In the early 1960s the Russian Baptist movement, which had representation in virtually every region of the USSR, split in a bitter dispute. On the one hand there was the official registered Church, under the aegis of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists in Moscow. On the other were unregistered congregations led by the author of this book, Pastor Georgi Petrovich Vins of Kiev. It was the dynamic and fearless leadership of Vins and a handful of others that brought these unofficial congregations together into an organised movement, eventually called the Council of Evangelical and Baptist Churches. The cause of the crisis was a series of new restrictions on evangelism forced on the Moscow leadership in 1961. Vins and his group challenged the Moscow Council and the Soviet atheist authorities on legal grounds, well-argued and expounded in a wealth of clandestine documents. Eventually those who protested challenged the very legitimacy of the Moscow leadership and the schism persists to this day. There is very little of this background in The Gospel in bonds and the book would have benefited from an editorial introduction explaining it. What we have instead is a slim volume of prison memoirs, adding to the voluminous documentation of the Gulag. Although some of the autobiographical material has appeared before in various forms, this publication is more than worthwhile. It is timely to be reminded of the horrors of Soviet political prisons at a time when their memory is fading. Vins himself was a tough but spiritual personality. He never yielded an inch in the face of his interrogators. He suffered two periods of imprisonment totalling eight years, the first from 1963 to 1966, the second cut short after five years in 1979, when Vins found himself against his will on a list for an exchange of prisoners with the USA, two Soviet spies for seven of the highest profile dissidents. Many years later he was able to visit Russia and Ukraine as a free man and had the satisfaction of being rehabilitated. Throughout these vicissitudes – and it is the main theme of the book – Vins comes across as a man of iron will, with compassion for his fellow-prisoners and determination to preach the Gospel to them, whether or not he was in possession of a minuscule copy of St Mark which could be concealed, often successfully, in the palm of one's hand or a cut-out section of the heel of a boot. Vins died of a brain tumour in America in 1998, aged sixty-nine. The book contains a wealth of illustrations which are almost as moving as the text itself.