Vladimir Shelkov was a Christian preacher and Seventh-day Adventist leader in the former Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. He headed the Church of True and Free Seventh-day Adventists, which rejected any government interference in the activities.

Vladimir was born in Bolshaya Viska village in Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

.

In 1931 Shelkov was imprisoned for the first time by the Soviet regime and spent almost all his life in prisons and camps. His last confinement began in 1979, when a Soviet court in Tashkent

Tashkent

Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan and of the Tashkent Province. The officially registered population of the city in 2008 was about 2.2 million. Unofficial sources estimate the actual population may be as much as 4.45 million.-Early Islamic History:...

 sentenced him (than a delicate eighty-three-year-old man) to five years of hard labor camps.

He died in a labor camp Tabaga near Yakutsk

Yakutsk

With a subarctic climate , Yakutsk is the coldest city, though not the coldest inhabited place, on Earth. Average monthly temperatures range from in July to in January. The coldest temperatures ever recorded on the planet outside Antarctica occurred in the basin of the Yana River to the northeast...

 in 1980.

External links

• "Special Section: Adventists in the Soviet Union", in issue 11:4 (June 1981) of Spectrum
  Spectrum (magazine)
  Spectrum is the official publication of Adventist Forums, published four times a year. It was established "to encourage Seventh-day Adventist participation in the discussion of contemporary issues from a Christian viewpoint, to look without prejudice at all sides of a subject, to evaluate the...