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Christianity in the regions now considered part of the Soviet Union has a long and glorious history, dating back even before 988. But it seems that an atheistic state like the USSR would disdain any mention of that history, much less a grand celebration of it. So what’s going on—and what’s wrong—with the big Soviet show?

It’s finally come. the observance that millions of Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Russian Christians have been waiting for, the millennium of the Christianization of Rus’. That is, the alleged 1,000th anniversary of the occasion when the Grand Prince Vladimir ordered the people of his kingdom to be baptized into the Orthodox Christian faith, and personally oversaw the baptisms of the majority of the people in Kiev, the capital of his realm.

But the arrival and celebration of this millennium is heavily laden with irony. Probably the chief irony is the fact that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union, a zealously atheistic government, is endorsing—even funding and promoting—the most spectacular of the many events worldwide that are being dedicated to this “millennium of Christianity in Rus’.”

A second great irony is that the city of Kiev, where the celebrated baptism took place, is now the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR), one of the several republics in the the USSR. So we have the descendants of the people that Vladimir led into the fold of Christendom now under the rule of a Cornmunist government that, if it is to comply with the tenets of orthodox Marxist Leninism, must consider religion “an opiate of the people” and work in every possible way to discourage its existence.

So what’s really going on here, in this irony-filled celebration of the “Christianization of Rus”?

Actually, the message of Christ had reached the lands north of the Black Sea long before the 980s. Church tradition has it that sometime between 50 and 60 A.D. the Apostle Andrew, the first apostle that Jesus called, visited the future site of Kiev and possibly left new converts behind in other parts of that region, which was then known as Scythia. In fact, the Apostle Paul mentions the Scythians in his letter to the Colossians (3:11), apparently suggesting that some were already becoming Christians.

History tells us that late in the first century, the bishop of Rome, St. Clement, was exiled to Kherson (just south of the Rus’ region) and then martyred there. History also tells us that Christianity spread through the Greek colonies along the coast of the Black Sea, and that bishops from the Black Sea and Scythian regions attended some of the earliest ecumenical councils.

In the mid-900s, the Christian soldiers in the army of Prince Sviatoslav (Prince Vladimir’s father) said their vows of allegiance in a church building that had already been constructed in Kiev, the Church of the Prophet Elias. So obviously Christianity was far from unknown in those regions, though it was assuredly a minority religion, whose adherents were far outnumbered by worshippers of the Eastern Slavs’ pagan idols.

But then, in about 955, Princess Olga, the wife of Sviatoslav’s father and regent to her son, apparently went to Constantinople and was baptized an Orthodox Christian. Then Vladimir, her grandson, embraced Christianity, and proceeded to establish it as the state religion.

Radical changes in the culture soon followed. Vladimir abolished the death penalty. He and his successors established schools throughout the realm, so that the people could learn how to read the Scriptures. They established welfare institutions in order to take care of the unfortunate.

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