Sergei Kourdakov was a young defector from the Soviet Union who was born on March 1, 1951. According to his autobiography, he persecuted countless Christians as a KGB agent while a student and youth communist leader at the Petropavlovsk Naval Academy in Eastern Russia. In 1970, he began reading the Gospel of Luke and was transformed by it. Oh September 3, 1971, while a naval officer, he defected to Canada by jumping off of the ship he was stationed on. Kourdakov later converted to Evangelical Christianity, moved to the United States, and joined Underground Evangelism, an organization that smuggled Bibles and other religious materials into the Soviet Union. On January 1, 1973, Kourdakov was found dead by a gunshot to the head at a motel in California.