Protestant Communities of Moscow and the Moscow Region during the Great Terror

The Great Purge has provoked numerous debates about its purpose, scale and mechanism. Different religious victims of mass operation have been a constant topic of research in the recent years; however, they focused primarily on the relationship between the Orthodox church and state, unlike the point of view in this paper. This paper seeks to cast new light on the specifics of persecutions against religious minorities during the Great Purge (1937-1938) in the USSR. Recent research has argued that the Great Purge was provoked by the fear of the Soviet politics to lose elections and by the system failure. In this paper it is argued that, evangelical Christians had fallen victims of religious and political views and fear of internal enemies («the fifth column») among politicians. This project concludes that evangelical Christians were one of the targets of terror. This is demonstrated by archival sources, in particular, records of interrogation, religious brochures and magazines, personal letters and resolutions of the Politburo.