The Siberian Seven’ Families Win a Round with the Soviet Monolith

The score: 31 Pentecostals out, 30,000 to go.

Five years to the day after 5 of them dashed into the American embassy in Moscow, 15 members of the Vashchenko family flew from Moscow to Vienna. For 23 years the single-minded Pentecostal family had waged a determined campaign to emigrate.

Some combination of Western publicity of the case of the so-called Siberian Seven, the Vashchenkos’ and Chmykhalovs’ abandoning of sanctuary in the embassy, and an apparent decision by Soviet authorities to make a symbolic gesture were the ingredients that led to the June 27 breakthrough.

Last month 15 members of the Chmykhalov family flew from Moscow to Vienna enroute to the United States. They had been told earlier by the authorities to obtain invitations from friends in the West. Their permission to exit coincided with the formal agreement of the United States to sign a compromise document on security and human rights at the East-West conference in Madrid. Observers speculated that the Chmykhalovs may have been retained as a bargaining chip and to insure restraint by the outspoken Vashchenkos at the time of their exit.

Those who attempted to provide diplomatic help to the Seven recognized, in the words of Lynn Buzzard, executive director of the Christian Legal Society, “that the families in no way were going to be allowed to emigrate directly from the embassy.” Therefore, the most difficult task was to produce enough “good-faith signs” to convince the Seven to take the risk of leaving their embassy haven.

The rigid stand-off between the Seven and the Soviet authorities began to buckle after the Christmas of 1981 hunger strike led to Lidia Vashchenko’s hospitalization in January 1982. On her release, she returned to the family’s home village of Chernogorsk in Siberia and again applied for an exit visa. Last March she was summoned to the local visa office and told to reapply. Two weeks later she was allowed to leave. She flew to Israel and sent a formal invitation to the rest of her family from there. On the strength of her being permitted to leave, her parents and two sisters left the embassy (along with two members of the Chmykhalov family) and returned to Chernogorsk.

The fact that the official Soviet news agency, Tass, which rarely comments on emigration permissions, even after the fact, broke the story one day in advance of the Vashchenko exit, indicates that the Soviets were cultivating some good press from their action.

The Vashchenkos are now in Tel Aviv, Israel, on visitor’s visas. Prime Minister Menachem Begin commented positively on their arrival over Israeli TV, and Mayor Teddy Kollek formally welcomed them to Jerusalem. Christians form a beleagered minority in Israel. And whether or not the Vashchenkos will be granted residence rights is another question. They have standing invitations from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and elsewhere. Lidia actually visited the U.S. in a deliberately unpublicized visit late this spring.

Kent R. Hill, the Seattle Pacific University professor who translated material from the Vashchenkos for Siberian Seven biographer John Pollock, visited the Seven at intervals during their embassy stay. He said that their “hostage-like existence” had taken its toll. He observed the “signs of great pressure, a certain amount of paranoia, and on occasion a certain amount of bitterness.”

They arrived in Vienna fatigued from their three-and-a-half day train ride from Siberia to Moscow and from the departure hassles, and were at first reserved to the point of defensiveness. (Their escorts, from Vienna on, are convinced that there was a KGB agent on their flight from Moscow, and another in the Vienna airport.)

But in Israel they quickly bounced back as they settled into new routines—shopping for necessities, learning English words, and splashing and diving on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Hill said they “demonstrated a very sweet and warm spirit—a testimony to the vitality, the vibrancy of their faith.”

Hill praised the obvious warmth and mutual respect evident in the extended family of two parents, 13 children ranging in age from 9 to 32, and one in-law—“the way they defer to each other, particularly to the older children.”

Vic Glavach, until recently with the Christian Legal Society, who also accompanied the Vashchenkos during their first week in Israel, had been alerted to the family’s reputation for headstrong stubbornness. But he said he found them “delightful, comfortable people to be with.” He said he did not get the impression they were picking a bone with anyone, would make demands, or were looking for publicity. He said it was obvious, as they visited sites around the Sea of Galilee, that the family members knew the biblical significance of each location. Glavach was struck by the family custom of all following the father, Piotr, in rising for prayer and thanksgiving around the table both before and after each meal.

Christians did most to contribute to the exit of the Seven at the consciousness-raising level. Groups formed to champion their cause created a flurry of publicity that rippled to government leaders, especially in Britain and Sweden. Some denominations with ties to the Soviet Union took little action, however, considering it a Pentecostal problem. And even a denomination such as the Assemblies of God produced no support for the Seven during their first four years in the embassy. When funds were needed to cover the emigrant travel and relocation costs, $60,000 quickly poured in, a significant share of it from the Jewish community.

In spite of the two families exit, Soviet emigration policy has been tightening up over the last two years. Internal pressure on the church is also increasing. Hill says, “There is absolutely no evidence that this is going to begin any kind of a trend toward greater emigration of Christians—be they Pentecostal, Baptist, Russian Orthodox—to the West. I think the Soviets and Andropov will resist that completely. I don’t think there’s any sign that this is a harbinger of any major breakthrough.”

Why did the break come? Hill says, “It is the result of their being known in the West. It was only when individual Christians were willing to speak out on their behalf, making it a public issue in the West, that the pressure built sufficiently for the Soviets to decide to go ahead and make an exception. It is a vindication of the prayers and the work of those who have been willing to speak out on behalf of those in trouble behind the Iron Curtain. If there is any lesson in this, I think it is that without that, we have absolutely no way to protect them.”

There are many in need of that kind of protection. The unregistered Baptists report 171 of their leaders are imprisoned. Michael Rowe, a Keston College, England, researcher on religions in Communist lands, says there are about 150,000 Pentecostals in the Soviet Union, of whom 30,000 have signed petitions seeking emigration. Then there are some 1.8 million Baptists, Mennonites, and Lutherans. That is quite aside from the estimated 60 million who retain their Russian Orthodox faith.

The Siberian Seven, says Buzzard, are a symbol of all these oppressed believers. “If the Christian community in the West says, ‘Whoopee! Wow! I’m glad that’s over with. Now we get back to the chicken dinners’—somehow they’ve missed the point.”

HARRY GENET

A Christian Rock Star In The Soviet Union?

A remarkable new type of clandestine communication recently reached the West from the Soviet Union. It is a cassette recording in both Russian and English of a Christian rock opera, entitled The Trumpet Call, and produced by a group of young Christian musicians in Leningrad.

Valeri Barinov, the composer of the opera and leader of the group, has been working on it for six years. Influenced by rock music of the 1970s, and particularly by the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, he decided to try to communicate his faith to young people through his music. Barinov’s concern is particularly for young people who are outcasts in Soviet society: drug addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics, and criminals.

While living in one of the inner-city slums of Leningrad, in 1977, he often staged concerts for young people at the local Komsomol (Communist Youth League) youth club. He and his friends would play old Beatles and Rolling Stones songs. This drew young people in from the neighborhood like a magnet. As a student in the Soviet Union at the time, this reporter was present one night and observed the young people singing and dancing.

When the room was full, Barinov and his fellow musicians stopped singing and waited for everyone to quiet down. Barinov then took a New Testament from his pocket and, with a broad smile that lit up his face, began to preach the gospel.

Barinov’s Christian rock opera was produced by a group of professional musicians who are Christians—a painstaking and dangerous operation. All seven members of the group had to get off work at the same time for every secret rehearsal. Completion of the rock opera recording is especially remarkable since Barinov was under observation by KGB agents throughout the preparation years.

Barinov’s aim in sending a Russian-language version to the West was to have the music broadcast back to the Soviet Union over foreign radio stations. He hoped that in this way the message in The Trumpet Call, a call to repentance and belief in Jesus Christ and in his death and resurrection, would reach thousands who avidly listen to foreign radio broadcasts.

Barinov has lost a succession of jobs because he engages in personal evangelism at work. For a time he held a relatively well-paid job as an ambulance driver—the ambulance also was useful for transporting his guitars and other equipment around town. He now is employed as an outdoor worker, hosing water on asphalt in parks to create skating rinks. He earns barely enough to feed himself and cannot adequately support his wife and two daughters.

At the same time as copies of the rock opera cassettes were sent to the West, Barinov and another member of the group, Sergie Timokhin, sent a signed appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR calling on it to allow the group to “stage open performances of religious music in the concert halls of our country.”

Having received no reply by mid-June, the pair decided to stage a performance in the Leningrad Baptist Church on Sunday, July 10. They preceded the concert with a week of prayer and fasting.

In mid-February Barinov received notification that he was to be called into the army for two months of reservist training. He was then ordered to report for medical examination and examined by a psychiatrist, who told him that if he “preached” (witnessed to his faith, that is) in the army, he would be sent to a psychiatric hospital.

Barinov was visited by an employee from the psychiatric hospital on June 26 and ordered to go for an interview with one of the head doctors there. A letter received from Timokhin protests Barinov’s registration as a psychiatric patient: “I consider him completely normal. The program words, music, and arrangements written by Valerie bear witness to this fact, as do his organizational skills in arranging the recording in the most difficult circumstances …”

Barinov himself wrote an appeal to President Reagan, saying, “What is astonishing about the whole farce is that people working in a humanitarian profession agreed to take part—people who are bound by the Hippocratic oath.”

LORNA BOURDEAUX

Commandos Free Sudan Hostages

Four missionaries are safe after Sudanese government commandos rescued them and another hostage from a rebel group that held them for two weeks. The rebels, who held them in Boma, a remote outpost in southeastern Sudan, had released six other hostages, some of them missionaries, before the commando raid.

The ordeal began June 24 when members of the South Sudanese Liberation Front captured missionaries Martin Verduin, a Canadian; the John Haspels family, of Lyons, Kansas; and Willem Noort, a nurse from the Netherlands. Also held were two representatives of the Frankfurt Zoological Society. The next day the rebel group took hostage Ron Pontier and Bruce Riggins, both American missionary pilots.

The rebels demanded clothing, medicine, about $100,000 in cash, and the right to make a statement over a Voice of America radio broadcast. They threatened to shoot the hostages if their demands were not met. The rebels are fighting to free the southern Sudan, which is predominantly Christian and animist, from the domination of Arab Muslims in the north.

On June 27 they allowed Riggins to fly out of Boma with Haspels’s wife and children and with one representative of the zoological society. The remaining five were held until the commando rescue on July 8. Most of the hostages are affiliated with a consortium of mission agencies called the Africa Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Southern Sudan (ACROSS).

ACROSS Executive Director Charles Wilson joined representatives of the United States and Sudanese governments in negotiating with the rebels. At the time the Sudan decided to send in government commandos, none of the rebels’ demands had been met. Eighteen rebels and one government soldier were killed in the rescue. None of the hostages was injured.

Pontier and Riggins are pilots for the New York-based Africa Inland Mission (AIM), an evangelical missionary sending agency, AIM was a founding member of ACROSS. The Haspelses are relief and development workers affiliated with ACROSS. Verduin is a pilot for the Sight by Wings mission agency, based in Nairobi, Kenya.

AIM U.S. Director Peter Stam said his organization has a policy that prohibits paying ransom for the safe release of its staff. “We have so many exposed people, once we started [paying ransom] there’d be no end [to the hostage taking].”

World Scene

The founder of the only nonofficial disarmament group in the Soviet Union has been expelled from the Soviet Union. Sergei Batvorin, founder of “The Group to Establish Trust Between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.,” will continue to be active in Western disarmament campaigns. He says the antinuclear movement in the Soviet Union is growing, despite repression.

The former general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, John Rees, has been convicted for defrauding the ecumenical agency of more than $250,000. Desmond Tutu, current general secretary of the council, has accused white South African liberals of turning against him and of making a martyr of Rees, his predecessor. Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Archbishop Denis Hurley, who is president of the South African Conference of Catholic Bishops, a massive ecumenical church conference is being planned for 1986. Hurley hopes the Catholic church can become as relevant to South Africa as it has been in Central America since a landmark conference was held in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968.

Guatemalan president Efrain Rios Montt is under considerable pressure to fulfill his vow to restore “authentic democracy.” He made the vow after annulling the results of national elections held in March of 1982, with the claim that the voting was fraudulent. Dissenters, including Catholic church leaders and an army general, have petitioned Rios Montt to rid the government of the military and to draft a constitution. Recently Rios Montt declared a “state of alert” because of threats of a military coup. An electoral tribunal has been formed for the purpose of establishing a democracy. Rios Montt expects elections will be held sometime next year.

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