New Freedom Baptist Church Faith Statement How to be Saved Pastor's Page Missionaries Sermons New Freedom Christian School Soul-Winning Events How to find us Gods Help Page Youth Program Patch the Pirate Club Childrens Church Links Bob Jones University 
The Holy Bible (KJV)  Rejoice Radio Broadcast The Lord's work
|
 "Reaching Russia and Eastern Europe since 1981"   by Chris Lovelace of Baptist International Evangelistic Ministries. During Soviet rule. Peter Rumachik served as Vice-President of the Council of Evangelical Baptist Churches, an organization coordinating the efforts of 2,000 underground churches in Russia. In 1957, Mr. Ramachik and four other Christian workers founded a church in the Moscow suburb of Dyedovsk. In 1961 - the same year that the Berlin Wall was built and Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space - Brother Rumachik was arrested and tried in a highly publicized trial in the Dyedovsk House of Culture. He was charged with starting a church, holding services in a private home and organizing children's activities and youth work in the church, and was subsequently sentenced to five years internment in the infamous GULAG* prison camps of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Mr. Rumachik was released from his four years of internment (one year early) after the Soviet authorities informed him that his imprisonment had been a "mistake". During the brief period of freedom that followed. Peter was ordained as a missionary by the church he had helped to found in Dyedovsk (1968. In this same year, Soviet troops would be called upon to crush the anti-Communist "Prague Spring" movement' in Czechoslovakia.) After having served several more years in the GULAG, Brother Rumachik was ordained as pastor of the church at Dyedovsk (1977). In August of 1980, Pastor Rumachik was sentenced yet again to five years hard labor in the camps. During this time, he was so brutally treated that he had to spend a period of three and a half months in the hospital after having been held in an isolation cell for fifteen days. (During the first seven days after his release from isolation, he had to be fed intravenously. At the end of ten days, he was still unable to stand.) In a letter that was smuggled out to his wife during the winter of 1982-83, he intimated that he expected to be meeting the Lord soon and that the next meeting with his family would likely be in heaven. At the end of his 1980-85 prison term and after over 16 total years of imprisonment, the Soviet authorities held Mr. Rumachik in a local prison without release while they prepared a new case against him. He was sentenced to five more years on February 7, 1986 - the same year that Gorbachev began instituting the policies of glasnost and perestroika. On February 5, 1987, Brother Rumachik and countless other prisoners were released by a direct order from the Presidium of the Soviet Union. Peter Rumachik spent a total of 18 1/2 years in the Soviet GULAG, giving him one of the longest prison sentences served by a Christian. Note: GULAG: (Glavnoye Upraviernye Lageryei) Lit "Head Directorate of Camps". "The extensive network of concentration camps during mass repression." (Ozhegov. Tolkovyi slovar'russkogo yazyka.) In bis books One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The GULag Archipelago, Aleksandr Soizhenytsin brutally exposed the many inhumane practices in the camps. Although he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for this work, he was exiled by the Soviet government in 1974. Home| Faith Statment| Salvation| Pastors Page| Missionaries Sermons| N. F. C. School| Soul Winning| Events| How to find US Gods help page| Patch Club| Childrens Church| Links |