17th centuries in connection with expatriate communities from western Europe. In the 18th century, under Catherine II (the Great), large numbers of German settlers were invited to the Russian Empire, including Mennonites, Lutherans, Reformed and also Roman Catholics. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, various new religious movements emerged from the Russian Orthodox Church (including Molokans, Dukhobors, Khlysts, and to some extent, Subbotniks, and in 19th century Tolstoyan rural communes), and their existence prepared the ground for Protestantism's future spread. The first Baptist communities within the Russian Empire arose in unrelated strains in three widely separated regions of the Russian Empire (Transcaucasia, Ukraine, and St. Petersburg) in the 1860s and 1870s. In the early twentieth century, Pentecostal groups also formed. In the very early years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks focused their anti-religious efforts on the Russian Orthodox Church and it appeared to take a less hostile position towards the 'sectarians'. Already before Stalin's rise to power, the situation changed, however. And from the start of the 1930s, Protestants - like other religious groups - experienced the full force of Soviet repression. Churches were shut and religious leaders were arrested and convicted, often charged with anti-Soviet activity. One of the leaders of the Pentecostals movement, Ivan Voronaev, was sentenced to death in 1937, for example. Baptists, Evangelical Christians, and Pentecostals The Second World War saw a relaxation of church-state relations in the Soviet Union and the Protestant community benefited alongside their Russian Orthodox counterparts. In 1944, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists was formed, bringing together the two main strands within Soviet Protestantism. Over the following two years, the leaders of the two main Pentecostal branches within the Soviet Union also agreed to join. The immediate post-war period saw the growth of Baptist and Pentecostal congregations and there was a religious revival in these years. Statistics provided by the leaders of the registered church suggest 250,000 baptised members in 1946 rising to 540,000 by 1958. In fact the influence of the Protestantism was much wider than these figures suggest: in addition to the existence of unregistered Baptist and Pentecostal groups, there were also thousands who attended worship without taking baptism. Many Baptist and Pentecostal congregations were in Ukraine. Women significantly outnumbered men in these congregations, though the pastors were male. By 1991, Ukraine had the second largest Baptist community in the world, behind only the United States. Although the