Russia on Our Mind

Abstract Russia has had a bad reputation in the West for most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine in February 2022 reversed any lingering optimism that followed in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost reform programs at the end of the 1980s. Western Pentecostals not only have shared this negative view of Russia but also have viewed Russia in a negative eschatological light. This article aims to show, however, that Western Pentecostal perceptions have not always been negative, at least in early Pentecostalism. By a historical analysis of Western Pentecostal periodicals from the last years of the Russian Empire (1910–1917), through the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), to the initial years of the Soviet Union (1922–1929), the article demonstrates that perceptions of early Western Pentecostals fluctuated quite significantly in this period and were due to a changing historical situation and the efforts of influential leaders like William Fetler. The article concludes with an analysis of the reasons for the shifting perceptions.