The prophet on trial: Baptist dissenters before the Soviet courts, 1960s–1980s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the courtroom behaviour of adherents of the oppositional dissenter wing within the Evangelical Baptist community in the Soviet Union, who faced trials for violating Soviet religious laws between the 1960s and 1980s. The analysis reveals that the accused believers developed a nuanced defence strategy encompassing three core elements: mobilizing support from their fellow believers in courtrooms, constructing communicative patterns that involved drawing prosecutors and judges into theologically driven dialogues about truth, and employing distinctive rhetoric aimed at questioning the legal foundations and legitimacy of Soviet religious policy. The accused Baptists adopted a marked confrontational stance towards state officials in charge of criminal prosecutions and trials, striving to overcome them in argument. Ultimately, the courtrooms became a platform for them to voice and promote their faith-based views on state politics and freedom.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".