Vladimir Shelkov

Vladimir Andreevich Shelkov Владимир Андреевич Шелков (December 20, 1895 – January 27, 1980) was a Christian preacher and Seventh-day Adventist leader in the former Soviet Union. He headed the Church of True and Free Seventh-day Adventists, which rejected any government interference in the activities.^[1]

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Shelkov was born in Velyka Vyska village of Kherson Governorate, today in Ukraine.^[2]

In 1931 Shelkov was imprisoned for the first time by the Soviet regime and spent almost all his life in prisons and camps.^[3] In 1946 Shelkov had been sentenced to capital punishment, which later was changed to 10 years imprisonment. His last confinement began in 1979 when a Soviet court in Tashkent sentenced him (then a delicate eighty-three-year-old man) to five years of hard labor camps.

Shelkov died in a labor camp Tabaga near Yakutsk in 1980.