Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

held its first meeting in February 1964 and very likely organized the May demonstration. Nothing is known about the first leaders, but after Georgi Vins’s arrest, his mother, Lidia, became the dominant personality in the CPR. Not only had Lidia Vins suffered through the agonies of losing her husband in prison, and raising her son alone, but she had also lost a brother and a sister-in-law in the Stalinist persecution.47 She now. demonstrated unshakable courage, an organizing talent, and had a flair for utilizing world public opinion. Under her guidance, letters of protest were sent to nu- merous high-level state agencies, as well as to leading church organizations abroad. A characteristic letter, composed at the second All-Union Congress of Prisoners’ Relatives, gave a historical suryey and cited hard evidence to illustrate the complaints.** Not only had 524 persons been imprisoned since _ 1961, of which forty-four were women, there had been an additional 391 receiving fifteen-day prison sentences while they had evidence for a total of 8,648 interrogations of believers, including 390 children who had been in- terrogated. Church members had now paid a total of 94,300 rubles in fines. In other letters they listed a bibliography of propaganda articles from central, regional, and provincial newspapers which, contrary to the law, abused the feelings of believers by calling them fanatics, barbarians, pigs, dope addicts, hypocrites, or obscurantists.“° Between 1965 and 1970 the CPR collected data on prisoners, helped 242 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il circulate appeals and addressed great numbers of telegrams and letters on behalf of all the believers to higher authorities. Finally, in 1969 the council was able to hold its first All-Union congress, which greatly helped to orga- nize and systematize the information. A second congress met the following year, again in secret, on December 12-13, 1970. All of the leaders were either in prison or had gone underground to escape the authorities. But the CPR appeared to be even more upset by the arrest of its leader Lidia Vins on December 1, 1969. The appeals were to no avail, and Lidia Vins, in spite of her age and ill health, spent three years in prison.5° With the arrest of Lidia Vins, CPR leadership was taken over by a younger woman named Galina Rytikova. Rytikova’s husband, Peter, was an evangelist and candidate member of the CCECB. With him in prison, she was left to struggle for survival for herself and their six children. Rytikova has remained the leader of the CPR to the present and has put her stamp on the organization by introducing the Bulletin.» The Bulletin became the regular journal of the CPR; the organizers promised to issue it on a quarterly basis. The reformers had circulated a journal called Herald of Salvation from the beginning, but it appeared at — highly irregular intervals and suffered extensively when the key l