Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

d to study, graduating in 1954 from the Kiev Polytechnical Institute as an electrical engineer. He had married Nadezhda Ivanovna Lazaruk in January 1952. Nadezhda had been baptized when she was fifteen. By October 1961 Georgi Vins, together with other members of the local AUCECB affiliate, had spoken out in favor of the reformers’ call for a congress. Then in May 1962 he was present for the first time at an extended meeting of the Orgkomitet. The following month the church in Kiev responded by excommunicating him. Vins and others promptly or- ganized a separate unregistered church, where he was elected an evangelist in October 1962. The aged Initsiativniki leader A. A. Shalashov came to perform the ordination. Finally in August 1963 Georgi Vins left his job in an institute and began to work full time for the Orgkomitet, having been elected secretary in September 1963.%4 Kriuchkov was the son of a choir leader and evangelist in Moscow. His father, Konstantin Pavlovich, began a three-year prison sentence in 1929 when Gennadi was only three.35 There were five children in the family, and life from then on became very difficult. In 1933 Konstantin Pavlovich was forbidden to live in Moscow, and they now began moving from place to place. Although in declining health, he was sent to work in the mines in the Donbass region, and then again in the mines at Uzlovaia (Tula Oblast). After 1955, when Gennadi’s mother died leaving twelve children, Konstantin Pavlovich moved back to Moscow, remarried, and became ac- tive in the church. He too joined the Initsiatiuniki in 1961 and was the presbyter of the Reform Baptist congregation in Moscow until his death in 1976. Young Gennadi Kriuchkov remembered having lived in such faraway places as Ashkhabad (Turkmenia), Astrakhan, and the Kalmyk Steppes. From 1944 to 1950 he served in the Soviet army. When he returned home to Uzlovaia (Tula Oblast) in 1950 he worked as an electrician in the mines. In 1951 he was converted and baptized in the Tula Evangelical Christian Baptist church and was also married to Lidia Vasilevna. Immediately he started to preach. Soon he was elected choir leader, then deacon, and finally he became presbyter of the unregistered church in Uzlovaia. Severe state pressure on the unregistered churches in Tula Oblast began in 1959 and in 1961 at a members’ meeting with visitors from the Ukraine present, Kriuchkov proposed organizing an initiative group. Soon after, he escaped police arrest because he was attending a meeting in Moscow at the time. As Reunification Rejected, 1964-1974 237 a result he left his job, went into hiding, and devoted all his time to the Init- siationiki cause.36 During the early years of the reform movement, Kriuchkov and Vins remained at liberty while local church leaders who supported them were ar- rested and given prison sentences. The two leaders, both young and constantly on the move, managed to keep one step ahead of t