To allay fears that he would push for reunification, Graham acceded to the urgings of East German officials and canceled plans for a preaching tour of West Germany. The Moscow visit finally toppled the last barriers to state approval for a trip to the GDR, but another premature leak of the news, this time by a staff member in BGEA’s Berlin office, almost undid nearly four years of backstage negotations. When Graham finally visited six East German cities in October 1982, he met with enthusiastic response from young people but notable restraint on the part of church and state leaders. He recalled a meeting with Lutheran pastors of the Synod of Saxony as extremely uncomfortable. “When I walked in,” he said, “I did not see a warm eye in the place. I shook hands with several people, and they gave me a very cold look. When I stood up, I told them that I’m a fellow believer. I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all my heart. So do you. We profess the same faith. But you all looked at me with such hostility when I came in. I could see it in your eyes. I didn’t see the warmth a Christian should be having toward a fellow Christian.’” He acknowledged that this sort of challenge was unusual for him. “I had never done that in my whole life, to any group of people. But when I finished, they gave me a nice ovation, and when I went out, I shook hands with many of them and their eyes were just smiling.”
Graham’s appointments with state leaders were similarly cool. At a meeting with party leader Erich Honecker’s first deputy and other top officials, he listened to a series of predictable statements about the peace-seeking ideals of the Soviet bloc nations. When his turn came, he got right to the point. “Your country doesn’t trust my country,” he said, “and my country doesn’t trust your country. And that makes it pretty difficult to live with each other.” He then spoke of the atomic bomb and subsequent nuclear weapons. Men had built them, dropped them, and now stood ready to use them again. The problem, it seemed, was something wrong with the hearts of men. With that as his “sermon starter,” he proceeded to tell them how Jesus Christ could renew the heart of any man who seeks him. Ed Plowman recalled that “they were ill at ease, but fascinated. They couldn’t say much. He hit them right where they lived. He felt good about it.”
From East Germany, Graham went directly to Czechoslovakia for a rather tense four-day visit. Clergymen in all the Soviet bloc countries had to make some accommodation to the state in order to operate with any measure of freedom. In Czechoslovakia state control of the clergy was so strict, and sometimes capricious, that ministers operated in constant anxiety over the possibility that a misstep, or even an internal church squabble that displeased state authorities, would cost them their license and their ministry. As a result, Graham found churchmen more wary of his visit than were government officials. The government, however, had its own agenda and clearly hoped to use Graham’s visit to bolster its image. Admission to Graham’s several appearances was by ticket only, and tickets were given only to those who the government felt certain would not be whipped into some kind of antigovernment uprising. “They tried to keep this silent,” Haraszti recalled. “They wanted the propaganda advantage of [making it appear they had a] free society, while keeping control of a closed society.”
In one blatant effort, they arranged for him to visit a war memorial in Bratislava and suggested he deliver a speech praising the Russian soldiers who had died in the liberation of Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II. He had already learned that in official Soviet history America’s role in defeating Germany had been virtually elided. He agreed to speak at the memorial but gave clear notice he would pay tribute not just to Soviet soldiers but to Russians and Americans alike. “Oh, they did not like it! They took strong exception,” Haraszti recalled. “But we gave them two alternatives: Either Billy Graham does not visit the war memorial or he does visit and speaks according to history, not according to your history. He visited the memorial. I had to be there all the time, to check the history, to be sure that he would not be led astray.”
Graham continued his practice of speaking to government officials about the need for greater religious freedom and the reduction of tension between Church and State. He also gained an unprecedented bit of national exposure for religion when a television interview by one of the country’s best-known news commentators aired uncut in prime time over the state-run network. Once again Graham made a positive impression on government officials. Several years after the visit, Reinhold Kerstan, a Baptist World Alliance executive who had accompanied Graham on this tour, ran into visa problems while traveling through Czechoslovakia on his way to Austria. Unable to make headway through normal channels, he called the head of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, identified himself as a member of Graham’s 1982 party, and asked for help. Within forty-five minutes, Kerstan was on his way, with the assurance that “it was a delight to do something for the friend of my friend, Dr. Billy Graham.”
Graham’s plane had barely soared out of the Moscow airport at the end of his 1982 visit when Alexander Haraszti began preparing the ground for a return visit. His first task was to make amends to Orthodox leaders who resented Graham’s attention to government authorities. They had hoped his visit would strengthen the Church’s hand in dealing with the State; by spending so much time with state officials, and particularly by visiting Arbatov before attending an official church function, Graham seemed to have indicated he held the state in higher regard. “We were ready,” one clergyman told him, “not to ever see Billy Graham in the future.” Haraszti carefully explained that the Graham team had been uncertain about just who was in charge. When Arbatov sent for him, he had assumed it was with the knowledge and approval of church leaders. When he spoke to other high officials, he had done so not to upstage the church but to represent its interests in a way that church leaders might not be free to do. That seemed to satisfy the Orthodox clergy, as did Haraszti’s explanation that Graham’s remark that he would like to conduct a “crusade” in the Soviet Union meant simply that he wished to have a chance to preach the gospel, not that he wanted to conquer either the Orthodox Church or the Soviet people. Over the next two years, a dozen more trips, most involving Haraszti, led at last to the extended preaching tour Graham had been seeking so long.
During twelve days in September 1984, Graham spoke more than fifty times in four cities: Moscow and Leningrad, the Estonian city of Tallinn, just across the bay from Finland, and Novosibirsk, deep in the heart of Siberia. The itinerary was tightly controlled, and all speaking engagements were in churches and other religious settings rather than open to the public, but Graham was able to speak to thousands of Christians face-to-face, something no Westerner had ever been allowed to do. In Leningrad he addressed nearly six hundred students and faculty at the Russian Orthodox Theological Academy, telling them how to communicate the gospel effectively. He had prepared a formal lecture, but seminary officials told him, “Oh, no. We’ll get this printed and hand it out. We want you to tell us how to preach.” So, he recalled, “I just got up and told them how I got started, what methods I use in study, what kind of sermons I prepare, how I deliver them, how I give an invitation to receive Christ, and all that. And then I answered questions. It’s the same thing I try to do at every university I visit.” He told the seminarians that wherever he went, he found four omnipresent problems: emptiness, loneliness, guilt, and fear of death. All four problems have the same solution—-the gospel of Jesus Christ, simply and authoritatively proclaimed. “In some societies,” he admitted, “you cannot go outside and preach as in others,” but in every society Christians could manifest such “fruits of the Spirit” as love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, kindness, and self-control. “People will see you,” he assured them, “and after awhile they will say, ‘What makes you different?’” And that question would provide the opportunity to bear witness to saving faith. Graham’s address was videotaped for use in homiletics classes at the seminary, and one professor grandly declared that Graham’s visit “could change the style of preaching in the Orthodox Church.” Graham also spok
e at Leningrad’s patriarchal cathedral, where Metropolitan Antonii shattered precedent by interrupting the three-hour liturgy to introduce him to the congregation of 6,000 as “a great preacher and a great peacemaker” and to allow him to deliver a full-length sermon on “The Glory of the Cross.” He followed this triumph with an emotional service at the city’s 3,000-member Baptist church, packed to the rafters with eager worshipers, many of whom held microphones to capture every word on their tape recorders.
In Tallinn, Graham spoke at the Orthodox cathedral and two large Baptist churches. At one of the Baptist churches, the 4,500 people who managed to squeeze into the sanctuary were treated to a highlight in the evangelist’s life, when he and son Franklin, newly ordained to the ministry, participated together in a service for the first time. The setting, though auspicious, could not have seemed entirely foreign; at the end of the service, two choirs, with full orchestral accompaniment, sang a song that had somehow made its way from the American South a full century earlier: “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There.” In the academic city of Novosibirsk, five time zones to the east, Graham visited the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, where he surprised a group of scientists by asserting that his anthropology professor at Wheaton, a Russian, had taught him that a Siberian had traveled to the New World long before Columbus made the trip. At the city’s flourishing Baptist church—one of fifty-four in western Siberia—several thousand people who could not get into the church listened to him over loudspeakers set up in a fenced-in area around the church. The evangelist’s request that the congregation pray for the upcoming meeting between President Reagan and Foreign Minister Gromyko surprised the worshipers and caused his advisers to wince; the meeting, revealed to Graham by Reagan, had not yet been announced by either government.
In Moscow, Graham preached at the cathedrals overseen by Patriarch Pimen and Metropolitan Filaret. Remembering the frustrating problems of his first visit, he arranged this time for a special sound system that enabled the thousands of worshipers in both cathedrals to hear him clearly. He also returned to the Baptist church, once for a regular worship service and a second time to address more than 250 Baptist ministers who were gathered to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of Baptist mission work in Russia.
In every city, Graham visited with key government leaders, sharing his Christian faith on every occasion—without exception—and stressing the need for all people to work together to achieve lasting peace. In Moscow he renewed his acquaintance with ministers Kuroyedov and Fitsev, who had cleared the way for his visit, and with academician Arbatov. But the most significant visit of this trip was a meeting of nearly two hours with Boris Ponomarev. Chief of the International Affairs Department for the Central Committee of the Communist party and a member of the Politburo, Ponomarev was the most influential Soviet leader to receive Graham on either of his visits and the man Graham felt could do most to improve the situation for Soviet believers. This was the moment he had been waiting for, the moment when all the careful preparation and the quiet bearing up under criticism of his motives would be rewarded. Ponomarev began the conversation with a forty-five-minute monologue on Soviet foreign policy. “I am sure he was trying to get to Reagan through me,” Graham admitted. “When he finished, I asked him, ‘Now that you have told me what you wanted to say, can I tell you about America? About religion in America? Because you can never understand America until you understand its religious life. Would you like to know what I preach about, and why so many come to hear me preach?’”
Drawing on a statement he had prepared and which he left with Ponomarev at the end of their conversation, Graham explained that a major reason for his tour of the Soviet Union was to “make some contribution to the search for peace in our world.” He admitted, “I am not a politician, nor do I consider myself able to deal with the very complex details which are involved in arms control,” but as a follower and representative of the Prince of Peace, he felt compelled to call upon the leaders of powerful nations to have the vision and courage to renew their efforts to eliminate such weapons. He acknowledged the ideological and social differences between the United States and the USSR but expressed his conviction that “we must learn to coexist, and even be friends.” But before that could happen, he felt Soviet leaders would have to improve the situation with respect to religious believers, “a situation which has a direct and important bearing on relations between our two countries.” Graham readily admitted that religious believers had more freedom in 1984 than in earlier periods, as when Nikita Khrushchev closed thousands of churches and subjected believers to severe oppression during the 1960s. He commended the government for relaxing some of its restrictions on believers (as a case in point, he found nine of his own books in print in Russia) but urged that more be done. Pointing to the more than 100 million believers, he observed that trying to control the religious beliefs and practices of so many people created a complicated and unnecessary problem for the government. It also cast the government in an unfavorable light internationally, particularly in the United States, where over 90 percent of the population professes to believe in God and cannot feel much kinship for a society that attempts to establish atheism as its official philosophical position. “We in America,” he said, “have fought for decades against discrimination among our citizens because of race, religious creed, color, or national origin. It was a long time before these ideas germinated, but presently it is accepted and more and more practiced by the majority of our people. It also is fully backed by our laws.” To people with such a tradition, however imperfectly realized, Soviet restriction of religious freedom constitutes “a deep gulf” between the two nations. “To put it clearly,” he explained, “a major reason the American public does not support closer ties with the Soviet Union is because of what is perceived as religious discrimination and even oppression, especially of [Christians] and Jews. You will never reach a satisfactory understanding with the United States as long as you keep up this anti-Semitic and anti-Christian thing. Many Americans are concerned over the very low number of Jews who have been permitted to migrate from the Soviet Union in the last year or two, and other issues affecting people of Jewish background, such as rabbinical training and language teaching in Hebrew. It is difficult for detente to be successful as long as these problems remain.”
Graham recalled the barrage of criticism he had received in 1982, when he observed that religious freedom in the Soviet Union was greater than many Americans realized. The media would be lying in wait for him when he returned home this time. People would pay attention to how he answered. “I would like to be able to say in good conscience that in the Soviet Union there is a trend toward granting more and more freedom of religion, and toward lifting regulations and administrative measures which discriminate against believers.” He specifically recommended allowing young people to practice religion openly without fear of being barred from universities or desirable occupations, removing all restrictions from the publication of Bibles and other types of religious literature, allowing people to build new church buildings and alter old ones as needed, and permitting churches to operate more seminaries and other institutions for theological training. A man with a keen intuitive understanding of the value of symbols, Graham assured Ponomarev that these and other steps would do much to overcome the negative image Westerners have about Soviet life, “a negative image which again I stress is a major barrier in friendly U.S.-Soviet relations.”
The old statesman told Graham, “We will discuss this among ourselves.” Four years later, as Graham and former Ambassador Dobrynin entered the building housing the offices of the Central Committee, they ran into Ponomarev. “He was so warm and friendly,” the evangelist recalled. “He said, ‘I will never forget the things that you said. We have deeply appreciated it and have discussed it many times.’”
Both the Orthodox Church and the Soviet government should also have appreciated the account of Graham’s trip that air
ed on prime-time television in the United States and Canada. The hour-long documentary gave a rather detailed and sympathetic description of Orthodox religion and painted a positive picture of life in the Soviet Union. It also paid tribute to the importance of Moscow as a world city, lauded the richness of its cultural life, and reflecting Graham’s appreciation for cleanliness and order, praised the immaculateness of its subway system and made note of the fact that the trains run on time.
A Prophet with Honor Page 79