-atheist Russia (Bourdeaux and Filatov 2003, 185–94).¹ In recent decades, the brotherhood has been the most active mission among northern Indigenous peoples, having converted, among others, many Nenets Independents. As already mentioned, Pentecostal denominations also proselytize in the area (see chap. 4), although none of them has been as successful as the Unregistered Baptists (cf. Vagramenko 2014; Wiget and Balalaeva 2011, 173).

Throughout their existence in Russia, the Protestant denominations have been shaped by their relations with the state, and they continue to be. This has probably been the single most important factor in interdenominational dynamics as well: during the Soviet period, the state was the direct or indirect cause of all major splits of church unions. Both Baptists and Pentecostals, the two biggest Protestant denominations in Russia, were united during the Soviet era under one union by the state. As a result, they all split into so-called registered and unregistered branches.² Although in the post-Soviet period the religious landscape has changed radically, the divisions that emerged in the Soviet era among the evangelicals are still playing a significant role today.

The Unregistered Baptists’ separatist history, strict morality, and heightened discipline have all played into their conversionist ideology, missionary techniques, and church-building in the tundra. Members are convinced that they have restored the initial church and that the eschatological end is not far away. They call themselves a spiritually awakened brotherhood (probuzhdennoe bratstvo), the true church, the people of God, and the direct followers of the early apostolic church. The long-term charismatic leader Gennadiy Kryuchkov (1926–2007), who authored the official historical narrative of the union, argued that three hundred years after Christ, the true church grew tired of persecution and Christians were entrapped by the new tactics of Satan, who approached them under the guise of powerful rulers like Constantine. By Kryuchkov’s words, if the early church had remained firm in its separatism or world-rejecting ideology then “it would have won the whole world and possibly already then evangelized up to the ends of the earth” (Tserkov’ 2008, 183; see also Kryuchkov 2008, 33). Having survived decades of harassment, the International Union, also known as “the persecuted church” (gonimaya tserkov’), is there to complete the process.

I suggest the attention of the International Union in the North is not random but has its cosmological reasons embedded in its specific concepts of space and time. I realized this partly because of my own positionality while doing fieldwork. Anthropologists have always aimed to become insiders to some extent. However, fundamentalist evangelical logic sets certain limits to this—at least this was what I found to be the case. The anthropologist’s position is not fully of one’s own making, especially in a missionary culture whose sole aim is to change all outsiders, including researchers (Harding 2000; see also S. Coleman 2015; Crane and Weibel 2012). Some church members saw in me a “sympathizer” or potential convert (priblizhayushchiy), as I was interested in spiritual topics. I realized that converts saw me above all through the future, through the potential of change, through God’s plans. I sensed some of my best Nenets friends’ concern as they tried to convince me to become a believer. For instance, Yegor, when trying to persuade me of the need to become a member of the church, insisted that he would like to meet me in heaven. Yet negotiating my position was even more prominent in my relations with Baptist missionary Pavel.

In April 2007, Pavel invited me to his home in Vorkuta to inquire about my scholarly project. We had had numerous conversations during occasional meetings in both the city and the tundra over the course of eight years. Being convinced that God had a purpose in sending me to the tundra, he proposed several times that I should quit my academic work and “start to work for God.” Despite his overall friendliness, this time I felt that he was trying to vet me more seriously than ever before. We were having a conversation sitting behind the kitchen table in his flat situated in a five-floor concrete building on the edge of the tundra.

Figure 3.1. Baptist missionaries visiting Yegor’s nomadic camp, March 2004.

To his question of what my interest was in living with herders for so long (far longer than any evangelists had), I explained that I was exploring reindeer herders’ “culture” (kul’tura). I tried to accommodate my vocabulary to the local setting, or at least what I thought it to be. Pavel replied that everything about Nenets culture was in a book written by Yevladov. There, one can find descriptions of Nenets clothing, dwellings, and reindeer herding in great detail, he said.³ When I mentioned that I was not only exploring material aspects of reindeer herders’ culture (that had not changed much over this period) but also their worldview (mirovozzrenie), Pavel became noticeably tenser. With an authoritative tone, he said that worldview was not culture and that I was going beyond the boundaries of ethnography (etnografiya). “Culture is their clothes and tents,” he insisted. This statement was in line with the wider Soviet-period understanding of material culture being the true object of ethnography. Although one could find chapters on ethnogenesis, social structure, and religious conceptions (religioznye predstavleniya) in the works of the Soviet ethnographers (see, e.g., Khomich 1966, 1995), the lay understanding of ethnography was above all related to material objects displayed in museums (Vakhtin 2006; cf. Pelkmans 2007; Vaté 2009).⁴

As I understood it, Pavel’s remark was not so much concern about my academic work for the sake of its quality but concern about unwanted attention by an outsider into spiritual matters of the born-again Christian Nenets for whom he felt responsible (cf. Crapanzano 2000, 91). Every time I returned to Vorkuta and met Baptists in their prayer meetings, I sensed that the overall atmosphere was changing slightly. As some openly said, they felt a growing pressure from outsiders (vneshnie). Hints about that had become more common over the years in both sermons and my conversations with Baptists. Congregants tried to protect church life from the external gaze more keenly as the ideal of secrecy (konspiratsiya) and alertness or vigilance (bodrstvovanie) were in high gear once again.⁵

Unregistered Baptists feared that the current period of relative freedom has weakened their ability to oppose the world, the state, and Satan, which are all intricately linked. Their ethos depends on opposition, similarly to the early Christians. Furthermore, this understanding matches the Unregistered Baptist myth of origin—being spiritually the direct descendants of early Christianity and the only true continuation of it. While others change around because of the world’s (or the devil’s) pressure, they claim to have not changed. This is why in the post-Soviet period, their central mission has been keeping up secrecy and alertness, which backs up their identity as the holy people.

In the eyes of Pavel, I belonged to the category of outsiders, even if he referred to me as drug, “friend” (but not brat, “brother”) and prayed for my soul by saying my name out loud in my presence. I guess he had become slightly impatient at not seeing my heart change despite my interest in faith matters over the years. He still welcomed me with a smile on his face, but growing concern on the matter of outsiders made him apprehensive. Most Nenets Baptist friends were less obsessed with me being an outsider, probably because of the closer relationship we had developed over an extended period. When I was staying with Nenets presbyter Andrei in 2007, he once openly admitted, “I was warned about you.” As a sign of trust, he then quickly assured me that he did not regard me as a threat: “If you had evil purposes, God would have revealed it to me in my dreams. I said it to them as well.” Although he did not say it directly, “them” must have been Pavel and other Russian missionaries. I had lived with Andrei’s family several times over eight years, and he encouraged me to take an interest in the Nenets way of life. However, even with Andrei I did not discuss faith as a matter of knowledge. For him, believing was to be enacted in a very specific way. It could be spoken only in performative contexts through the Holy Spirit and not just discussed for the sake of “exchanging information” (Crapanzano 2000, 88; see also Tuzin 1997, 26; chap. 6).

Toward the end of the conversation with Pavel at his kitchen table, I explained that my aim was to gain a better understanding of various points of views that reindeer herders possessed, including those of the believers. My statement must have sounded hopelessly wrong. Pavel was silent for a moment and then asked, “Do you know what tolerance is?” He went on, explaining, “Tolerance is everything other than being on the narrow path after Jesus.” For him, I was another typical secular person who did not understand that various viewpoints could not exist that were right at the same time. For instance, his assessment was that other Protestants—not speaking of the Orthodox, who were simply “mistaken idolaters”—were known to be treading a wide path that did not lead to paradise but to hell.

Pavel was there to guard proselytes. Nenets converts belonging to those few who were saved had to be protected with extra care. Childlike in their innocence, according to Pavel’s words, they were not used to outside pressure from the world and could fall into its traps more easily. Their souls belonged to God, who had sent him to save them. The “infantilism” of the reindeer herders—a motif repeated in descriptions by Christian ministers on Nenets (see, e.g., Makariy 1878; Shemanovskiy 2011; cf. Balzer 2011, 222)—had yet helped to open their hearts to God more easily, the evangelist assumed.

Pavel tried to open my eyes to what the world’s actual intentions toward the Nenets converts were. There were many signs, he said. His intention, I guess, was to warn me not to become complicit, explaining that “in these days, many have become interested in the Nenets as God’s people. This is not without reason. We are currently heading toward the times we have had earlier—persecutions [goneniya]. The interest is abnormally big. Last year there were attempts to write down all the Nenets. All believers. Have you heard of that? This was done because they wanted to control God’s new people. Where were they before [conversion]? Earlier, nobody was interested in them. They lived without passports, without being registered. But now they are being registered.”

Registration was a stimulus to extra alertness by Russian Baptists and Nenets herders alike, although not always for the same reasons. Both had avoided one or another form of registration that they felt threatened their way of life (even if they knew that being unregistered was against the law). Although the census he referred to was an economic survey, according to Pavel, this was a mere smokescreen, as every kind of registration was just another cunning way of the world (and Satan) to attempt to control God’s children.⁶

I asked Andrei what he made of that census. Andrei seemed to be more concerned about his herd, the size of which was asked by enumerators. Converts, like nonconverts, feared that the state was trying to take control of their reindeer because—as older people used to say—after the census takers had left the tundra, new restrictions, additional taxes, or confiscations of animals followed. The Nenets shared wariness toward the state with the Unregistered Baptists, although they were only learning that the Russian Baptists’ reasons were bound to their historical experience, of a very different kind though, as I shall explain below.

The Birth of the Vorkuta Church in the Gulag

To understand the self-perception of the Russian Baptists in Vorkuta, one must look at the wider history of the evangelical movement in Russia and its ecclesiology (see H. Coleman 2005). Baptists have been known for their schismatic tendencies (Troeltsch 1960, 694ff.; Weber 2001, 92–101). As mentioned above, in the Soviet Union, the schismatic groups declared their total independence from the state and state-managed church unions. Paradoxically, in the long run, this drove them to depend on opposition to the state. In their publications as well as in their church services, Unregistered Baptist ministers boasted that they had always kept the church separated from the world (which evidently comprised the state). They did not engage in political activities or even in any kind of social work among the unsaved.⁷ The only thing the church of the Unregistered Baptists was obliged to offer to outsiders was God’s Word. For Baptists, this was an issue of relationship with God, who did not give power to “the ones who loved the world.” As older ministers of the International Union proudly said, they had never committed “the sin of cooperation with the world” (grekh sotrudnichestva s mirom).

Vorkuta, with its Gulag history, has a special place in the imagination of the Unregistered Baptists. Many consider it “a symbol of the suffering of God’s people,” as Pavel said (see also Belyakova and Dobson 2015; French 2018; Panych 2012b). One of the songs I heard frequently sung by both Russian and Nenets congregants was a hymn called “Infertile Land, Uninhabited Expanses” composed around the motif of prisoners of faith in Vorkuta. Nenets converts seemed enchanted by its march rhythm, even if the lyrics portrayed the area rather counterintuitively (e.g., “uninhabited”) to the Indigenous sensibilities: “Harsh region you, the North. . . . Your harsh polar elements, and the dead tundra, wild taiga. Let the whole country, vast Russia, hear the news from Christ’s witnesses” (Pesn’ 2004). In this song, Vorkuta is the place where “holy seeds” start growing and where “the soldiers of Christ” become free and “take the banner of the truth to the nations.” The union journal refers to the prophetic hymn: “Today with joy we can witness these words come true. The Indigenous inhabitants of the Far North turn to God” (Dolzhno mne 1995, 30).⁸ Nenets converts were expressing themselves in a language that had a transcendental (and southern) origin. They were about to accommodate the gaze of “the other,” which was one of a Soviet schismatic church.

Pavel had been a member of the Vorkuta Baptist church from the early 1980s and had been a presbyter since 1990.⁹ Although he had not suffered repressions himself, he proudly promoted the history of “the persecuted church.” In 2007, sixty years of the Vorkuta church was celebrated with photos on the walls of the prayer hall and past events recalled from the pulpit. The Vorkuta church, like the city itself, had its roots in the penal labor camp that was set up there to excavate coal. Throughout their existence, Vorkuta labor camps, like others of their kind, had—in addition to political prisoners, kulaks, and criminals—people convicted for their religious views or activities from virtually all Christian denominations represented in Russia. Despite the efforts of the camp guards, there was a lot of religious activity. Bibles were smuggled into the zone, and services were held secretly (Noble 1970). As a result of illegal missionization in the camps, many prisoners converted to Christianity.

Figure 3.2. Vorkuta Baptist congregants celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of their church, February 2007.

Most of the Nenets congregants were absent at the time.

Vorkuta had been a temporary home for hundreds of Baptists, including later Baptist schismatic leaders such as Nikolay Baturin (Podrazhayte 2001) and Nikolay Boyko (2006; see also Kovalenko 2006). Those who were released but did not have the right to leave Vorkuta organized church life on the other side of the barbed wire in “the work zone.” One of those was Grigoriy Kovtun, who in 1947 founded the Baptist church of Vorkuta and became its first presbyter. Like many other isolated congregations elsewhere, the church did not attempt to register its congregation with the authorities (Podrazhayte 2001, 72). By the mid-1950s, the congregation had around sixty members (many of them Germans from the Volga area of Mennonite background) but did not have a prayer house; instead, they gathered in private homes of the members (Boyko 2006).

In 1944, the authorities decided to allow Baptists, Evangelical Christians, and Pentecostals to legalize their activities—on the condition that they were all governed by one centralized organization called the “All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists” (hereafter “All-Union Council”). However, not all joined the union. Many remained autonomous, like the church of Vorkuta. Others soon splintered off from the artificial conglomerate and became illegal again. Pentecostals, who are not allowed to speak in tongues, perform faith healing, or wash feet during their services, lost half of their churches through secession from the union after 1946 (Mitrokhin 1997, 405–10).

As the only officially accepted central body of evangelical Protestant churches in the Soviet Union (except for a small union of Seventh-day Adventists), the All-Union Council was closely monitored and managed by the state. Everything had to go through a system of registrations with state organs; it was not possible to open new churches at will or appoint presbyters without the approval of local Communist Party officials. Furthermore, union leaders and senior presbyters (some of them registered as agents of the secret police) were on a short leash, giving regular reports to the special councils for religious affairs and making pro-Soviet statements at home and abroad. Despite the obedience of the leaders to the state, church members were harassed in oft-repeated campaigns against believers not only during services but also at work, school, or in the army (Marsh 2011, 90–98; Nikol’skaya 2009; Sawatsky 1981).

De-Stalinization after 1953 and the gradual release of Gulag prisoners mobilized a cohort of young, uncompromising evangelicals who were dissatisfied with the state-managed official union. After an upsurge in the activity of committed Christians at the end of the 1950s, the first secretary of the Communist Party and Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, launched a new campaign aimed at the eradication of religion (J. Anderson 1994). He revived the use of groups of atheist agitators and the methods of the notorious League of Militant Atheists in the 1920s (Peris 1998; see also Suslov 1931 on the League’s fight with “shamanists”). This campaign reached the remotest areas, including Vorkuta. Soviet historian Yuriy Gagarin (1978, 292) reported that at the end of the 1950s, Komsomol (Communist Youth League) members from the Vorkuta coal mines were carrying out “individual work”—taking into account one’s denominational affiliation, age, sex, social background and so on—with sectarians (sektanty) under the guidance of “experienced atheists” (cf. Barenberg 2014, 211–12). Next to the individual work, the government launched an atheist propaganda campaign through newspapers, radio, and television, which was not always well received by Christians or a wider audience (Smolkin 2018; Wanner 2007, 2012). In 1961, by command of the city party organization, a Club of Atheists was founded. They claimed their words to be “weapons” that find “a road to the hearts” of the people and save them from “a fog” (Zhilin 1963, 10, 15, 27). The underlying idea was to offer their own positive program and rituals in place of religion. However, Soviet commentators argued that success was poor because “mistakes” were made during campaigns (Gagarin 1978, 304).

From the perspective of the regime that was in rush, educational measures alone were not enough. Councils for religious affairs and the KGB launched so-called administrative measures to eradicate religion and accelerate the arrival of Communism. As they had done several times earlier, the state used the requirement of registration as its main tool to control and suppress Christian congregations. Between 1959 and 1964, hundreds of prayer houses were shut down. As many congregations were not allowed or not willing to register, the state forced a substantial number of churches underground. Many other congregations registered (Prokhorov 2013, 345; Smolkin 2018, 80; Walters 1993).

The All-Union Council leaders decided to comply with the new anti-religious policies that aimed to cut off the transmission of religious knowledge to youth while hoping that “the old people, illiterate fanatics” would take their religious zeal with them when they died (Kryuchkov 2008, 498). In 1960, the All-Union Council changed the church statutes and composed a secret “Letter of Instruction,” which they sent out to all senior presbyters controlling local congregations in regions. This notorious letter ordered ministers to preach less, keep children away from services, minimize the number of baptisms among under thirty-year-olds, and stop “unhealthy missionary tendencies” in general (Bourdeaux 1968, 20–21; Koroleva et al. 2013; Mitrokhin 1997, 414; Sawatsky 1981, 139, 177).

Many Baptists had been dissatisfied with the All-Union Council leaders’ overt obedience to the authorities. But the new rules triggered more widespread discontent, especially among young Baptist men. Gennadiy Kryuchkov, Aleksey Prokof’ev, Georgiy Vins, Mikhail Khorev, and some other hardliners formed an Initiative Group to fight submissive union leaders. Nicknamed “Initsiativniki” by seculars, they called for a general congress to be convened and urged leaders of the official union to stop collaborating with the state, to repent, and to become sanctified again. As expected, the government did not give a permit to convene, and the leaders of the All-Union Council gave a hostile reaction to the call as well. The Initiative Group saw in the leaders of the All-Union Council apostates through whom Satan worked, and as such they declared the excommunication of those alongside with most senior presbyters (Bourdeaux 1968, 44–45). This was an attempt to take over the union. Yet it was only partially successful. After having won around half of the All-Union Council congregations and many unregistered churches, in 1965 they resorted to establishing a new central church body, called the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (hereafter “Council of Churches”) (Sawatsky 1981, 146, 179). The leaders of the new council claimed that, being full of the Holy Spirit, only they were the true children of God and the true church on earth. Another schism was complete.¹⁰

Staying outside the World and Welcoming Persecution

Although the state repressed all Christians in the early 1960s, the Unregistered Baptists (including members of autonomous congregations, such as the Vorkuta church) were arrested more often than others because of their stubborn refusal to register or to give up instructing their own children and evangelizing among Soviet citizens. In the 1960s alone, more than five hundred activist Unregistered Baptists were imprisoned for three to five years on average (Khorev 1988). Until the end of the 1980s, nearly all the leaders of Council of Churches were either underground or imprisoned. Despite this, they managed to run the union through a dispersed network of activists and to print in underground offset printing houses journals (samizdat), church literature, and appeals addressed to the authorities in the USSR and in the West.

The relationship with the state remained highly controversial. This was the area where Baptists’ literalist reading of the Bible was tested to the fullest in the maze of contradicting messages about the state in scriptures (cf. Kee 1980, 119–25). All Baptists agreed that the worldly authorities required respect because God had instituted the rulers. What the respect required from a believer was, however, interpreted radically differently among the Registered and Unregistered Baptists. One of the most debated passages in these disputes were Christ’s words, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). While the Registered Baptists stressed Paul’s urge to obey the state and law, the Unregistered stressed Acts 5, where Peter and John expressed the idea that “we ought to obey God rather than men” (cf. Sawatsky 1981, 189–90). While the All-Union Council ideologists quoted passages that recommended quietism and obedience to the state (e.g., Romans 13:1–4; Titus 3:1), the Council of Churches argued that when the matters inside the church (i.e., “spiritual matters”) were at stake, they did not need to be obedient to the state because in their words, the church stayed outside the world.

Outworldliness or out-stateness was not a result of free theological debates but of tension with the Soviet state, which made the Unregistered Baptists resort to a rigid concept of it. Against the Baptists’ own understanding, both the Soviet and Western authorities saw them as political dissidents. Reformers stressed that they were dealing with purely spiritual matters and that they were not anti-Soviet, as God did not allow dealing with politics. They fought for their biblical and constitutional right (which recognized the separation of the state and church) to be left in peace in matters of religion. Despite what was said, the state was always an implicit addressee of the Baptists’ texts.

The principle of noninvolvement was frequently repeated. Referring to Paul (1 Corinthians 5:12–13),¹¹ Unregistered Baptists argued that they were not called to criticize or comment on the authorities in any way because only God could judge outsiders. They declared that “making tsars is God’s work and not for humans. He puts them in place, overthrows and humiliates them (Job 12:19; Ezekiel 17:24; Daniel 4:32; Romans 13:1)” (Tserkov’ 2008). Kryuchkov preached forcefully the ideology of noninvolvement until the end of his life. In his ideological testament, he wrote:

Border maintenance had become the ultimate issue for Unregistered Baptists; what they called the external world, meaning nonspiritual, worldly, contrasted to the internal, which was spiritual. They boasted that they had remained unpolluted while the All-Union Council had let outsiders govern the church from inside. In the true church, there could be no place for outsiders because the church and the world could not be merged without damage. This ecclesiology has ultimate importance for understanding what was at stake. The church, both universal and local, is a collective of individual believers who constitute Christ’s body, “a holy place” (Kryuchkov 2008, 33). This body is regarded as a collective of interiorities that is in tight relationship with God. Like individual believers, so the church needs to have a pure “heart,” or as Kryuchkov put it, “Only by finding freedom inside the church and liberating it from all the sinful, do we free its heart so that God could act in it powerfully, soundly, and strongly” (Tserkov’ 2008, 201). This shows how the imagined interiority shifts between individual and collective dimensions. (I shall return to the importance of the notion of heart, and “internal” and “external” in the concept of personhood of Baptists, in chap. 7.)

To reconcile two seemingly contradictory commands of behavior, one of the law-abiding person and another of the obedient God’s child, Kryuchkov and some other church leaders worked out a conceptual division between an individual-as-church-member and an individual-as-citizen. All the matters recognized as the sphere of the state’s interests, like education and military service, were considered to remain out of the reach of the church. These were institutions that believers had to work out their relationship with and participate in only as citizens. The church as a collective body had arguably no right to intervene. An explicit command to the presbyters was phrased categorically: “Do not take any church resolutions in our congresses or membership meetings about military issues, state politics, the electoral system, social issues, education, or health care. Every Christian can only form independently his own position in these questions as a citizen” (Tserkov’ 2008, 202). The Unregistered Baptists did not intend to change the social order but only to take as many people as possible outside the world, by following the principle of “spreading the news out to the world, holiness of the brotherhood inside the church” (blagovestie spaseniya—vovne, svyatost’ bratstva—vnutri) (Tserkov’ 2008, 201).

As Louis Dumont (1986) has argued, renouncing the world is always a relative position as it entails an inherent tension between living in the world and trying to be already otherworldly. Relying on the work of the well-known Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch, he offers an apt characterization of this kind of tension among Christians:

The same tension is constitutive in the identity of the Unregistered Baptists who struggle with the classical theological question of how to be in the world without being of the world. The answer is “the brotherhood of love in and through Christ, and the consequent equality of all,” (31) which enables “the emancipation of the individual through a personal transcendence, and the union of outworldly individuals in a community that treads on earth but has its heart in heaven” (ibid.). Notably, the practice of constantly defining what is inside the church and what remains outside has offered the Unregistered Baptists the possibility to uphold their separatist identity and a necessary distance from the state.

In the tundra, I heard Nenets reindeer herders dutifully mentioning rulers in their prayers every fourth Friday of the month. They followed what their printed prayer plan prescribed. Most had only a very vague idea about state politics. The only one among the Independents who was interested in politics was Andrei. Yet this was more a curiosity about the Russians’ world “over there” that had only a limited impact on the life in the tundra.

Among urban church members in Vorkuta, persecution was a topic that came up again and again. Believers shared stories of martyrdom (muchenichestvo) and persecution they had experienced, heard of, or read about (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 107–8, 252–55, 333–35). The usual motifs were how police and vigilantes disrupted services and arrested congregants, how homes were confiscated, how children were taken away to state orphanages, and how brothers and sisters in faith suffered in prison. I heard a few testimonies from older Vorkuta congregation members recalling how they gathered in private homes or how they carried out baptisms in the tundra away from external gaze. Many accounts were also printed in Baptists’ journals, which were the main reading material, after the Bible, for all age groups. All these stories stressed that repressions did not end the activity of local churches due to the high morale of their members who, in the case of raids and arrests, found other places for services and had new ministers ordained (cf. Wanner 2007). For Nenets converts, these stories illustrated the evil of the state and bravery of the church.

With the arrival of greater religious freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union, reformers paradoxically faced significant difficulties in maintaining their identity of that of the persecuted. To maintain the earlier zeal, they increasingly glorified their past and cherished the memory of the martyrs.¹² After twenty-odd years hiding, in the late 1980s, Kryuchkov came out and began to rally churches with this purpose in mind. His main message was that the new freedom was only a temporary break and that new persecutions were coming soon. For example, this idea was reflected in the union journal Herald of Truth from 1994: “We shall be beaten and persecuted. Let our children see it. That will be their best Sunday school. . . . Let our children become new people. . . . Let them see that we are cocrucified with Christ and that every day we are given over to death for the sake of holiness and piety” (quoted in Tserkov’ 2008, 201). In 2004, I met the Russian missionary Viktor in Ivan’s tundra camp. With obvious regret in his voice, Viktor said that in recent years, the younger generation, who had not experienced persecution, lacked the zeal of the older believers. In his assessment, new persecutions were unavoidable—and even necessary—because the world hated the true church.

Attacks against evangelicals (what the Russian media called “totalitarian sects”) intensified in the late 1990s and have increased since. The signs of hatred of the “outsiders” became ever more frequent after the passing of restrictive laws on religion in 1997 and 2016, which made registration requirements once again more stringent (Witte 1999; Zagrebina 2017).¹³ Behind the menaces and attacks were both state agents and vigilantes. In the Nenets areas or nearby, there had been many incidents. In Syoyakha, a Nenets village in Yamal, a senior official of the administration threatened to burn down the prayer house of the local Baptists in 1999 (Neverov 1999). In 2003, some “ill-wishers,” as Baptists called them, did burn down a prayer house in Arkhangelsk (Severo-Zapadnoe 2004, 11; cf. Bur’yanov 2007, 80). In 2009, the local authorities in Naryan-Mar tried to force a Baptist congregation to register its prayer hall that was accommodated in a private house. Although the Vorkuta church had not seen direct assaults, parallels between the Soviet and current period were increasingly a topic for discussions there, which echoed a mixture of fear and expectation. Some older Russian members, probably hoping for the zeal of the old times to be restored, seemed to be ever more thrilled about new tensions.

Pavel’s Mission at the End of Space-Time

In the imagination of the Unregistered Baptists, the world is like a huge litmus paper. It suffices to look around and see that the world has reached a level of moral degradation characteristic of the end times. The Baptists know the future from the Book of Revelations, which, as Ivan repeatedly said to me, is very difficult reading. Those who were more knowledgeable, like Kryuchkov, presented the present time as “the period of the Laodicean church,” being the last among seven periods depicted in the Book of Revelations and known for its wealth and corruption (Bourdeaux 1968, 34; Bratskiy listok 2001, 556; Prokhorov 2013, 126–27; Tserkov’ 2008, 57, 166). Like other “everyday millenarians,” as Robbins characterizes this kind of Christian, the signs of the end can be seen everywhere, even if people have different ideas about the imminence of the arrival of Christ (2001b; 2020, 105–27). For those who evangelize and keep looking for signs in the North, the area is a source of great excitement, as it shows that the time is drawing near.

During fieldwork, I was referred to various signs of the end. Some of them were visible and recognizable for the chosen but not for outsiders. I shall give one example. While staying in Yegor’s camp one afternoon in December (ngarka pevdya, “the great darkness”), I admired a vista of the sky with an intense patch of light above the cloudy horizon and took a photo of it (see fig. 3.3). The next day, Pavel and a young Russian preacher, Zhenya, from Karelia, arrived in the church vehicle. They had seen the same vista while on their way to the camp, but their interpretation was eschatological, not aesthetic, like mine. Immediately after arriving, Zhenya asked Yegor whether he had seen the unusual light in the sky the day before. Yegor, who must have been used to similar vistas, confirmed—although not too eagerly—that he had seen “something unusual.” Zhenya explained that this was a sign of the approaching Second Coming. He argued that the North was an especially good place to witness it, referring to Job (37:22): “Fair weather cometh out of the north: with God is terrible majesty.” Effortlessly, Zhenya moved to a related topic, speaking of other signs such as Satan marking people through various forms of registration, using his number 666,¹⁴ and gathering them through the Internet: “As it is written, before the end, Satan gathers people together. This has happened via the Internet.” Yegor and other Nenets were listening to him, nodding from time to time, not probably having much of a clue how the Internet enabled the evil work. However, they did not question what Zhenya was saying. It just had to make sense.

Figure 3.3. The sign of the second coming of Christ, December 2006.

The world was trying to do everything possible to hinder those who were fulfilling Jesus’s command for mission. During the conversation at his kitchen table, Pavel had given me another example of how evil forces tried to hold the true church back from doing its “saving work.” He said that recently the authorities had restricted missionaries’ access to the border zone by enlarging it from five to twenty kilometers in the Nenets Region. “This was done with the purpose of stopping us,” he claimed. It was difficult to get permission to enter the restricted area with the motive of evangelism. It turned out to be not only a bureaucratic matter but also a part of the decisive cosmological fight, as the devil was making obstacles for the preachers to reach the literal end of the earth.

Although freedom is a source of worries for the church, it is also praised. Freedom offers a unique chance to enact the command of Jesus and take God’s Word to the ends of earth, including to “the lost tribes” (Kirsch 1997). Missionary work is imagined to be sowing of the Word in a straightforward manner through a public performance of one’s faith or witnessing (svidetel’stvo), conversations, singing, and handing out literature. In remote Arctic areas, several options for mission trips are used to alleviate the “friction of terrain” (Scott 2009, 43) hindering or slowing movement on the swampy, rocky, or snowy landscape. Missionaries cruise along rivers on boats or over vast plains on all-terrain vehicles or snowmobiles. As described in the opening scene of the introduction, Pavel used to move across the tundra on a big-wheeled Trekol, which gave him access to the remotest reindeer-herding camps that outsiders rarely visited. Another option was to dispatch families from the south to live with the reindeer herders for short periods, motivated by a conviction that they were making history on the edge of space and time with and for God.

Pavel had described how on one of his first mission journeys to the tundra in 1997, he was standing on the shore of the Arctic Ocean and predicted, “The gospel will be preached to the ends of the earth [do kraya zemli], and then comes the end.” God’s promise was unfolding in front of his eyes, or as he explained, “These were historical days when the all-powerful God fulfilled his Word. The ends of the earth were only ten meters from us.” By the conquest of this ultimate periphery, the missionary, empowered by the situation, was participating in the completion of God’s plan, being full of his Spirit. Pavel showed his true source of inspiration, the Acts of the Apostles, quoting, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8).

He followed a geography of apocalypses that entailed not only space but also time: only after the Gospel reaches the margins of the world will the second coming of Christ be possible. The space and time become interchangeable. Although nobody can know exactly where the time edge lay, his use of “meters” sounded more like “days” or “years.”

Figure 3.4. Missionaries driving their all-terrain vehicle on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, August 2002.

A herder shows the safe passage across the river to the next campsite.

In many ways, Baptists’ focus at the ends of the earth is not random. Instead of preaching in Vorkuta or other densely inhabited areas, Pavel and other missionaries from Nadym, Syoyakha, and Novyi Port tried to reach as remote areas as possible (like Soviet workers in search of “the romance of the frontier,” Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 20). Their trajectories of movement themselves followed the logic of the conquest of the ends. Pavel made trips to the shore of the Arctic Ocean, Vaigach Island, and even as far as the northern parts of the Gyda and Yamal Peninsula. The latter was a rhetorical favorite: nearly every report from there that I heard or read about referred to the etymology of “Yamal” (ya mal), meaning “land’s end” in Nenets. It was as if God had already made his imprint into non-Christians’ language to prepare them for his eschatological plans (see Vallikivi 2014b for more details; cf. White 2020, 111–14).

In the perceptions of the Baptists, the margins were described as the most difficult areas to conquer because they were full of evil forces and devil worshippers. Among Russian Baptists and Nenets, there was a certain convergence (or rather, an inversion) between the ideas about the edges. In Nenets cosmology, gods live on the farthest edges of the known world (Golovnev 2000b, 232). The most powerful sacred areas are the northernmost part of the Yamal Peninsula (Yamal Khekhe Salya, “cape of the spirit of the land’s end”), Belyi Island (Ser Ngo, “white island”), the end of the Ural Mountains (Khadam Pe, “Grandmother’s mountain”), and Vaigach Island. Ivan told me that to evangelize in these places, a particularly powerful minister full of the Holy Spirit is needed. Pavel was convinced that he was qualified for the job. In 2003, he made two trips to Varnek on the isle of Vaigach, a village where almost a hundred Nenets lived by fishing and hunting for the Karataika enterprise “Friendship of Peoples.”

To demonstrate the idea about the dangers on the edge and the perception of the missionary role in conquering it, I present here a longer extract from Pavel’s mission notes circulated in the church:

Referring immodestly to his fearlessness in his conquest of faraway places full of evil forces and possessed people, Pavel implicitly framed himself as an apostle working at the end of time. When listening to him or reading his text, my impression was that he saw himself as a tool who enjoyed his own instrumentality. It is evident in the language he uses. As one can see, he writes in biblical language. The random character of using quotations like “the abomination of desolation” (Matthew 24:15) or “spiritual wickedness in high places,” referring to “pagan” sanctuaries (Ephesians 6:12) illustrates how his language was to be taken as a reenactment of divine words and early apostolic travels, only to be enhanced by elements of prophecy (“the snowstorm will stop”) and confirmations of God’s supremacy over Satan.

There are many parallels between Christian and Communist ideologies. As briefly discussed above, one of them is the idea of mastery (osvoyenie) of the remotest areas and an implicit attempt at the mastery of time in its linear logic (see chap. 1). When analyzing the socialist temporality of the Stalinist period, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (2006, 359), referring to Boris Groys and some others, has argued that socialist acceleration of time and frantic rushing on the surface actually froze time. A similar tension, although somewhat inverted, can be found in the Baptist ideas of temporality. They preach a complete change to outsiders while claiming that true Christians are not entangled with the changing world. Pavel claimed that the true church would always remain the same, “early apostolic” by its nature (despite all the material innovations they used eagerly). None of the other self-proclaimed Christian churches, including the ones of the registered union, could remain the same because they were hopelessly enmeshed in the changing world.

As the early apostolic church had stopped short before the work was finished, the task of finishing the job fell on the shoulders of a small community of the saved people in the land where the Antichrist had recently hit the hardest. As a visiting missionary from Petrozavodsk once said in a sermon, “Lord gave the honor to reach the last edge to our brotherhood,” making clear that they were unique in their endeavor to conquer the land’s edge. Pavel, with his fellow ministers, was there in a frenzied haste to save others. They shared with Communists a sense of being the chosen ones as well as a model of abrupt rupture on the axis of the past and future; they read the present through the lens of a utopian future and operated on an assumption of speeding up the fulfilment of cosmic promises and being involved in conquering space to its ends (cf. Etkind 2005; Halfin 2002; Ssorin-Chaikov 2006).

Pavel seemed to be always in a rush, usually not staying longer than half a day at one place when on a mission trip in the tundra—to talk and not so much to listen. His, like others’ accounts of mission trips, reveal the quality of hurrying across the tundra, overcoming constant obstacles on the way. Often, they entail fewer descriptions of witnessing and conversion (which tend to be short and standardized), and instead entail long descriptions of all kinds of perilous situations on the road, including mechanical problems with their all-terrain vehicle, satellite navigation, and threats from administrators.

Missionaries needed to hurry up, because there were many who had not heard of Jesus yet, as they said. Pavel had become one among many enthusiastic collectors of unevangelized Indigenous peoples. In his statements, he was talking of saving the Nenets people or the Komi people. Converting a few members from one ethnic group seemed to fulfill Jesus’s “missionary command.” It was important that all nations be proselytized (Matthew 24:14; see also Kryuchkov 2000, 4). Evangelizing all ethnic groups living in the ex–Soviet Union alone appeared to shift the balance and remove the last obstacles for the big final events. (As in Roman times, all nations seemed to live in “the known world.”) From the pulpit, senior Baptists expressed their joy that in their brotherhood there were over fifty nationalities (unquestioned objective entities) from all over the ex–Soviet Union, including twenty-odd “small peoples” (i.e., northern minorities), which allowed them to call their union proudly “a multinational family” or “multinational brotherhood.”

Every year plans were made for a year ahead at the highest administrative level in the International Union. As in Soviet state practices, the element of fulfilling a plan and reporting even bigger numbers was a ritual part of annual conferences. Some report makers remark apologetically that numbers were not important; however, they then go on to provide a detailed account of how many trips, how many kilometers, and how many converts they have achieved during the last year. A conversion of somebody from a “new” ethnic group causes particular excitement, as it enables one more “nation” to be added on the list (see, e.g., Bratskiy listok 2001, 501–2, 513, 532; Ural’skoe 1999, 34; Yamalo-Nenetskiy 1998). The Unregistered Baptists were full of confidence that they were moving toward a completion encompassing all peoples and areas.

However, the variety of ethnic groups speaking in different languages complicate everyday practical arrangements for the missionaries, especially in terms of effective communication. Notably, learning local languages and translating scriptures have no significance whatsoever in the agenda of the Unregistered Baptists. Pavel was neither learning Nenets nor organizing translations of scriptures into it. Rather, he relied on the Russian version of the Bible, local interpreters, and especially schooling of the young Nenets generation in Russian.¹⁵ In everyday workings, Russian was seen to have an instrumental value for communicative purposes. And yet, as they said, this was already planned by God, as there was nothing left to chance—a concept that does not exist among evangelicals—on the path of historical progression. To confirm this, Pavel told me that the creation of the Soviet Union was in God’s plan exactly for the purpose of bringing more believers together who could communicate with one another in the same language, implicitly working in the paradigm of the Russian (Slavic) messianic mission. Like other Ukrainians, Pavel knew that Russian had advantages in “godly matters” over Ukrainian or Nenets (cf. Wanner 2007, 26).¹⁶

Unwittingly, Unregistered Baptists had been forming a new myth of Holy Russia in which events of cosmic importance were unfolding. According to Kryuchkov, it was not a coincidence that the true and incorruptible church emerged in the Soviet Union. Satan had chosen “one-sixth of the earth” for its battlefield by establishing the first atheist state in the world there. God responded by carrying out a great spiritual awakening of the true church in 1961 (Kryuchkov 2008, 210). Kryuchkov argued that members started building the church from scratch, as they had nobody to take a tradition over, or as he put it, “The style of the brotherhood’s spiritual life we took from the texts of early apostles, gospel, and the Holy Spirit” (Tserkov’ 2008, 201). Like so many other accounts of seceded Christian groups, they seemed to need both an element of continuity for the sake of universal claims and an element of a fresh beginning for the sake of emotional intensity and purity. They thus acted as restorers of the divine will and revolutionaries at the same time (cf. Humphrey 2014).

Paradoxically, despite or because of their outworldliness, Baptists believed that they were making world history. Even if everything happened because God had planned it, in one or another way, the deeds of “his people” were silently assumed to make a difference because God was dwelling in them. For example, one did not need to propose any sociological explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pavel and others argued that on Christmas Day 1991, the day Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, “atheism capitulated” because loving Christ came to annihilate the devil’s work after the blood of the saints had been spilled and a multitude of prayers were said for thirty years (see also Tserkov’ 2008, 24, 196–97).

In their sermons, the Unregistered Baptist pastors called upon church members to stay “strangers” to the world. As noted above, although Soviet Baptists were a product of the political predicament in which they lived, most of them, and especially the Unregistered Baptists, never discussed politics publicly, as they were not supposed to delve (vnikat’) into it. The only exceptions to this political disengagement occurred when policy infringed on religious freedom, a constitutional right that existed only on paper in Soviet times. As a rule, the Unregistered Baptist pastors preached against participating in contemporary “sodomite culture” (sodomskaya kul’tura) in which the main channels for Satan’s work were television, theater, cinema, concerts, sport events, and, eventually, the Internet. Russian Registered Baptists were known to increasingly participate in these sins.

Unregistered Baptists claimed that they were just different from the others. This distinction was partly visible, or as visiting missionary Viktor told me, “Outer appearances mirrored what was inside the person.” Inner purity had to be achieved through disciplined behavior—in everyday life, Christians were expected to follow certain standards of conduct, outlook, and cleanliness. Some rules could be traced directly back to certain scriptural passages; others were said to correspond to the spirit (po dukhu). Unlike Registered Baptists, Unregistered Baptists avoided wearing mainstream or “fashionable” clothes. This concerned women more than men. Nenets women fitted easily with these demands, as they never wore trousers or used makeup anyway. Their colorful dresses were accepted as part of their “culture.” Men were far less restricted in their outlook. While some younger Nenets men wore fake designer jeans and jackets bought at the Vorkuta market, others wore secondhand suits, often too big for men of such small stature. Most other aspects of “sodomite culture,” like secular forms of entertainment and mass media, were largely out of reach for tundra dwellers.

Figure 3.5. Pavel gives a sermon in a Nenets mya, July 2002.

Even more serious accusations toward the Registered Baptists were that they practiced marriage with unbelievers (i.e., non-Baptists), divorce, and birth control. Supposedly, this never happened in the unregistered brotherhood that functioned as an endogamous unit. If one did not follow the rules, other church members were quick to point to one’s misconduct, which sometimes led to excommunication or to not being accepted as a church member in the first place. For instance, birth control was not used among the Independents until very recently. Yet I heard of a Nenets woman who had a contraceptive device and because of that she was not baptized before she had it removed (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 350–51). This was revealed only at the last moment in a closed session before baptism in which missionaries systematically inquired about the candidate’s readiness for the act. Although this was a doctor’s prescription that she dutifully fulfilled, in the imagination of the Baptists, this was yet another example of Satan’s cunning and evil work.

At first glance, there are some striking parallels between the Unregistered Baptists and the Independent Nenets, especially in the way they have delineated the borders of their communities and managed to avoid the state interfering in their lives. The issue of registration is especially relevant in this context. Yet, in detail, these two societies can hardly be more dissimilar. The main difference lies in the way ideological borders are drawn and managed. While the Independent Nenets were literally living outside state institutions to pursue the lifestyle of their ancestors and engaged with Russians cautiously, Baptists were defined by their militant opposition to the state. Most of them were employed and schooled by the state. Practically, Unregistered Baptists were living as separated from the world as possible. Wanner (2007, 77) has stressed the importance of homes for unregistered believers, “The home not only became a sacred place, but it also functioned as something of a total institution, the hub of social, leisure, often professional, and, of course, spiritual needs.” They actively sought to stay outside the state as an enclave by claiming to have become a transcendent collective body, believing that their souls were outside the world and their bodies were in the world, which was declared to be close to its end. The antagonism of great forces defined the scene. In everyday life, the state and corrupt “moderns,” including the state-sanctioned Registered Baptists, enabled the Unregistered Baptists to sustain their identity.

Unlike the Unregistered Baptists of the Soviet era, the Independent Nenets did not develop an elaborate ideology of withdrawing from the state. They did not have disciplined practices for group formation, nor did they entertain the discourse of strict exclusion and inclusion (cf. Humphrey 2001). Independent families, autonomous in their decisions (on the scale of Independents versus others), were living as they found best. Indeed, they regarded outsiders as a danger and the Russian (lutsa) world as highly polluted but in a very different and negotiable way. The borders were permeable (as I have discussed in the introduction and chapter 1). Nenets argued that there were risks and these were a part of their life. With the coming of Christianity in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, there were new rules that introduced unnegotiable convictions and fixed forms of belonging. One result of this was the segregation of the community into different groups in entirely new ways.