Vladimir Shelkov

Vladimir Shelkov (1895–1980) 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.
Vladimir was born in Velyka Vyska village of Kherson Governorate in today Ukraine.
In 1931 Shelkov was imprisoned for the first time by the Soviet regime and spent almost all his life in prisons and camps. 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.
He died in a labor camp Tabaga near Yakutsk in 1980.