It was 25 degrees below zero when Alexy asked me if I had been baptized. We had just cleared the final police checkpoint and were in sight of the Coca-Cola plant where we worked. "Sure I have," I replied, somewhat surprised.
"Have your wife and children?" Replying in Russian, I said "koneshna" — of course!
Silence filled the car. After a few minutes Alexy said he and his entire family had been baptized the week before. I was amazed.
Alexy, 35, is a former colonel in the KGB's internal security division. He had never heard the word of God until a few months before. College educated, highly intelligent and a member of the nomenclatura — a privileged class of Communists — he had felt "empty." He wondered if all there was to life was security, work, a meager pension and then death. Christ filled that void before my eyes.
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