Abstract
The last fifty years of the Soviet era were marked by the ongoing development of policies to monitor religious organizations and their members, with local officials varying in their enforcement of these policies. Despite the Marxist-Leninist line that religion would wither away and some periods seeing harsher anti-religious restrictions than others, religious organizations—including the largest Protestant denomination in the Soviet Union, the Evangelical Christians-Baptists (ECB)—nevertheless persisted and often flourished. Women constituted 70 to 80 percent of ECB congregations’ official membership. And although children and youth were an essential focus of ECB energy, little scholarly work has been done concerning their experiences growing up in the Soviet Union. This dissertation draws upon oral history, extensive archival work, self-published dissident literature (samizdat), and photographs. It examines the lived religion of women and children in the ECB communities of four Siberian provinces in the period from World War II until 1991. The project demonstrates how ECB women’s activism constituted a dual subversion; they facilitated an enduring evangelicalism in the face of hostile state monitoring of and attempted patriarchal hegemony within their congregations. This study also shows that children and youth became a clear battleground due to the symbolic notion of them constituting the “future” for both churches and communists. Throughout this dissertation, sites of ambiguity emerge. Neither the official narrative (“Evangelical women are a constant threat, and their children are problems to be solved.”) nor the standard evangelical narrative (“Soviet authorities are constant evil oppressors.”) was an accurate portrayal of reality. Instead, the lived experience of ECB women and children shows a more complex story than these standard, mutually hyperbolic narratives dared admit.