Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

evant authorities to permit their leading workers to devote themselves full time to church work as was true of AUCECB leaders. ®8 150 - Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II For whatever reason, the optimism was short-lived. Vins was again ar- rested and ordered by the court to work as an engineer. Several other council members were arrested and received three-year sentences. The key figure in the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives, Mrs. Lidia Vins, was ar- rested in December 1970 and received a three-year sentence. Soon thereafter both Vins and Kriuchkov and two other CCECB members found jt advisable to go underground and the authorities began to search for them like hunted criminals. In 1969 a Council of Christian Mothers was formed as resistance to the threat to take children away from believing parents.” Appeals and detailed reports were also circulating about the Sloboda family. The two older children and then the two younger children were forcibly placed in orphanages. Finally Mrs. Sloboda herself received a four-year prison sentence.7! In spite of all these pressures, the CCECB gradually developed its own church structure and highly organized activities. _ Orthodox dissenters, on the other hand, were more severely crippled by the pressures. The gifted mathematician and writer Boris V. Talantov died in prison. Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov was imprisoned from 1969 to 1974 and then emigrated in the summer of 1974. Gleb Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman seemed muzzled till their next major letter to the World Council of Churches in Nairobi in 1975.” a , The Baptist split was first made public in the West around 1964.75 Generally speaking, however, till 1970 the existence of religious dissent was relatively unknown. During the seventies, due to the increased activities of Western journalists possible in the new atmosphere of détente, as well as due to the growth of tourism, much more information about Soviet religious life became available. Scholarly studies relying on Samizdat proliferated. During the year or so before Solzhenitsyn was forcibly exiled (February 1974), he became known for his Lenten letter to the patriarch which identified him as a believer and for his support of other religious dissidents.” Shortly after Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, Georgi Vins was finally caught and eventually brought to trial in January 1975. During the ten months that Vins was in custody before his trial, he became the symbol in the Western world for all suffering believers in the Soviet Union and an unprecedented campaign calling for his release took place. Soviet authorities, however, had cortectly assessed that although sympathy for Soviet dissent had never been as strong in the West as now, in the Soviet Union itself it had no broad base of support and therefore Vins was given a five-year sentence, strict regime. » The Khrushchev Campaign Against Religion 151 Phase VIII: “Normaliza