Vins, Georgii [Винс, Георгий], b 4 August 1928 in Blagoveshchensk, RSFSR, d 11 January 1998 in Elkhart, Indiana, USA. Prisoner of conscience. The secretary of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians and Baptists and a Baptist pastor in Kyiv, he was imprisoned in labor camps in 1966–9 for his religious activities. He was rearrested in March 1974, and sentenced in 1975 to five years in camps in Yakutiia and five years’ exile. He was released in April 1979 as a result of an agreement between the governments of the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and given asylum in the United States of America. There he founded and headed the International Evangelical Christian Baptist Representation and published the Prisoners’ Bulletin: Voice of the Persecuted Church in the Soviet Union.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]