Arrest and Imprisonment of Ekaterina Voronaev (1933)

The (un)Forgotten: Story of the Voronaev Children
Missions & Intercultural Studies
Dony K. Donev, D. Min.

Presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies

“On one miserable cold, dark night in March 1933, Mother had gone to bed sick. After midnight a loud knock at the door awakened us. Three Secret Police officers entered and one of them shouted, “Citizen Ekaterina Voronaeff, you are under arrest.” Mother hurriedly dressed. My little brother and sister awoke and began to cry as they saw the police ripping our clothes and mattresses …. I can still see my mother standing in the middle of that awful room with graying hair, lips trembling on her sweet pale face, and her bright blue eyes filled with tears. Heartbroken, Timothy and Hope sobbed a last loving good-bye as our dear mother was dragged away to prison.”

Ekaterina Voronaev would spend 24 long and horrible years in prison before seeing her children again. After being arrested on April 10, 1933 she spent 15 months in the Odessa prison interrogated constantly, 18 hours straight at times, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in mid-Asia. Petition sent to the Aid to Political Prisoners led by Ekaterina Peshkova (wife of Russian author Maxim Gorky) had little effect on the situation. Her children were allowed to see her only once, before she was sent to Siberia.

As both Voronaev parents were now in prison, and their American born boys had been safely returned, Paul, Hope and Timothy remained in Communist Russia. They were all born there, but this was hardly their country. Their parents have travelled the world and returned to their motherland only to find out it had become foreign to them. Paul was born somewhere on the Eastern Asian border, Hope and Timothy in Odessa, but now that they had no city on earth to call home and no one left to look after them. These children truly belonged to Heaven and God…

Arrest and Imprisonment of Rev. Ivan Voronaev (1930)

The (un)Forgotten: Story of the Voronaev Children
Missions & Intercultural Studies
Dony K. Donev, D. Min.

Presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies

The enormity of the movement could not be left unnoticed by the Bolsheviks. After crashing every form of organized life in Russia, sentencing for life in the death camps of Gulag or simply shooting on the spot every leader and visionary of freedom, the atheistic government turned to the only organization apart from the Communist party that could still gather thousands of people – the Christian Church. The persecution of evangelicals was ordered from the very top and began with a full force.

First, in the winter of 1929, the Voronaevs were thrown on the street from their home on 22 Jukovskaya Str. and the father was constantly called and harassed by the Communist police. As soon as a friend took them in his home at 8 Arteoma Str., Ivan was arrested and beaten severely.

Over 800 Russian pastors were arrested and imprisoned in 1930. Some of Voronaev’s closest coworkers, among which B.R. Koltovich, were also taken away by the KGB and Ivan knew his turn was coming soon. His son Paul recalls him praying and “…. pleading with God for days for strength and courage…. Then it happened. It was a cold winter night, we were asleep. It was after the midnight hour. We were rudely awakened by a pounding at the door and someone calling with a loud voice, “Open the door, in the name of the law.”

After a thorough examination of their quarters the agents confiscated boxes of Bibles and religious literature and Rev. Voronaev was taken away.

“Mother walked silently beside him. In a moment, life had become a vacuum; husband taken from her, six children to care for, the youngest not even three years old. How could she endure it! …. Once more father embraced mother and tried to comfort her with the words “Cheer up, dear Katusha. God will take care of you … go back and take care of the children. Everything will be all right …”

For the next several months, Rev. Voronaev was moved around from prison to prison, “….battened, tortured, and kept without visitors or mail privileges. Then without trial, he was sentenced to lifelong exile in a Siberian prison.” On one rare occasion, his second oldest son Peter was allowed to visit him in prison for a period of 10 days. Peter took the difficult journey alone and travelled 11 days by train to Moscow and Kotlas, riverboat to Yst-Vym and secretly hidden on the back of a prison truck to the Siberian consecration camp of UFT-Uza reaching his father’s prison barrack at last. It was the last time any of his children ever saw him.