On May 16-17, 1966, five hundred delegates from Baptist churches all over the Soviet Union converged on Moscow’s Old Square to demand an end to the state’s persecution of Christians. With cold efficiency, the government ordered soldiers and KGB officials to surround the demonstrators (thus hiding the scene from passers-by), attack them, herd them onto a fleet of waiting buses, and haul them away for “interrogation.” Two days later one of the organizers of the demonstration, Georgi Vins, pastor of a small Baptist church in Kiev, showed up at the Communist Party’s office building asking what had happened to the demonstrators. After nearly two hours, officers of the State Security Committee forced him into a car, arrested him, and threw him into a solitary confinement cell.1 Vins would spend most of the next thirteen years in the Soviet gulag2 before being expelled from the country altogether, but that was in his mind a small price to pay for keeping the gospel alive in the Soviet Union.

After 1944, Hitler’s invading armies distracted Josef Stalin from his brutal campaign against Christianity, and Russian Christians enjoyed a measure of peace and even prosperity. The respite would be short-lived, however, for in 1960 Nikita Khrushchev launched a new program of persecution. Like Pharaoh in Moses’ day, he was alarmed at the growing strength of God’s people in his land. As part of his plan, Khrushchev intimidated the governing body of evangelical churches into signing a set of New Statutes. Intended to be a death blow to organized religion, the Statutes ordered local pastors to do several things: exclude children from their services, drastically reduce baptisms of 18- to 30-year-olds, refrain from evangelistic preaching, and work vigorously to curtail the “unhealthy missionary tendencies” of their congregations.3

Georgi Vins was enjoying a successful career as an economist in Kiev when the New Statutes were enacted. Himself the son of a Baptist minister who had been executed during Stalin’s pogrom, Vins was appalled when his own pastor urged the congregation to obey the new rules. Vins challenged him, sparking a bitter confrontation between the two men. Soon afterward, he decided to enter the pastorate himself and spend his life resisting the Communists’ anti-Christian campaign.

Within a few months, Vins convinced a group of pastors to found a new union of evangelicals, a splinter organization from the body which had signed the New Statutes. They petitioned the government for permission to hold a national congress, demanded the right to meet without registering, and insisted on teaching their children the doctrines and morals of the Christian faith.4 Soviet officials reacted swiftly to this new threat. Vins himself landed in prison no fewer than three times: in 1966 after the Moscow demonstration, again in 1970 for “parasitism” (the government did not recognize the pastorate as a productive career), and finally in 1974 when he was convicted of evangelistic preaching and, strangely enough, of having authored the 23rd Psalm as a piece of incendiary anti-government propaganda.5

In 1979, the Soviet government struck a deal with the White House, agreeing to trade Vins and four other exiled dissidents for two captured spies. Soviet officials summoned Vins from his exile in Siberia, revoked his citizenship, gave him a new suit, and put him on a plane bound for New York City. Though shut out of his own country, Vins continued to work and pray for his evangelical brothers in Communist Russia. He eventually established Russian Gospel Ministries (RGM), a missions organization designed to represent, defend, and aid evangelical churches in the Soviet Union and to promote the spread of the gospel there.6 Under Vins’ leadership, the RGM translated and published Christian literature, financially supported 50 Russian pastors, provided money to help build new meeting-houses, and shipped food, clothes, and medicines to poverty-stricken Christians.7 Communist authorities pressed their campaign against Christianity well into the 1980s, but even from exile in the United States, Georgi Vins pressed just as hard to shore up embattled churches.

Under the Soviet regime, the Christian Church suffered horribly as they struggled to remain faithful. The perseverance of Georgi Vins and his brother pastors in the face of such brutal persecution speaks to the esteem in which they held the Church and the value which they ascribed to her. For them, the body and gospel of Christ were treasures of all-surpassing worth—treasures for which they gladly endured imprisonment, exile, torture, and even death.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Michael Bourdeaux, Faith on Trial in Russia (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 9-14.
 
2  Russian acronym for the system of slave labor camps into which political prisoners were cast.
 
3  Ibid., 64.
 
4  Ibid., 60-101.
 
5  Felix Corley, “Obituary: Pastor Georgi Vins,” The Independent (London), January 17, 1998, 20.
 
6  Michael Bourdeaux, “Obituary: Georgi Vins: Pastor Who Defied the KGB,” The Guardian (London), January 22, 1998, 16.
 
7  Dan Wooding, “Georgi Vins—A Great Warrior for the Gospel,” Assist News Website, http://www.assistnews.net/strategic/s0000014.htm.
 

article form Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville, 4800 W. Pulaski Hwy., Perryville, MD  21903