When the Russian army first came over Ukraine’s eastern border in 2022, about 3.5 million people fled west to Poland. Many came through Kraków, where Aleksander Saško Nezamutdinov is a Ukrainian missionary and church planter.
His 40-member congregation, Christ the Savior Presbyterian Church, worked hard to provide transportation, housing, food, and clothing to the refugees. Then, after the initial rush died down, they saw another thing the Ukrainians needed: books.
“People started looking for resources,” Nezamutdinov said. “But materials in the Ukrainian language were scarce.”
The biggest reason for that was the Soviet Union. During most of the 20th century, the Russian-language government severely restricted the printing of anything in Ukrainian. Books or magazines written by Protestant Christians almost never made the cut.
“[That’s] because Protestants often have connections with other friends and family in the West,” Nezamutdinov. “But also because Protestants are taught to think, which makes them harder to control.”
He sees Russia doing the same now.
“In the sections of Ukraine that have been annexed, one of the first groups [targeted was] Protestant churches,” he said. “They would take over the church buildings, changing the locks and putting a guard at the front. You can see history repeating itself.”
Nezamutdinov and his congregation saw a growing desire among Ukrainians to push back by using their native language. They also saw a need for gospel-centered books on everything from counseling to trauma to Advent devotionals.
So two years ago, Nezamutdinov’s small church started a Ukrainian publishing house.
The Gospel Coalition asked him how they pulled it off, if anyone is interested in the books they’re publishing, and how he has seen God at work.
You named the Ukrainian publishing house Ukrainian Reformation because you’re also repeating history, right?
Yes. In the late 19th century, the Reformed church began flourishing in Ukraine. One big reason was the language they used. The Catholics were using Latin in their mass until 1962, and the Orthodox Church was using Old Slavonic, which is a really ancient Slavic language no one can understand.
The Reformed missionaries, like Luther with the printing press, wanted to give the people the gospel in their own language. They preached and held worship services in Ukrainian, which drew people. Whole villages would come to hear them, churches were started, and the movement was picking up steam.
Those missionaries also started two magazines in Ukrainian to refute atheism, [to] teach church history, and to quote and publish Ukrainian authors. Like Paul, they were trying to make connections between the culture and Christianity: “You’ve heard a philosopher say this; now consider this angle or connection to Scripture or God’s general revelation.” They wanted to show that common grace and general revelation have always been here, that there are traces of it throughout Ukrainian history.
Both of those publications were ended under the Soviet Union. We took our name from one of them, which was called Ukrainian Reformation.
For a church of 40 members to start a publishing house seems like a big undertaking. How did God prepare you for this?
We’d already started publishing theological books in Polish back in 2016 because we had noticed a big need for gospel-centered resources. With connections to Crossway, Desiring God, 9Marks, and Ligonier, we have produced about 70 titles in Polish.
So in the summer of 2022, it wasn’t hard for us to start some Ukrainian translation. We printed 60,000 copies of titles like John Piper’s Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die and R. C. Sproul’s The Donkey Who Carried a King.
The response was so strong that we kept going. We’ve got around 20 titles now. It’s funny—when we do a book in both Polish and Ukrainian, the demand for the Ukrainian language is probably twice as big as for the Polish language book. They move quicker and they get distributed quicker—the market is bigger because there are more Ukrainian Christians.
Are you sending those books back to Ukraine?
Some of them. There are millions of Ukrainian refugees in Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic, so we send books there. But we also send them back into Ukraine.
There are other Christian publishers in Ukraine, but it’s hard for them now. For example, there is often a power shortage. We especially saw this last winter, when Russia was targeting the infrastructure. Our editors and translators in Ukraine couldn’t always work because their electricity was out for hours or days at a time and their computers ran out of charge.
In addition, many Ukrainian publishers are producing literature I’m sure they were not planning to do—titles on counseling, on PTSD, on helping children who have seen something horrifying. They’re shifting to more mercy ministry.
So we said, “OK, we could produce some other things to help out.” We’ve just licensed a good number of books by R. C. Sproul. We are finishing up an Advent devotional by Alistair Begg. And believe it or not, not a single book by Charles Spurgeon exists in the Ukrainian language. So we’re doing Spurgeon, too.
Ukraine has been its own country for more than 30 years. Why are there so few gospel-centered resources in the native language?
Under the 70 years of Soviet rule, the Russian language was everywhere. It was on the television, in the books, in the universities. But it wasn’t like an immigrant who comes to America and wants to learn English. This language was forced, imposed.
So at home, and in the lower schools, everyone spoke Ukrainian. And many of the churches preserved the Ukrainian language, especially in the hymns.
That means for the last 100 years or so, the people have been bilingual. So when communism fell and Christian missionaries poured in, not a lot of effort was put into creating resources in Ukrainian. Because if you put your money and time into creating resources in Russian instead, the people of Ukraine could read it, and so could everyone else in the former USSR. You could reach a lot more people that way.
But now, we see people are using the Ukrainian language more often in order to distance themselves from the influence and ideology of Russia.
It isn’t hard to see the way God has positioned your small church in just the right place at the right time to provide thousands of gospel-centered resources to people looking for comfort and truth in difficult days. How do you see God at work?
I’ve been thinking about that: What are you doing, God? Where is all this going? Three years ago, I would not have thought this would be something we’d be involved with so heavily.
I’m seeing many opportunities. One is in Belarus, which has very close ties to Russia. But the young people are trying to revive the Belarusian language, and we’ll try to help them publish their first Christian book.
I’m also wondering if we could do a conference, where we could supply more pastors with these books we have.
And we’re thinking about adding some kind of app or website with a digital library, because if you’re on the front lines it’s hard to receive shipments. If we had the time and resources, I’d love to build something to get free ebooks into the hands of those on the front.
We do all of this by the grace of God. It is a ministry of our church, and we’re happy to serve the Polish and Ukrainian churches this way.
