Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Vins received a degree in electrical engineering from the Kiev Polytechnical Institute in 1952 and was ordained a minister in 1962. Struggle, and even martyrdom, in the service of religious conviction runs in his family. His father Pyotr was a U.S.-trained preacher who went back to the Soviet Union in 1922 as a missionary. He was arrested three times for his religious activities and died in 1943 somewhere in Stalin's vast Gulag system. Georgi pursued a career in industrial research in Kiev until he dedicated himself full time to religious work...
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...
...were rescinded, the bond of trust between the leadership and the more impassioned Baptists was broken.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...
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...
...business. Eaton amassed a fortune in power companies, steel and rubber concerns. After Hiroshima his chief interest became saving "capitalism and all mankind from nuclear annihilation." He conducted a series of "Pugwash Conferences" between Western and Communist intellectuals, promoted trade with Eastern bloc countries, and met frequently with Soviet leaders-efforts that won him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1960. Said he: "We must either learn to live with the Communists or resign ourselves to perish with them...