Talk:William J. Samarin

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Samarin's Russian heritage

In 2012 I got to know Dr. Samarin somewhat well. He was our house guest for about 2 weeks because he wanted to interview me and use my extensive library about the various Spiritual Christians from Russia that migrated to California from the Southern Caucasus, which included our families. For most of my life I knew his father, 4 brothers and many nephews in California.

Samarin's great-grandfather was among the first to immigrate to Los Angeles from the Southern Caucasus with a mixture of Spiritual Christians -- non-Orthodox sectarians. A sketchy partial biography of him published in 1949 was posted online with corrections -- "Ivan G. Samarin -- The Great Molokan Communicator." It is not known if I.G. Samarin was of the Molokan faith because he worked among all tribes of Spiritual Christians from Russia and the Russian government.

Bill Samarin grew up among Spiritual Christian Dukh-i-zhizniki in Los Angeles, which he did not know until we met in 2012. Very few, if any, of the descendants of the Spiritual Christian from Russian in Southern California knew much about their actual history which was permeated with misinformation and omissions. Dr. Samarin's understanding was no better. He grew up in Boyle Heights District of Los Angeles in the 1930s-1940s and left the community about age 20 to become a Grace Brethren missionary with a girl who met him on his first day while they were enrolling at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA). Their American church marriage excommunicated him from the faiths of his heritage Russian community.

I had studied his book Tongues of Men and Angels and was prepared to quiz him about how he came to write it given his ethnic roots among diverse Spiritual Christian Pryguny (Jumpers), Maksimisty, and related zealous faiths from Russia, and their association with the Azusa Street Revival. I learned none of that had anything to do with the book. He agreed to us recording his story about the book's origin on video, which I intend to post.

In-Progress ...

Conovaloff (talk) 01:33, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]