GEORGY VINS
In October 1974, in Kiev, the pre-trial investigation of the case against Georgy Petrovich VINS, Secretary of the ‘schismatic’ Council of Churches of Evangelical-Christian Baptists (CCECB), came to an end.
Vins was arrested in March 1974. He was charged under articles equivalent to Articles of the RSFSR Criminal Code: 142, pt. 2 (“Contravention of the law on the separation of Church and State and of School-system and Church”), 190-1 and 227 (“Infringement of the personality and civil rights of citizens under the pretext of conducting religious ceremonies”).
Vins’s mother, wife and adult children asked the Soviet authorities to allow him to appoint a believing Baptist as a defence lawyer; they appealed to the European Committee of the World Baptist Alliance, asking them to nominate such a lawyer from the committee’s Legal Commission. This, as they said, was what Vins himself wanted. His mother also asked the organization ‘Amnesty International’ to send a representative to the trial.
In answer to the appeals of the Vins family, seven Norwegian religious leaders appointed by a congregation (among them a lawyer), applied to the Soviet embassy for visas and asked to be informed of the date of the trial.
They were refused visas; and they were given no answer to their question.
Meanwhile, the trial of G. P. Vins had been postponed: the case was sent back for further investigation. It is believed that the investigation was reopened in connection with a case of the publishing of the Gospels in Latvia (see below).
Vins has already served a sentence for his religious activities (CCE 5.1 [19]).
The statement made by the Vins family, together with a letter from A.D. Sakharov, G. Podyapolsky, S. Kovalyov and T. Velikanova to the World Council of Churches and Amnesty International (22 October 1974) and a statement by the Council of Churches of Evangelical-Christian Baptists to the Soviet government will all be published in Archive of the Chronicle (No. 2).
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“THE CHRISTIAN” PRINTING PRESS
On 24 October 1974, after a number of days of helicopter surveillance, a large militarized detachment of KGB officials and police (180-200 in number), under the command of a general, surrounded the farmhouse Ligukalys in the woods of the Cesis district (Latvian SSR). Inside the farmhouse, which belonged to the Gauer family, a married couple, one of the printing presses owned by the ECB (Evangelical-Christian Baptist) publishing-house The Christian was discovered.
The KGB officials confiscated a home-made printing press, nine tons of paper, obtained through the voluntary contributions of believers, and 15,000 printed Gospels. The Bulletin of the Council of Relatives of ECB prisoners in the USSR (No.18, 1974) reports that seven printing workers were arrested: Vitaly Ivanovich Pidchenko (b. 1941), Ekaterina Ivanovna Gritsenko (b. 1943), Viktor Anatolyevich Pikalov (b. 1950), Zinaida Petrovna Tarasova (b. 1942), Ida Danilovna Korotun (b. 1938), Tatyana Sairovna Kozhemyakina (b. 1937) and Nadezhda Gerasimovna LVOVA (b. 1946).
Bratsky Listok [The Fraternal Leaflet] No. 5, 1974, the organ of the CCECB, reports that when they were detained they “agreed on a three-day fast in prison”. Bratsky Listok also includes the statement by the CCECB sent to Podgorny and Kosygin on 24 November 1974 in connection with the confiscation of the printing-press and the arrest of its workers.
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PRISONERS
The above-mentioned statement by the CCECB, dated 24 November, says that the number of Baptists “sentenced to long terms of imprisonment” has long since exceeded a thousand and is still growing.
The elected leadership of the churches (the CCECB) has become a particular object of persecution//. N. G. Baturin and P. V. Rumachik, members of the Council of Churches, have been sentenced for the third time (Bratsky Listok, No. 5).
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According to the figures given by the Bulletin of the Council of Relatives of ECB Prisoners (No. 18, 1974), about 25 Baptist prisoners in the USSR have been released early on probation since October 1974. Other sources give the number released as around 32.
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ARRESTS
On 14 May 1974 four Baptist supporters of the CCECB were arrested: Mikhail Aleksandrovich PSHENITSYN, Vasily Fedosovich RYZHUK, Nikolai Vasilyevich SMIRNOV, Vasily Sergeyevich CHEVORDAYEV.
Their trial took place from 6 to 24 September in the Moscow Region. All the defendants were charged under Articles 142 & 190-1 (RSFSR Criminal Code). Pshenitsyn, Smirnov and Ryzhuk were each sentenced to three years in a labour camp (this was Ryzhuk’s third prison term); Chevordayev was sentenced to two years.
M. A. Pshenitsyn’s family consists of his wife, Tamara Matveyevna; and his children Gena (6 years old), Nadya (5), Andrei (4) and Petya (one and a half). Their address is: Moscow Region, //st. Zheleznodorozhnaya , 99 Prigorodnaya Street.
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FEDOTOV
On 15 August 1974 Ivan Petrovich FEDOTOV, one of the leading Pentecostalist preachers, was arrested in the town of Maloyaroslavets, Kaluga Region. Fedotov was charged under Articles 142 & 227 (RSFSR Criminal Code).
Fedotov’s wife has been dismissed from her job. The Maloyaroslavets congregation of ‘Christians of the Evangelical faith’ has been fined 2,500 roubles for holding ‘illegal religious services’.
I. P. Fedotov is 45 years old. Earlier he served 10 years in strict-regime labour camps under Article 102 (7) of the RSFSR Code. He was released on 30 August 1970. In the past four years he has twice been forced to change his place of residence. (For example, in the Tula Region the authorities simply struck his name off the list of residents, without informing him.) At present, it appears Fedotov is undergoing psychiatric diagnosis.
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UZBEKISTAN
Throughout 1974 there has been gross interference in the internal affairs of the congregation of Saint Sergei’s Church, the only Orthodox church in the city of Fergana (Uzbekistan).
Rakhimov, the Fergana Regional Executive Committee official in charge of religious affairs, supported by Abdunazarova, the deputy chairman of the City Executive Committee, refuses to register the new parish committee of ‘Twenty’ and the church council elected by the ‘Twenty’. Rakhimov is trying to ensure that the ‘Twenty’ includes people who support the former church rector Father Alexei (Leonid) Zinchenko.
His appointment was annulled by the church council on behalf of the congregation for several reasons: he performed marriage ceremonies for couples who were not adults, and in an unconsecrated place; he conducted services without transferring money he received to the church funds; he extorted fees larger than those allowed; sometimes he took services while intoxicated; and so on.
Rakhimov allowed Zinchenko to continue taking services, although this was against the law.
In October Rakhimov finally dismissed the church council and the auditing commission, and announced the registration of new personnel for the executive bodies of the congregation. However, only the assembly of the ‘Twenty’ has the right to re-elect the executive bodies, and it appears that the new church council, the new auditing commission and, probably, the new ‘Twenty’ were simply appointed by Rakhimov.
ADELGEIM
At the same time as the dissolution of the ‘Twenty’ which had been freely chosen in January 1974 by the believers (which is the only legal basis for its creation), a second priest at the St Sergei church — Father Pavel Adelgeim [1] — was dismissed from his post. In his place Archpriest Valentin Rubanovich was appointed; he is reported to be using the church for his own personal profit.
The complaints sent by the parishioners to various authorities have remained unanswered. Ruzmetov, the Uzbekistan Commissioner for Religious Affairs, formerly the procurator of the republic, stated in a conversation that the congregation’s representatives do not have the right to compose statements or complaints about the actions of Soviet authorities.
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DIVORCE
On 23-24 October 1974, in the city of Vladivostok (Soviet Far East), a people’s court heard the divorce case of Yury Bregman and Svetlana Vardapetyan.
The main request of the plaintiff Yu. Bregman was that the court should award him custody of their three small children: Misha (five and a half years old), Natasha (about three) and Masha (one year and three months).
Both the plaintiff and the respondent are biologists and research workers at the Institute of Marine Biology. Bregman is a Cand.Sci. and a member of the CPSU Communist Party. Svetlana. Vardapetyan holds a postgraduate degree from Leningrad Biological Institute, and is a Baptist believer.
Bregman based his request on the fact that his wife was bringing up the children in a religious spirit; she read the oldest child stories from the Bible and took him with her to prayer meetings. He also stated that his wife did not bother about their son’s intellectual development and did not take him to the cinema; she looked after the younger child carelessly; and she cooked badly.
Bregman said his mother would help him to bring up the children until he found himself a new partner.
The respondent Svetlana Vardapetyan agreed to the divorce, but asked the court to leave the children in her custody and not to deprive them of their mother.
She insisted that she had the right to acquaint her children with her basic beliefs and to bring them up in the spirit of Christian morality: “Christian morality and communist morality are not contradictory”. She said she had cared for her children’s health and intellectual development. Vardapetyan refused to answer specific questions from Judge Stepanova about her religious convictions; she also refused to name the leaders of the religious congregation she belonged to, or to tell the court who gave her religious literature, etc.
WITNESSES
The witnesses at the hearing were T. F. Orekhov, the head of the communist education section on the newspaper Pacific Ocean Komsomolets, I. S. Yaichnikova and T. V. Volkova, employees of the Institute of Marine Biology; E. I. Bregman, Yury’s mother; and others. The evidence of the witnesses basically concerned whether Svetlana Vardapetyan believed in God and was training her children (in particular, Misha) to believe: “I’ve heard that Svetlana believes in God”; “Somehow, I came to the conclusion that he (Misha) says prayers”, “Sveta . . . read the Gospel aloud and listens to religious broadcasts on the radio”, “Misha says ‘Thank you, Lord God’ after eating.” The witness Volkova, like Bregman himself, asserted that at a fancy dress party — a sea festival — Misha had been scared of “people dressed as demons”.
During the trial, representatives of the public also spoke: they were employees of the Institute — Preobrazhensky, Brykov and Penchuk. They asked the court to remove the children from their mother’s custody because she was a `religious fanatic’. The district paediatrician Kozlovskaya stated that ‘religious education assists the development of diathesis and rachitis’ — these were social diseases. Physically, the children (Misha and Masha) were developing according to their age. In answer to a question by the judge as to how a child’s psychological state could be affected by being deprived of films and television, Kozlovskaya said: ‘The child will fall behind at school.’
At the request of Vardapetyan, the court heard evidence from Professor 0. G. Kasakin, a Doctor of Biological Science and Professor of Biology at the Far East University. He stated that Misha gave the impression of being a normally developed, intelligent child. He gave Svetlana a good character reference as a laboratory worker. Kasakin stated his opinion that the mother’s religious faith could not be used as a reason for depriving her of her children.
The court awarded all the children to the custody of their father; alimony was to be paid by Svetlana Vardapetyan.
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CHURCH CLOSURE
In November 1973 the Bogoyavlenskaya church in Zhitomir (66 Karl Marx Street) was closed by order of the City Executive Committee [2]. The protesting parishioners were at first told that the reason for closing the church was its proximity to the school: the school and the church have stood beside each other for 32 years. Then the reason was said to be the reconstruction of the city.
The many complaints sent to higher authorities by the believers have been sent back to the city authorities and have had no effect. The believers have sent a complaint to the UN Secretary-General.
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NOTES
- On Father Pavel Adelgeim, see CCE 13.10 [11], CCE 17.14-2 [54], CCE 24.12 [17] and CCE 25.11.
↩︎ - For the context in which this Orthodox church was closed see Religion in Communist Lands, 1974, No. 6, p. 15.
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