Commentary

The Russian dissident and the American Sunday school teacher

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INDIANAPOLIS — By April 1979, Georgi Vins had spent eight years in a Soviet Union labor prison in Yakutsk, Siberia. Days after he and four other dissidents had been exchanged for two spies, he found himself in a Baptist Church Sunday school class taught by American President Jimmy Carter.

“Since Georgi Vins was with me, the parallel between this lesson and his persecution in the Soviet Union was remarkable,” Carter wrote in his 2010 book, “White House Diary.”

President Carter died at age 100 last month, and was laid to rest in Plains, Georgia, after lying in state in the U.S. Capitol. Vins, a Russian pastor who had been arrested in Kyiv for failing to affiliate with only state-sanctioned Baptist churches, would go on to publish the Prisoner Bulletin in Elkhart before he died at age 69 in 1998.

“I’ve just been told that four days ago, Pastor Vins was in a cattle car being transported within Siberia as an exile in his own country because of his belief in Christ and because of his own personal courage in expressing that belief in the strongest and most forceful way, in spite of the intense pressure and punishment placed on him and his family by the Soviet officials,” Carter told the class.

“There could hardly be a better lesson than what I’ve already said,” the president continued. “Our lesson today is precisely a lesson about our visitor — his life in the Soviet Union, his altercation with state officials, his intense courage, his punishment. And I guess it is a coincidence, but I’m not quite sure.”

President Carter said his April 29, 1979, Sunday school lesson was titled “A Cry for Justice,” drawn from 1 Kings 21, Christi Harlan wrote in Baptist News Global in August 2024.

“It’s sinful to be silent in the face of injustice,” Carter said. “And … the people of God who know Christ must represent the cause of justice on behalf of the oppressed everywhere.”

Vins recounted in an address to the Exchange Club of Elkhart County in 1987 how he distributed tiny brown Bibles with waterproof pages. Each copy could be easily exchanged in a handshake or, if KGB agents approached, tucked in a snowdrift for later retrieval. “We are very thankful to help Christians in this way,” he said.

Vins raised eyebrows with his Elkhart speech, saying, “The Soviet Constitution is a good one. It has many good things — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to immigrate. But none of this is done by the government. None of the laws of the constitution have been fulfilled. None were ever intended to.

“The Soviet Union is a totalitarian system and the leaders are accountable to no one,” Vins continued. “They do only what they think they should do.” 

In the United States, President Carter was adamant about how he approached the separation of church and state. He held no religious events in the White House during his four years in power. He joined the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., about a mile from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and where he taught Sunday school.

When he announced his White House campaign in December 1974, the Democratic Georgia governor said as president, “I would not tell a lie; I would not mislead the American people. And I would not betray your trust.”

Carter was a breakthrough political figure in the era that gave America “Saturday Night Live” just a year after President Richard Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal. He was a new kind of candidate.

After defeating President Gerald Ford in 1976 Carter became a victim of international intrigue and his own stubbornness. He kept the United States out of the Moscow Olympics after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and fell victim to the oil shocks from the Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis. He given a speech describing a “malaise” among the American people.

That set the stage for the Reagan revolution of 1980, with conservatives providing the next chapters for FDR’s New Deal with LBJ’s Great Society. 

Carter would go on to become the greatest ex-president in history, working to rid the developing world of the guinea worm, while building thousands of Habitat for Humanity homes.

Jimmy Carter’s death comes as Republicans persistently say Democrats don’t love their country and many are seen as deviants and not Baptist Sunday school teachers.

Vins said in 1987: “I have to admit that my years in prison and concentration camps were the best years of my spiritual life. Hardship and danger made every day a struggle for survival. Christians in the Soviet Union think of prison as a practical test of faith.”

As for his adopted land, he said he believed Hoosiers take too much for granted. “I like it here in Elkhart,” he told me. “It’s a nice place. It’s peaceful.”

The historical echoes of Georgi Vins persist as he quoted Ephesians 6:19-20: “That I may open my mouth so boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds.”

 

Brian A. Howey is senior writer and columnist for Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs. Find Howey on X @hwypol.


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