Rod Dreher's Blog, page 195

The Kingdom Of The Petty Tyrant

A quick note to let you all know that I am unable to write much here, because I can’t connect to the Internet from my hosts’ home. I am in the cafe at the Hermitage Museum, checking email and approving comments. This will be quick, because I can’t allow myself to be online when I’m AT THE HERMITAGE!

I haven’t been following the news these past few days, but if this is true, it’s a humiliation and a disgrace:

Two senior American diplomats warned congressional investigators a White House plot to manufacture political dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine had undermined US national security interests and shredded faith among foreign service personnel, according to transcripts released on Monday by committees pursuing an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.

One of the diplomats, former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, described her “shock” to discover that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal emissary who has also worked for Ukrainian and Russian interests, was attempting to destroy her reputation.

When she sought advice on how to staunch the attack, she said, she was told to tweet something nice about Trump.

Again, if true, this is repulsive. The way for a senior diplomat to stop Giuliani’s assault was to TWEET something nice about Trump?! If a satire writer made that up, it would be unbelievable.

If this is true, then Trump is going to fall — not *because* of this, but because a man who runs his presidency like that is pathetically weak and vulnerable. It’s a Brezhnev At The Olympics moment.

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Brezhnev In The Dark

I’ve got to tell you this story before I forget. I talked to a Russian man who, during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, found himself working near the stadium box where Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was going to sit for the opening ceremony. He was standing by when Brezhnev’s security detail stormed in ahead of the General Secretary, and demanded to know what certain metal poles were doing in a particular place. Technicians explained that these were the supports for the TV lights that would illuminate Comrade Brezhnev.

“We didn’t agree to these things!” one of the KGB men barked. “Get rid of them!”

You didn’t argue with the KGB. Down came the poles. And so, at the 1:25 mark in the opening ceremony (see above), when the camera lands on Brezhnev as he is introduced to the crowd, and to the watching world, the General Secretary is shrouded in darkness.

“That was the first clue I had that the system was going to fall,” said my Russian interlocutor. He meant that a system that caused a globally humiliating mistake like that to happen, because certain people in authority thought they knew better, and everybody below them was reasonably terrified to tell them no — a system like that was going to collapse.

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Night Train To St. Petersburg

Well, I’m off. The night train to St. Petersburg is pulling out of Moscow’s Leningrad Station as I type this. That’s me getting settled into my cabin. I splurged and bought a bed in a solo cabin. I’ll be waking up just south of St. Petersburg. I would love to go to the restaurant car to order a martini and see if there are any spies about, but I’m too tired. Time to brush teeth, fold out bed, and drift off while the train rocks.

It’s going to be a while before I can figure out what I think of Russia. I am so glad I came here. This country is so deep and wounded and glorious. I think of the final lines from Evgeny Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus:

What kind of people are you? says the merchant Zygfryd. A person heals you, dedicates his whole life to you, and you torture him his whole life. And when he dies, you ties a rope to his feet, drag him, and tears stream down your faces.

You have already been in our land for a year and eight months, answers blacksmith Averky, but have not understood a thing about it.

And do you yourselves understand it? asks Zygfryd.

Do we? The blacksmith mulls that over and looks at Zygfryd. Of course we, too, do not understand.

I did not understand that ending both times I read the novel. I mean, I understood what the author was getting at, but it was poetic and mysterious. Now, after the past few days talking with Russians, I am starting to get it.

When I get to St. Petersburg, Vodolazkin himself will be waiting for me on the train platform. He and his wife live in St. Petersburg. When I was planning this trip, I told him that I would be in his city, and would love to take them to lunch. We have had a friendship by correspondence since I first wrote about Laurus a few years ago. We have hoped that we would one day have the opportunity to meet, either in Russia or America. And now, we would.

Stay in a hotel? he said. Not at all! You’re staying with us. And so, I will spend the next few days with the writer of one of my favorite novels, talking about writing, our shared Orthodox faith, and this great and fearsome country. What a blessing.

My Moscow guide and translator Matthew told me at Leningrad Station something that a fellow American living here said to him: That if you can help it, you don’t go to Russia just once; that you won’t be able to get it out of your head. I can see that. I couldn’t have seen that when I landed here, but after these last days in Moscow, spending time with these beautiful, tragic people, and visiting their sites both sacred and terrible, I know what he means.

Before I forget, let me tell you something I heard last night. I had dinner at the home of a Russian family and their two children, teenagers who have the most impeccable manners. The family made me feel right at home. They’re practicing Orthodox Christians. We talked about Soviet history, and at one point I said I found it hard to understand how anybody ever believed that Bolshevik garbage.

“You want me to tell you why people believed that garbage?” said Valentin, the husband. “I’ll tell you why people believed that garbage.”

Then he launched into a spellbinding discourse on Russian history, going back to the controversial reforms of Patriarch Nikon in the 17th century. 

Valentin talked about how close Nikon was to the Tsar, and how ruthlessly the Church and State, which were united, persecuted the Old Believers (Russian Orthodox who resisted Nikon’s reforms). Then he spoke of the imposition of full serfdom in that same century, and the buying and selling of peasants as if they were slaves.

On he went to Peter the Great, telling about how Peter abolished the patriarchate and absorbed the Church fully into the State. And Valentin emphasized how much the aristocratic class under Peter despised ordinary Russians and the Russianness. The poverty and immiseration of the vast peasant class, and the Church’s complicity in their oppression, caused many of the poor to despise the Church. Their ignorance and deprivation made them susceptible to Bolshevik propaganda, he said. “They had the mentality that said that if you just kill all the bad people, goodness will triumph,” said Valentin.

My host’s point was clear: the ruling class for centuries ground the peasantry into the dirt, and the clergy, who ought to have defended the poor, sided with their oppressors. Valentin is no Bolshevik; he is, as I said, a believing Orthodox Christian. He wanted me to understand, though, that Bolshevism didn’t come from nowhere.

As he spoke, I thought about the line in that great book about Father Arseny, the legendary Orthodox priest of the gulags. The story has it that a bunch of prisoners were sitting around the gulag at night, cursing the Bolsheviks, and trying to figure out who was to blame for the accursed revolution. Everybody had a theory. Finally someone asked Father Arseny what he thought. As I recall the story, Father Arseny blamed the clergy for bringing the judgment of the revolution onto Russia.

The priest was making a very Orthodox spiritual point, not a strictly historical one. He was taking responsibility for the failures of his people, the clergy — and by implication, modeling for the prisoners their own duty to take responsibility for the roles their own people had played in this catastrophe.

I want to be very clear: Valentin was in no way justifying the Bolshevik revolution, especially in light of the mass murders the Communists committed, which we had been discussing earlier. However, I think he wanted to help me to understand that nothing is simple in Russia’s history. What kind of people are you? says the merchant Zygfryd…

I’m going to leave you with this 2015 interview I did with Evgeny Vodolazkin. 

 

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Father Alexey’s Carpentry Shop

Today is my last day in Moscow. I went to the Divine Liturgy today at St. Seraphim of Sarov in Moscow’s Raevo neighborhood. It’s my translator Matthew’s parish, and he loves it intensely. There I met its priest, Father Alexey Yakovlev, a great big bear of a man.

After liturgy and lunch in the trapeza, Father Alexey took me on a tour of the church complex. Construction on the church started in 2009, on the site of a former garbage dump. It was finished in 2016 — and today, it’s full of worshippers. It’s so new that the interior walls are mostly white (normally they’re covered with icons in the Russian church). The church compound is surrounded by a plastered wall. They have a church flower garden, a church hall, a gallery showing Fr. Alexey’s matushka’s paintings and other buildings.

Father Alexey was especially proud of the carpentry school there. We saw about ten men working hard in the cold rain, sawing wood, planing boards, and suchlike. They were doing this for fun, in fact. All of them are ordinary people who are learning traditional carpentry of the Russian far north. They will be helping in a project administered through Fr. Alexey’s church, in which volunteers travel to the rural northern part of Russia and rebuild abandoned wooden churches that are falling apart. The men I saw working today are being trained for free by a master craftsman (who was there supervising them), and in exchange for their training, they have to go on at least one of these mission trips.

The guys looked like they were having a great time. Father Alexey told me:

These men, when they come in here for class, they look like plankton. But then they take off their business suits, put on their work clothes, pick up a saw or a hatchet, and transform themselves into men. It’s an amazing thing to see. There’s something about working with your hands that is necessary to developing your masculinity.

Again, they’re not doing this because it’s a neat thing to learn (though it is). They’re doing this so they can put these skills to work restoring and recovering a precious part of their country’s religious and cultural heritage. The state isn’t paying them to do this. This is not a project of the Moscow Patriarchate. In fact, this year, Patriarch Kirill flew to a village in the Arkhangelsk region to see for himself the fully restored church where the project first started. Matthew told me that the Patriarch was delighted to see the fruit of their labor and praised the volunteers for their own initiative — that is, for seeing a need, and responding to it. I should mention that the project began when Fr. Alexey and his wife saw a man in his 70s fixing the bell tower in this village all by himself. Since then, the movement has grown, with over 370 expeditions in 13 years, and 153 churches restored. Moreover, the volunteers use their own vacation time to take part.

Here’s a short YouTube video about the project, with English subtitles:

Lots of churches do mission projects, of course. What I love about this one is that the church members and others who want to learn these traditional skills are engaged in rescuing holy buildings that have fallen into ruin. As Russians, and Russian Orthodox Christians, they’re also restoring something within themselves. Father Alexey invited me to come to next year’s summertime mission to the far north, and bring along believers who are ready to build. Any of you who are interested in this, let me know, and I’ll put you in touch with the folks in the parish.

What a great ministry within the local church, too: engaging men in learning a useful and often forgotten skill. That was a happy group of Russian men working there behind the church this afternoon.

I gave a talk later in the afternoon to a group from the parish. Well, not a talk, really, but just answering their questions about my work, and the challenges facing Christians in our time. I found myself sitting there telling a room full of Russian Orthodox Christians about Drag Queen Story Hour, and the other things that have become a normal part of US culture. Hearing these things come out of my mouth, and watching their faces as Matthew translated my words, really brought home how completely freaking insane we Americans have become. Someone asked if the churches were standing up to this madness. I had to tell him no, not really. Some churches bless it, a few oppose it, but most just want to be quiet and wait for it to go away.

A man in the back of the room said that it seems to him that we are losing the image of God in man. Yes, I said — and if we lose the image of God, then we will also lose man himself.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? It defies comprehension.

After spending the past few days here talking to men who endured prison and torture for their faith, or, as in the case of Father Kirill Kaleda, tends a mass grave where 21,000 people, including over 1,000 Christians, were massacred by the Bolsheviks — well, it really puts into perspective the triviality of US Christianity (that is, what we have allowed our Christianity to become). Don’t get me wrong, Russian Christianity has lots of problems too, and I’ve heard about them. But I really do wish that every American Christian could have the experience I’ve had these past few days, learning about what people suffered for the sake of their faith in God, and where they found the hope to stagger onward rejoicing. We Americans take so much for granted. It’s a cliche to say that, but it really is true. One of the many gifts Russians have given me this week is a new awareness of the cost of discipleship.

On to St. Petersburg in a few hours, on the overnight train…

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Moscow Saturday

I’ve been staying this week at the Hotel Metropol, because yes, I’m that guy who read A Gentleman In Moscow, loved it, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to take up residence in Count Rostov’s dwelling.

This morning, after eating my last breakfast of blini, plum jam, and sour cream (tomorrow is Sunday; no eating before the Divine Liturgy), I set out with Matthew Casserly, my translator and guide, to the Tretyakov Gallery. I wanted to see the famed Holy Trinity icon of Andrei Rublev. It did not disappoint. I had not known that the equally famous “Vladimir” icon of the Virgin and Christ Child is in the church attached to the Tretyakov. Matthew, who is also Orthodox, and I reverenced the icon, and I prayed for a special intention I have taken to the Theotokos every time I have prayed before one of her icons here in Russia.

What surprised me, and delighted me, about the Tretyakov was the 19th century Russian art, about which I knew not a thing prior to this visit. I have a number of images on my camera, but inasmuch as I can’t figure out how to get them off of the damn thing and onto my computer, I’ll have to wait until I get home late next week to post them.

We couldn’t spend more than an hour and a half in the gallery because we had to be back at the Metropol to meet Alexander Ogorodnikov, one of the best-known Christian dissidents of the Soviet era. Though he came from a family of Bolshevik aristocracy, he converted to Christianity in his twenties. The Soviets threw him in a mental institution. He was released, but then jailed and tortured in the gulag for about a decade. (Here’s a book about his life.) Gorbachev released him in 1987, and he met Ronald Reagan on the US president’s final visit to Moscow. Ogorodnikov told me today that when he shook Reagan’s hand, the American president quoted Anna Akhmatova to him, which touched his heart.

We began with me telling him about the thesis for my book: that emigres from the USSR and Soviet-bloc countries are sensing the coming of a soft totalitarianism in the West, and to both fight it and prepare for it if it comes anyway, I’m seeking out the advice of Christians who endured the hard totalitarianism of Communist rule. They endured an Orwellian ordeal, while we in the West are today, and in the near future, facing a dystopia that has more in common with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. That’s how I put it to Ogorodnikov.

He nodded his agreement.

“I’m already shocked by the totalitarianism that already exists in the West, within social opinion,” said the gulag survivor. “Someone makes some kind of announcement that’s not up to progressive social standards, and immediately there’s a quarantine zone around them. It gets to the point just in order to be understood you have to constantly simplify, in order not to hurt or offend anyone.”

That was the first thing he said to me, and it brought me to the edge of my chair. When a man who has suffered what Sasha Ogorodnikov has suffered under totalitarianism tells you that he sees signs of a new version of it emerging in the West, you had better pay attention.

Of course everything in the Soviet Union was much rougher, he said, so you have to be careful drawing parallels. We spent the next two and a half hours together in the bar, drinking tea, with Matthew translating Ogorodnikov’s stories about growing up in the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), but losing his faith in Marxism as a university student.

In the 1970s, he converted to Orthodox Christianity, scandalizing his Communist parents, and making himself an instant target for the KGB. Ogorodnikov and a few other young converts — all of them from atheist backgrounds, all of them from solidly Communist families — started holding seminars where they would come together to pray, sing hymns, and talk about the faith.

Father Alexander Men, a well-known dissident Orthodox priest, would send people who presented themselves to him seeking information about living out Christianity to Ogorodnikov and his friends.

“Once Father Alexander sent a writer to was rather old. He came to one of our seminars and spent about an hour and a half, not saying a word,” the dissident told me. “This older man finally stood up and identified himself as the son of a high official in the Russian Empire. He said, ‘Brothers, you have no idea what you are doing here. If just ten of you had been in St. Petersburg in 1917, the Revolution would not have happened.’ That man had already been through the gulag. He even organized a revolt in one of the camps where he had been. It was such an encouraging thing to hear. We had a really, really brotherly atmosphere in these seminars. These seminars were like a bonfire where people could come and warm up their frozen Orthodox hearts.”

“This was the blood that flowed in our veins,” he added. “This was our confession of faith.”

I mentioned to him that I had read in a biography of the dissident priest Father Dmitry Dudko that the nascent Christian movements of the era drew young people who were desperate for something to believe in.

“The young people that were coming to us were in an ideological crisis,” he affirmed. “They were looking for truth. They were living in this omnipotent ideological system, one so total that it gave answers to all questions. Of course we knew that these answers weren’t good enough.

Ogorodnikov told about how as a teenager, he was completely sold out to Communism, and received favorable attention from the Communist press for his leadership initiatives in Komsomol. He began to see that he could have a good career working for the state. Even the KGB put out feelers to see if he was interested in coming to work for them.

He declined these offers, because he was starting to lose his faith in Marxism. When he finally lost his ability to believe in it, his whole world fell apart. Ogorodnikov became desperate for something to believe in, because “I couldn’t just live like an animal.” Though he kept his doubts about Marxism secret, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sensed that something was wrong with the promising young acolyte, and invited him to come in and explain what was going on.

“It was then, on this trip to Moscow, that I came to the realization that I was anti-Soviet. I was 20 years old,” he said.

Having failed to pass the entrance exam to study philosophy at Moscow State University — he had criticized Lenin’s primitive ideas about materialism — Ogorodnikov landed at a university in the Urals. He ended up giving his first anti-Soviet speech there, which got him expelled both from Komsomol and the university, and sent into exile to clear his head.

“When I arrived at the exile city, they had already forewarned people that I was coming, and had slandered me,” he said. “They gave me a job at the factory, but the people there had already been told that I was a dissident who repeated the propaganda of our Western enemies. There was this almost kind of quarantine zone. Even people in that city who knew me well, if they saw me coming, they would cross the street to avoid me.”

Yes, I can see why people who lived through this kind of thing are made so anxious by cancel culture. Can’t you?

We talked about the role of suffering in the Christian life. He told me that when he finally landed in prison for his faith activities — when he refused to accept exile to the West, the Soviets threw him in jail — the KGB told him flat out that they intended to break him.

The first prison I was in was the most difficult jail you could be in. It was where they sent people who specifically needed to be broken. As one of the employees of the jail who had rank, a colonel or something, said we’re not here to whack you, we’re here to bleed you out, drop by drop.

They sent me to Tver. This was a jail where people were shot. They put me on death row, even though I didn’t have a death sentence. It seems that they told the other prisoners,  okay, don’t actually kill him, but if he dies, we will give somebody else their freedom. When I went into the cell and looked at the gusy that was there, I told them, “Listen brothers, I was sent here to help you meet death, not as criminals, but as men with souls that are going to meet their Maker, to go meet God the Father.”

Given that they always took people to go be shot really early in the morning, many of these prisoners spent all night waiting for the knock at the door to see who would be called out. So of course they didn’t sleep. Neither did I. I helped them turn this night of terror into a night of hope. I told them I am a layman, I can hear your confession — they were confessing to me what they had done. I told them I couldn’t absolve them, but when I die and go before the Lord, I will be a witness to your repentance.

If I wanted to describe their confessions, I would need Dostoevsky. I don’t have the words myself. I told them that God is merciful, and the fact that you are expressing what you have done, and that you are denouncing it, that your regret and repentance is washing and purifying. When they would be shot, they would die as purified people.

When my jailers understood that me being in that cell wasn’t breaking me, it was only making things worse, they took me out of death row.

The moved Ogorodnikov to solitary confinement. Then something mystical began to happen.

 I felt very clearly someone waking me up in the middle of the night. Very clear, but softly. I had a very, very clear vision when I woke up. I could see the corridor of the jail. I could see a man being taken out of in chains, but I only saw him from behind. Still, I knew exactly who it was. I understood that God sent me an angel to wake me up so I could accompany that man in prayer as he was being taken out to be shot. I understood that if God was showing that to me, that He was asking me to pray a kind of funeral prayer for that condemned prisoner as he was going to his death. I understood that the prayers of this prisoner and I had been heard, and that he was forgiven. I was in tears.

This mystical awakening in the middle of the night didn’t occur with all of those prisoners, only with some of them. I believe it was to show that those prisoners had been forgiven. I would literally feel someone touching me on my skin to awaken me, even though I was all alone in the cell.

He wondered why in these visions he was not allowed to see the faces of the condemned.

The answer came to me in a different prison, in solitary confinement, God revealed why I had been seeing them from behind. In that prison there was an old prison guard. This was a small prison. He was the only one. All the cells were empty. This old man was on duty — he was clearly a pensioner, they let him work at night because he was lonely.

One night, he opened the door and came into my cell, which was forbidden. He had absolutely crazy eyes. The guard said to me, ‘They come at night!’ And I understood. I said to the guard, you need to tell me this now, you need to confess.

He said that when he was a young guard, they would gather 20 or 30 priests who had been in this prison, take them out of the prison, then bind them to a sled so they would be pulling it, like a horse team. The guards made the captive priests pull the sled into the forest, running all day until they found a swamp.

Then they organized the priests into two columns of men standing single file. The old man back then was one of the guards that formed a perimeter around the priests to prevent them escaping. One of of the KGB guys walked up to the first priest. He asked him very calmly and quietly, “Is there a god?” The priest said yes. The KGB man shot him in the forehead in such a way that his brains covered the priest behind. He calmly loaded his pistol, went to next priest, asked, “Does God exist?”

“Yes, he exists.”

The KGB man shot him in the same way. Not one of those priests denied Christ.

Meaning they all died. Ogorodnikov fought back tears telling me this.

When he composed himself, Ogorodnikov said the old prison guard said that the KGB had not blinded the priest before shooting them. Memory of the eyes of the men facing execution that night tormented the old guard. He asked for the night shift at the prison because in his mind, he was visited by those he saw murdered that night in the forest. He was clearly going insane.

Here’s what Ogorodnikov learned from that half-crazy old man’s testimony: that the eyes of the men being led to be shot were full of horror. In his mystical vision of them going to their execution, “God didn’t let me see their faces because I couldn’t bear the terror there.”

“You learned that you weren’t suffering in vain,” I told him. “If you had not been in that prison to witness to those men, and to pray with them and for them, what would have happened to their eternal lives?”

What a radical message for the American church! I said. The American president has just appointed a prosperity gospel televangelist to be his top religious adviser and public liaison.I explained to my Russian interlocutor how popular the prosperity gospel is in America (they have it here in Russia too), and how it is pure poison for the Christian churches. These kinds of health, wealth, and comfort Christians are going to be the first ones to fall away when times get hard.

I thought about how clean, primped, and puffed the TV evangelists are, and how strongly they contrast with the long-haired old man sitting across from me, whose stiff body never fully healed from all his prison beatings. We American Christians may never see the inside of a jail cell, but the kind of Christianity that we are going to need for the future is the one of which Alexander Ogorodnikov is an icon.

I mentioned that the Soviets tried, and largely succeeded, in breaking the Russian church by violence and cruelty. North America and Europe, by contrast, are bleeding the churches out through material pleasures and distractions. We are disintegrating as religious communities. And so many Christians don’t want to see what’s happening all around us.

Yes, said Ogorodnikov, there’s a trend in the West. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

I was once invited to a conference of Catholic laypeople in Europe. It was a lay movement. I was listening to the level of the discussion they were having, and I could see that they were in a deep, deep crisis. They were retreating without any fight. The territory that they once controlled spiritually, they were giving up. I could see that the youth were giving up their commitments. You could see it coming into their movement like rust.

But there was absolutely no talk about it! Nobody was beating the alarms, nothing. It’s like they were on the Titanic and it’s beginning to sink, and nobody will talk about it. This is horrible. No one was saying anything to them about this. When I asked to speak, I tried to tell them what I was seeing among them, in diplomatic terms. I got a surprising reaction. Nobody objected to what I was saying, but everyone pretended that they hadn’t heard what I had said.

As we wrapped up the interview, Ogorodnikov told me that he hopes this book I’m working on will wake up the West, before it’s too late. Whatever success this book may have will be because of heroes like Sasha the Confessor.

I left our table and walked over to the bar to pay the bill. The young Russian woman who had been waiting on our table seemed curious about why I had been taking notes on a laptop while talking to this aged hippie in blue jeans.

“That’s one of the greatest men in Russia,” I told her. “He’s a Christian who suffered horrible tortures in the Soviet gulag, all for his faith.”

She made an O with her mouth, and looked genuinely distressed.

“I learned something about that from a movie I watched not long ago,” she said.

The entire country was turned into a police state and prison camp, and this generation who never knew the Communist yoke barely knows what men like Alexander Ogorodnikov endured. That’s a heavy thought to carry.

I had a lovely dinner out near the edge of the city tonight with a family of four, and learned some really interesting things (among them: I don’t like kvass, which tastes like beer Coke, or a stout as brewed by the Nutri-matic machine by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. But that’s all I can say now, because I’m falling asleep, and tomorrow morning I’m going to the liturgy. Off to St. Petersburg on an overnight train at day’s end. Goodbye, Metropol! Goodbye Red Square!

Anxious area fathead in search of Brezhnev’s eyebrows

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Moscow Diary

Yesterday morning was for sightseeing in Moscow, as I had no appointments until late in the day. Matthew took me to Red Square, where I saw the line to get in to see Lenin in his tomb. A lot of Latin American commies do that, Matt explained. I would have done it just to make sure the SOB was dead, but you couldn’t make me stand in that cold for an hour and a half to look at the corpse of one of history’s greatest monsters. Still, it was fascinating to see the place where all those Soviet military parades took place, and to see where Brezhnev and the Politburo stood (atop Lenin’s tomb) reviewing the procession. It was all somehow smaller than I expected.

At the far end of Red Square is St. Basil’s Cathedral, the iconic Moscow church — the one with the candy-colored onion domes. What an astonishing place. I’ve never been in a church like it. Inside, there is no central nave. Instead, it’s like a fistful of candy canes. That is, there are around 12 individual churches, all very small, connected by a dark medieval warren of hallways. Icons everywhere. It was magical. I felt for the first time that I was in the world of “Laurus,” Evgeny Vodolazkin’s great novel of the Russian Middle Ages. I saw an icon of the Holy Trinity featuring God the Father depicted as an old man (“Sabaoth,” Matt explained), with Jesus the Son on his lap, and in turn with a white dove (the Holy Spirit) on his lap. Never before had I seen such an icon, but by day’s end, I had seen several.

We walked onward, to a marvelous new park by the Moskva River. I forget the name, but it was designed by an American. It’s a superb use of public space. Then we strolled over to the tiny, once very poor Moscow church where Saint Alexey Mechev and his son, St. Sergey, a martyr of the Bolsheviks, had served. I prayed there and bought an icon of the father and son. Then we walked over towards the Sretensky Monastery, where I venerated the remains of St. Hilarion Troitsky martyred as an archbishop by the Bolsheviks. I lit candles in the church for friends, and prayed for some time.

A friend of Matt’s who works there told us that the basement of the older church was a charnel house for the Bolsheviks. Many people were murdered there. Priests had to undertake the rite of blessing six times before people felt comfortable using the room. Later in the day, Matt and I passed a building in the center of the city, in fashionable Nikolskaya Street. Matt said that in the seven years he’s lived here, that building has remained abandoned, even though it’s sitting on very valuable land. Why? Because it was known as a Bolshevik murder house; no one wants to be in it now.

Later, we met the Russian historian and anti-cult activist Alexander Dvorkin for dinner at a Georgian restaurant. In our conversation, Dvorkin, who spent a lot of time in the United States as a younger man, and who was baptized into Orthodox Christianity there, said that he has grown sad to observe how quickly Christianity is fading in America. That, and how powerful political correctness has become.

“People in America believe all this stuff in earnest,” he said. “At least in the Soviet Union, people might have said things, but they didn’t believe any of it. There’s an old Soviet joke. An elementary school teacher says to her pupils, ‘Children, do you know who has the best toys? The Soviet Union! Do you know who has the best food? The Soviet Union! Do you know who has the nicest clothes? The Soviet Union!’ A little boy in the classroom starts crying, and she asks him what’s the matter. He says, ‘I want to go to the Soviet Union!'”

As we talked about political correctness, Dvorkin said that American liberals make a huge mistake by not speaking out against illiberal progressives. In pre-revolutionary Russia, he said, the number of hardcore left-wing radicals was relatively small. But

there was a much larger group of intellectuals who said, yes, those Bolsheviks really are some crazy guys, but we can’t criticize them, because they are against a lot of the bad things going on in Russia, just like we are. Even when the Socialist Revolutionaries were killing innocent people in their attempts to assassinate Czarist officials, liberals still wouldn’t criticize them.

Some worthy, I forget who, once said that there is no telling how much evil has been allowed to run free in the world because people were afraid of appearing insufficiently progressive.

Dvorkin is rather pessimistic about the future. He believes Christians should start preparing themselves for exclusion from certain careers, and should start forming “parallel groups” to carry out things like homeschooling (“Have I got a book for you!” I thought). Where do you find hope? I asked.

“We are promised [by Jesus Christ] that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. Otherwise there is very little hope,” Dvorkin said. “We know that eventually we will lose. We should keep fighting, but at the same time we have been warned [in Scripture] that it will go this way. It’s just a fact that we life in a post-Christian civilization.”

After we said goodbye, Matthew and I walked over to a Christian cultural center run by the Russian branch of the Italy-based Catholic movement Communion & Liberation. There we met Viktor Popkov, a Christian dissident from Soviet times, who spent a couple of years in prison for his faith. Popkov converted to Christianity as a college student. We sat down for a chat at a table in the kitchen behind his office in the center.

When considering parallels between potential totalitarianism in our time and the Soviet version, he said, one has to remember that as a Christian in Soviet Russia, there was no place to hide.

“There was no separate culture, no niche, nowhere to withdraw,” said Popkov. “The minute you declared yourself a non-Soviet person, everything went against you. You had no way of of defense — not socially, not legally. You were an outcast. At the moment when everyone is building socialism, and you are an outcast, you have no way to save yourself.”

“The State recognized faith,” he continued, “but only for babushkas. The idea was that they needed it to add color to their lives. For young people, there was a wide array of ways the State could apply pressure, at different levels of cruelty.”

The most extreme was committing you to a psychiatric hospital. But there were softer versions. Popkov is from the city of Smolensk, about 200 miles southwest of Moscow. In the early 1970s, when he was a young man, there was only one cathedral, sitting on a hill. Few people wanted to go to it on ordinary Sundays, but at Pascha (Easter), youth often wanted to go there to see what was going on. But police surrounded the church to prevent access. Only the babushkas, the old women, were allowed through. If young people would show up, cops would lead them to buses, drive them miles out into the forest, drop them off, and tell them to find their way back on their own.

“The faith was dying back then,” Popkov said. “It was passed on in very few families, for example, priestly families. If you wanted to be a Christian, it had to be a conscious decision to remain faithful, no matter what happened. But these cases were very few and far between.”

I brought up the case of Father Dmitry Dudko, a leading dissident priest, who realized that the Russian people were mired in despair, and needed something to give them hope.

“Yes, that’s true. I was one of the ones who was drawn to the faith back then,” he said. “People like me were on a search. In a sense, we rejected what we had been given, and were searching for something different.”

In Soviet life, there was a difference between what people believed, what they said, and what they did. Said Popkov, “I wanted to speak what was on my mind, and live according to my real values. Soviet man was divided against himself. There’s a well-known joke from those days that expressed this feeling well: ‘I haven’t read Boris Pasternak, but I denounce him anyway.'”

This was the early 1970s, when Popkov was in his late teens and early 20s. Christianity wasn’t on his radar at the time. “I was just living in a swamp, trying to find just a little piece of dry land on which to stand.”

Living in a provincial city made finding good literature next to impossible. “The control they had over everybody’s life was total. Everything around us was only about communism. The most sincere conversations were among low-level manual workers. They weren’t as scared. They had a lot less to lose.”

What led Viktor Popkov to Christian conversion? Reading Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger, the story of a man radically alienated from life.

“The question stood before me: What is the point of living?” he said. “If Christ is real, what is that supposed to mean for me. That was my point of departure from Soviet life — and I know a lot of people who found similar points of departure.”

Slowly, Popkov felt himself drawn to church. The local Orthodox priest didn’t want to talk to him. If the inspector of religious affairs discovered that he had been speaking to a potential convert, the priest could be sacked. When he would hear through the grapevine about a group of people getting together to talk about Christianity, the KGB had typically heard about it first, through informers.

If you showed up anyway, the KGB would try to pressure you by leaning on your parents and teachers. It was hard to deal with, “but at the same time, you gain experience of a different life. In this experience of faith and this encounter with Christ, you receive a new feeling, and you know that you would not go back to how you used to be for anything. You are willing to endure anything they throw at you.”

“You can’t really prepare for it,” he went on. “To have a living connection to Christ, it’s like falling in love. You suddenly feel something you haven’t felt before, and you’re ready to do something you’ve never done before.”

I asked Popkov what the church today would have to be like to have the same kind of appeal to contemporary young people that Christianity had to young people like him back in the 1970s. He fell silent, thinking hard about the question.

“The main thing is that the church has to have real believers in it — people who actually have faith, not just cultural Christians,” he said. “Then you become a living human being. When you remain in society, people can tell there’s something different about  you.”

Pastors and religious leaders today have to put aside any thought of watering down the message to avoid offending people and losing them. “If you are always adapting to meet the times, that will not lead to anything good.”

Fellowship is extremely important too.

“Unfortunately, not everyone can say they have a close circle of friends,” he said. “I was in a very difficult situation at the beginning, when I was alone. There was not one person I could talk to about faith. Not one. It was only when someone introduced me to a woman who had a Christian circle around her did I come to understand why fellowship was so important.”

Popkov’s first Christian circle was not underground, though it did take some measures to protect itself.

“After a while, something very important happened,” he said. “All the people of a similar mindset began coming to Moscow every few weeks to meet. These were the Christian seminars run by Ogorodnikov.”

Alexander Ogorodnikov was one of the most important Christian dissidents in the Soviet Union. A convert to Orthodoxy, Ogorodnikov led seminars in Christianity until the Soviet government sent him to the gulag in 1978, where he remained for a decade.

“Fifteen to twenty people would get together (at these seminars) on the weekend to talk to each other,” recalled Popkov. “Completely surprising things would happen. Obviously we were being followed by the KGB. They knew everything about us. These meetings caused me to feel something very, very deep that I continue to feel today. It was an intoxicating happiness. We gathered together, and the Lord answered us with his presence. This feeling was something we felt only when we were meeting. When I’m reading the Acts of the Apostles, that’s what it felt like. By gathering together, we were able to rise to a new level, and then go back home and live at a higher level.”

Popkov ruminated for a moment, then said: “In Soviet life, there were only two colors: black and white. In Western society today, there are a large number of colors, and it’s so hard to make a decision. In that way, we had it easier than people today.”

I mentioned the quote from the late media theorist Neil Postman, who said:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.

Popkov responded:

Maybe this will sound strong, but the principles and the things that you confess, you need to be ready to die for them — and only then will you have the strength to resist. I don’t see any other way.

As our conversation ended, Popkov said that Christians need to have “a golden dream” — something to live for, a conception of hope. You can’t simply be against everything bad. You have to be for something good. Otherwise, you can get really dark and crazy.

By the time I reached my hotel that night, I was exhausted from all I had seen and heard. I opened the window a bit to let the cold night air of Moscow in, and fell into a deep sleep. This morning, I woke up, met Matthew for breakfast, and then went to a cafe to speak with Yuri Sipko, a leading Russian Baptist pastor. Even today, Baptists are repressed in Russia. I thought it important to speak to one of them for this book project.

Pastor Sipko told me that there aren’t many Baptists in Russia. I told him that in the American South, where I live, there are millions of Baptists. “When you go home, greet them for me,” he said. So, Baptist readers, consider yourself greeted.

Here we are on a street near the Kremlin:

With Russian Baptist pastor Yuri Sipko

 

Sipko was born in 1952, in a small Siberian city called Tara. Stalin was still alive. Everyone suffered from harsh material conditions. His parents were converts to Christianity, through the Baptist form of faith.

“I received a lot from my childhood, especially my respect for reading Scripture, prayer, and singing the Psalms,” he said. “I had the Baptist stamp on me from childhood. The boys in our neighborhood would tease us Baptist kids and beat us. In school it only became worse, because my teachers would call me to the front of the class and say, ‘You see that boy? His parents are American spies.’ This created a specific atmosphere.

“At home, maybe we didn’t live in the best possible conditions, but at least I knew we were safe,” he continued. “Outside the home was enemy territory. We knew that they all saw us as enemies.

At age seven, Soviet children received a badge with the portrait of Lenin. At age 11, they received the red scarf of the Pioneers, a kind of Soviet Scout.

“I didn’t wear the pin with Lenin’s face, nor did I wear the red scarf,” the pastor said. “I was a Baptist. I wasn’t going to do that. I was the only one in my class. They went after my teachers. They wanted to know what they were doing wrong that they had a boy in their class who wasn’t a Pioneer. They pressured the director of the school too. They were in turn forced to pressure me to save themselves.”

“How did you find the strength to resist, even as a child?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “We had a specific atmosphere in our family. I’m one of 12 kids. My older brothers and sisters had already gone through this. My father was the pastor of our congregation. All sorts of pressure was put on him. When I was a child, all I knew was that I wanted to be like my father. I could see that he had certain positions, and I saw that he was able to stand alone, against all of this pressure against him. He was able to stand up with dignity and courage. I wanted to be like him.”

Sipko was around ten years old when the state first charged his father with a crime — for preaching — and sentenced him to five years in eastern Siberia.

I was probably 10 years old when they first brought charges against him, and sentenced him for five years, for preaching. They sent him to prison in eastern Siberia for five years. Young Sipko dropped out of school at age 16, knowing that he had no future in Tara. He moved to Omsk, the regional capital, and entered a technical university. At that point, he quit living as a Christian.

“It was a new city, and I didn’t know where the faithful were gathering in the city. There was no way to find out, because it was illegal to gather,” he said.

So he drifted away from his faith. After he earned his degree, he served in the Red Army for two years, married, and started a family.

I was living a completely secular life. I was an atheist. Completely without God. I was behaving like everybody else in terms of drinking, smoking, and acting like a hooligan

Quite often the idea came to me that there is a God, and I’m going to need to answer to him. When I would be drunk, I would often say, “I can’t live like this anymore.” But in general, my life was on a downhill path. I wasn’t interested in having a career. In the society around me, my possibilities were so limited that I saw no prospect for change. I was even visited by thoughts that there was maybe no point in living.

The only thing that held me back was the thought that God existed, and I was going to have to answer to Him. This idea began to worry me more and more. Where we were living in Yakutia, it was impossible to find a Bible. There were no gatherings of the faithful. There was nothing.

Then, in 1976, the Sipko family went on vacation to visit his mother and father.

That was the first time I found God. My wife did too, at the same time. We were visiting my parents. This feeling that I was going to have to answer to God, and that my answer was a shameful one — that thought began to torture me. I had a breakthrough there. In the community of believers, I first confessed the name of Christ, and repented. That is how my new life started. I was 24 years old.

Yuri Sipko had every reason to expect that his life would be a great trial from that point forward, but he didn’t think about that. At that point, he was only worried about his eternal fate.

He went on this morning:

The first unexpected trial was when I came back from holiday, and I wanted to tell everyone about the salvation Christ offers. But all of my friends, instead of sitting and listening to me, they immediately turned away. The secret police came, and had conversations with everyone I worked with, and did a kind of preliminary survey about me. These meetings with the secret police had two purposes: one, to gather information about me, and two, to warn everyone around me that I was dangerous, and not to have contact with me. The guy in the office next door, pretending to be curious, said, “I would like to read the Bible.” I said sure, and gave it to him. I was barely able to get it back. I didn’t see these as external trials. I knew it was going to happen. I had been working as an engineer, but I took a lower status job. That was a voluntary decision. It gave me more freedom.

Being an engineer at that time, that was a high enough position that I would have to be involved in ideological work. Not being a Communist, but rather a Baptist, I knew there would be consequences for me if I stayed in that job. By taking a step down, I had more freedom.

Meanwhile, at home, the young Sipko family read the Bible and prayed. They had no church, no services — only home. They received a Bible through a connection in the Christian underground. The pastor stopped his narrative to observe that in its post-communist freedom, Russians are suffering the same kinds of trials that Americans are: the trial of what he called “practical materialism.”

This practical materialism has turned out to be far more effective than any kind of theoretical materialism the Marxists inflicted on us,” he said. “When we lived in the Soviet Union, there was a declaration of the equality of all, but everybody knew that mean we were all living at an equally low level. You could have as bright a mind as you wanted, or skillful hands, but you knew you were not going to get anything more than anybody else. Everyone was still put through the same process. You had no freedom. There was no possibility to set yourself apart. Everything was determined from above.

Focusing on your career offered nothing. Everybody was living at the same level: a couple of pieces of bread, a simple couch, and a few steps from the grave. The Communists were headed toward hell, the Baptists were headed toward heaven, but it looked identical.

Now the world has burst open. Get an apartment, get a car, get a TV, go on nice holidays. Loans, credits, mortgages — all of this is able to pull people in. We even see from the West this idea coming into the heads of young people, even believers: this idea that if you believe in God, you’re going to be able to get rich and healthy. This form of Christianity has become very popular in Russia. It’s a disease of contemporary society.

Pastor Sipko said contemporary Christians who think they can be faithful without being willing to deny themselves, to suffer even unto death, are fooling themselves. They are hypocrites.

“When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the dividing line,” he said. He continued:

When I think about the past, and how our brothers were sent to prison, and never returned, I’m sure that this is the kind of certainty they had. They lost any kind of status, they were mocked and ridiculed in society. Sometimes they even lost their children. Just because they were Baptists, the Soviets were willing to take away their kids and send them to orphanages. They were unable to find jobs. Their children were not able to enter universities. To get to universities you had to take an exam in scientific atheism. A believer could not pass this exam. But at least the battle was clear then. Today the truth has become blurry. The sharpness of this battle is not clearly defined.

What I would say to my Christian brothers in America is that you need to return Christ to the pedestal of your heart. You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie. This is difficult but this is what makes man an image of God.

More:

I think back to the example of my fathers who held themselves to strict standards. They drank no alcohol, they were 100 percent faithful to their wives, they didn’t go to restaurants where people were having a good time. They were completely faithful. The example we had from our fathers was so powerful. Even among young Baptists today, they think they can drink, can go party in nightclubs. Their external look, the way that they speak to each other, is no different from the rest of society. So then you have to answer the question: where is your Christianity? They say, ‘oh, but in my heart i had faith.’ But this is completely abstract, and it bears no fruit.

I tell these young people, if you want to be a Christian, you need to have all areas of your life subject to Christ. He should touch all areas of your life. Your entire life should reflect godliness.

We began to talk about identity politics and hating others. Pastor Sipko spoke emphatically against the idea that Christians can ever hate anybody, even our persecutors. I told him the story about Brandt Jean, the black man in Dallas who, in the courtroom, forgave the white police officer convicted of killing his brother — and about the judge who gave the killer a Bible.

“I can’t imagine something like that happening in our courts,” said Sipko. “For that young man to show that kind of forgiveness, for the judge to show that kind of humanity — we can’t imagine that happening our courts in Russia. In our country today, we are seeing Jehovah’s Witnesses being sentenced to jail just for being Jehovah’s Witnesses. The machine continues to grind away. There is no humanity.

“I would say that this episode shows that regardless of what kind of disturbing developments there are in America, America is still standing up in its Christian mission in the world. All is not lost.  Here in Russia, even my fellow Baptists are standing up and saying that it’s good that they’re jailing Jehovah’s Witnesses, because they’re heretics. We don’t see any mercy. We don’t see anyone responding to Christ saying that blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

I told Pastor Sipko that one consistent I have heard from Christians in every formerly Communist country is that the fellowship of small groups of believers were critically important in helping them withstand persecution. He responded:

Back then, this kind of communication, this was our only means of strengthening ourselves. Many of us didn’t even have Bibles. Just to be able to find yourself in a situation where there was a group, and one person was reading the Bible to others, this was the greatest motivation. This was our little niche of freedom. Whether you were at work in the factory, on the street, or anywhere else, everything was godless.

It’s impossible today to reproduce what we had back then. People coming together to sing hymns, to pray for each other — it was such an amazing feeling. We can’t reproduce it today. Everyone has a Bible, everyone has a library of spiritual books, everyone has the Internet with access to all kinds of preachers and sermons. Everyone can pick a preacher according to their own taste. But we see a lowering of standards. Christianity has become a secondary foundation in people’s lives, not the main foundation. The main line of people’s lives now is their career, their material success, their standing in society.

In these small groups when people were meeting back then, the center was Christ, and His word that was being read, and being interpreted as applicable in my own life. What am I supposed to do as a Christian? What am I doing as a Christian?  In that way, I, together with my brothers, was checking my own Christianity. In these small groups, it was very easy to perceive one’s connection to the larger body of Christ. Here, you won’t be able to lie. You won’t be able to hide behind a mask. You have to be real. Here, in these groups, through the presence of the Holy Spirit, we were able to see our own errors. This was so wonderful. This was true Christianity.

When they jailed my father, my mother was left alone. Several other women — we called them sisters — were left without husbands. We all got together. We found the Bible they had hidden. The women were reading the Bible to all of us. They were telling how people lived, what they had to hope for. They prayed together, and cried. I remember this even today as something unbelievable, this preservation of the faith in conditions when believing was illegal.

Sipko began our interview praising the strength and uprightness of his father. Now he told a story about his mother:

Our mother defended us in front of the directors of the school, in front of doctors. This really made an impression on me. The teachers at school were teaching us materialism. We did a good job in our studies. We answered the questions as they were written. Our teachers believed we were part of their contingent. One of these teachers came to our mother and said you know, you are a little crazy. What is this cult you’re involved in, and why are you teaching these kids this nonsense? My mother got out her Bible and began to read. It’s so pleasant to me to see how my mother responded to her. The teacher called me over and said, “This is our boy; he’s learning our lessons.” But under the protection of my mother, I found the courage to say, ‘No, I believe in God.’ It was a fiasco for the teacher.

I told the Baptist pastor about the Catholic priest Father Tomislav Kolakovic, who in 1943 began to prepare Slovak Catholics for future persecution. He told them that Communism was going to come to power in Czechoslovakia, and they had better use what time they have left in freedom to get ready for it. They formed small cells for prayer, Bible study, and learning techniques of resistance. Then, when the Communists seized power in 1948, Father Kolakovic’s followers became the core of the underground church.

My thought, I told Pastor Sipko, is that Christians in the West today need to use our freedom to start preparing for oppression, maybe even persecution. What do you think? I asked.

This makes sense, he said. When the Bolsheviks began to persecute Christians in the Soviet Union:

 … the strongest strike was against the preachers and the pastors, first of all. They took the preachers and pastors to prison. Other men stood up and filled their shoes. Then they took their houses of prayer. Then at that point began the practice of small groups — people who lived close to each other would gather in small groups. There was no formal structure of pastors or deacons. There were just brothers and sisters who read the Bible together, prayed together, and sang. They gathered together and closed the curtains and worshiped. Those small groups lived through Stalin, through Khrushchev, and even until Brezhnev was almost dead. Up until 1986 there were religious prisoners of conscience; only Gorbachev released them.

Despite sixty years of terror, they were unable to get rid of the faith. It was saved specifically in small groups. There was no literature, no organizations for teaching, and even movement was forbidden. It was almost impossible for people to go some place to meet others. They rewrote Biblical texts by hand. Even the songs that we sang. I even remember writing these notebooks for myself. But they preserved the true faith. This was the best venue of testing the faith. The dignity and the fullness of the Bible really proved itself. For me, this is still such a strong proof for me that any sort of commercial projects surrounding the church are destructive. For me, the center that is more than sufficient is just to have the Bible at the center. It has everything full, and everything sufficient. My own history has proven that for me: that true relationship with God is through Christ.

I suggested to the Baptist leader that Christians in all churches should come together to support each other in the face of persecution. His answer made me realize how blessed we are in America to have relative peace and mutual respect among believers in various traditions. Sipko said that in Russia, “as long as we’re in a situation of inter-Christian war, we can’t have any kind of collaboration.”

He explained:

In modern Russia, Baptists are definitely being persecuted. They have closed our schools. They charge us with infractions of the rules. They persecute us for any kind of missionary work. It’s done in particular locations. In some cases it goes to the courts. They even do what they call in Russia to stamp a building — to seal off buildings. They even seal off houses of prayer, and tell us that we don’t have permission to meet there to pray. This is how they close them. People don’t even know about things like this, but it’s well known about us that anyone looking to serve in the government, and have any kind of career, that if you profess Baptist Christianity, the door is closed to them. We even know situations when they find out someone is Baptist, they tell them either you change your faith, or you’ll lose your job.

We Baptists are few and far between. Those given their choice have chosen to give up their jobs. It’s virtually impossible for us to do any kind of missionary activity. If we want to put up a tent somewhere in a village, we can’t even do that.

There was a time when we were able to do prison ministry, and now that’s impossible. In schools, in any kind of military units, that’s not possible. They won’t even let you into a hospital. Of course our Baptist faith will survive. I have no doubt. My confidence is in the fact that it’s going to be purified. People are going to have to make a very clear and tough choice: stay with Christ, or not. Moreover, our experience of the past is not forgotten. There are a large number of Baptists of that generation who even today live a sort of underground existence. They don’t register their parishes, and out of principle have no relation with the state. They’re very, very conservative on all questions — in terms of family, having kids, in terms of how they look. They refuse government propaganda, don’t watch TV, don’t have computers. This semi-closedness is how they are able to preserve their purity. They have a very clear understanding that their faith in Christ means that they are going to have to reject this secular world. Even under free conditions today, we are having to live in the underground.

That was painful for me to hear, as an Orthodox Christian, as I know my fellow Orthodox Christians are the ones doing this to Pastor Sipko and his followers. Nevertheless, I left this meeting with a brother in Christ inspired by his strength and fidelity. I do not share Pastor Sipko’s theological convictions — I believe he is mistaken, as he believes I am mistaken — but I pray that my Russian Orthodox brothers will come to show mercy and love to our Baptist family.

Matthew and I went to nearby GUM, the shopping arcade on Red Square, to eat lunch in an old-school Soviet cafeteria. Ever eaten Uzbek cafeteria food? Now I can say that I have. Then we took the metro out to south Moscow, and found our way to the apartment of Vakhtang Mikeladze, an 82-year-old documentary filmmaker from Georgia, and survivor of the gulag.

Vakhtang Mikeladze is the son of Evgeni Mikeladze, a well-known Georgian orchestral conductor, and the grandson of the first secretary of the Communist Party for the entire Caucasus region. As an Old Bolshevik, Vakhtang’s grandfather was personally acquainted with Lenin.

In 1938, Stalin’s Great Terror reached his family. Today, the state symphony in Georgia bears the name of his father, but in 1938, he was a criminal in the hands of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. He was blindfolded for interrogation, but according to a story that Stalin’s daughter later told, Evgeni Mikeladze said aloud that he knew Lavrenti Beria, who was overseeing the Terror in the Caucasus (and who would soon rise to head the NKVD, was present in the room.

“Comrade Beria, you know I’m not guilty,” said the conductor. When Beria demanded to know how the conductor knew he was there, Mikeladze responded that he recognized Beria’s voice.

An enraged Beria ordered his interrogators to shove blades into the conductor’s ears to make him deaf. Later, the NKVD shot him.

Vakhtang’s grandmother died under interrogation. His mother spent 19 years in the gulag. He and his orphaned sister were raised by their aunt. When he was 15 and his sister Anna was 17, the KGB came for them. They were charged with the crime of being a member of the family of a traitor to the Motherland.

“When they came to arrest us, my sister saw the arrest warrant, with the words ‘life sentence’ written there. She said, ‘I’m not going anywhere, I have a test tomorrow.’” he said. “This memory sits inside me. It’s impossible to get rid of. Anyone who went through the system, they can’t go back to who they were. But this comes with a positive side. It gives people a kind of sense of vision. It makes people sensitive in a different way inside themselves.”

Vakhtang’s former screenwriter, Anastasia, sat next to him during our interview. She explained that Vakhtang’s five years in prison marked him for life. It gave him a great moral passion for making films about human suffering, especially the suffering of prisoners. It kept him preoccupied in his work with exploring “eternal questions.” And it gave him a deep well of images with which to tell his stories.

The old director, whose thinning white hair swoops toward his shoulders, sat in front of a blackout curtain pinned tightly over the only window in his apartment. This is an old Soviet habit, I learned. People were afraid of others looking into their apartments. He also poured shots of brandy from Kaliningrad for us as we spoke. This too was an old-school tradition. This afternoon I learned to bite a thin lemon slice after every sip.

Vakhtang is aging, but he spoke with the passion of a much younger man, slicing the air with his fingers to emphasize certain points. He was funny, too. When my eyes wandered over to framed photos of Tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra, Vakhtang said, “Sometimes I’ll be sitting here in my underwear watching TV, then I’ll realize that they are looking at me, so I’ll put on my pants.”

But mostly, he spoke of trauma and tragedy. Over the course of our discussion, he kept returning to his personal sense of shame. It was almost like a confession. He said:

When they arrested my sister and me, we were completely scared. They put us in the back of a truck. They put my aunt in the cab, with a soldier. When they took us out of our building and to the truck, all of our neighbors were there watching and weeping. In the back of the truck, my sister and I were sat across from each other looking at each other. There was a soldier on either side of us. As we were driving along, out of nowhere different trucks were joining us on the highway. We became a long caravan of the arrested. When we both realized that all these other trucks were full of others who had been arrested, she looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. We realized that at least we weren’t alone.

I’m ashamed that I was glad at that moment. In your book, you can write, ‘If you want to live like this, go ahead and live like this.’ But maybe no one will want to read a book like that.

What he meant was this: if we are unwilling to stand up against totalitarianism when it first begins to show its face, we will allow the kind of life that the Mikeladzes had to live to be our fate, and the fate of our children. And we will be responsible.

Another confession came when we talked about contemporary identity politics, and the left’s habit of determining the guilt and innocence of people based on their race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, or political beliefs. Vakhtang said:

When I was in prison, every two months we all would have to sign a document testifying that we hadn’t tried to escape. In the gulag, I was there with people from all different nationalities [Note: In the Soviet Union, “nationalities” was the word they used for people from different ethnic groups.] We would have to get in line to sign the paper. No matter what our nationality, we would all try to stand apart from the Germans, who were left there in prison after the war. I’m ashamed of it to this day, and I want to make a film to apologize to these Germans.

I want you to know, he said to me, that standing by and watching innocent people be denounced, slandered, abused, and even fired from their jobs, because some leftists hate people like this is the same thing as not wanting to stand next to the German prisoners. Said Vakhtang, “One day, these people will be ashamed, as I am ashamed.”

Vakhtang talked at length about the cruelties of prison, and how the gulag really was the core institution of the Soviet state. He despises the contemporary fashion for tattoos, because in his day, tattoos were a marker of the degradation of prison life. (He also explained that Russians find homosexuality abhorrent for the same reason — that is, they associate it with the gulag.) He told me that during his filmmaking career, he spoke once to a top psychotherapist.

He once asked me a question that forced me to think quite hard. ‘Vakhtang, do you think in the time of Stalin there were no serial killers? I’m asking you this question because I want you to understand that they were built into the State.’ And that’s why the people who were in prison were so afraid of these interrogators: they were the serial killers of Soviet society.”

He added:

The people who were allowed to become interrogators were people who had already shown their dedication. They were already murderers. They had already acquired a taste for blood. That’s why they were allowed to have such jobs.

Anastasia sat next to her mentor’s side and gently interpreted some of his more effusive statements. He said that if he were to make a documentary about my book project, he would depict the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil monkeys, and shoot the Speak No Evil one. Then he said that there is a scene from his film Pale Flowers, in which a man is having his lips sewn shut. Your book project, he told me, is trying to pull the thread out of people’s lips, so that they will speak out against what’s happening.

Anastasia explained that Vakhtang is trying to express how important it is to wake people up, to warn them of what kind of nightmare can descend on their countries if they are not vigilant and active in fighting it.

“We’re sharing our experiences about how to be free under a totalitarian system because totalitarianism is inevitable,” she said quietly. “Freedom is given to us by God. Those forces that are taking more and more control of the world have their primary goal as to take away a person’s freedom. In different systems, in different countries, they work using different weapons. This is a process that’s inevitable, because we are in a war.”

Vakhtang disagreed slightly, saying that it isn’t necessarily inevitable. “When there’s a fire, the most important thing is not to put it out. The most important thing is to warn people. If you’re working now to warn people about coming totalitarianism, it’s possible that it will end up not coming.”

“Totalitarianism usually comes at four in the morning,” he said, in a memorable phrase. “They would always come at 4 am to arrest people. When everyone is heavily sleeping.”

Toward the end of our interview, Vakhtang took off of a side table a framed photograph of his father as a boy, standing next to his aunt. He held it in his bony hands, and stared at intensely.

“I often look at this image and think about how my father had no idea what kind of pain was ahead for him,” said the old man, who starts to cry. “I don’t like giving interviews. Look at this photo. He doesn’t know what he’s going to have to go through. I keep on thinking, what kind of faith does he have? That’s why I don’t like giving interviews.”

So there we are. An elderly man whose father was tortured and murdered by Stalin, whose mother endured nearly two decades in the gulag, and who, along with his sister, was thrown into the gulag as a teenager, is sitting on a weary couch weeping, while the murdered czar and his murdered wife look on from a shelf across the room. It is time for us to go.

But our host refuses to let us end on a sad note. When he was released early by Khrushchev, Vakthang Evgenievich went to film school, and discovered he had a real talent for moviemaking. He had a prolific life as an artist. Life goes on, he affirmed to Matthew and me. “We know that life is stronger than death because Christ has risen.”

That was my day in Moscow. Tomorrow, I will meet and interview Alexander Ogorodnikov. This amazing journey continues.

UPDATE: I edited this post to replace the name Alexey Beglov with Viktor Popkov. I misread my interview list, and confused names. I did not get to meet with Alexey Beglov. I apologize for the error.

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View From Your Table

Moscow, Russia

My translator Matthew and I ate today at one of the Soviet-style cafeterias in GUM, the shopping arcade, which is today a luxury mall. But they still have the cafeterias. This particular counter is where we bought our lunch, which you see in front of you. It was Uzbek and Russian. There was sorrel soup, a beet-and-sauerkraut salad, lamb-stuffed steamed dumplings, some sort of lamb and rice dish, and Uzbek bread. Pretty good stuff.

Last night we ate Georgian. As Matt put it, “How can a country so small have such complex and delicious food?” True, true. Matt thinks if he could come to America and open a Georgian restaurant, he could get rich. Verily, this is the most delicious cuisine that Americans know nothing about.

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Postcard From Moscow

So, I made it to Russia. Landed in Moscow from Helsinki, and was set upon by a swarm of vultures disguised as taxi drivers. Ha ha, you fiends, I’m not going to be taken in by you! I know how you work. I’m going to march over here to the proper taxi stand and get a real taxi.

The guy at the stand told me that all the drivers standing around are reputable, and that I could trust them. Well, okay, if you say so.

Of course they cheated me, charging me more than three times what the right fee from Sheremeteyvo airport to the city center should be. But I had already paid the flat fee after they put my bags in the car, and I more or less had no choice. Fortunately I had the good sense to pay for it with a VISA card. Once I got to my hotel and found out how badly I had been cheated by those snakes, I called VISA and got them to put a stop payment on the charge. I trust that that will happen. Later, I found out from a friend that I had done the right thing, but the young man working the taxi counter must have been taking a kickback from the thieving taxi drivers. It was not a good start to my Moscow trip. I tell you that as a warning.

Too bad, because this is an astonishing city. I had not imagined how massive Moscow is. We drove forever to get to my hotel, which is near the Kremlin. After I got settled, I met my friends Dmitry and Andrei, both theologians, and we paid a visit to Vladimir Legoyda, the communications chief for the Moscow Patriarchate. He is a fan of The Benedict Option, as it turns out, and wanted to meet. We drank tea with Legoyda at his office inside a monastery, then went to a Georgian restaurant for dinner. I could show you a lovely View From Your Table, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to make this new camera I bought work for sending photos to my laptop.

This morning I had breakfast at the hotel, then met my translator and guide, Matthew Casserly. He’s a young American who has been living and working in Moscow for seven years, and is also a convert to Orthodox Christianity. We went into the metro, which is every bit as astonishing a place as you’ve heard. Matthew said he has no good words for the Bolsheviks, except that they built a glorious subway system. And that they did.

We headed out to the far southern edge of Moscow, and then caught a bus for even further out. Our destination was the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, a sanctuary built next to a Stalinist killing field sometimes called the Russian Golgotha. In the field, called the Butovo firing range, the Communists murdered 21,000 political prisoners in a 14-month period between 1937 and 1938, at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. They buried their bodies there. At least 1,000 of them are known to have been martyred for their Orthodox faith. The nearby church glorifies not only them, but all those murdered by the Bolsheviks — including the Romanov family.

Please read this to learn the full story of the killing field, which was turned into a mass grave. You can also see the tiny wooden chapel on the field, dedicated to the martyrs made there. Across an asphalt road is the big white church, where Matthew and I lit candles.

Yesterday, October 30, was in Russia a national holiday: the Day of Remembrance of those killed in political repressions.

When Matthew and I finally arrived at the big white New Martyrs church, the liturgy of commemoration had ended, and worshipers had migrated into the field surrounded by woods to stand in the wet snow and take turns reading aloud the names of those murdered there. It would take them many hours.

Russians queued up to read the names of the murdered

Beyond them was a long rectangular walk, modeled in part on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. You pass along a granite wall on which you see the names of all those murdered on that field in a particular month. In the grassy area surrounded by the path are some mugshots of some prisoners who were later shot there. The eyes of these men and women say everything: calm resignation in some; defiance in others; disbelief that this is how one’s life is going to end, and so forth.

One of the murdered political prisoners

The mugshots of political prisoners shot at Butovo

Standing at an exhibit at the edge of the field, looking at a tally of the number of dead killed each day, a Russian man struck up a conversation with us. He was there because his grandfather had been murdered by Stalin for telling people on the collective farm where he lived and worked to save their own houses in a fire, not the farm. Someone told the authorities, and that was the end of  Vladimir Alexandrovich’s grandfather. On this spot they killed the priest of his church back then, and also the man who held the door at the church.

“And for what?” said Vladimir Alexandrovich, not expecting an answer.

Speaking to him in Russian, Matthew told him what my new book was about. When I told him that people are losing their jobs in the US over political issues, he said, “That’s a bad sign.”

“History always repeats, one way or another,” he said, heavily.

The wind picked up, and it was snowing harder. Matt and I found a military mess tent with a men ladling hot sugary tea into cups and buckwheat kasha into bowls for pilgrims. A stout, cheerful babushka stood guard over the buns: a box full of cabbage-stuffed buns, and a box of apple-filled. She coached us men sitting there shivering in the tent to eat more.

View From Your Table: Butovo Firing Range, Russia

After our lunch, Father Kirill Kaleda, the archpriest of the big church across the road, and the man most responsible for turning this killing field into a memorial site, invited us to come into the log cabin where his office was, and they met pilgrims. As you can see above, his table was laden with food on this day, in case anyone came for lunch. 

Father had just returned from a local school, where he met with students to tell them what happened at Butovo. I mentioned to him that Vladimir Alexandrovich told us how much he worries for the future because so few young Russians know or care about history.

“Unfortunately, he’s right. I can clearly see that the young people I was talking to today know nothing about what happened here. When I started talking about very simple things, I could see they knew nothing. So yes, there is a danger that in some form, there will be a repetition.”

We were sitting at a table in a log cabin that served as Father’s office and the church’s reception house. The table was laden with wine, salmon, herring, cheeses, and blini, all to serve visitors who came by throughout this special day. I noticed two cars with diplomatic plates from former communist countries parked outside.

In terms of protecting liberty, Father Kirill said that the most important thing to talk about is the free access to information, and the freedom to have an opinion about your nation’s history.

“It’s limited here, and I hear that it’s limited in the US,” he said.  “This ability to have a different opinion is so important. 

“It’s not only about having an opinion about one’s historic past, but it’s also about the idea of what is right. It seems to me out of place and unacceptable that America has the idea that what it does is right, and there’s no room for that to be challenged.”

I told him about some things that are happening in America, with regard to the suppression of speech on college campuses, and people like Dr. Allen Josephson being fired for speaking their minds.

“What kind of freedom are you talking about, then?” he said drily. “People have a right to make errors, including ideological errors. But if somebody is limiting somebody else’s freedom simply to have an opinion, we can already call that unfreedom.”

We spoke about gender ideology, which he said that most Christians and Muslims will see as “unacceptable, because there is no natural basis for it.”

“Obviously these phenomenon have existed historically,” Father Kirill said. “The thing that has changed now is people are trying to say that it’s good. This is the battle in front of us now: maintaining the distinction between good and evil.”

But how to resist? We spoke of political combat. I don’t think Father Kirill had heard of The Benedict Option, but I told him about my frustration with American Christians who think the best and only way to fight these things is by electing politicians who will put the right judges onto the court.

He seemed to agree.

“The most correct way and the most productive way of battling has to be in your own world, that you can effect,” he said. “Not everybody can share their opinions with large number of people, but the way your living your own life, your insistence on having your own opinion, and more importantly the way you’re running your own family, this is more available to ordinary people. What did St. Seraphim of Sarov say: ‘Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved.’ That is the best way. In fact, this path of podvig [a feat, a deed] is the one chosen by the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church even in the middle of the most horrible persecutions.”

In the future, when Americans ask me what use the Benedict Option would be in a time of persecution, I will remind them of what the priest who serves a church named for the martyrs of the Bolsheviks said. He went on:

When thinking about this topic, it’s important not to be limited to just the canonized saints. What’s more significant is what in Russia we call the white headscarves — usually women, simple women with low education levels, who continued to go to church no matter what the conditions were. They were able to save something, and pass it on to their children. We can’t lose sight of these. There were so many of them. 

One can be tempted to think that they performed no holy feats, that they just went to church. But in fact they were the ones that saved the faith and were able to preserve the church.  

As he spoke, I looked behind his shoulder, through the window where snow was falling on a field where 21,000 men and women met their deaths, and were buried in a mass grave. It added weight and depth to the priest’s words.

Father Kirill continued to speak of the personal responsibility every Christian has for the space around him. He emphasized that believers can’t wait for great leaders to emerge to set things aright. Doing so is a way of avoiding responsibility for mastering the small spaces in which we ourselves live. “Out of these small spaces, that is what society is built of,” he said.

He spoke of a second-century saint who had a mystical vision:

He was shown the construction of a tower. When they were building tower in his vision, people brought stones. Some of them were perfect, and could put right into the construction. Others needed only a little bit of work. Others had to be thrown out. The angel who showed him this vision told him this tower is the church: a buillding that is being constructed throughout the course of human history. Each one of the stones is an individual member of the church. Those that spend their lives getting ready to be a part of the structure, they were able to be put right in by the builder. The history of the construction of this tower is the history of the construction of the church, and that is the history of humanity. The story of this construction is also the story of these people. The history of this tower is the history of these individual people — not of wars, not of church councils, not of a certain bishop occupying a certain position, that’s not what this tower is made of. So, the story of humanity is the story of individual people, not the story of presidents.

I told Father Kirill that the rise of identity politics seemed to me a worrying sign. The American left is training its people to regard others only in terms of their group identities, and to regard some groups as evil oppressors, and others as virtuous victims, simply by virtue of their group membership. How can we resist that? I asked.

“Here the most important thing is maintaining simple human contract, making sure that people have contact with each other,” said the priest. “This is made clear by the people who come here to Butuvo. They arrive with all kinds of opinions about what happened here, and about our country’s past. From their conversations, you can see a new relationship is being built, maybe even a brotherhood. It’s not that everybody changes their opinions, but the weight of what happened here begins to break down barriers. The most important thing is to see a humanity in others.”

I raised Solzhenitsyn’s injunction to the Soviet people to “live not by lies.” How, I asked, does an honest man live in a society where lying is a way of life?

“With difficulty!” he said, laughing.

“Of course it’s difficult, but thanks be to God, there were people who were doing their best to build their lives in such a way that they could live in truth,” he continued.  Of course people understood that if living in truth was going to be a priority, they were going to have to limit themselves in other ways — the progress of their careers, for example. But they made a choice, and resolved to live by it.”

Born in Moscow in 1958, Father Kirill grew up as one of six children in a practicing Orthodox family. None of them joined the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol.

“When I was a teenager, I wanted to study history,” he said. “My father explained to me that in the Soviet world, trying to be involved with studying history and not be involved with Soviet ideology, is impossible. So I became a geologist.”

Many families opposed to the Bolshevik regime sent their children into the natural sciences to avoid the taint of ideology as much as possible.

Then I asked him what his experience growing up in the Soviet Union taught him about the importance of understanding how propaganda works. He emphasized that propaganda did not end when the Soviets fell.

Today things are slightly different because people have access to more information. Despite the fact that there’s so much information available, we see that so much propaganda is also available. Think of what’s happening now with Ukraine. These people are our relatives. We have seen the way TV changed us Russians from thinking of them as our family to being our enemies. The same methods from the communist era are being used. People today have a responsibility to search out more information than what they are offered on TV, and to know how to look critically on what they’re reading and seeing. That’s what is different now than before.

I told Father Kirill that I was not worried about totalitarianism coming in the form of Stalin 2.0. I do not expect the killing fields of Butovo to return. But I do fear the gradual and profound loss of human freedom in a soft way: people willingly handing over control of their thoughts, their actions, and their lives out of fear of suffering — even suffering inconvenience. I told him about my Millennial friend in Budapest, and her testimony about how members of her generation are driven by the maximization of “well being” — which, in their case, means avoiding any kind of suffering, no matter what the cost.

The priest thought hard before answering. Then he said:

Christ said that his followers should be ready to pick up their cross and carry it at all times. Taking up your cross and carrying it is always going to be uncomfortable. We can say clearly that this current ideology of comfort is anti-Christian in its very essence. But we should point out the fact that the Church, not once, ever call its followers to look for suffering, and even made it clear that they were warning not to do that. But if a person finds himself in a situation where he’s suffering, then he should bear it with courage. 

Every person in his life goes through some kind of test, through different kinds of difficulties. People that are accustomed to living in some kind of comfort, not only in a typical household way, but even in a spiritual way, then they are not able to bear these trials. The memory of a Russian saint who lived at the beginning of the 20th century, Father Alexei Michev comes to mind. Where did everything begin for him? He served in a small, poor church in the center of Moscow because of the fact of where their house was in this church, it was a raw, unheated space. His wife got tuberculosis and died, leaving him with a young son. In the Orthodox Church, you can’t marry a second time if you’re a priest, so he was in despair. He met with Father John of Kronstadt, now St. John of Kronstadt, who said to him, “What are you doing walking around grieving all the time? Look around you. Look at how much grief everyone around you has? Take that grief upon yourself, and when you take their grief upon yourself, you’ll feel that your grief is smaller. And he fulfilled the words of St. John. 

Father Alexey Michev died in old age. His son Sergey was also an Orthodox priest — one who was martyred by the Bolsheviks. Here is their story from a Russian Orthodox website. Notice what it says about St. Sergey, whose name and story was unknown to me before Father Kirill brought it up:

Fr. Sergius entered the ranks of Russia’s New Martyrs for his uncompromising stand in ecclesial matters. His principal renown, however, rests upon his pastoral skills. The Maroseyka parish was unique in Moscow in cultivating an inwardly monastic orientation. Fr. Alexey often said that his task was to create “a monastery in the world,” by which he meant a parish family guided towards the same goal of sanctity and deification as the monastic.

Fr. Sergius held the same principle although later on he stopped speaking of it as a “monastery in the world,” because others had adopted this term as meaning some kind of community of secret monks or nuns who lived in the world while under obedience to monastic vows. Instead, Fr. Sergius took from ancient Russian church practice the term “repenting family.” He also referred to his parish as a “repenting-liturgical family.” It was very apt. As a spiritual director, he strove to cultivate in his flock a spirit of repentance and he encouraged frequent attendance at church services, which he considered to be the best school for the development of spiritual life.

 

 

My God. This martyr-priest, Father Sergey Michev, was living what I call the Benedict Option, and leading his parish that way. I will look for an icon of him today while I am in Moscow.

I asked Father Kirill what his message is for American churches. He said:

What happened in the 20th century in Russia serves as witness to the fact that many Russian people not only believed in God, but they also entrusted themselves to God. For them, the spiritual world and the kingdom of heaven were a reality. Despite the fact that for them, because of their own human weaknesses, it was a scary and painful time. Their podvig is the witness to the existence of another world, a spiritual world, and the Kingdom of Heaven. The lesson for us are the values of this earthly life, including our comfort, are nothing in comparison to the value of the Kingdom of Heaven. But this is a very difficult lesson. 

What he meant was that it is not enough to say that we believe. We have to cultivate deep faith in the reality of God’s kingdom, and live it out. There is no other way.

As Matthew and I put on our coats to leave, Father Kirill called us into his office. There he showed us the mitre of St. Alexey. We both crossed ourselves and kissed this precious relic.

Russia! What a country. I have more to say about who I met yesterday and what we talked about, but I have to go out into the city now. I’ll blog more later tonight.

Let me add that it is cold, cold, cold here. Napoleon got what he deserved. I am thinking about the time I saw, in the military museum in Paris, the coat Napoleon wore on his disastrous winter siege of Moscow. It was made of cloth. Russia’s winter mocked him bitterly. Moscow isn’t even in winter yet, and it’s mocking this Louisiana boy bitterly. I feel as if I’ve had a full winter, and it was only my first day.

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Russia Bound

St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow (Expedia)

Hi readers, I am leaving today for about ten days in Russia, to do reporting for my next book. I was able to hire one of you, an American living in Moscow, as my interpreter and guide for the Moscow leg of the trip (the first five days). I will be in St. Petersburg after that, staying with a Russian friend and his family, and enjoying the city. My Moscow contacts have been able to put together an incredible list of people to interview — men and women who endured Soviet repression, and who will tell me their stories.

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to blog while in Russia, because of security concerns regarding my laptop and my smartphone. However, with the help of a security consultant, I was able to work out a solution, and expect to be able to blog regularly. However, my schedule is very busy, so don’t expect as many posts as usual.

I will be traveling from, well, now, and not arriving in Moscow until 7 am Central time on Tuesday (3 pm Moscow time). I will almost certainly be out of Internet contact during that time, so please be patient with my approving comments. In fact, I’m disciplining myself to having no contact with the Internet, except to post blog entries, from now until I come back to the US. I presume the withdrawal will be grotesquely difficult for the likes of Self, but one does what one must.

This will be my first trip to Russia, and my first visit to an Orthodox country. As an Orthodox Christian, I am really excited. To go there, and to meet such heroes — well, it’s a privilege that I never expected to have in my life.

Please be aware that I will not be able to check my TAC e-mail address or (if you have it) my personal account until I’m back in the US. If for some reason you urgently need to reach me, please contact the Mothership at letters at –theamericanconservative — dot — com

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Washington Post, Anti-Trump Newsletter, Steps In Poo

The Washington Post headline, as it actually appeared

A reader writes:

Has the tide just turned? Please tell me you have seen the Washington Post headline about U.S. special forces killing the leader of ISIS and referring to him as “Austere Religious Scholar”. I mean, if people don’t believe in TDS at this point, I don’t know what to say. Dude was leader of frickin’ ISIS and he becomes an “Austere Religious Scholar” when Trump has him eliminated.

This is the number one thing trending on Twitter and WashPo is getting ROASTED. I attached my favorite parodies. How can anyone take the Washington Post seriously now? I mean, every time Trump’s idiotic clown show reaches a low from which I think he cannot recover, the frickin’ media outdoes him. Trump is a buffoon, but an American newspaper deliberately attempting to conceal and deceive with such an absurd characterization of evil incarnate beats all. I laughed out loud in real life when I saw it. Would be funnier if it were not so sinister at the same time. What has gone wrong in someone’s soul that in order to deny credit to Trump, they characterize the leader of ISIS in such a bland tone?

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