500 Years of Protestants in Russia
1% - 2% of Russians are Protestants. Here's a bit of their history...
It’s no secret that the vast majority of Christians in Russia are Orthodox. There are relatively few Catholics or Protestants here. Once in St. Petersburg, someone actually walked up to me and said, “You are from America? What is ‘Protestant’? I have heard of it, but I don’t really know what it is.”
I am happy to be an Orthodox Christian, and a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, having been Protestant for the first 30 years of my life, it is interesting to learn more about the role that Protestantism played in the history of Russia. I recently started looking into it, and was intrigued to discover that there have been Protestants in Russia for more than 500 years.
A significant difference between Russian Protestantism, and American Protestantism, is that Russian Protestants are often taught to deeply distrust the Orthodox Church, and even to consider it unchristian. In America, Protestants are frequently taught to distrust Roman Catholics, but Orthodoxy is often unknown to them. In Russia, however, the vast majority of Christians are Orthodox, and thus the rare Protestant community tends to place strong emotional barriers between itself and the Orthodox Christian Faith. This can make it especially difficult to get Russian Protestants to consider conversion to Holy Orthodoxy.
The first Protestant communities appeared in Russia during the lifetime of Martin Luther, while Russia was under the reign of Tsar Vasily III, who invited craftsmen, tradesmen and pharmacists to the country. Subsequent tsars invited Protestant specialists to Russia — Swedish and German merchants, healers, artisans — who were valued for their good moral and professional qualities. During the reign of Boris Godunov, in the very center of Moscow, a church was built with the tsar's money and preachers from Germany were specially invited there.
The number of Protestants in Russia increased not only because of guest specialists, but also because of political events, such as the annexation of the Baltic States, Poland, and later (in the 19th century) Finland. By the end of the 17th century, there were about 30,000 Protestants in the country, and a hundred years later there were more than 20,000 Protestants in St. Petersburg alone. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Protestants accounted for 5% of the total population of Russia, and in the northern capital, they were over 12%.
By this time (late 19th-early 20th centuries), Russian Protestantism was influenced by highly influential personalities such as Vasily Alexandrovich Pashkov (1831-1902) - a Russian nobleman, whose homes are still known in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the founder of a religious movement known as the Evangelical Christians-Pashkovtsy; Vasily Guryevich Pavlov (1854 - 1924) - Russian missionary and preacher, one of the founders and first leaders of the Russian Baptist Union; and Ivan Yefimovich Voronaev (1885 - 1937), who was a founder of the Pentecostal movement in the USSR.
Vasily Alexandrovich Pashkov (April 2, 1831 - January 30, 1902) was one of the richest people in the Russian Empire, and he led a life full of entertainment as a capital aristocrat. At home, he arranged balls for the emperor. Later, after the religious conversion of Pashkov, ordinary peasants prayed in the same house along with representatives of the highest St. Petersburg nobility.
Vasily Pashkov devoted himself to Christian service - active and multifaceted. He is known for extensive philanthropy as well as missionary funding. Pashkov created and headed the Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Moral Reading for the dissemination of Christian literature, led the movement of Evangelical Christians, who began to be called "Pashkovites". This movement was aimed at the spiritual transformation and renewal of society - as opposed to the growing nihilistic and revolutionary moods.
Pashkov's activity provoked opposition from representatives of state power and the Russian Orthodox Church. Given his high status, he was punished only by deportation from Russia, and he ended his days in exile. Some modern Protestant denominations in the post-Soviet space consider themselves the successors of the Pashkovites.
Vasily Gurevich Pavlov (February 1, 1854 - April 14, 1924) was a Russian missionary and preacher, one of the founders and first leaders of the Union of Russian Baptists.
After completing of a one-year course of study at a Protestant theological school, he spent much of his early life making trips to the Samara, Kiev, Kherson, and Mogilev provinces, where he preached and performed baptisms. Because of his religious activities, he twice served a four-year term of exile in Orenburg.
During the revolution of 1905, V. G. Pavlov supported constitutional reforms related to the establishment of the principle of freedom of conscience. With the direct participation of Pavlov, a package of amendments to the legislation regulating the registration of non-Orthodox religious organizations was prepared.
Pavlov became the editor-in-chief of the Baptist magazine, and he was unanimously elected chairman of the Baptist Union of Russia.
After the revolution of 1917, V. G. Pavlov was actively involved in the work of uniting the Union of Baptists of Russia with the All-Russian Union of Evangelical Christians, for which he held a number of joint conferences and congresses in 1920.
Pavlov composed a significant number of apologetic, dogmatic and exegetical works, journal articles, and textbooks. He translated the "Hamburg Confession of Faith" from German into Russian. Many Russian Baptists used it as a model for developing their own confessions of faith. Pavlov also translated a number of sermons and apologetic works by German and English Protestants. He also wrote "The Truth About the Baptists", which was the first systematic work on the history of Russian Baptists.
Nikita Petrovich Cherkasov (April 16, 1885 - November 5, 1937) went down in history under the name of Ivan Voronaev, which he received when applying for a fake passport.
In 1912 he emigrated to the United States with his wife, and graduated from Bible College in Berkeley, California. After that, he led the Slavic Baptist Church in Seattle for several years. In New York, he became acquainted with the teachings of the Pentecostals and adopted the practice of "speaking in tongues". In 1919 he organized the Russian Pentecostal Church in New York.
In 1921, together with the Voronaev family, he returned to Russia and settled in Odessa, where on November 12, 1921, he started the first Pentecostal congregation in that region.
A few years later, the Union of Christians of the Evangelical Faith (KhEV) was formed, with Ivan Voronaev as its chairman. At the second All-Ukrainian Congress of KhEV held in 1926, 350 churches and 17,000 believers were reported. By this time, Pentecostal communities appeared in almost all regions of Ukraine, as well as in the central regions of Russia, in the Urals, the Caucasus and Siberia. In his (presumably last) letter to the General Council of the Assemblies of God in August 1929, Voronaev reported 25,000 members. Until his arrest, I. E. Voronaev was a staff member of the General Council of the Assemblies of God. In 1930, Ivan Efimovich Voronaev and his associates were arrested and exiled.
In the summer of 1936, Voronaev was sent into exile in the Kaluga region. At this time, he secretly came to Odessa, where he visited the grave of his daughter Vera. In October of the same year, Voronaev was arrested a second time, sentenced to 5 years and sent to a prison camp.
On November 2, 1937, Voronaev was sentenced to death by an NKVD troika. The sentence was carried out on November 5, 1937 in a camp near Mariinsky.
The atheistic soviet government heavily persecuted Protestant leaders and congregations. During the years of the USSR, many Protestants had to keep a low profile and conduct services in secret.
Fast forward to today, and most major Protestant denominations can be found in Russia, including Lutherans, Baptists, Reformed, Nazarenes, and Pentecostals. Around 1% - 2% of Russia’s population identifies as Protestant, with somewhere between 1.5 million - 3 million total adherents.
One can even find the Russian equivalent of Protestant mega-churches, with thousands attending services on Sunday mornings. For example, consider the “Good News” (Благая Весть) church in Moscow. If it wasn’t for the Cyrillic letters and Russian words, the following photo could easily be mistaken for a Protestant church billboard in America:
Pavel has been the Senior Pastor of the Good News church since 2020. He is the oldest son of pastor Rick and Denise Renner. In January, 1991, he moved to Latvia with his parents and brothers. In 2000, he and his family moved to Moscow where he set up a recording studio at the Good News church. The studio has recorded various church praise bands, professional music groups, and performers from Russia and other CIS countries.
Pavel married Polina Sveshnikova in 2004. Today, Polina leads the "Family and Childhood" ministry at Good News church. Pavel and Polina have four children - two sons and two daughters.
Just as in America, Russian Protestants come in many different flavors, with widely varying beliefs and practices. Lutherans, Baptists, Nazarenes, and Seventh Day Adventists differ from one another in numerous ways. In that sense, the state of Protestantism in Russia is not unlike the situation elsewhere in the world.
According to official data from the Russian Ministry of Justice, there are more than 4,000 registered Protestant churches in Russia. There are also many which are unregistered.
Something like as many Protestants in Russia as Orthodox in America?