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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 Though the hated orders were rescinded, the bond of trust between the leadership and the more impassioned Baptists was broken.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.