Vladimir Stepanov. Keep the faith and the faith will keep you

· Baptists, Persecution, Evangelical Christians, KGB, Unregistered Pentecostals, Vestibule, Orthodoxy, Pentecostals, Council of Churches in Exile, USSR, Subbotniks

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

The 20th century was a time of special trials for Christians living in the USSR. The Soviet atheist state elevated the task of destroying the church to the level of state policy. The persecution of the church reached its peak during the Stalin era, when the GULAG came into being. The word GULAG (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, Main Camp Administration) became a byword for the system of Stalinist terror against his own people, while originally it denoted the state structure that administered camps using the forced labor of millions of our former fellow citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Christians, alongside them, experienced all the horrors of the GULAG.

The Bible says: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:7). And if we remember and honor the names of people who lived thousands of years before us, the names of heroes of faith from the Old and New Testaments, then it would be wrong to forget the names of our grandfathers and fathers, who lived so recently, to forget their thorny path of suffering, confession of faith, and martyrdom.

Of course, the Stalinist apparatus took care to make the repressive system appear lawful in the eyes of fellow citizens and world public opinion. And since the Constitution forbade imprisoning people for their faith, Christians were slanderously accused of political crimes (espionage, links with military-spy organizations of capitalist states, counterrevolutionary and anti-Soviet activity, undermining the collective farm system, and even preparing an assassination attempt on Stalin). Witnessing for Christ outside church walls was turned into anti-Soviet agitation, and the evangelist himself was declared an enemy of the people, against whom the infamous Article 58 was applied. In this or a similar way, Christians ended up in GULAG camps.

Innocently convicted people were turned into slaves of the totalitarian Bolshevik system and used for the industrial and transport development of the harsh and uninhabited regions of Siberia, the Far East, and the Extreme North. Essentially, the position of GULAG prisoners was worse than that of slaves in past centuries. A slave owner would still take some care of the slave’s food and health so that he could work long and bring profit. In the GULAG, no one counted the losses of prisoners, because the flow of newly convicted people more than made up for the “natural” attrition of the workforce.

The conditions in the GULAG were truly hellish. The hardships of camp life were not limited to an almost impossible work quota and meager food. Prisoners performed heavy physical labor in lumbering, in mines and pits, and on general construction work. After a few months of such work people weakened and were no longer able to meet the quota, and then their already meager food was reduced. As a result, prisoners weakened still further and soon died of exhaustion. In winter—cold; in summer—mosquitoes and biting flies from which there was also no escape—this was the lot of camp inmates serving their “punishment” in the taiga and tundra zones. Oppression by professional criminals and camp guards, torture and abuse, beatings, and murders were common. One of the leading brothers of the Baptist Union, Pavel Vasilievich Pavlov, was killed by criminals in one such Siberian camp. There were also mass shootings of prisoners, for example, in the camps of Vorkuta and Kolyma in 1938. All this together led to the fact that about half of the camp inmates did not live to see their release, and in most cases relatives could find out nothing about the cause of death or the place of burial. Officially, Stalin’s camps were called “corrective-labor” camps; in practice, as the prisoners rephrased it, they were “extermination-labor” camps. In his book Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Robert Conquest quotes the cynical words of a camp doctor to a prisoner: “You were brought here not to live, but to suffer and die. If you are alive, it means you are guilty of one of two things: either you worked less than you were supposed to, or you ate more than you should have.”

The camp system not only killed people, but also corrupted them morally. Informing, thieving ethics, cynicism, abuse of the weak, slavish fear, and other vices defiled people’s souls. As A. I. Solzhenitsyn noted in The Gulag Archipelago, Christians were “perhaps the only ones to whom the camp philosophy and even the camp language never stuck at all.”

Another feature distinguishing believers was their readiness to help. In his Memoirs, M. M. Ermolaev, who worked in lumbering in the Komi region, notes how he was struck by the Baptists and Old Believers. They regarded heavy physical labor as a test sent by God, almost a desired one, which had to be gone through and overcome. Believers, like some of the political prisoners, helped newcomers in the work brigade meet the quota, something the professional criminals never did. The latter, having met their own quota, would idle around, laugh, and sometimes even mock those who were straining themselves to the limit. Believers, on the other hand, would pair up with the weak and pull them along, taking on part of their quota in addition to their own. In this way they gave the newcomer a chance to get used to the heavy work, to hold on and survive. Ermolaev himself—a geographer, a scholar, an unbeliever, raised in atheism—provides testimony that is all the more valuable as an outside perspective, showing that Christians, even in camp conditions and contrary to the prevailing law of the jungle, demonstrated love for their neighbors in practice.

Talking about God was dangerous. The camp administration severely punished those who actively spread the message about Christ and tried to prevent spiritual fellowship among Christians and their joint prayers. If the authorities learned of such meetings, they would break them up by transferring believers to other places. Every attempt was made to separate the brothers, but sometimes there were too many of them, so completely suppressing spiritual fellowship was impossible. Believers gathered secretly. For participating in forbidden gatherings, they were put in a punishment cell or even had their camp terms extended.

But even in such conditions, believers, those who were stronger in spirit, found ways to bear witness. The Lutheran pastor Harri Haamer, an Estonian arrested in 1948 for “excessively free sermons”, wrote a memoir titled Our Life is in Heaven, in which he recounted his eight years in Kolyma camps. The book includes an episode about his conversation in a barracks of the Magadan transit camp with two Muslims, one of whom was a mullah. Pastor Haamer read the Sermon on the Mount to them, which the Muslims listened to calmly until they heard Jesus Christ’s call to love one’s enemy. In the ensuing debate, the Muslims defined the Quran’s position on this matter as follows: “For a brother, the heart should be open; for a guest, a table set and shelter offered. But for an enemy, we have only a sword prepared.” To this Haamer objected: “But does not the Quran teach that if you want to kill an enemy, a sword’s blow is enough; but if you want to conquer him, you must give him your heart?” And which victory would they deem greater: when conquerors seize a land strewn with corpses and smoking with fires, or when the victor can walk hand in hand, like a brother, with yesterday’s foe? The Muslims acknowledged the second option as preferable. “But the essential condition for such a victory is precisely the commandment ‘love your enemy,’” concluded Pastor Haamer.

The GULAG subjected believers’ lives to severe trials. Nikolai Petrovich Khrapov, as a young man who had just turned to God, was sent to Kolyma for confessing his faith. He remembered words spoken to him by a fellow believer: “Keep the faith, and the faith will keep you.” The truth of these words was confirmed by camp experience: if a person kept the faith, God kept the believer in the most dire circumstances. In 1938, mass executions of prisoners took place in Kolyma. Barracks that had been overflowing with people just recently became empty. It was not immediately known to the prisoners that people were being shot at night near the camp zone to the noise of a tractor engine. The initiator and director of the shootings was a certain NKVD colonel named Garanin, at whose hands Nikolai Khrapov nearly perished.

In his autobiographical trilogy The Happiness of a Lost Life, Khrapov recounts his camp years through the voice of the main character, Pavel Vladykin. At the moment in question, Pavel, weakened by backbreaking labor, hunger, and cold, having already faced death (he was nearly crushed by a heavy mine car), was in a state close to despair because of his overwhelming sufferings. One day during work he was summoned to the camp zone, and he realized that the grim lot had fallen to him as well. There was an old brother in the camp who tried to support Pavel and began to pray for him, though he understood that the punitive system operated mercilessly, making no exceptions for anyone. When the party of condemned prisoners arrived at the site, Pavel met Garanin’s gaze. Horror pierced the young man’s soul, as if death itself were staring into his eyes. The names of the doomed men were read out. Many fell to their knees, begging to be spared — it had no effect. Pavel’s name was also called, but for some reason he, along with three others, was separated from the main group. They were ordered to return to the camp zone, but from the terror they had endured, all strength left them, and they collapsed to the ground. No matter how they were beaten with rifle butts, not one of them rose. A truck had to be brought up to load them onto its bed. In the camp, the old man who had been waiting for Pavel embraced him: “My child! You have returned! How I prayed for you! Why are you silent?” This was the first instance when those sentenced to death were left alive in that camp. Garanin himself was shot a year later — he was charged with being a Japanese spy.

There were many cases when the Lord delivered believers from inevitable death. When the Orthodox priest Fr. Zachary (Kutsenko) fell ill and could not rise from his bunk to go to work, the camp guards beat him and threw him into a punishment cell for five days. He came to from a terrible cold that pierced his whole body. The frozen walls of the cell were covered with a thick layer of hoarfrost. The priest understood that he had been thrown in there to die. With bluish, bloodless lips he whispered a prayer: “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Every word of the prayer came with difficulty. Every movement caused pain. At times he lost consciousness. Overcoming the torment, Fr. Zachary prayed ceaselessly. After five days, the guards came to carry his body to the morgue, but to their astonishment they found that life still glimmered in the emaciated, dried‑up body of the priest. They could not understand why the zek had remained alive, lying for five days in a stone box on an icy floor, sick and starving. From there everyone was taken to the cemetery.

In the camps, those who weakened and perished were primarily those assigned to hard general labor, on which a physically healthy man would turn into a dying skeleton in three months. At a logging site in a remote taiga camp in Eastern Siberia, the Leningrad presbyter of the Baptist church Ivan Nikitovich Shilov and many brothers whose names are unknown to us today passed into eternity. The consolation for the dying was the faith they had preserved and the crown of martyrs.

It was easier to survive for those who managed to get work inside the camp, in warmth and under a roof. Some of the brothers who lived until their release testified that at first they nearly died on general labor, but then a fortunate opportunity to change their work presented itself. Thus, Ioann Mark (Galustyants) obtained a cook’s position, Pastor Haamer became a camp carpenter, Nikolai Khrapov a mine surveyor’s assistant in the office, and Fedor Zhubinsky a blacksmith in the mechanical workshops.

It is astonishing, but the sufferings that people endured in the camps often proved to be healing and cleansing for the soul. For some, they helped them to find saving faith in God. The example of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn is textbook. Camp sufferings, an incurable illness, a meeting with a believing Christian doctor, and a miraculous healing contributed to his turning to God. And so in his «Archipelago», drawing on personal experience, he – while writing with pain and condemnation about the GULAG – paradoxically proclaims: “Bless you, prison!”

Presbyter Shilov organized a group of believers in the Karaganda camp in 1935 and began holding meetings, to which those prisoners who were seeking God were also invited. In the summer of 1936, Shilov, observing strict secrecy, baptized those who had come to faith in the camp.

Glory to God and special honor to those Christians who were faithful unto death and who did not renounce their faith even under torture. Solzhenitsyn told about a believing old woman who was tormented by endless night interrogations in the NKVD prison in 1937, at the height of the Great Terror. Two years earlier, a metropolitan hiding from persecution had spent the night at her home. When asked where he had gone afterwards, the old woman replied: “I know. But I will not tell! You will never get anything from me, even if you cut me to pieces. You are afraid of the authorities, afraid of one another, you are even afraid to kill me – ‘you’ll lose the chain.’ But I am not afraid of anything! I am ready to stand before the Lord right now!”

Yes, there were those who did not return from the interrogations, who were faithful unto death, who did not deny God and did not betray anyone! And what is remarkable is that these Christians, stripped of rights, slandered, tortured, and killed, remained in a sense the masters of the situation. They were a silent reproach and a sentence upon their tormentors.

In Sergei Petrovich Fadyukhin’s book «Memories of the Past» there is an episode. A high-ranking NKVD official, reviewing Fadyukhin’s case, was struck by the sincerity and conviction of his answers to the interrogator’s questions. Evidently tormented by his conscience, the official invited the accused to his office and asked him to answer his questions. He said that he wanted to hear the same truthful answers as during the investigation and assured him that this informal, off-the-record conversation would not affect the outcome of the case in any way, that the answers were needed for him personally. To the question, “Will history forgive us for our deeds?” Fadyukhin replied: “No, history will never forgive you for the evil you are committing!” And after a short silence and a heavy sigh, the official said almost in a whisper: “Yes, history will never forgive us for these terrible things.”

The lives of our fathers and grandfathers fell on an unprecedentedly cruel atheistic era, and they worthily carried their cross as confessors and martyrs. Their testimonies, written with tears, sweat, and blood, their heroic feat of faith for Christ’s sake must not be forgotten! They must not be forgotten by us, the succeeding generations of Christians! Vladimir STEPANOV

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