Evangelsk (city project)

The city was supposed to be located at the beginning of the Ob River - the confluence of the Biya and Katun rivers. The initiator of the project was the poet, engineer and religious activist Ivan Prokhanov , who managed to achieve the creation of effective agricultural Christian communes in different places of the Soviet Union ^[1] .

It was assumed that the city according to its layout would resemble the sun: in the center - an area with a diameter of 2 versts , surrounded by prayer houses , schools, hospitals, etc .; from it radiate the streets drowning in the greenery of gardens and groves. A powerful spotlight - “sun” shines from the square. The city was supposed to maintain Christian order and cleanliness, and in the suburbs - to organize agricultural enterprises for gardening , beekeeping , fine-fleece sheep breeding , horse breeding , silkworm breeding , etc. ^[2] .

The prototype of the Vertograd commune in Crimea, near Sofiyivka , which Prokhanov organized in 1894 ^[3], was a prototype of Evangelsk. The artisans of Vertograd were engaged in agricultural labor, and in their free time - reading the Holy Scriptures . As a result of tougher persecution of Protestants in the Russian Empire, the commune was forced to cease operations in 1898. However, in the future, Prokhanov used this experience, in particular, already in the Soviet period, becoming the inspirer and organizer of the Christian labor communes movement that swept many regions of the USSR ^{[4] [5] [6]} .

This movement received official support in the first decade of Soviet power. For example, the Thirteenth Congress of the RCP (B.) In 1924, after an internal party discussion, decided: “With a skillful approach, it is necessary to direct significant economic and cultural elements among sectarians into the mainstream of Soviet work” ^[3] .

A large-scale prokhanov project for the construction of Evangelsk became one of the stages of the movement of Christian labor cooperation ^[1] . In November 1926, at the end of the Tenth All-Union Congress of Evangelical Christians, on his initiative, experts from among the believers took up the development of the project. This job took less than a year. According to the historian and theologian Andrei Puzynin, Evangelsk became the “apogee” of Ivan Prokhanov's post-millennialism , his idea of ​​the ideal organization of the Christian commune, built on the principles of restored apostolic Christianity ^[7] .

The project was supported by the secretary of the Anti-Religious Commission under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks , an employee of the OGPU Evgeny Tuchkov . According to Lev Mitrokhin , it was Tuchkov who proposed the project a second name - “City of the Sun” ^[8] , in honor of the medieval utopia Tommaso Campanella . According to the religious scholar Andrei Savin, Tuchkov’s support was most likely explained by the desire to liberate the major cities of the USSR from the evangelists, gathering them all in one place where it would be easier to monitor them to his department ^[9] .

Prokhanov received permission in the People's Commissariat for land allocation and survey work. To this end, Prokhanov went to Siberia in August 1927. After talking with local historians and other experts, a place for the city was chosen. Here Prokhanov and the believers accompanying him (engineer M.P. Shop-Mishich, chairman of the Siberian department of ALL, M. A. Orlov and others) September 11 made a symbolic landing of cedar and American maple, and also held a worship service ^[3] .

Things didn’t go beyond symbolic planting of trees. At a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on May 17, 1928, JV Stalin made a statement about the "egregious fact" of the permission of the resettlement department of the People's Commissariat of the RSFSR to organize a "religious city" in Siberia. The Politburo instructed Emelyan Yaroslavsky to make a report on the situation at the next meeting. After Yaroslavsky’s speech on May 25, the Politburo instructed the People’s Commissariat to “liquidate the case” ^[9] .

The historian Savin wrote that this decision of the Politburo very symbolically coincided with a general change and tightening of state policy from the NEP to collectivization , during which the religious question in the USSR had to find its “final solution” through explicit administrative-prohibitive and repressive measures. Subtle KGB combinations became unnecessarily complicated and unnecessary in the eyes of the Soviet leaders ^[9] .

Hope for their city of the Sun lived for some time among evangelical Christians and Baptists. As an example, historians Popov and Savin cite the words of Baptist Manchenko, which he said at a village gathering in the village of Solon, Krasnoyarsk Territory, dedicated to campaigning for a collective farm: “To us, Baptists, a new city will be built in the center of Siberia called“ The Sun ”, where alone will live Baptists and have their own production, then it will be good for us ” ^[9] .

• Dementiev A.A. Aven-Jezer: The Gospel Movement in Primorye 1898-1990 . - Vladivostok: Russian Island, 2011 .-- 272 p. - 1,500 copies - ISBN 978-5-93577-054-2 .
• Mitrokhin L. N. Baptism: history and modernity (philosophical and sociological essays). - SPb. : RKHGI , 1997 .-- 480 p. - 2500 copies. - ISBN 5-88812-037-5 .
• Nikolskaya T.K. Russian Protestantism and State Power in 1905-1991. - SPb. : Publishing House of the European University in St. Petersburg , 2009. - 356 p. - (Territories of history; Issue 2). - ISBN 978-5-94380-081-8 .
• Puzynin A.P. The tradition of evangelical Christians. The study of self-identification and theology from its inception to the present day. - M .: Bible and Theological Institute of St. Apostle Andrew , 2010 .-- 523 p. - ISBN 978-5-89647-235-3 .
• Popov V.A. Siberian Utopia of the Baptists // Nezavisimaya gazeta . - Moscow, 2010.
• Popov V. A. Christian Communities of Prokhanov // Science and Religion . - 1990. - No. 7 . - S. 48-52 .
• Savin A. I. “City of the sun”: on the history of a religious utopia in Soviet Russia // Bulletin of Novosibirsk State University. - Novosibirsk: NSU , 2009.- T. 8 , no. 1 . - S. 45-49 .