An exiled Russian preacher who spent eight years in Soviet prison and labor camps will speak on being a Christian in an aetheist nation.

Georgi Vins, one of five Soviet prisoners exiled to the United States in exchange for two Soviet spies in 1979, will speak on “Persecution and Glasnost in the Soviet Union” at 7:30 p.m. in the Holmes Student Center’s Carl Sandburg Auditorium.

“What we have noticed lately is the Soviet Union is searching for God,” Vins said through an interpreter. Vins read aloud two official Communist newspapers in which people wrote about spiritual collapse in the Soviet Union.

The articles indicate Soviet citizens doubt the “70-year experiment” of aetheism, Vins said. “There is nobody left who believes in communism. Only American university professors believe in communism.”

Vins, a Russian Baptist, was arrested for preaching about God in 1966 and imprisoned for eight years before being exiled. Vins’ father, an American-born missionary in Russia, was arrested for preaching, when Georgi was two years old, and died in prison 13 years later.

Despite religious freedom in the U.S., Vins said many Americans are apathetic about religion. “I think in the United States there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians. Then there are some who are Christians,” he said.

Vins appealed to Americans to value their freedom. “God is blessing America very richly. In order not to be robbed of that blessing, people should love Jesus, cherish the Bible and pray for spiritual awakening,” he said.

Vins said Tammy Bakker, wife of imprisoned PTL televangelist Jim Bakker, interviewed him when he first arrived in America. He said he was confused by the lavish studio and the Bakkers’ lifestyle because the way they lived and what they preached were two different things. “I had my doubts from the beginning about that man,” Jim Bakker.

Of all the cultural differences Vins experienced on arrival to America, “the hardest was to adapt to freedom, because when you are oppressed and in bondage, and then suddenly free, it’s a shock,” Vins said. He went directly from a Moscow prison to New York City when he was exiled in 1979. His family was allowed to join him six weeks later. Vins is married and has two sons and three daughters.

Vins said he has very different feelings about being banished from his homeland. “If it was possible to go back and preach, I would go,” he said.

“People in the Soviet Union have suffered for a long time. Christians will suffer quietly, but non-Christians will not hold their feelings in,” Vins said, reflecting on the Oct. 30 crackdown on demonstrators in Moscow.