A Prophet in Peril

One day a "repairman" visited the home of a pious Ukrainian Baptist in Kiev, supposedly to fix an electric meter. In fact, he was there to install a listening device so that secret police could monitor the premises. Last March 30, when the family's pastor came to the house, police pounced and arrested him for illicit religious activities.

The pastor is Georgi Vins, 46, the best-known leader of 100,000 or more Initsiativniki (Initiators) who have split from the main body of Soviet Baptists. Stubborn and courageous, Vins is the latest in a line of Baptists from John Bunyan to Martin Luther King Jr. who have gone to jail for defying the state on grounds of conscience. Though the plight of Soviet Jews and intellectuals is far better publicized in the West, Baptists have suffered every bit as much. At least 700 have been jailed, and one civil rights leader reports that Baptists have comprised more than one-third of the known political prisoners during the past two decades.

Secret Letter. The trouble began 15 years ago with a Communist crackdown on the 535,000-member All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, which is the largest body of Soviet Protestants. (President Nixon visited their main church during the 1972 Moscow summit.) Under pressure from the government, the All-Union Council in 1960 sent a stringent "Letter of Instructions" to its district overseers. This secret letter, published fully only last year by the authoritative U.S. journal Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, urged church officials to be strict in their enforcement of Soviet laws against religious training and baptism for youths. It also told them to suppress "unhealthy missionary manifestations." Convinced that their official church had become a tool of the atheistic regime, Vins and other Baptist leaders founded their own unauthorized church council. They also launched a vigorous civil rights campaign, including perhaps the most remarkable mass demonstration in Moscow since the Revolution. For his role in all this, Vins was sentenced to three years in labor camps.

Such protest was a family heritage.

Vins' father Pyotr, who went to the U.S. to study for the ministry in Rochester, N.Y., and Louisville, was jailed three times for resisting party encroachments on church life and died in a Siberian labor camp. In the same period a Vins cousin also died in Siberia, an uncle was jailed, and an aunt somehow survived 17 years in a camp. Despite his father's fate, young Georgi managed to earn degrees in engineering and economics, but in the early '60s he became a full-time church worker.

After release from his first jail term, he became a pastor in Kiev but was later ordered to do a year of compulsory factory labor. Fearing worse charges to come, he went underground in 1970. Till last spring's capture he led the life of a Fundamentalist Dan Berrigan, eluding government agents as he traveled about, preaching and organizing.

While Vins has been held in a Kiev jail awaiting trial, his mother Lydia, 68, herself fresh from a three-year term, has tried to rally Western support, seeking in particular, a sympathetic lawyer. The Christians' response has been quiet and ineffectual. The World Council of Churches requested information and permission to send an observer, but got no reply. The Vins family approved a Norwegian judge as counsel, but he and three members of Parliament who wanted to attend the trial were refused visas. Last month Baptist World Alliance leaders--in Moscow for the All-Union

Council's first meeting since 1969 --asked the government for a chance to visit Vins and observe his trial but were turned down. Meanwhile, the All-Union Council's plea for amnesty for all Baptist prisoners has led to the release of 50 of them. Baptist General Secretary Aleksei Bichkov, however, plans no special appeal for Vins, whom he considers an extremist with a martyr complex: "He is the most zealous of our opponents. He has called us atheists."

The government's current strategy is to undercut the Baptist underground by building up the All-Union Council and its support in the West; some concessions have been granted the council, and its membership is up. But prospects are bleak for the rival movement. Thousands of Initsiativniki have been forced back into the All-Union Council or outside of all organized religion. For Vins himself, the future almost certainly holds a sentence of up to ten years, since acquittal in political cases is virtually unknown. Vins' wife and four children fear that given his shaky health, he will follow his father into martyrdom.

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