{"id":4557,"date":"2025-04-16T08:40:42","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T12:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4557"},"modified":"2025-04-16T08:40:42","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T12:40:42","slug":"surviving-communism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/16\/surviving-communism\/","title":{"rendered":"Surviving Communism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Each day this Lent we\u2019re looking at major \u201cturning points\u201d in Christian history \u2013 moments or seasons in which the story of God\u2019s people took an important and often unexpected turn. \u00a0<\/em>

If heaven is a place where we will finally have a chance to hear all the stories of what really happened in this world \u2013 and all the stories that lie behind those stories \u2013 then some of most inspiring will no doubt come from behind the Iron Curtain.

They will recount how Christianity, against all odds, survived history\u2019s most brutal, systematized attempt to crush it out of existence.

To date, most of those stories have never been told, for the simple reason that the central players never had the chance to share their experiences before they vanished from the scene.

But a handful of accounts were recorded by some heroic chroniclers. And if they are representative of the whole, we will consider Christianity\u2019s emergence from the blast furnace of communism to be one of history\u2019s great turning points.

For the better part of seven decades in the 20th<\/sup> century, outsiders could only wonder what was happening inside the nations dominated by Soviet and Maoist idealogues.

Before Lenin\u2019s Bolshevik revolution in 1917, there were at least 55,000 Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union. By the 1940s, only a few hundred remained. The number of monasteries went from 1,025 to zero. Church buildings were shuttered or demolished. Some became museums or propaganda centers for Marxism.

Maps of the city of Moscow were redrawn so that churches didn\u2019t even appear. Even when visitors were holding those maps and standing directly in front of beautiful buildings, they were told, \u201cThere is no church here.\u201d

In a sense, the architects of Soviet communism tried to make religion itself disappear. Jesus was mentioned in history books, but only as a legendary figure. Orthodox bishops and priests were dragged off to the gulags (forced-labor camps), along with political dissidents, artists, and other \u201cundesirables.\u201d

More than a million never returned.\u00a0

Schoolchildren were indoctrinated into atheism. They were instructed to bow their heads, close their eyes, and pray for blessings from God. After a minute their teachers said, \u201cYou see, nothing happened.\u201d Then they were instructed to pray for blessings from Stalin. This time when they lifted their heads there were bags of candy on their desks.

What was the outcome of decades of militant, state-sponsored unbelief?

Author Philip Yancey reports that Stalin unleashed a kind of Marxist speakers bureau \u2013 gifted presenters who preached the intellectual supremacy of atheism and the glories of the Communist State at mandatory gatherings around the nation.\u00a0

One such speaker worked his crowd for more than two hours.\u00a0Empty, emotionless faces stared back at him.\u00a0When he asked for questions at the end, there was silence. That\u2019s when a Russian Orthodox priest in the crowd suddenly shouted, \u201cHe is risen!\u201d\u00a0Immediately a majority of those present roared in response: \u201cHe is risen, indeed!\u201d

It turned out to be harder to stamp out the flames of faith than anyone thought.

When Mao Zedong died in 1976 and the Soviet empire crumbled 15 years later, missiologists were stunned to discover that Christianity was in fact alive and well in both China and Russia.

The twin lessons? God is faithful, no matter what. And hope is often born in the darkest places.

One of those who suffered in the gulags was a doctor named Boris Kornfeld. Sentenced to years of \u201cre-education,\u201d he kept to himself.\u00a0He watched his back.\u00a0He took no risks.

Then something happened that he never expected:\u00a0He began to trust in God.\u00a0His heart was flooded with hope.\u00a0

Kornfeld didn\u2019t tell anyone why, but he began to serve others.\u00a0He even used his surgical skills to save the life of one of the hated guards.\u00a0That act of compassion, he knew, would bring trouble.\u00a0But when one of the vilest prisoners threatened him with death for helping the enemy, he realized he was no longer afraid.\u00a0

Later that day he performed life-saving stomach surgery on a young man with a sad face.\u00a0He stayed up all night, sitting beside his patient, who was hovering between life and death.\u00a0

Suddenly he felt led to break his silence.\u00a0He talked for hours to the young man about the joy of meeting this God of mercy and grace.\u00a0He described how God\u2019s love had driven the fear from his heart, and how he had even felt buoyed by meaning in the midst of the gulag\u2019s misery.

The young patient, gripping the doctor\u2019s hand, listened intently as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

Sometime around dawn, Boris Kornfeld was murdered by the prisoner who had threatened him.\u00a0He had shared his spiritual convictions just once.

But his audience of one, the sad-faced prisoner, lived on.\u00a0His name was Alexander Solzhenitsyn.\u00a0

Seized by the words he had heard on that recovery table, he chose to make Kornfeld\u2019s faith his own. He would go on to win the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming one of the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s most valiant voices for freedom, chronicling how God\u2019s grace is able to break through some of the most grace-challenged places on earth.

During the heyday of Stalin\u2019s reign, crosses disappeared.\u00a0Religious icons were confiscated.\u00a0Millions of Bibles were taken from the homes of believers and incinerated.\u00a0

Not long after the doors to Russia reopened in the 1990s, an American mission team in the city of Stavropol heard a rumor that there was still a warehouse outside of town where confiscated Bibles had been stored since the days of the Great Depression.\u00a0Members of the team approached local officials and asked permission to look inside.\u00a0

What they discovered was a mind-boggling mountain of Russian Scriptures.\u00a0Having received the officials\u2019 consent to distribute as many as they could, the team returned with a truck and some hired hands.\u00a0

One of them was a Russian college student who made no secret of his cynical dismissal of religious claptrap.\u00a0The rubles he would earn, however, would come in handy.\u00a0 \u00a0

As the workers loaded the Bibles, one of the mission team members noticed that the young man had disappeared.\u00a0Ultimately they found him in a corner of the warehouse, weeping.\u00a0

He had secretly put one of the Bibles into his pocket.\u00a0Then he had slipped away, unnoticed, hoping to take a quick glance at its pages.\u00a0He was shaken by what he had discovered.\u00a0

On the first page of the Bible he had randomly picked up, he saw the name and the distinctive handwriting of his own grandmother.\u00a0Of the tens of thousands of Bibles in the warehouse, he had somehow pocketed the one that belonged to a family member who had never lost her faith.

And who had never stopped praying for him<\/u><\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0

Those are two of the stories that originated from behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps one day in heaven, looking back, we\u2019ll get to hear all the rest.

Right now your corner of the world may seem to be a dark, grace-challenged place. But there\u2019s a reason this is called Holy Week.

On the darkest Friday afternoon the world has ever known, the Son of God took upon himself every one of our sins and burdens.

Then he proved that nothing<\/u><\/em> in the world \u2013 not communism, not fear, not violence, not your worst failure \u2013 has the power to defeat the God who delights in raising the dead.

Nothing.<\/em>
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here Each day this Lent we\u2019re looking at major \u201cturning points\u201d in Christian history \u2013 moments or seasons in which the story of God\u2019s people took an important and often unexpected turn. \u00a0 If heaven is a place where we will finally have a chance to hear all the stories of what… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4558,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[884,912,874],"class_list":["post-4557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-church-history","tag-communism","tag-persecution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4559,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557\/revisions\/4559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}