Gennadi Kryuchkov

Who was Gennadi Kryuchkov?

Gennadi Konstantinovich Kryuchkov was a Russian leader of the Baptist church in the Soviet Union. He was pursued by the KGB for over 25 years, and was described in his obituary in The Independent as "one of the most extraordinary of the Soviet Union's religious leaders in the post-Stalin era".

Kryuchkov was born in the then newly renamed Stalingrad. His parents became Baptists shortly before his birth, and he was raised in that denomination. In 1931, his father was sent to a labour camp for five years as a result of his faith, and was banned from living in Moscow after he was released.

Kryuchkov was conscripted into the Red Army in 1943. He remained a soldier until 1951, when he rejoined his family in Uzlovaya, near Tula, where his father was a coal miner. He became an electrician. He married Lydia Domozhirova in 1951, and they were both baptised as Baptists later that year at an unregistered church. The official All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists considered sending him for training outside the Soviet Union, but he refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. He was ordained as a Baptist pastor in 1960, but was quickly in trouble when in 1961 he joined a call to resist new and more restrictive regulations imposed on the church.