A Path Not Lined with Roses

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 1956, Peter Rumachik and four other Christian workers founded a church in the Moscow suburb of Dyedovsk. He was eventually arrested for his Christian activities in 1961, when he was tried with the others in a highly publicized trial in the Dyedovsk cultural center. The trial concluded with a sentence of five years internment in the infamous GULAG prison camps of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Peter Rumachik was released one year early as an act of amnesty. Amnesty was short-lived, however, and the Soviet government continued its relentless persecution of the Church. In the years that followed, the Soviet government tried and convicted Pastor Rumachik four more times before his ultimate release in 1987. In all, Pastor Peter Rumachik served over 18 years in the Soviet prisons and concentration camps for his faith in God. While no volume can ever hope to encompass the fullness of the hardships he endured, this book has been composed to tell the account of how God sustained him and his family during these times. It is the hope of the authors that this account will be an encouragement to the faith of all who read it. - Back cover.