Many years before the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Lord frequently used to call us as a group to action stations to pray about the “menace” that Russia posed to the nations. Back in 1980, towards the end of my seven years in Oxford, one of our flatmates had a dream that, long after people had dismissed the thought of it, the Russian military would rise again and spring into action. Russia’s continuing flexing of its military might in Ukraine and Syria remind us of verses God spoke to us through many decades ago, such as Jeremiah 6:22, prompting us to pray fervently for this mighty country, where the Spirit of the Lord has nurtured and sustained so many, but where persecution of believers has brough such intense hardships.

Sadly, the hopes of spiritual renewal that blossomed in the early 1990s have not developed as far or as fast as many Christians had hoped and expected. According to the statistics that I have seen, a disheartening 90% of Russians have no meaningful link with any church. On paper, 64% of the nation are Orthodox, 19% Non-Religious, 12% Muslim, and 1.2% Protestant/Evangelical and just 0.6% Catholic.

May the Lord use these two contrasting articles to place something of His ongoing burden for Russia on your soul. In this first one I want to focus on how Russia’s failure to “remember” properly, and to learn from its history, is a serious obstacle to constructive growth and change in the heart of the nation.

The Importance of Remembering at a National Level

Remember your history, your long and rich history. (Isaiah 46:9)
How apt that verse is for Russia!

In the epilogue to her excellent book Gulag; A History of the Soviet Camps (Allen Lane, Penguin Books 2003), Anne Applebaum brilliantly shows how powerful Memory and Remembering are – and how serious the consequences are when serious matters are locked away in filing cabinets with no intention of referring to them again.

Anne shows in considerable detail that remembering is not something that Russia does well. Issues that are not reformed root stock and branch all too often find fresh ways to spring up, and because this historical legacy has not been faced up to, ideological and totalitarian oppression is never far away in Russia. Truth remains a commodity to exploit rather than to honour, and those who stand up to declare it  often find themselves in great danger.

Making opportunities to confess, forgive and remember well

Remembering properly is vital for the well-being any nation. Germany has made more effort than any other nation in modern times to face up to its past. When a younger generation were in danger of forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust they reminded the nation using comic formats.

See Vale of Tears: When Grief and deception engulf nations

South Africa’s attempt at restorative (rather than retributive) justice in the aftermath of the Apartheid is generally considered to have been a success.*

The great value of Truth Commissions set up there is that they allowed victims to share their stories in an “official” forum whilst at the same time making it possible to bring grievous crimes from the past into the light of public attention. (Cf the British Parliament’s 2002 enquiry into the bloody Sunday Massacre.) No such “truth-telling” has ever been permitted in Russia, either in Parliament or anywhere else within the judicial system.

No official investigations have therefore ever been conducted into the countless murders that took place in the Soviet Gulag. Four and a half million political have certainly been rehabilitated into mainstream society, but many see the reason for this as being motivated less by any real concern for truth and reconciliation than as a ploy to end any unwanted investigations into the past. It is easier to “buy” victims off with a few inducements (such as free bus tickets) than to look more deeply at how the injustices that Stalinism engendered continue to live on into the present day.

Refusing to face the truths of our past

It feels significant that Russia does not have a national monument to honour the victims of the Gulag -and neither has it done anything to promote any sense of national mourning let alone repentance. Such memorials as there are in Russia are known to relatively few – and the country continues to act as if it had not inherited the legacy of the Soviet Union. There is certainly no national museum dedicated to the history of repression. A national centre of mourning would officially acknowledge the suffering of victims and their families.

Most Russian leaders are reluctant to renounce their past explicitly in case this leads to present practices being brought into question. An additional reason for the reluctance to ask probing questions is because people are afraid of finding out things they do not want to discover about their loved ones – or even of betraying someone they love. This was the acute problem that millions wrestled with in East Germany when the Stasi files were made public, revealing the names and identities of the people who had been part of the vast network of Stasi informers.

Given that former communists have continued to dominate most of the former Soviet countries, there was therefore little inducement for any real openness concerning the past to develop. People had a vested interest in keeping the past under wraps in order to avoid incriminating themselves, or the system they owe allegiance to.

In the last of his brillaint science fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis describes the horrifying impact of an alien Fascist-like dogma taking over first a university and then a town. Concerningly, there are many warning signs of this happening in our own country.

Our past impacts on our present and our future

When dealing with big issues it is always good to go from the particular to the general – toe deep, knee deep, waist deep and suddenly we find ourselves swimming in the flow of subjects that mean so much to God Himself.

From time to time I have reread the stories of believers who were imprisoned in Soviet days, and wondered how they are faring today. The stories of these Russians who either survived or perished in the Gulag camps deserve to be retold far more widely in this day when totalitarian regimes in nations such as Uzbekistan and Belarus continue to persecute believers actively. E.g. Voice of the Martyrs: Uzbekistan and other sites on the web.

In Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps Anne Applebaum writes that in many of these countries, the structure of the secret police apparatus remains virtually unchanged, ensuring that many “overshadows” remain as a result of alliances that were formed – and deals that were struck – in the days of the former Soviet Union, with its enormous military establishment and imperial goals.

More than just the missing monuments, Anne Applebaum suggests that it is public awareness that is most lacking here. The Russian government certainly made no attempt to bring the perpetrators of torture or mass murders to justice, even though many of them were easily identifiable. In fact, very few in contemporary Russia consider the past as something to be repented of: it is looked on rather as a bad dream to be forgotten. But, as Anne presciently warned 12 years ago, “it lies in wait for the next generation like a great and open Pandora’s box.”

One of the reasons for this is that many Russians follow Putin’s feeling in viewing collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. “The old system may have been bad, but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful.”

As a result, the consequences of no attempt being made to address bad memories have been much more damaging and persistent in Russia than in any of the other former communist countries.

Along with obvious financial shortages, this lack of willingness to face the past goes a long way to explain the absence of any serious reform of the judicial and prison services. There continues to be a grimness about Russian prisons which is utterly reminiscent of the conditions that existed back in the labour camps of the 1930’s. Appalling sanitation, foul air, lack of light combined with intense mental degradation lead to the complete loss of everything that affirms an individual’s personhood.

Given this more or less voluntary amnesia on pretty well everyone’s part, and the lack of any meaningful judicial intervention – to say nothing of the colossal weight of constant propaganda from the media outlets – everything was in place for Putin to impose heavy censorship in this country, together with the secret police, (the FSB), continuing to exercise a heavy and oppressive presence.

Anything that might tell another side to the story, such as the real-life cases that Amnesty International and  Memorial, the Human Rights Watch centre that kept alive the memory of Soviet-era injustices, is being ruthlessly suppressed. The closure of these organisations represents a great loss. Nations that do not remember well are prone to repeat the sins and errors of the past – but making such memories accessible to all does not fit in with the image Putin in seeking to create, of a newly resurgent Russia that has nothing to be ashamed of.

The example of Chechnya set a precedent for what happened earlier this year (2014) in Crimea 

When Stalin deported the Chechen people to the wastes of Kazakhstan, it was in the full intention of wiping them out – along with their language and culture. At least half of them physically died in exile. Fifty years later, in a repeat performance, the Russian Federation obliterated the Chechen capital, Grozny. If the Russian people, and especially the Russian elite had taken to heart what Stalin did to the Chechens, would it have made them think twice about invading Chechnya again in the 1990’s? For to do so was the moral equivalent of present-day Germany invading western Poland with all guns blazing.

As Anne Applebaum puts it, “Very few Russians saw it that way of course – which itself is evidence of how little they know (or are told) about their own history. History can easily acquire a living momentum – rather like a free-wheeling demolition ball which continues to destroy and knock down”.

Conclusion

Intercessors have long known that remembering and identificational repentance go hand-in-hand. This has always been a task for the few rather than the many. From the Russian perspective, there is resentment that the West focuses more on the ugly things than on the serious achievements of the Soviet regime. The West may well have missed many tricks by not making greater efforts to incorporate Russia into the family of nations when the Cold War ended, and while glasnost was at its height – but there is a deadweight of tradition from the Soviet days that cannot fail to influence the future – and this unquestionably includes the security services as well as the eager-to-recreate-its-former-glory-military.

Of course we ourselves must guard our hearts from viewing our neighbours as enemies, and reducing them to nothing more than ‘objects and categories,’ let alone portraying them as being lesser or evil beings, for every time we label people in such ways, it merely makes it easier for each new episode of totalitarian excess to develop without facing up to the darker side of human nature. But if people choose to forget just how brutal the totalitarian regime of the USSR really was – affecting half of Europe as it did – it is likely to skew and distort our what we know about the other half too. Just think how many already today in the West have never heard of the 7/7 massacres in London! As dark inclinations surface again, it is important to remember that totalitarian philosophies and “shows of strength” make a profound appeal to millions of Russians back home. We should not forget, either, just how popular Putin remains for many in Russia.

Unless the elite comes to recognise the value and the importance of all the Russian citizens, and honour both their civil and their human rights, the outlook is grim for the nation, and Russia risks becoming a land populated by “impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss banks and their private jets on runways, with their engines running.”

May the Lord give increased wisdom to western politicians, economists and other key players to know how to respond to the enigma that is Russia – which is really no enigma at all, but rather a nation where an iron fist overlays any tendencies to what we would regard as open democracy.

You might find it helpful to use this prayer cast from Operation World as a starter for your prayers for Russia.

Links

See Watchmen for Russia for more insights, information and background.

Anne Applebaum has subsequently written a severe indictment of the direction Russia is heading in: How [Putin] and his Cronies stole Russia

*We focused recently on Hungary in another post, where a modern museum simultaneously beams both Fascist and Communist propaganda at visitors through a series of television screens from the moment they come through the door, in order to give a generation that is too young to have experienced the reality of either a taste of the terror in its not-so-distant past. No surprise that the ex-Communist party, now rebadged as the Socialist party, fought bitterly against this museum being opened, highlighting as it does the plight of so many victims of terror.
See https://remember.org/house-of-terror-museum.html and https://pastinthepresent.net/2019/08/16/hungarys-bloody-past-remembered-at-budapests-house-of-terror-and-the-road-to-democracy/