Crypto-Mormons or Pseudo-Mormons?

Western Folklore, Summer 2002 by Eliason, Eric A, Browning, Gary

Despite these cautions, one fact is clear, based on Russian scholarship as well as Noble's, Scott's, and Lyon's reports: Russians in a few specific areas were calling particular neighbors "Mormons" for many years before the 1990 arrival of Latter-day Saint missionaries. But this practice does not answer the question of origins. Unlike the Kakure Kirishitan and remergent Mormon communities in the South Pacific, Russia's "other Mormons" have no clearly documented historical origins. Four possibilities seem likely to explain the use of Mormon in Russia. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and in an extremely large country with a history of limiting the free flow of people and information, several possibilities could operate simultaneously, overlapping with each other. We have found no conclusive disproof of any of these possibilities, but the last one is supported by Russian scholars and our fieldwork. It is unique in its ability to account for virtually every reported case of pre-1990 "Mormons" in Russia.

Missionaries

Tsarist Russia had strict laws against non-Russian Orthodox proselytizing that would have greatly complicated Church missionary efforts, such as that anticipated, but not undertaken, by Orson Hyde and George G. Adams, who were appointed as missionaries to Russia by Joseph Smith in 1843 (Browning 1997:4-5). Laws relaxed enough before the 1917 revolution to allow the Johan and Alma Lindelof family-ethnic Swedes from the Russian Empire's Grand Duchy of Finland who moved to St. Petersburg-to meet with a Latter-day Saint missionary sent from Sweden at their request. The Lindelof parents were baptized in the Neva River in 1895 (Lund 1895:413-15). By 1905 at least two Lindelof children and another Finnish woman in St. Petersburg had joined the Church. As far as is known, the surviving Lindelofs all eventually fled Russia, some of them after serving time in labor camps (Browning 1997:10-12). Perhaps some Lindelofs made an undocumented return to Russia. Maybe some of this wealthy family's friends or domestic help experienced unrecorded conversions and stayed in Russia as an underground tributary into today's Russian "Mormon" communities.8 Despite these possibilities, Latter-day Saint missionaries never established or maintained a continuous, official presence in Russia until 1990.

Migration

Another possibility is that converts from other places immigrated into areas that became part of the Soviet Union. For example, the 1915-16 exodus of 300,000 Armenians from Turkey to the Russian-controlled Caucasus (Chaliand and Rageau 1995:83-89) may have included Latter-day Saint converts from the 1880-1909 mission to Armenians in Turkey and Syria (Deseret News 1996:272; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1997:7). Haifa dozen officially organized LDS congregations now operate in the former Soviet republic of Armenia. It is unknown whether any of these congregations include Latter-day Saint participants in the Armenian exodus or their descendants.9 Many of the early Armenian converts immigrated to Utah.