Gennadi Kryuchkov
Soviet and Russian Baptist religious leader
Gennadi Konstantinovich Kryuchkov (Russian: Геннадий Константинович Крючков, 20 October 1926, Stalingrad, Soviet Union - 15 July 2007, Tula, Russia) 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 (previously Tsaritsyn, now Volgograd). 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-Baptists considered sending him for training outside the Soviet Union, but he refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gennadi Kryuchkov” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.