In February 1964, a human rights organization for Evangelical Christian Baptists (ECB) was established—“The Council of Relatives of Evangelical Christian Baptist Prisoners.” For 15 years, it was led by Lidia Vins, the mother of Georgiy Vins and wife of Petro Vins, who perished in the Stalinist camps. For her activities, Lidia Vins served a three-year sentence from 1970 to 1973. This human rights organization collected and disseminated information about the repression of ECB believers and gathered material aid for the prisoners’ families. In 1974, Georgiy Vins himself, the secretary of the Council of Churches of the ECB, was arrested. However, this sparked such a powerful wave of protest, both in the West and in the USSR, that the Soviet leadership was forced to make concessions and exchange G. Vins for several Soviet spies arrested in the West. In emigration, G. Vins was actively involved in public activities to protect the rights of Baptists in the USSR and to help the families of the imprisoned. He organized a representative office of the Council of Churches of the ECB in the United States.
A very important aspect was the close cooperation of the Baptist movement with the human rights movement, and in Ukraine, with the Ukrainian national movement. This proximity to human rights activists made the movement open and not isolated. The Chronicle of Current Events regularly published information about the repression against Baptists. As mentioned, another member of the Vins Baptist family—Petro Vins, son of Georgiy and grandson of Lidia and Petro Vins—joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
The Baptists widely distributed their samizdat. Starting in 1963, the ECB journal “The Herald of Salvation” was published (renamed “The Herald of Truth” in 1976). From 1964, the Council of Relatives of Prisoners published “Emergency Reports,” and from 1971, the “Bulletin of the Council of Relatives of ECB Prisoners.” In 1971, the Baptists established “The Christian” publishing house. It announced its activities publicly but was forced to keep its printing presses underground. By 1983, they had printed about half a million Gospels and spiritual publications in various languages, including Ukrainian. KGB agencies uncovered the publishing house’s clandestine printing operations several times. For instance, in Ukraine, in the village of Stari Kodaky in the Dnipropetrovsk region, an underground press of “The Christian” publishing house was exposed and dismantled in 1980. Many Baptists were persecuted in connection with this case.
After Lidia Vins emigrated, the Council of Relatives of Prisoners was headed by Hanna Kozoriezova, wife of the long-term prisoner of conscience Oleksiy Kozoriezov. In 1980, this mother of 10 children received a three-year suspended sentence. Another member of the organization, Ulyana Hermaniuk, a mother of five, was sentenced to three years in a corrective labor colony. Starting in 1979, members of the Council of Relatives of Prisoners organized a summer traveling camp for the religious education of children. In 1980, in Lviv, Pavlo and Volodymyr Rytikov and Halyna Vilshanska were sentenced to three years in a corrective labor colony for organizing the camp. In 1981, all members of the Council of Churches of the ECB were arrested, except for Kriuchkov, who had been in hiding since 1971.
The scale of judicial repression against Baptists can be judged by the following figures: as of May 1982, 158 Baptists were held in Soviet prisons and camps, accounting for half of all religious prisoners of conscience in the USSR. In Ukraine, 28 ECB believers were convicted in 1980–1981. Baptists were also subjected to other forms of repression, such as the disruption of worship services, weddings, and even funerals, the persecution of children in schools, and more.