Submission to "God Alone"

Submission to "God Alone" Newly exiled Georgi Vins speaks for Soviet Reform Baptists

On Thursday morning he was stuck in a jammed and filthy Siberian prison cell. Three days later, dressed in a dark blue suit issued to him by the Soviet government, he sat in the First Baptist Church of Washington while his host, the President of the United States, conducted a Sunday School class on I Kings 21. Even to secular eyes, this turn of events might seem miraculous; to the Rev. Georgi Vins, 50, it is quite literally an act of God.

Vins is an uncompromising Baptist. The trade that brought him and four other Soviet prisoners of conscience to the U.S., in return for two spies sent back to the Soviet Union, has presented the world with a new sort of religious witness. The stocky preacher and poet, who spent seven of the past 15 years in Siberia, is the first leader of the tens of thousands of breakaway "Reform Baptists" to reach the West. Fourteen years ago, they formally seceded from the government-recognized All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in order to fight for more religious freedom than Moscow permits. In an interview with TIME'S John Kohan, Vins painted an extraordinary portrait of a beleaguered religious movement and of a life that in some ways recalls letters of the imprisoned Apostle Paul to the early church.

"Our situation is difficult for Western Christians to understand," he says. Since the days of John Bunyan and Roger Williams, Baptists have traditionally believed in total separation of church and state. But attempts to practice that belief have had hard treatment in the Soviet Union. Baptists who follow Soviet rules can hold worship services, but the government forbids them to preach the word of God in public or to bring up their children with religious instruction.

Although they have been driven by religious conscience into resisting Moscow's strictures, the Reform Baptists insist that they are not political dissidents. "In accordance with biblical teaching," Vins says, "we believe that every authority is ultimately from God and that we are obliged to submit ourselves to such authority on all civil matters. To work. To pay taxes. To show respect to the government. But when it is a question of faith, then we submit ourselves to God alone."

Vins received a degree in electrical engineering from the Kiev Polytechnical Institute in 1952 and was ordained a minister in 1962. Struggle, and even martyrdom, in the service of religious conviction runs in his family. His father Pyotr was a U.S.-trained preacher who went back to the Soviet Union in 1922 as a missionary. He was arrested three times for his religious activities and died in 1943 somewhere in Stalin's vast Gulag system. Georgi pursued a career in industrial research in Kiev until he dedicated himself full time to religious work in 1963.

What Vins calls a strong "Baptist awakening" was occurring, especially among the young, partly in response to a virulent antichurch campaign then being conducted by Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev. Obviously under strong pressure, the All-Union Council ordered Baptists to keep children from attending church and to baptize no one under the age of 30. For many Baptists this signified, as Vins puts it, that the All-Union Council was "so dependent on the state that it could not withstand the pressure of atheism."

Believers demanded an end to government restraints, as well as a democratic vote in the choice of council leaders. Though the hated orders were rescinded, the bond of trust between the leadership and the more impassioned Baptists was broken. The Reformers formally went into schism, setting up their own church council with the Rev. Gennadi Kryuchkov, now 52, as president and Vins as secretary. To dramatize the need for an overhaul of Soviet legal restrictions on religious life, Vins and Kryuchkov led a daring march on Communist Party headquarters in 1965.

Both were soon sent to jail for three years. Once released, they set up a clandestine field operation for support of the Reform churches. Kryuchkov, the movement's leader, was never caught, and still directs the organizational work in hiding. But in 1974 police arrested Vins again in Novosibirsk. Refusing an offer of leniency in return for his cooperation with the KGB, Vins served a five-year term in the harsh labor camp at Yakutiya in Siberia. After that term ended this spring, he faced five more years of Siberian exile, when his liberation was engineered by Washington.

In describing the Reform Baptists' secret activities, Vins tells of a remarkable mobile publishing operation known as Khristianin (the Christian), that roams the country, turning out thousands of Bibles and pamphlets. Local Baptists gradually buy up paper and hoard it until a ton or more has been collected in one place. Then they call on one of their printing teams, which arrives with a special offset press that can be dismantled and carried in several suitcases. Since the Soviets permit no teaching seminaries for Protestants, the Reformers also run a Bible correspondence school, as well as an organization that seeks aid and publicity for religious prisoners. Their evangelistic work includes open-air testimony meetings, held in the woods, which often attract a thousand or more young people.

Yins' appearance in the West raises again the anguishing question of what, if anything, Christians outside the Soviet Union should do to help those inside. The Baptist World Alliance and other international church bodies have thought that public protest can be counterproductive. And so does the All-Union Council. That view Vins quickly dismisses. "If everyone had remained silent, we might very well be dead," he says of the recent prisoner exchange. He adds that his own prison treatment improved markedly after U.S. Congressmen began calling for his release.

Georgi Vins will go on speaking out and writing on behalf of the Reform cause wherever he finally decides to settle. He recalls that in Moscow, just before he was deported, a political officer explained that he had been deprived of his citizenship for actions harmful to the Soviet government, and "went on to say that at first American society would show great interest in me, but in the end everyone would forget me. I would be of no use to anyone. 'Your fate is a sad one,' he said. 'You will always be an exile.' " Vins replied: "The God in whom I believe will decide that."

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