Baptist Beginnings in Russia and Ukraine Heather J. Coleman Heather J Coleman holds the Canada Research Chair in Imperial Russian History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada
In the 1860s and 1870s, religious communities of Russians and Ukrainians that would later identify themselves as Baptists first arose in unrelated strains in three widely separated regions of the Russian Empire.
T
he history of the first decades of the Russian Baptists is the story of groups in Transcaucasia, Ukraine, and St. Petersburg, gradually finding one another, acknowledging their spiritual kinship, and, by the early 1880s, seeking paths to joint activity. This process of mutual discovery and preliminary organizing was also one of denominational selfdefinition. The combined force of non-Russian models of evangelicalism, the pronouncements of outside observers, and the responses of the state and its established Orthodox Church continually pushed these communities to clarify who they were and what they believed, transforming them from informal sectarian groups into Baptists.1 The question of the origins of Baptist work among Russians and Ukrainians was, from the first conversions in the Russian Empire, a hotly debated one. It remains so to this day. 2 For the issue quickly became intimately intertwined with that of the national legitimacy of believers' spiritual choices Did Slavic evangelicalism arise from local conditions and 24