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…