Moscow, Russia — For the first time since the days of the Czars, a Protestant has been elected mayor of a major Russian city. In run-off elections in the auto-making city of Tolyatti/Volga on March 18, the Evangelical Christian and political independent Sergey Andreyev trounced “United Russia’s” candidate, Alexander Shakhov.
Andreyev won nearly 57 percent of the vote. The Moscow Times reports that the upset occurred despite the national government having poured billions into the city to bail out AvtoVAZ, the city’s largest employer.
The incoming mayor is a member of the Association of Missionary Churches of Evangelical Christians made up of 25 congregations in Russia and the Ukraine. In a recent interview he stated, “I am neither Scientologist, Baptist nor Hare Krishna. I am an Evangelical Christian.”
Andreyev was trained as a lay preacher in St. Petersburg’s Baptist “New Life” congregation before moving to Tolyatti as a 20-year-old school teacher in 1993. The youth organization Living Word, which he founded in Tolyatti 19 years ago, is still described as Baptist.
Though he did not campaign as a Protestant believer, Andreyev made no attempt to hide his religious connections and ran his campaign from the church offices of “Divine Fire”, a local Full-Gospel charismatic congregation.
Lyudmila Kuzmina, head of the Tolyatti branch of Golos, an election-monitoring non-governmental organization (NGO), stated in The Moscow Times that Andreyev was “not entirely independent. The power vertical doesn’t allow it.” Yet she praised Andreyev for his willingness to cooperate with her organization — a rarity among Russian politicians.
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