A Salvation of Suffering: The Church in the Soviet Union

“I feel that faith is stronger with us … because we’re on this cross. Faith withers on earthly well-being and in the West there’s well-being, so faith is weaker there.”

Late into the night we talked with Katya and Reinhold, whom we were visiting in their stark resettlement camp apartment in West Germany. Leaning toward us across a tiny table in their cubicle-sized kitchen, our two Russian friends recounted their agonizing experiences as Christians in Barnaul, Siberia, prior to their immigration to the West.

In 1961, Soviet authorities padlocked the door to the only Baptist church in Barnaul when the congregation refused to accept a government-appointed pastor. The Siberian believers then moved their church meetings to homes, but druzhinniki, vigilante police, often disrupted these gatherings, sometimes assaulting believers physically. Besides harassing them at church, Soviet police searched church members’ homes, confiscating Christian literature and often installing bugging devices in order to eavesdrop on church plans.

In 1963, a Soviet court sent five Barnaul Christian leaders to prison. In 1964, the KGB sentenced to prison Nikolai Khmara, from the neighboring city of Kulanda, and then tortured him to death. In 1966, using the pretext that the Christians might “corrupt” children from a nearby elementary school, Soviet officials bulldozed the house where the Barnaul Christians had been conducting church meetings. Nothing but rubble remained.

In the early seventies, Soviet authorities began interrogating unsuspecting Christian school children about their parents’ beliefs and Christian activities. They even threatened to remove some children from Christian parents and place them in atheistic orphanages.

When our Russian Baptist friends had finished their sad chronology, we wondered how we could commiserate with this saga of struggle and suffering so remote from our experiences as American Christians. That evening we realized, as we had in many other encounters with Christians in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, how much we Western Christians have to learn from our brothers and sisters behind the Iron Curtain—particularly about suffering for the gospel.

It is not, of course, that Western Christians are foreigners to suffering. Rather, it is that the church in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has endured prolonged, unparalleled persecution, and this experience of sustained suffering can provide insight and instruction to the church everywhere.

The church in Russia has not sought suffering and martydom—nor has it been apathetic toward injustice. Increasingly in the last 20 years, Christians in the Soviet Union have stood for human rights and resisted repression of religious beliefs by the Kremlin. But for Christians everywhere, there are times when persecution persists despite human efforts to rectify the root injustice. How then should Christians in the Soviet Union—or anywhere—respond to the struggle and the suffering that result?

In all experiences of suffering, the question why is paramount. Like Job, followers of God everywhere have searched for the origin and significance of suffering. Through the storms that have battered their lives since the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian Christians in particular have been forced to confront this question.

Russian Orthodox priest Dmitri Dudko explored this mystery in his book Our Hope. In a reply to a parishioner about adversity in the Christian life, Dudko declared, “You still haven’t understood the main thing: that our earthly life has been given to us for ascetical struggles; that in our earthly life a battle rages. The devil fights against God, and the field of battle is man’s heart, as Dostoevski said. The Christian isn’t called a warrior for nothing. His battle ribbons and so forth are in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Dudko, who in 1980 was imprisoned, interrogated, and possibly drugged into a television confession renouncing his ministry, wrote: “My personal situation at present is this: I am in the battlefield.”

Christians everywhere are in a battlefield, in a supernatural struggle—with cosmic issues at stake. Scripture and experience teach us that spiritual warfare, whether visible or invisible, is always a reality for a Christian. To accept the reality of spiritual warfare provides perspective on the subject of suffering.

The comfort accompanying this reality is the promise of God’s ultimate triumph in a supernatural struggle that presently precipitates so much suffering in the world. Says Baptist reformer Georgi Vins: “With Christ’s help, the church in the East is invincible in spite of all its enemies.” Dmitri Dudko declares, “We have nothing to fear since all is ultimately in God’s hands.” But meanwhile, here on earth, the battle rages. And for Christians in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, this struggle is almost always intense. Beyond the hope of ultimate deliverance from suffering, the church in Eastern Europe has been forced to try to search out the divine design within the pattern of its present sufferings.

This pursuit has perhaps been easier for Western Christians to avoid. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly, recently noted, “There is nothing like the happiness of the early Christians, not despite, but because they accepted suffering for the sake of Christ. As far as the capacity of godly suffering is concerned, we are the poorest and least advanced. We want comforts; we do not want to be destitute and suffer for the sake of Christ.”

Dmitri Dudko has also addressed this theme: “That is why I feel that faith is stronger with us—because we’re on this cross. Faith withers on earthly well-being and in the West there’s well-being, so faith is weaker there.”

In a speech at Harvard in 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted: “A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger … we have been through a training far in advance of Western experience.”

One East European believer recently remarked to us, “I really get upset when I hear people in the West saying, ‘Come to Jesus and you will always be happy. You will have material abundance.’ ”

Another East European Christian observed, “You Western Christians often seem to consider material prosperity to be the only sign of God’s blessing. On the other hand, you often seem to perceive poverty, discomfort, and suffering as signs of God’s disfavor. In some ways we in the East understand suffering from the opposite perspective. We believe that suffering may be a sign of God’s favor and trust in the Christian to whom the trial is permitted to come. In one sense it seems to us that God has selected the church in Eastern Europe for a special assignment—suffering. Knowing this, of course, does not mean that our sufferings are not agonizing. But it does provide healing and redemption in our sufferings.”

Experiences of the Russian church in the last 65 years of Marxist domination have repeatedly affirmed the redemptive place and purpose of suffering in God’s divine design. One significance of suffering noted by many East European Christians is the sharpening of spiritual perceptions and clarifying of spiritual priorities. One young Russian Christian described to us the heightened presence of Christ that he experienced during his sufferings for his faith: “When I was persecuted for my faith, I realized that in reality it was Christ who was being persecuted, and with this realization I experienced the presence of Christ in a new way, helping me endure my sufferings.”

Anatoli Levitin, the well-known Russian Orthodox layman imprisoned for his Christian dissident activities, has described the heightened awareness of the power of prayer brought about by his sufferings: “I felt at ease and well in prison and I left it, strange as it may seem, with stronger nerves, although I had been subjected to very bad conditions the whole time. I would be terribly ungrateful if I did not say to what I owed my feeling of well-being. Here I have only one word to say: prayer.”

Parallel with a clearer perception of Christ and prayer, many East European Christians whom we have met speak of the strengthened bond with other Christians that has resulted from their sufferings. A Czechoslovakian Christian leader recently told us, “Suffering has shown us that we can survive without church structures. But we cannot survive without other Christians. Many of us learned that lesson in prison cells when we suffered together with Orthodox and Catholic believers. We discovered that it was not peripheral differences of doctrine that mattered, but only our central commitment to Jesus Christ.”

In many instances, Christlike suffering by Christians in Eastern Europe has helped build bridges to the persecutors inflicting the sufferings. In his book Living Prayer, Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony Bloom quotes the French Jesuit writer Jean Danielou, who has seen that “suffering is the link between the righteous and sinners, the righteous man who endures suffering and the sinner who inflicts it. If there were not that link, they would drift apart and sinners and righteous would remain on parallel lines that never meet. In that case, the righteous would have no power over the sinner, because one cannot deal with what one does not meet.”

In a letter recently received in the West, Lithuanian Catholic prisoner Jadvyga-Gemma Stanelyte writes that imprisonment has acquainted her with “unimaginable moral and spiritual misery” and “the naked amoral side of life.” Nevertheless, she describes purpose in this suffering: “Christ, too, was placed among murderers.… Here I have an opportunity to put into practice this noble theory that I have been taught: One should fall in love with humiliation, sacrifice—in short, the lowest depths—and perceive everywhere the Lord’s hand.”

Only divine grace enables this perception of God in all events. We met a group of Siberian Christians who told us of their encounter with an atheistic agitator who disrupted their meetings, even on one occasion dragging some believers from a house meeting to the police station. The agitator became seriously ill and lay in the hospital dying. His atheistic colleagues did not come to visit him, but the Christians did, with food, flowers, and the gospel.

Following the steps of Christ, who transformed the cross, an instrument of torture, into a source of salvation, the experiences of many East European Christians portray a pattern of suffering transformed to opportunity and blessing. The experience of Volodia, a Russian believer, illustrates such a divine paradox.

In his last year of medical school, when school officials discovered he was a Christian, Volodia was threatened with expulsion from school. “You choose—either God or diploma,” the Communist authorities demanded. His mentors tried to insure that Volodia, the best student in his class, would choose to graduate. For several months they conducted indoctrination sessions intended to force the student to renounce his faith.

One day, unannounced, a Communist party official visited Volodia’s class and declared, “Strange things have been happening in our university. There is a rumor that some students are trying to believe in God. We want to find out if this is true. I am going to ask Volodia to come forward and clarify this rumor.”

Struck by the shock of being summoned, Volodia understood. He was being offered a final chance to renounce his faith. “For 20 minutes I had the opportunity of my lifetime to tell my fellow students about Christ,” he told us later. Volodia was soon expelled from the university.

If suffering is a “divine assignment” entrusted to Christians, the influence of Christ’s followers in Eastern Europe who have embraced this calling cannot be calculated. In the first century, a small band of beleaguered Christians transformed the world. Perhaps we will witness a similar phenomenon occuring in the twentieth.

A few months ago we met Yuri, an East European Christian working as a scientist at a research institute in the Soviet Union. Officially, Yuri and his colleagues are forbidden to discuss Christianity. Unofficially, Yuri and several of his associates meet clandestinely to read the Bible. One member of the Bible study is a scientist who became a Christian before he met Yuri. His conversion had come unexpectedly through reading a passage about Christ in the writings of Nikolai Gogol. Apart from Gogol’s writings, the scientist, whose mother was an atheism propagandist, had never had contact with Christians. He had never attended a church, never heard a Christian broadcast, never read a Christian book. He desperately wanted a Bible but could not find one in any bookstore. Once he found a prerevolutionary one on the black market that cost 300 rubles—approximately one month’s salary. He went home for money, but to his grief, the Bible had been sold by the time he returned.

“Communism, with the suffering it has brought to believers, has swept away corrupt and lukewarm Christianity in our country,” Yuri said, as he concluded the story of his friend’s conversion. “It has created a vacuum in millions of people like my scientist friend, which can be truly filled only with vital Christianity. And that is what is happening—Christianity, purified and revitalized, is spreading throughout our country. Perhaps the day will come when our suffering church will be sending missionaries to your country.”

Anita and Peter Deyneka, Jr. is director of the Slavic Gospel Association, Wheaton, Illinois; Anita, his wife, is a teacher SGA’s lnstitute of Slavic Studies. They are coauthors of A Song in Siberia (Cook, 1977).

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