When the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution falls this autumn, Christian com-munities across the former Soviet Union will comme-morate the persecutions it unleashed upon them.
But they’ll also recall the religious meditations born in the country’s prisons and labour camps, some of which deserve to rank with the best in Christian history.
Though often viewed as an epoch of cultural and spiritual emptiness, Soviet rule produced profound Christian works of prose and poetry, offering vital reflections on a resilient faith.
The revolution’s mastermind, Vladimir Lenin, had sworn to emasculate Russia’s Orthodox clergy — those “agents in cassocks” who had been used by the Tsar to “sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.”
To call it the “opium of the people” was too kind, Lenin had written in 1909, paraphrasing Karl Marx. It was rather “a kind of spiritual rotgut, by which the slaves of capital blacken their human figure and their aspirations for a more dignified human life.”
