AFTER reading Russian at Oxford, after which studying Russian politics on the LSE, I joined Michael Bourdeaux’s Keston Institute (then College), which studies religion in Communist countries, and founded its academic journal.
It was as I read a mass of Soviet samizdat, and discovered what life was like for Christians within the Soviet Union, that I got here across a photograph of a Russian Orthodox bishop, Bishop Afanasy Sakharov (1887-1962), who spent most of his life between 1922 and 1954 in prison or exile. The look in his eyes is considered one of profound suffering, but his mouth is smiling. A fellow prisoner recorded how Bishop Afanasy all the time had a sort word for all and sundry, cheered everyone up, shared his food parcels, and continually gave because of God.
Towards the tip of his life, freed finally from prison, he’s described by considered one of his spiritual children: “A small wood cottage. Behind a partition in a tiny box room with one window placed low within the wall, amidst icons and shelves of books, sits an ancient starets in a cassock by the table. His face, the position of his body, all of him looks dreadfully broken and exhausted. You only need to go into his room and begin talking to him and he’s immediately transfigured. . .
“Whoever you might be, he’ll sit you down, take care of you as his guest, invite you to have something to eat; he’ll ask you about yourself, gesticulate, and be lit up with such love and sincere warmth, able to say something delightful and cheering, that even the toughest, coldest heart will feel warmed and at home.”
MORE than 20 years before the beginning of the Ukraine war, I travelled the length and breadth of Russia, doing field work for a project, funded by Keston Institute, concerning the current religious situation within the Russian Federation. It was during a field trip to Magadan, nearly 6000km east of Moscow — the port for the Kolyma mines, where among the most terrible labour camps of the Stalin period were situated — that I got here across a chunk of barbed wire bent right into a circle and resembling a crown of thorns.
A Roman Catholic church had been inbuilt Magadan by a priest from Alaska, who felt called to sacrifice his freedom, as he put it, “for individuals who lost their freedom”. He had gathered together 250 former prisoners and members of their families, and had recorded their experiences; a lot of them now formed the core of his church’s congregation.
Next to the church was a Chapel for the Martyrs, consecrated in 2004 as a spot of prayer for individuals who suffered and died within the Gulag. Below a crucifix was a low memorial wall, composed of black Kolyma granite; on most of the stones, a small crucifix was attached, each representing a prisoner who had disappeared with no record. Placed in frames on top of the memorial wall were a battered prayer book from the camps; a rosary with beads made out of bread; someone’s prison number; an embroidered Virgin Mary, sewn with a fish bone, using thread taken from a jail mattress; and the crown of thorns — the bent piece of barbed wire from a labour camp, which for me spoke so clearly of Christ’s suffering.
THE memoir that I continually find inspiring, Grey is the Colour of Hope, is by the poet Irina Ratushinskaya (1954-2017), from Ukraine, who was imprisoned in 1982 for writing religious poetry, and released with the arrival of Gorbachev in 1986.
Ratushinskaya describes her years in a unit for girls political prisoners, where — despite the near-starvation rations, and the regular spells within the prison isolation cell where prisoners needed to wear just a skinny smock in freezing temperatures — she and her companions still put others first, shared any extra food that they received, and refused to compromise their principles. Ratushinskaya writes: “Probably that is the very best method to retain one’s humanity within the camps: to care more about one other’s pain than about your personal.”
Within their bleak, inhuman environment, they created a garden, growing nettles and anything that will add some nutrition to their appalling food regimen. One Christmas Eve, the ladies gathered around a table, said the Lord’s Prayer, and divided up a communion wafer from Lithuania, sent to considered one of them in an envelope: “And we, despite our various creeds, never doubted for a moment that God was looking down on us all at that moment.”
Xenia Dennen chairs the Keston Institute.
