Video: The Sufferings of the Prisoners — Testimony of Georgy Vins

· Baptists, Video, Persecution, KGB, Kyiv, Unregistered Pentecostals, Vestibule, Russia, USSR, Subbotniks, USA, Asylum in the USA

The film was made in 2000 in the USA in Russian and English by the “Russian Gospel Mission.” It tells about the sufferings of believers in bonds.

The film is based on real events and taken from the book of memoirs of Georgi Vins, who, together with other prisoners of conscience, was exchanged for KGB agents at the UN.
The film relates the sufferings in prison for faith in the Lord Jesus Christ that evangelical believers had to endure in the “Chipishchanka” labor camp.
Already in the USA, Georgi Vins continued to be an outcast and was rejected during his lifetime by the Christian mafia of the AUCECB. Like all prisoners, he was a stranger to the friends of the world.

About Georgi Vins

Georgi Vins. 1960s

Georgi Petrovich Vins was born on August 4, 1928, in Blagoveshchensk-on-Amur to the family of American missionary Peter Vins. In 1937, Georgi’s father was arrested for religious activity, sentenced to execution, and then three decades later posthumously rehabilitated. Georgi’s mother, Lydia Vins, was able to pass on to her son the spiritual values for which his father gave his life, and as a 16‑year‑old boy Georgi dedicated his life to serving God.
In 1946, Lydia and her son moved from the Far East to Kiev, where Georgi enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute, got married, and began to take an active part in the life of the Evangelical Christian‑Baptist church. Having become a preacher of the Gospel, Georgi, like his father, suffered persecution from the atheistic state: in 1966 he was arrested, sentenced to three years in camps, and sent to serve his term in the Northern Urals. After his release, Georgi once again actively engaged in church life, for which he was re‑sentenced in 1975 to ten years: five years in strict‑regime camps and five years of exile. In 1979, at the request of U.S. President Carter, Georgi Vins was expelled from a Soviet prison to the United States.

Finding himself free, he founded a Christian mission whose aim was to help and support the persecuted church, and especially prisoners of conscience, persecuted for religious convictions in the Soviet Union. With the call to “remember the prisoners” (Heb. 13:3) and to give them all‑round support, he visited hundreds of churches in the USA, Canada, Europe, South America, and Australia. In addition, the mission he founded was engaged in translating Christian books into Russian and in delivering Bibles and other spiritual literature to the Soviet Union.

Georgi Vins is the author of the books “Horizons of Faith,” “The Gospel in Chains,” “The Path of Faithfulness,” as well as the poetry collections “From a Poetic Notebook,” “To Live Not by Lies,” and “We Need God.” Most of the poems included in the collection “From a Poetic Notebook” were written by him in the prisons and camps of Siberia and the Northern Urals.

As a result of perestroika and the changing situation in the Soviet Union, on August 15, 1990, M. Gorbachev issued a decree overturning the decision of the Supreme Soviet made in 1979 to strip Georgi Vins of Soviet citizenship and expel him from the USSR. In November 1990, 11 years after his forced expulsion, he was able to return to his homeland and once again preach the Gospel, but now freely — in city parks, prisons, prayer houses, universities — wherever an opportunity presented itself.

On August 4, 1995, in Moscow, at the Lubyanka, he was granted access to the archival department of the Federal Security Service, where he was able to examine the court documents of his father, shot in 1937. These materials became part of the book “The Path of Faithfulness.”

In September 1997, when Georgi Petrovich returned home after visiting churches on the Pacific coast of the USA, doctors discovered a brain tumor. He passed into eternity on January 11, 1998, having completed the work of his service on earth.

In the last year of his life, Georgi Petrovich spent more than three months in his homeland, visiting many cities of Ukraine and Russia preaching the Gospel. Most memorable for him was his visit to the Urals, and especially to those places where, thirty years before, he had served his sentence logging timber in the taiga camp “Anyusha.” There, at one of the critical moments of camp life, he wrote the poem “One Must Also Know How to Die,” which ends with these lines:

Hoisting the sails of radiant faith,
To speed to the longed‑for Fatherland,
And to look Christ straight in the eye,
Who extends the hand of life!

And to loved ones say with a smile:
“Dear ones, there’s no need for tears…
I will wait for you in heaven,
Overcomers of death and hell.”

In the bright light of eternal day
Jesus Himself will embrace me,
And no one, ever, will take away
Eternal life, my friends, from me!

Georgi Vins’s autobiographical book “On the Way”
Article by Vladimir Popov “The Case and Fate of Baptist Georgi Vins”

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