ABSTRACT
General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev is not simply directing a regime policy of perestroika but is in a battle for its implementation and effectiveness. Under the banner of perestroika, accompanied by pennants of glasnost and “democratization,” Soviet society and the communist party-state system have entered a significant new era, an era of change and of conflicts over the nature of change. Churches of foreign initiation yet now fully indigenous, active evangelical Christians in a Communist society, they are living out an apparent oxymoron: “Soviet evangelicals.” From the nineteenth century to the present, the Russian, then the Soviet, state has not administered a consistent program or policy approach vis-a-vis the Protestants. After the 1917 revolutions and in the early Soviet state, Protestant evangelicals flourished. Both the separation of church and state in the Bolshevik decree of 1918 and the “complex Leninism” of the early operation of a Soviet state created space within which growth of the indigenous Protestant sects was significant.
