Georgy Vins
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Georgi Petrovich Vins (Russian: Георгий Петрович Винс; August 4, 1928 Blagoveshchensk, Soviet Union – January 11, 1998 Elkhart, Indiana) was a Russian Baptist pastor persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his involvement in a network of independent Baptist churches. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1979 with a group of other dissidents, Alexander Ginzburg, Eduard Kuznetsov, Mark Dymshits and Valentin Moroz.
Vins was born in the Russian Far East to Peter Vins, an American citizen of Russian origin who had traveled to Siberia just two years before as a missionary. Peter was arrested in 1930, freed three years later but was soon re-arrested. The family was later informed he had died.
The young Georgi was brought up by his mother Lydia. After the Second World War the two of them moved to Kiev, where Vins qualified as an engineer.
Georgi Vins became involved in Baptist churches in Kiev. It was as Nikita Khrushchev's anti-religious persecutions began in 1959 that the state tried to impose new regulations on the Baptist church that drastically curtailed the small measure of independence they had enjoyed. As the Baptist movement split acrimoniously, Vins became one of the leading figures in the campaign to resist state pressure. He publicly opposed the pastor of his own congregation, in Kiev, who had accepted the new measures. Vins formed his own breakaway congregation, becoming its pastor, despite his lack of theological qualifications. The group met in a forest outside Kiev.
When the Council of Churches was formally set up as an underground body in 1965, Vins became its General Secretary. Hundreds of the movement's followers were already in prison. In a dramatic protest, Baptists converged from all over the Soviet Union for a mass demonstration outside the Central Committee building in Moscow. Several days later, Vins went to the Central Committee with other leaders to ask about the fate of those who had been detained at the unprecedented demonstration. As a result, they were themselves arrested. Vins and the Chairman of the Council of Churches, Gennady Kryuchkov, finally went on trial in November 1966 and he was sentenced to three years imprisonment. His wife Nadezhda was left to look after their four children.
After release, Vins resumed his work as pastor and organizer of the movement, but soon had to go into hiding to avoid arrest. He was finally discovered and seized in March 1974. Prodded by the human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov, the World Council of Churches finally joined the international protests at Vins' arrest. Vins was tried in Kiev in January 1975 and sentenced to five years in labor camp to be followed by five years internal exile, becoming the Soviet Union's most famous religious prisoner.
International pressure finally led to his dramatic expulsion from his homeland. On the 26th of April, 1979 Vins was woken up in prison and told to change into his own clothes. Completely unaware of his imminent change of circumstances, he was flown to Moscow, which he spent on bare boards in a center for vagrants. The following day he was issued with new clothes and informed that because of his anti-Soviet activity the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had stripped him of his Soviet citizenship. He was being expelled. Vins protested in vain that his activity was not anti-Soviet, but had to bow to the inevitable. He was told to write down the names of his close relatives so that they could leave the country with him. Realizing that he would be unlikely to see them again otherwise, he listed his wife, children, mother and niece.
Vins was driven to Moscow's Lefortovo prison and then all five expellees were taken to Moscow airport. Two American embassy officials on the plane explained that their release followed an agreement between the White House and the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. It was not until the plane landed in New York that they learned they were being exchanged for two convicted spies, and the handover took place in an isolated hangar at Kennedy airport. The five walked off the plane at one end while the spies walked on at the other.
Joined in the United States six weeks later by the rest of his family, Vins made the town of Elkhart in Indiana his home and learned English. He received invitations to the White House and to innumerable events around the world. At first there was competition between missions supporting persecuted churches in the Soviet Union to enlist him, but Vins kept his distance. He eventually set up the international representation of the Baptist churches in the Soviet Union that owed their allegiance to the Council of Churches, a group of tight-knit congregations that categorically rejected any compromises with the Soviet authorities and refused to register officially. Their members were suffering fierce persecution, with hundreds in labor camps or psychiatric hospitals.
Vins' work aiding Baptist victims of persecution changed dramatically in the late 1980s, when open Christian work in Russia became possible. In 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev revoked the decree that had stripped Vins of his Soviet citizenship, thereby allowing him to revisit his homeland. In the 1990s Vins made numerous preaching trips, especially in Russia and Ukraine. In 1995 he was allowed access, in Moscow, to his father's KGB case file, and Vins finally learned that his father had been executed in 1936.
Vins discovered in late 1997 that he had a malignant inoperable brain tumor, from which he eventually died.
