by Rod Dreher
“How does an honest man live under totalitarianism?” I ask the priest, a broad-shouldered man with a thick brown beard and piercing eyes.
“With difficulty,” he says, laughing. “Of course it’s difficult, but thanks be to God, there were people who were doing their best to build their lives in such a way that they could live in truth. People understood that if that was going to be a priority to live in truth, then they were going to have to limit themselves in other ways—the progress of their careers, for example. But they made a choice, and resolved to live by it.”
Father Kirill grew up in an Orthodox Christian family with six children. None joined the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol.
“When I was a teenager, I wanted to study history,” he says. “My father explained to me that in the Soviet world, trying to be involved with history and not be involved with Soviet ideology is impossible. So I became a geologist. Lots of anti-Bolshevik families sent their kids to study the natural sciences to avoid contamination with the ideology as much as possible.”
Refusing to join the Komsomol meant that he would not be permitted to travel abroad. Once, as a student, Father Kirill was offered an exciting ship voyage from Vladivostok, on the Soviet east coast, down to Australia, Singapore, up through the Suez Canal, and back home through the Black Sea. It was a dream come true—but he would have to be a Komsomol member to take the trip. Rather than violate his conscience, Kirill declined, and proposed a Komsomol friend in his place. The sea journey changed his friend’s life.
“To this day, that friend does a lot of traveling across seas and oceans,” the priest remembers. He, by contrast, tends this garden of sacred memory, and pastors the new church built nearby in honor of the martyrs of the Soviet yoke.
Two days later, I sat in a café in the heart of Moscow listening to Yuri Sipko, a retired Baptist pastor. In his village classroom in the 1950s in Siberia, Sipko and his classmates were given a badge with a portrait of Lenin. At age eleven, the children were given the red scarf of the Young Pioneers, a kind of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts for communist youth. Teachers drilled the children in the slogan of the Pioneers: “Be ready. Always be ready.”
“I didn’t wear the pin with Lenin’s face, nor did I wear the red scarf. I was a Baptist. I wasn’t going to do that,” recalls Sipko. “I was the only one in my class. They went after my teachers. They wanted to know what they were doing wrong that they had a boy in their class who wasn’t a Pioneer. They pressured the director of the school too. They were forced to pressure me to save themselves.”
To be a Baptist in Soviet Russia was to know that you were a permanent outsider. They endured it because they knew that truth was embodied in Jesus Christ, and that to live apart from him would mean living a lie. For the Baptists, to compromise with lies for the sake of a peaceful life is to bend at the knee to death.
“When I think about the past, and how our brothers were sent to prison and never returned, I’m sure that this is the kind of certainty they had,” says the old pastor. “They lost any kind of status. They were mocked and ridiculed in society. Sometimes they even lost their children. Just because they were Baptists, the state was willing to take away their kids and send them to orphanages. These believers were unable to find jobs. Their children were not able to enter universities. And still, they believed.”
The Baptists stood alone, but stand they did. If you have been discipled in a faith that takes seriously the Apostle Paul’s words that to suffer for Christ is gain and are prepared, as the Orthodox Kaleda family was, to live with reduced expectations of worldly success, it becomes easier to stand for the truth.
Reject Doublethink and Fight for Free Speech
Vladimir Grygorenko and Olga Rusanova, husband and wife, immigrated from Ukraine to the United States in the year 2000 and now live in Texas. They tell me that if you grow up in a culture of lies, as they did, you don’t know that life could be any other way.
“The general culture taught you doublethink,” says Grygorenko. “That was normal life.”
“In high school and middle school, we had to write essays, like normal school kids do,” says Rusanova. “But you never could write what you think about the subject. Never, ever. The subject could be interesting, but you never can say what you really think. You have to find some way to relate it to the communist point of view.”
When a people grow accustomed to living in lies, shunning taboo writers, and conforming to the official story, it deforms their way of thinking, says Grygorenko—and that is very difficult to overcome. He is concerned by polls showing that Americans’ support for the First Amendment—which guarantees the constitutional right to free expression—is waning, especially among younger Americans, who are increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinion. Grygorenko sees this as a sign that society prefers the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty. To grow indifferent, even hostile, to free speech is suicidal for a free people.
“In this country, what we need to do is protect free speech,” says Grygorenko, who became a proud American citizen in 2019. “The First Amendment is important. For us, the Soviet constitution had no meaning. Everybody knew these were just words that had no relation to real life. In this country, the Constitution is meaningful. We have an independent judiciary. We have to protect it. We don’t need to invent anything new—we just need to have the courage to protect what we have.”
Defending the right to speak and write freely, even when it costs you something, is the duty of every free person. So says Mária Wittner, a hero of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation. A communist court sentenced Wittner, then only twenty, to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment.
“Once I said to one of the guards in prison, ‘You are lying.’ For that alone, I was taken to trial again,” remembers the feisty Wittner. “The state prosecutor said to me, ‘Wittner, why did you accuse the guard of being a liar? Why didn’t you just say, ‘You’re not telling the truth’? I said, ‘It matters that we speak plainly.’”
For her insolence, Wittner was sent back to prison with extra punishments. She had to sleep on a wooden bed with no mattress and was given reduced rations. By the time her sentence was commuted and she was released, Wittner weighed scarcely one hundred pounds. Nevertheless, she insists that a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit.
“We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That’s just the case. But you shouldn’t accommodate to it,” she tells me as I sit at her table in suburban Budapest. “You will be surrounded by lies—you don’t have a choice. Don’t assimilate to it. It’s an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”
Under hard totalitarianism, dissenters like Wittner paid a hard price for their freedom, but the terms of the bargain were clear. Under soft totalitarianism, it is more difficult to see the costs of compromising your conscience, but as Mária Wittner insists, you can’t escape the decisions. You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.
Cherish Truth-Telling but Be Prudent
While it is imperative to fight assimilation to lies, combating the lies doesn’t mean refusing all compromise. Ordinary life, in every society, requires assessing which fights are worth having in a given context. Though one must guard against rationalization, prudence is not the same thing as cowardice.
As a Hungarian Boy Scout, Tamás Sályi’s father had been linked to a typewriter on which someone composed anti-Soviet propaganda. The year was 1946, and the Red Army occupied Hungary. All the Scouts connected to the typewriter suffered punishment—death, exile, or in the case of the elder Sályi, internment without charge in a prison camp.
In 1963, when Tamás was only seven years old, he came home fr
om school and told his father how the Soviet Army had liberated their nation.
“He said, ‘Boy, sit down,’” Tamás remembers. “He began to tell me stories about the ’56 uprising and the Soviet invasion. He told me the truth, and when he finished, he warned me never to talk about that at school.”
Tamás glances down at the floor of his Budapest living room.
“We have so many problems today because fathers never talked to their sons as my father did to me in 1963.”
Tamás Sályi’s point is that parents were so afraid that their children would be punished for inadvertently telling the truth that they chose not to tell them the truth at all about their country’s history and regime. Sályi’s father, though he knew from personal experience how vicious the communists were, believed that his son deserved the truth—but should also be taught how to handle himself with it.
Judit Pastor, Tamás’s wife and a literature teacher at a Catholic university, also watched her father suffer from persecution—though his fate was much crueler. He was sacked as a military journalist for refusing to swear a loyalty oath to the government installed by the Soviets following the 1956 invasion.
Then, in 1968, outraged by the persecution of ethnic Hungarians by the communist government in neighboring Romania, Judit’s father went to a trade fair in Budapest, ripped down a poster of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu at Romania’s exhibit, and stomped on it. For that, he received eighteen months in jail.
It shattered him.
“Based on the Soviet method, it was common practice to label political prisoners mentally ill and give them treatment,” says Judit. “He got fifty electroshocks. He suffered a heart attack as a result of the electroshock, but it was never treated. His wasn’t an uncommon case.”
When Judit’s father was released, he was a shell of himself. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic, put on a medical pension, and reduced to living on the margins. Judit’s mother divorced him after a while. No one in the family spoke of it. Ever.
The family’s code of silence about what was done to Judit’s father was an excruciating burden for her.
Today, though, she speaks openly about what communism did to her dad, especially to the university students she teaches. She is also campaigning to have his name posthumously cleared. This too is a matter of telling the truth.
“It has been a constant struggle for me to make people acknowledge what happened to my father. People don’t want to listen. They don’t want to know about that,” she says. “Whether you live under oppression or not, it’s an ongoing and constant struggle for truth.”
Pastor takes comfort that one of her sons has taken up the cause for which his grandfather essentially gave his life: the plight of persecuted ethnic Hungarians. Yet this woman who lived through the destruction of her family over her father’s recklessly brave decision to take a stand for the truth says that there is a lot to be said for passive opposition.
“Sometimes silence is an act of resistance. Not just standing up for the truth by communicating loudly—keeping silent when you aren’t expected to be silent. That, too, is telling the truth.”
See, Judge, Act
The dictatorship of thought and word under construction by progressives is a regime based on lies and propaganda. Most conservatives, Christian and not, recognize that to some degree, but too few see the deeper ramifications of accepting these lies. “Political correctness” is an annoyance; these lies corrupt one’s ability to think clearly about reality.
Once you perceive how the system runs on lies, stand as firmly as you can on what you know to be true and real when confronted by those lies. Refuse to let the media and institutions propagandize your children. Teach them how to identify lies and to refuse them. Do your best not be party to the lie—not for the sake of professional advantage, personal status, or any other reason. Sometimes you will have to act openly to confront the lie directly. Other times you will fight it by remaining silent and withholding the approval authorities request. You might have to raise your voice to defend someone who is being slandered by propagandists.
Judging when and how to confront the lie depends on individual circumstances, of course. As Father Kaleda says, the faith does not require one to actively seek opportunities for martyrdom. Most of us will be forced by circumstances and responsibilities to our families to be something less than a Solzhenitsyn. That doesn’t necessarily make us cowards.
But take care not to let reasoning prudentially turn into rationalization. That is the basis of ketman—and to surrender to that kind of self-defense will, over time, destroy your soul. Your consent to the system’s lies might buy you safety, but at an unbearable cost. If you cannot imagine any situation in which you would act like Havel’s fictional greengrocer, and live in truth no matter the cost or consequence, then cowardice has a greater claim on your conscience than you know.
A society’s values are carried in the stories it chooses to tell about itself and in the people it wishes to honor. Havel’s greengrocer is a myth that teaches a lesson about the importance of bearing witness to the truth, no matter what; the real-life stories of national heroes like Mária Wittner, and lesser-known resisters like Pastor Yuri Sipko and Father Kirill Kaleda, tell the same story. All of these stories are also important to tell and retell as a guide to others, including those generations as yet unborn. Totalitarians, both soft and hard, know this, which is why they exert such effort to control the common narrative.
CHAPTER SIX
Cultivate Cultural Memory
Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
THE PARTY SLOGAN, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Recently, a bright-eyed and cheerful twenty-six-year-old California woman told me that she thinks of herself as a communist. “It’s just so beautiful, this dream of everybody being equal,” she gushed. When she asked me what I was working on, I told her about the struggles of Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Christian dissident imprisoned and tortured by the Soviets, whom I had recently interviewed in Moscow. She fell silent.
“Don’t you know about the gulag?” I asked, naively.
Of course she didn’t. Nobody ever told her. We, her parents and grandparents, have failed her generation. And if she develops no curiosity about the past, she will fail herself.
She’s not alone. Every year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit educational and research organization established by the US Congress, carries out a survey of Americans to determine their attitudes toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post–Cold War generations have favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of “freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto. The political religion that murdered tens of millions, imprisoned and tortured countless more, and immiserated the lives of half of humanity in its time, and the defeat of which required agonizing struggle by allies across borders, oceans, political parties, and generations—this hateful ideology is romanticized by ignorant young people.1
Writing in the The Harvard Crimson in 2017, undergraduate Laura Nicolae, whose parents endured the horrors of Romanian communism, spoke out against the falsification of history that her fellow Ivy Leaguers receive, both in class and in the trendy Marxism of intellectual student culture.
“Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence,” she writes. “Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.”2
Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that n
obody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.
“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.
“Children, never look back,” [Kundera’s character Husák] cried, and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.3
A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.
Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.
Why Memory Matters
Everything about modern society is designed to make memory—historical, social, and cultural—hard to cultivate. Christians must understand this not only to resist soft totalitarianism but also to transmit the faith to the coming generations.