Short biography of Boris Perchatkin
Boris Perchatkin was born on July 1, 1946, in the city of Mirgorod, Ukraine, into a family of hereditary Protestants.
His grandfather, Viktor Benediktovich Voishvillo (born 1878), a native of the Kingdom of Poland, a participant in the Polish resistance for the liberation of Poland, a hereditary nobleman, a mechanical engineer specializing in electric and steam engines, a graduate of the University of Warsaw, builder of the ports of Vladivostok and Port Arthur, came to faith in 1924 under the preaching of Nikolai Peysti (father of Yarl Peysti) in Vladivostok. He was appointed by Nikolai Peysti to presbyterial service in the Baptist church of the city of Suchan (Partizansk). Arrested in 1933. Executed by shooting. His wife, Evgenia Stepanovna, née Kashura (1891–1977), a native of Ukraine, and the entire family were exiled to Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
His mother, née Lyudmila Viktorovna Voishvillo, born in 1928, was convicted three times, not counting the fact that she grew up in exile. Anatoly Bobrov (1927–early 1947) died in a training plane crash in Mirgorod when Boris was 6 months old. His stepfather, Georgy Mikhailovich Perchatkin (1926–unknown), a Soviet officer, was arrested in 1954 in the GDR for sympathizing with the German people, sentenced to execution, but the sentence was commuted to 25 years in camps. After this, his mother began attending Baptist meetings. For this she was convicted the first time in 1954 to 2 years of imprisonment, and a libelous article was written in the local newspaper accusing her of bringing her son Vladimir into the sect for sacrifice.
Beginning in 1962, Boris started attending an underground Pentecostal church in the city of Nakhodka.
From 1975, he was a participant in the dissident human‑rights movement in the USSR. He investigated, publicized, and protested facts of persecution for religious activity. He wrote and signed letters in defense of those arrested for their convictions. He gave several dozen interviews to Western correspondents about the religious situation in the USSR.
Since 1976, a member of the church council.
In 1977, he persuaded a KGB captain to secretly cooperate in defending believers.
In 1978, the leader of one of the communities in Nakhodka.
In 1980, he was elected in absentia as secretary of the Council of Churches of Pentecostals in the USSR.
Before 1980, he was detained more than ten times by KGB bodies. Over five years, twelve searches were carried out.
In 1979, he made two daring escapes from arrest, thereby delaying imprisonment by a year.
On August 18, 1980, he was arrested by a KGB capture team. The investigation was conducted by the Moscow KGB. During the investigation, he was subjected to “chemical” torture. He served his sentence in Sverdlovsk.
On February 27, 1983, a repeat arrest — under Andropov’s decree on “preventive detention” he spent four months in a death-row cell; his second sentence was served in the Kolyma camps; he was released in 1986.
In 1987, at the request of the U.S. Congress, he wrote a review of the religious situation in the USSR at the beginning of perestroika, after which he was placed under house arrest and regime surveillance.
In the same year, 1987, he met with U.S. Secretary of State Shultz at his invitation to discuss issues of religious freedom and emigration for religious reasons.
On May 30, 1988, he was invited to a meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan as a representative of Protestants in the USSR to discuss problems of freedom of faith and emigration.
July 26, 1988 — arrival in the U.S.; August 5 — an address to the U.S. Congress on the situation of believers in the USSR and the problem of emigration for religious reasons.
From September 1988 until 1991, he preached and gave his testimony in more than fifty American churches in order to raise money and pay for over a thousand invitations for resettlement to the U.S. for religious reasons (no one knew at that time how perestroika would end).
In November 1988, he founded a Christian human‑rights organization that continues to function to the present day.
During that period, he was invited three times to the U.S. Congress as a speaker on the religious situation in the former USSR.
Dozens of times he represented the interests of the persecuted before the State Department and before other bodies capable of influencing the improvement of religious freedom in the former USSR.
All this time he carried out this work largely at his own resources and enthusiasm, and from the proceeds of his book “Fiery Paths.”
In 2007, during a visit to a persecuted Pentecostal community in the city of Aldan, Yakutia, he was poisoned by special services. Having no health insurance, Boris delayed visiting a doctor, who discovered advanced rectal cancer. According to the doctor, such cancer could have developed over a period of five years, which was impossible because Boris Perchatkin had undergone a medical examination half a year before the trip with a result showing no cancer. He was operated on in the spring of 2009 and underwent three courses of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
In 1989, together with Alexander Kleymyonov, he organized the “Volgograd” church in Vancouver, Washington, which he handed over to an appointed presbyter in 1993, when he became engaged in the constant defense of Protestants from the former USSR and in support of the Lautenberg Amendment. In 2008, he organized a church in Seattle, which he had to leave as a result of illness. In 2013, he founded the “Exodus” church in Portland and Vancouver.
Boris Perchatkin says: “I often recall the formula of the devil that was applied to me as well: ‘No good deed should go unpunished.’ But I hope to pass this test too, for many act according to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 34-40.”
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