The case and fate of Baptist Georgy Vins

September 12, 2010 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

Today, the history of the evangelical and human‑rights movement in the USSR is studied through the books of Georgy Petrovich Vins.

In the long list of prisoners of conscience for whom the scholar and human‑rights activist Andrei Sakharov fearlessly interceded, one name was that of Georgy Petrovich Vins, secretary of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists. The voice of the Soviet academician sounded in the chorus of many representatives of the Western public. In November 1976, international news agencies reported that the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate had adopted, by a majority vote, a resolution calling on the Soviet government to release the Baptist pastor Georgy Vins from prison.

Even back in 1960, Vins became one of the leaders of the Initiative Baptists

Even back in 1960, Georgy Vins became one of the leaders of the movement of the Initiative Baptists. This name entered history and stuck to those Baptists who voiced a sharp protest against the large‑scale anti‑religious campaign launched during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev.

The movement’s leadership core was initially called the Initiative Group, then was transformed into the Organizing Committee, and in 1965 declared itself the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists, which set itself against the official All‑Union Council of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists (AUCECB). Gennady Kryuchkov was elected chairman of the Council of Churches of the ECB, and Georgy Vins its secretary. The authorities did not recognize the new spiritual centre that had emerged alongside the official one. And how could they recognize it? After all, the atheistic regime had a concrete plan: through the hands of the higher‑ranking church ministers, to reduce the entire life of congregations to the mere external performance of religious rites. No charitable work, no children, no young people, and no more or less educated people were to be among the believers. To agree with such a situation for a true Christian would mean striking a clear bargain with one’s conscience, betraying the ideals of the Gospel. In defiance of the intensified total atheisation of the population, active believers continued to engage in spiritual‑educational, missionary, and charitable activity, and did not prevent children and young people from coming to church and attending prayer meetings. Such activists faced inevitable repression. The artfully organised harassment and persecution could not bypass Georgy Petrovich Vins. The authorities immediately spotted in him an authoritative leader of the non‑conformist Baptists.

Vins’s ancestors on both his father’s and his mother’s side belonged to religious dissidents: his mother’s forebears were Molokans from the Tambov province, and his father’s lineage went back to Dutch Anabaptists and Mennonites. Unrelenting persecution forced his mother’s family to move to the Far East. His father’s great‑great‑grandfather, Heinrich Vins, had once come to Ukraine from Germany. Both the Russian Molokans and the European Mennonites professed pacifist views. The reigning authorities in Russia, as is well known, sometimes made concessions to pacifist believers, offering them the opportunity to settle on the far‑eastern and southern outskirts of the empire. For the sake of developing untouched lands, the hard‑working and conscientious believers were exempted from military service.

Peter Vins’s childhood was spent on the Volga in the family of a presbyter of the Baptist church in Samara. A surge of persecution forced the presbyter and his family to leave Russia in 1911 and settle in Canada. Desiring a good theological education, Peter moved to America and completed training in a Bible school and seminary. Soon Peter obtained U.S. citizenship, but life in respectable, prosperous America did not satisfy him. He wanted to return to his homeland, but when he proposed to his fiancée that she follow him to Russia, she flatly refused. “Are you in your right mind, Peter? Everyone is fleeing from Russia! Go to that godless, barbarian country? No, that’s not for me,” she stated plainly.

In October 1926, Peter Vins found himself in Blagoveshchensk, and was soon elected presbyter of the local Baptist congregation and assistant chairman of the Far Eastern Union of Baptists. There he also found his faithful life companion, Lydia. Two years later their son Georgy was born. At that time, ordeals began to rain down one after another. The father was given an ultimatum – return to America or accept Soviet citizenship. After brief reflection, Georgy’s father and mother jointly decided that Peter must hand in his American passport. When the father announced this at the GPU, officials of that agency shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment, and some of them in low voices tried to talk the Baptist presbyter out of such an unwise step and advised him to leave Russia as quickly as possible. Peter Vins did not heed this advice, renounced his American citizenship without regret, and sent a short message to his relatives in America: “I am staying with my brothers and sisters in the faith.” A mere month and a half after officially assuming the status of a Soviet citizen, Peter Vins was sent to forced labour building a road through the taiga.

Peter Vins’s fate seriously alarmed his friends in the faith. As soon as he returned from the construction site, they vied with one another in offering to help him escape from the USSR. At that time the Far Eastern border had not yet been hermetically sealed; one could quite feasibly cross the Amur River into China. “I cannot abandon God’s work in Russia,” Peter would say in reply to their persuasions.

From 1930 onward, an almost uninterrupted saga of arrests and interrogations began for Pyotr Vins. In August 1937, when his son Georgiy was nine years old, his father was executed by sentence of a troika under the NKVD of the Omsk region. Georgiy Petrovich learned about this only in 1995, when he was reviewing his father’s file in the FSB archive in Moscow. From childhood, Georgiy sought to follow his father’s precepts and example. “I would very much like you to become a preacher and an engineer. But most of all I pray that the chief calling of your life would be a living faith in God and a witness for Christ to the Russian people” – these fatherly exhortations remained in Georgiy’s memory. During the war, Georgiy and his mother lived in Omsk. In 1946, his mother decided to move to Ukraine, to Kiev, closer to her relatives.

In Kiev, Georgiy Vins became a student at the Polytechnic Institute, choosing the specialty of electrical engineer. There he also became a preacher in a Baptist church. He was only eighteen years old.

When Nikita Khrushchev, having proclaimed a program to build communism, launched a struggle against religion, Vins was working as a leading design engineer in a design-and-construction institute, while his wife Nadezhda taught English in a secondary school. In the autumn of 1962, all departments of the institute suddenly buzzed with heated gossip. The reason for the lively conversations was an article in the newspaper ‘Evening Kiev’ about the family of their colleague Georgiy Vins, who in his free time from work preached in a Baptist church. “The Soviet government gave them a higher education, and they had the audacity to believe in God? How can they work in Soviet schools and at our enterprises? Where, after all, is the management looking?” – they loudly quoted in hallways and offices the author’s threatening ‘questions.’ Indignant letters flowed to various authorities: “Soon it will be the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet power; there is no place for Baptists in our communist society!”

The director of the institute, having invited Vins into his office, said bluntly and without concealment: “Georgiy Petrovich, I defended you as best I could in the regional party committee. But there, unfortunately, they made it clear: either you or me”… Vins submitted his resignation. His wife was also forced to leave her job at the school.

Damaging articles in the press were typically a kind of ‘artillery preparation,’ tuning public opinion to an aggressive mood and heralding impending judicial persecution. In 1966, Georgiy Vins found himself in the dock. He was charged with raising his children in a religious spirit, organizing Christian youth meetings, publishing spiritual literature, forming the Council of Churches, drafting a collective petition to the Constitutional Commission, and organizing a demonstration in defense of freedom of conscience near the building of the CPSU Central Committee on May 16–17, 1966.

The appearance of a group of believers from 120 cities of the USSR (about five hundred people in all) in the center of Moscow, the loud singing of spiritual hymns, kneeling prayers, and insistent requests for a meeting with Leonid Brezhnev – all this caused a considerable uproar in party and security structures. Hastily summoned reinforced police detachments fell upon the believers and shoved them into buses brought in for the purpose. On May 19, Georgiy Vins and Mikhail Khorev, on behalf of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, went to the public reception office of the CPSU Central Committee to find out the fate of their brethren. The response to the official inquiry was the arrest of Vins and Khorev.

Vins was not among the demonstrators, but the court considered that all the main threads led to him and Kryuchkov. As a result, both Vins and Kryuchkov, who was arrested several days later, received three years of imprisonment each. Vins had to serve his sentence in the Northern Urals, in one of the logging camps. Prisoners were sent each day on foot to fell trees and build a railway.

Just as his father once did in the thirties, Georgiy Vins uprooted stumps, heaved stones, and worked with crowbar, axe, and shovel. To speak about God or to pray aloud would immediately bring summons to the authorities. In protest, Vins even had to declare a ten-day hunger strike.

In May 1969, Vins was released. A year later, his mother was arrested. The sixty-four-year-old pensioner was sentenced to three years in camps for organizing the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives and for providing legal and charitable aid to those behind bars and their families. The elderly, intelligent woman was held, without any scruple, among hardened female criminals. She was offered, it is true, early release if she agreed to write to a newspaper that she renounced her faith in God. Such a condition was clearly impossible, and she had to serve the term from start to finish. Georgiy Vins continued to work on his books until his very death.

Vins’s older children were also not left in peace. His son Pyotr, whom no one would hire because of his father, was accused of ‘parasitism’ and thrown into a standard-regime camp for a year. To his daughter Natalia, right before state exams in her final year of medical school, the director announced: “You will not receive a diploma. Medicine and religion are incompatible!” Natalia managed to get a job as a masseuse in a children’s hospital. But even there she soon faced a menacing ‘reckoning.’ The head doctor, in the presence of party and trade union activists, without hiding his anger, reproached Natalia for being a spreader of sedition, a dangerous sectarian, and that her father was hiding from arrest. Natalia was told that there was no place for her in the ranks of medical workers.

At that time, Georgiy Vins was in hiding. An all-Union wanted notice had been issued for him. He did not appear at home; relatives sometimes managed to meet him briefly in safe houses.

On March 31, 1974, Georgiy Vins was arrested at the Novosibirsk airport. From the preacher they confiscated Gospels in Russian and Kazakh, sermon outlines, a notebook of poems, and a manuscript on the history of the evangelical movement in Russia. Also found on him were two large cans of printing ink and a special microfilm of the entire Russian Bible.

The verdict of the Kyiv Regional Court was harsh – five years of strict-regime camps and five years of exile. During interrogations the investigator said: “This is not the West, not America. You must shut down the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives, liquidate all your secret printing presses! You still don’t know what Soviet power is! It is strong and has defeated all enemies.”

Vins’s case appeared in the documents of Academician Sakharov, in the actions of the international human rights organization Amnesty International. Naturally, interest could not fail to arise in the country where Vins’s father had obtained citizenship at the beginning of the century. In response to the concern of world public opinion and statesmen from democratic countries, Soviet ideologists published a large article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta on November 17, 1976. The article had an intriguing title: “Whom the American Congressmen Are Defending.” The author of this journalistic opus spared no dark colors in depicting Vins as a renegade and a sworn enemy of Soviet power. In the camp, the article was passed from hand to hand, evoking respect for Vins in some, and undisguised malice in others.

About half a year before the end of his camp term, Vins was unexpectedly flown from Yakutia to Moscow and placed in Lefortovo Prison. He was kept there for almost two months without any notification or interrogations. But from time to time he was transferred from cell to cell, where he was met by strange occupants. They presented themselves as financiers, currency dealers, jewelers. One called himself a Moscow writer. Wondering that their new companion in misfortune was convicted for religious activity, they all, for some reason, extolled life in Western countries and advised Vins to apply for permission to leave abroad. Vins brushed off such advice, pointing out that he had but one homeland, that he did not think of any overseas countries and did not want to hear about them.

After his stay in Lefortovo, Vins was returned to the Yakut camp. In the industrial zone, while repairing the electric drive of a sawmill, he seriously injured his hand from an electric arc. Despite a warning poster, someone, accidentally or not, energized the line. Before he had properly recovered from the burn, he again ended up in the hospital. This time with severe leg bruises from falling logs.

Vins expected that his exile would also be in Yakutia, but the authorities had other plans. At the end of March 1979, he was sent under convoy to Tyumen. Once again, transit prisons packed to overflowing, “Black Marias,” the furious barking of guard dogs. Already in Tyumen, by some miracle, he managed to obtain a short visit with his wife. Through her, who had visited the head of the prison administration the day before, Vins learned that his exile was to be served in the environs of the settlement of Berezovo. His wife assured him that she and the children intended to move to him at his new place of residence.

Contrary to all forecasts and expectations, Vins, instead of Berezovo, was soon delivered by a regular passenger plane under guard to Moscow. In one of the capital’s special detention centers, he was dressed in a brand-new, tailor-made suit, a white shirt with a tie. Then, in a spacious office, another surprise awaited Vins. From the lips of an important official, Georgiy Petrovich heard the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR depriving him of citizenship and expelling him to the USA. To all protests and objections, the official drily repeated that the matter had been decided at the highest state level and that it was useless to try to change anything.

Two hours later, Vins was already sitting on the plane. There he saw four more prisoners. They were human rights activists: Valentin Moroz, Alexander Ginzburg, Eduard Kuznetsov, Valery Dymshits.

When the plane landed at the New York airport, two Soviet intelligence officers arrested in America were brought on board. Representatives of the U.S. State Department who met the airliner from Moscow immediately explained that an agreement had been reached between Brezhnev and Carter for a mutual exchange of prisoners.

Three days later, U.S. President Jimmy Carter invited Georgiy Vins to a worship service at the Baptist Church of Washington. To his surprise, Vins learned that the president was actually a deacon of that church and regularly taught in the adult Sunday school. Carter introduced Vins to the congregation as a brother in faith and a former prisoner of conscience. Georgiy Petrovich listened to the president’s account of the exploit of the biblical Esther, who stood up to defend her captive people. Georgiy took this reminder of a human rights defender from biblical times as a finger of God pointing him to what he should be doing in conditions of freedom. Moreover, an offer soon reached him from Gennady Kryuchkov to establish a foreign representation of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists in the USA.

Not only in the USA and Canada, but also in South America, Australia, the countries of Scandinavia and Europe, the voice of Georgiy Vins was heard. He spoke in various churches, at Christian conferences, in educational institutions, recounting the facts of persecution and reprisals against active Christians in the Soviet Union. High-ranking officials from official religious centers who came from the Soviet Union to the West tried to keep silent about this. And some of them even stressed that in the USSR there was complete freedom of conscience and that only criminals sat in prisons.

In 1982, Georgiy Vins, together with ten former Soviet prisoners, was received at the White House by Ronald Reagan. Greeting the guests, Reagan asked Vins to offer a prayer before the start of their joint conversation and meal. The president questioned the preacher in detail about the life of believers in the Soviet Union, asking whether the Soviet leaders had any respect for the Bible and whether they honored God. In reply, Vins cited numerous instances of confiscation of Bibles from Soviet citizens, and handed the president a long list of Baptists serving sentences in places of deprivation of freedom. Reagan carefully examined a miniature Gospel of Mark, printed in an underground printing press in the USSR, which Vins presented to him.

Whenever Georgy Vins had the opportunity to speak with American presidents and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he always expressed the desire that they would, when appropriate, point out to Soviet leaders the violations of the Declaration of Human Rights regarding freedom of conscience in the Land of the Soviets.

The time came when the word “perestroika” began to flash across the pages of the international press. On August 15, 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev issued a decree restoring Soviet citizenship to Georgy Petrovich Vins.

The wind of change and freedom so gladdened and inspired the preacher that, disregarding his declining health, he began making extended trips back to his homeland starting that autumn. Vins was invited to schools, institutes; he preached at numerous open-air gatherings, and visited Baptist churches in Russia and Ukraine. At the suggestion of the leadership of the Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, Vins transformed the foreign representative office into the Russian Gospel Mission. The entire organizational work rested on his shoulders. Through a staff of employees and volunteer helpers, Vins arranged for the delivery of humanitarian aid, medicines, medical equipment, and spiritual literature to his homeland.

Unfortunately, his persistent and varied labors were halted by a serious illness — a brain tumor. Even while in the hospital, Georgy Petrovich was sketching out plans for the future development of the mission, giving advice to coworkers, and continuing to write another book entitled “On the Way.”

The end of the preacher’s earthly journey came on January 11, 1998. Today, the history of the evangelical and human rights movement in the USSR is studied through the books of Georgy Petrovich Vins.

Vladimir Alexandrovich Popov — lecturer in history and theology at the Moscow Theological Institute of the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists.

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