In the Cauldron of Russia

In the Cauldron of Russia, 1869–1933 is the autobiography of Ivan Stepanovich Prokhanov, the foremost leader of the Russian Evangelical Christian movement. Subtitled “the life of an optimist in the land of pessimism,” it tells his own story alongside a history of the Russian Evangelical Christian Union he founded and led.

Prokhanov recounts his spiritual awakening against the atheism and pessimism that dominated the Russian intelligentsia of his youth. Converted in 1886 and baptized in 1887, he gave up a promising engineering career to preach, and built the evangelical movement into a mass following through the last years of tsarism, the Revolution, and the early Soviet years.

Much of the book documents what it cost to hold and spread that faith — evangelical life under both tsarist persecution and the officially atheist Soviet state, including arrests, censorship, and encounters with the Cheka. Written in exile and published in New York in 1933, it is a firsthand record of Christian conviction sustained through decades of hostility.

Our public-domain edition presents the 1933 New York text — the only English version — in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link to a free source as well.

This is a modern reading edition of In the Cauldron of Russia, the autobiography Ivan Stepanovich Prokhanov (1869–1935) published in New York in 1933, two years before he died.

He grew up among the Molokans of the Caucasus — a dissenting people the Orthodox Church and the state both treated as sectarians — was converted young, and spent his life building an evangelical movement in Russia: through the persecutions of the tsars, through the revolution, and then under the Cheka. He was imprisoned twice. He went abroad and came back, and went abroad again, and wrote this at the end. He gave it the subtitle "The Life of an Optimist in the Land of Pessimism".

On its copyright. The book carries no copyright notice anywhere in it, and under the Copyright Act of 1909 a work published in the United States without notice entered the public domain on publication. HathiTrust's copyright review records it as public domain on that basis. Prokhanov died in 1935, so it is also out of copyright by term in every country that measures from the author's death.

A note on what we changed. We set this edition from the Internet Archive's scan, and the work was mechanical; every rule is written down. We removed the page numbers and running heads, rejoined the words broken at the end of a line, repaired the letter-shapes this printing loses, and set the chapter titles from the headings the printer put on the page.

The book is illustrated, and its plates are printed sideways, so their captions were scanned rotated and came back as eight paragraphs of nothing — "(oz] a8ed vas skemyprey d14991q Bingssajod" is "(see page 20) St. Petersburg Electric Railways" upside down. Those we removed, because the plates are not in this edition and the captions are not Prokhanov's text. A passage long enough to be his own writing is never removed on those grounds, however badly the scan has treated it; it is reported and left.

What we did not change. We did not rewrite a sentence or smooth his English, which is a Russian's English and is the better for being left alone. The free scan is linked from this book's page.