Slavic youth are handing out New Testaments in Sweden

On August 15, it marked 500 years since the New Testament was published in Swedish. In the weeks before, nearly 1,000 Slavic young people had arrived to distribute God´s Word in every mailbox in Stockholm area. Several said that Bible smugglers from Nordic countries had brought Bibles across the Iron Curtain during the Soviet period to their families – now they wanted to repay the debt.

Brevlådemissionen/The mailbox mission and Bible mission from Germany, together with various congregations, have taken the initiative to distribute God’s Word. Blekinge, Gothenburg, Skåne, northern Sweden, and several other cities and regions have already received their share of the gifts – now it was Stockholm’s turn. Printing the books for every mailbox in our long country will cost nearly 1,5 million Euros. Two-thirds of the amount has already been raised and distributed. Thanks to Slavic young people from Germany, the USA, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Moldova, Sweden…

I was invited one evening to the Arken Church in Kungsängen by Raoul Åkesson to talk about Bible smuggling to the Soviet Union during the time before glasnost and perestroika. Over 300 Slavic young people were housed in the premises during their stay there. Parents and grandparents of some had several times told how Christians from the Nordic countries had carried God’s word across the borders to the persecuted church in the East.

The leader of Bible Mission in Germany, Albert Froese, says:

• Our parents have often told us about this and how they got their first Testaments. Often, they would sit in front of radios in the evenings and nights to listen to radio missionaries Earl Pöysti’s sermons from Swedish IBRA radio.

During the jubilee week, the youth distributed about 20,000 New Testaments every day. When the jubilee then culminated at the big service at Sergels Square, in the center of the Swedish capital, where a couple thousand celebrants had gathered on Saturday, August 15, the deeply moved Pastor Froese mentioned during his sermon:

• Young people from Sweden, Finland, and Norway took great risks to bring Bibles into the Soviet Union. When our parents suffered persecution because of their faith, they lacked the comfort of God’s word. Then you came from the Nordics and helped us with Bibles, and many received their first Holy scriptures. Now we have come to your country to repay the debt and provide you with God’s Word.

During the Soviet era, the Bible was considered anti-Soviet propaganda. Therefore, it was not allowed to be brought into the country. The so-called ‘Bible smugglers,’ on the other hand, believed that it was the Soviet Union that was breaking its own law, since the Bible had been written 1900 years before the founding of the Soviet Union and could therefore not contain anything negative about the Soviet Union. Due to the shortage of Bibles, several Christians in the Nordic countries got involved so that the spiritually hungry in Russia and Ukraine could get Bibles and New Testaments. A Bible could then cost up to a month’s salary on the black market. 

The Swedish Slavic Mission, Avainsanoma, Finnish Folk Missionen, Open Doors, Operation Mobilization, and other organizations in Europe organized regular trips with specially prepared cars, which sometimes had secret compartments with space for up to 200 New Testaments. A couple of hundred Christians from Sweden are believed to have been involved in the so-called Bible smuggling, making 1–2 trips per year across the Iron Curtain up until the early 1990s.

According to a survey conducted in the early 1990s by Christian organizations, about 4.6 million New Testaments and Bibles were brought across the border into the Soviet Union during the 1960s-1980s. These were also printed in so-called underground print shops that, among others, Finnish missionaries helped set up in countries like Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, and Kazakhstan. The unregistered Baptists at that time were led by Georgi Vins and had several print shops working to produce God’s word. The publishing house that printed the Bibles was called Kristianin.

When I arrived at the Slavic youth dormitory in Kungsängen a couple of days before the jubilee meeting at Sergels torg to talk about Bible smuggling during the Soviet period, I was filled with great joy. During my lecture, I showed, among other things, a photo on a screen from an underground printing press in Moldova. Suddenly, one of the youth raised his hand. After waiting for a while, when I did not respond immediately, he stood up. When I gave him the go-ahead, he said that his father had worked at the underground printing press – absolutely incredible!

After another meeting three days later at the Sjöhamra camp, three dark-haired youths came forward. I immediately identified them as Gagauz from Moldova. The Gagauz are a Turkic people with a Christian tradition. In Moldova, the Slavic Mission and congregations from Sweden and Finland had already organized a missionary Bible school in 1990. As a result of the training, five Gagauz students decided to move to Central Asia to work with church planting. At that time, the places they moved to were completely untouched ground for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

A couple of years later, they had planted the first Kazakh-speaking and Turkmen-speaking church in southern Kazakhstan and in Turkmenistan’s capital, Ashgabat. I told the young people about this. Then they asked cautiously what the missionaries’ names were and where from Gagauzia they came.

When I had mentioned their first and last names, there was complete silence at first. Then they told me that they were their cousins and that they knew them well. That’s when I realized that God’s word had been fulfilled:

“Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again” (Eccl. 11:1).

Over the summer here in Stockholm, we have been completely overwhelmed by the distribution of Bibles. One of my young grandchildren also received a Testament in the mailbox at home. He has already reached page 221. He reads it every night before going to bed.

Rauli Lehtonen

AI-translation from Swedish to English