“I Will Be His Witness until Death”

Abstract

The Second World War brought about a new era for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Eastern Europe. Soviet Witnesses organized a complex underground organization, ran dangerous smuggling operations, and distributed illegal literature printed on secret presses. The remarkable activity of postwar Witness communities suggests the need to rethink the boundaries of dissent and conformity during the late Stalin era. The state treated the newly minted citizens in its borderlands as a potential fifth column, and directed much of its repressive capacity toward the wholesale elimination of people and groups who represented a threat to the Sovietization process. Viewed in this light, Witnesses’ subversive actions were taken far more seriously because of their geographic location in a politically sensitive region. The state arrested hundreds of Witnesses and undertook two mass exiles of Witnesses and their families from the western borderlands to Siberia.