Shtundists


The Shtundists are the predecessors of several Evangelical Protestant groups in Ukraine and across the former Soviet Union.

History

The movement refers to evangelical groups that emerged among Ukrainian peasants in the southwestern region of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. The Shtundists were heavily influenced by German Baptists, Pietists and Mennonites that settled in the southern parts of the Russian Empire, and somewhat by indigenous Spiritual Christians. Their origin is associated with access to Bibles from the "British and Foreign Bible Society."
The word Shtundist is derived from the German word Stunde, in reference to the practice of setting aside an hour for daily bible study. The term was originally used in a derogatory sense, but has also been adopted by many adherents to this tradition.

Creed

An article in 1896 describes their "Creed":
The Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and writer Sergey Stepniak described in 1905 his impressions of their "religious doctrine" that he witnessed while growing up in Ukraine:
In the 1890s, Pobedonostzev, supervisor of the Russian Orthodox Church, ordered all heretics and sectarians, non-Orthodox faiths of ethnic Russians, to be reformed or punished. During this time many were persecuted, arrested, beaten and thousands were exiled to Siberia and the Caucasus.

Unification of related denominations

Another revival that led to the formation of a denomination known as the Evangelical Christians which first appeared in 1909 when a British missionary, Granville Radstock, started preaching among the imperial Russian aristocracy. Led by the engineer Ivan Prokhanov and mostly rooted in the Pietist tradition, they formed a nationwide association in St Petersburg, the All-Russian Evangelical Christian Union. Prokhanov's parents had left the Spiritual Christian Molokan faith, and many Molokane transformed to his similar but more organized faith form. These evangelical groups came under pressure in Soviet times, with many adherents being incarcerated or deported.
Conditions changed somewhat during the late 1940s, when most evangelical, Baptist and Pentecostal groups were led, with some pressure from the Soviet state, to form the All-Soviet Association of Evangelical Baptist Christians, which was later also joined by Mennonites.

Recent history

Prior to its independence in 1991, Ukraine was home to the second largest Baptist community in the world, after the United States, and was called the “Bible Belt” of the Soviet Union. Despite mass emigration of formerly persecuted Ukrainian protestants into the West, Ukraine's Baptists continue to be the largest Protestant denomination in Ukraine and the country has the second highest number of Baptist churches in the world.
In Russia, the Evangelical Christian Baptists still form the largest Protestant denomination with about 80,000 adherents.
During the late 20th century, Shtundism also extended its influence to Germany when many former Soviet citizens of German origin emigrated there and set up parishes and gospel halls, mostly referring to themselves as "Evangeliumschristen".
The Shtundists helped many Jews in Ukraine hide from the Nazis during the Holocaust.