AFTER reading Russian at Oxford, and then studying Russian politics at 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 in the Soviet Union, that I came 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 one of profound suffering, but his mouth is smiling. A fellow prisoner recorded how Bishop Afanasy always had a kind word for each person, cheered everyone up, shared his food parcels, and constantly gave thanks to God.
Towards the end of his life, freed at last from prison, he is described by one of his spiritual children: “A small wooden cottage. Behind a partition in a tiny box room with one window placed low in 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 have to go into his room and start talking to him and he is instantly transfigured. . .
“Whoever you are, he will sit you down, look after you as his guest, invite you to have something to eat; he will ask you about yourself, gesticulate, and be lit up with such love and sincere warmth, ready to say something delightful and cheering, that even the hardest, coldest heart will feel warmed and at home.”
MORE than 20 years before the start of the Ukraine war, I travelled the length and breadth of Russia, doing field work for a project, funded by Keston Institute, about the current religious situation in the Russian Federation. It was during a field trip to Magadan, nearly 6000km east of Moscow — the port for the Kolyma mines, where some of the most terrible labour camps of the Stalin period were located — that I came across a piece of barbed wire bent into a circle and resembling a crown of thorns.
A Roman Catholic church had been built in Magadan by a priest from Alaska, who felt called to sacrifice his freedom, as he put it, “for those who lost their freedom”. He had gathered together 250 former prisoners and members of their families, and had recorded their experiences; many 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 place of prayer for those who suffered and died in the Gulag. Below a crucifix was a low memorial wall, composed of black Kolyma granite; on many 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 from bread; someone’s prison number; an embroidered Virgin Mary, sewn with a fish bone, using thread taken from a prison 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 constantly 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 advent of Gorbachev in 1986.
Ratushinskaya describes her years in a unit for women political prisoners, where — despite the near-starvation rations, and the regular spells in the prison isolation cell where prisoners had to wear just a thin 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 this is the best way to retain one’s humanity in the camps: to care more about another’s pain than about your own.”
Within their bleak, inhuman environment, they created a garden, growing nettles and anything that would add some nutrition to their appalling diet. One Christmas Eve, the women gathered around a table, said the Lord’s Prayer, and divided up a communion wafer from Lithuania, sent to 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.
keston.org.uk