by Rod Dreher
As lawyer Ján Čarnogurský puts it, “There weren’t many people in general who wanted to stand up to communism. You had to take allies where you could. The secret police tried to keep secular liberals and Christians apart, and they wanted to keep Czechs and Slovaks divided. They did not succeed because the leaders of the movement had become friends with leaders in other circles.”
In the Slovak region, František Mikloško reached out to liberals not because he had to but because he genuinely wanted to.
“To this day, communicating with the secular liberal world really enriches my views,” he says. “It is important for me to have my home and to be aware that I know where I stand. I know my values. But I have to stay in contact with the liberal world, because otherwise there is the danger of degeneration.”
Mikloško’s close association with secular liberal writers and artists helped him to understand the world beyond church circles and to think critically about himself and other Christian activists. And, he says, liberal artists were able to perceive and describe the essence of communism better than Christians—a skill that helped them all survive, even thrive, under oppression.
In the communist past, secular liberals shared with Christians the conviction that communism was a destructive lie. But today, I put to Mikloško, most liberals seem to think that the kind of oppression coming against religious believers is justified, even necessary, despite its illiberality.
Consider, he says, that good-faith liberals have something to learn from us—and they will only be able to do so if we remain in contact with them.
“I have spent my whole life in the environment of liberals,” Mikloško says. “There came a moment in their lives when these people wanted to talk about something deeper. They realized they were seeking, and needed to have somebody to talk to. We Christians have to be present in the world, and be ready when this happens.”
Under communism, a well-known liberal intellectual who was known for his atheism quietly asked Mikloško to take him to church. “He told me, ‘I tried to pray in my home, but it really didn’t work out. He wanted to try in the church. He told me, ‘I will try to do whatever you do and see if it works.’”
The Christian activist’s point: be kind to others, for you never know when you will need them, or they will need you.
What do you do in a world where you can’t be sure who is trustworthy? One response is to withdraw into circles of confidence. Another response—a risky one, it must be said—is not to worry about it, and to be kind anyway.
“Father Jerzy knew that the whole society was infiltrated by communist agents. The priest who was his neighbor was a communist agent. The priest who announced his death right here in the church was a communist agent,” says Paweł Kęska, curator of the Popiełuszko museum. “But Father Jerzy said one important thing: ‘You can’t worry about who’s an agent and who’s not an agent. If you do, you will tear yourself apart as a community.’”
Kęska tells a story about a stranger who came to Father Jerzy to bring him a package. He ended up staying with Father Jerzy for three years, until his death. He was an atheist, but over time, came to be interested in the faith. Once he asked Father Jerzy something about the Bible. Father Jerzy answered him but kept the focus on the man as a human being, not a potential convert.
“When it comes to survival, maybe what’s most important is simple fidelity: not by evangelizing people directly but by developing honest relations with one another—not looking for whether one is good or bad, or judging them by their ideology,” says Kęska. “He was constantly observed by the secret police, parked right in front of his home. During the severely cold winters, he would bring them hot tea to warm them up. Because they were people, just like that.”
Making Grief Easier to Carry
Vakhtang Mikeladze is a well-known documentary filmmaker from the country of Georgia. He is advanced in age, but still filled with theatrical, old-world flair. Visiting him in his Moscow apartment involves raising more than a few glasses of Georgian brandy in sentimental toasts. It also takes an American visitor into a world of almost incomprehensible suffering.
Mikeladze’s father, Evgeni, was a famous orchestral conductor in Tbilisi when he somehow ran afoul of Stalin. In 1937, he was arrested, tortured, and shot by the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Vakhtang, then fifteen, and his seventeen-year-old sister were taken into custody under a law that mandated punishment for family members of “traitors to the fatherland.”
During our long, emotional conversation, Vakhtang spoke of the shame he carries with him still, but he did not reveal why until the end when, in tears, he told me about the night the secret police came for the Mikeladze teens.
“When they arrested my sister and me, we were completely scared,” he says. “They put us in the back of a truck. They put my aunt in the cab, with a soldier. When they went out of the building into the truck, they had this kind of closed courtyard. Everyone was out there watching and weeping.
“As we drove, my sister and I were sitting across from each other looking at one another. There was a soldier on either side of us. As we were driving along, out of nowhere different trucks were joining us on the highway. We became a long caravan of the arrested. When we realized all these other trucks were full of the arrested, she looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. We realized that at least we weren’t alone.”
The tears flow freely now. The old man softly mutters, “I’m ashamed that I was glad at that moment.”
As painful as that memory is for Mikeladze, who would go on to spend many years in the gulag, it testifies to the importance of camaraderie amid travail. Father Kirill Kaleda tells a story about Saint Alexei Mechev, a Moscow priest who died in 1923. Earlier in his life, Father Alexei’s wife died of an illness, leaving him with six children to raise. Bereft and paralyzed, Father Alexei sought the advice of Father John of Kronstadt, a well-known Russian Orthodox priest who was canonized after his death in 1909. Father John told the mourning priest, “Join your grief with the grief of others, and then you will find it easier to carry.”
Father Alexei took the advice. He went on to become a renowned pastor, spiritual father, and counselor of the broken. When he died in 1923, the Bolshevik regime let Tikhon, the patriarch of Moscow, out of prison to celebrate Father Alexei’s funeral. Father Alexei’s son Sergei also became a priest. In 1944, Father Sergei was executed in prison by the Soviets for his faith. Both father and son are now canonized saints. Their icon sits above the fireplace in my living room.
College instructor Mária Komáromi sees so much loneliness among the students at her Budapest institution. She thinks about the communist years, when she and her late husband held small group meetings with young Christians in their Budapest apartment. Those sessions helped struggling youth so much, she remembers. Maybe something like that could do so again.
“The first step no doubt is to acknowledge this loneliness,” she says. “For young people, the fact that they have lots of social media friends conceals the problem. So we have to counteract that loneliness. That can be done by forming small communities around basically anything.”
Sir Roger Scruton, who helped Czech allies build the intellectual resistance, emphasizes the importance today of dissidents creating and committing to small groups—not just church communities, but clubs, singing groups, sports societies, and so forth. The point is to find something to draw you out of yourself, to discover your own worth in relation to others, and to learn how to accept the discipline that comes through accountability to others and a shared purpose. Indeed, Václav Benda, though a Christian, worked hard to bring his fellow Czechs of all creeds together for any purpose at all, if only to defy the fear and atomization that the totalitarian regime depended on to carry out its rule.
Komáromi agrees that we have to start somewhere in our rebellion against contemporary atomization. The individual standing alone against the machine will be
crushed.
Organize Now, While You Can
Zofia Romaszewska is one of the true heroes of modern Poland. She and her late husband, Zbigniew, were academics and activists in the Solidarity trade-union movement. The couple joined the fight for liberty and human rights in the 1960s, when they hosted dissident meetings at their apartment. When the communist regime declared martial law in 1980 in an attempt to smash Solidarity, Romaszewska and her husband went into hiding, and founded the underground Solidarity radio station. She was eventually arrested, but amnestied after several months.
Today, at eighty, Romaszewska, now a grande dame of the anti-communist resistance, still retains the spark and tenacity of a street fighter. After five minutes of speaking with her in her Warsaw flat, it’s clear that any commissar faced with a firebrand like this woman would have no chance of prevailing.
Romaszewska is fierce on the subject of, well, solidarity. She sees the danger of soft totalitarianism coming fast, and urges young people to get off the internet and get together face-to-face to build resistance.
“As I see it, this is the core, this is the essence of everything right now: Forming these communities and networks of communities,” she says. “Whatever kinds of communities you can imagine. The point is that the members of that community must be very supportive of one another, no matter what comes. You don’t have to be prepared to give your life for the other person, but you do have to have something in common, and to do things together.”
See, Judge, Act
The atomization of contemporary life has left most of us vulnerable to demoralization—and therefore, to manipulation. Christians are no different. It’s easy for believers to feel that they are all alone, even when they are gathered at worship. By their indifference to solidarity, and surrendering to social disintegration as the new normal, Christians make it easier for those in power who hate us to control us.
We desperately need to throw off the chains of solitude and find the freedom that awaits us in fellowship. The testimony of anti-communist dissidents is clear: Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist. The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. We must see in our brothers and sisters not a burden of obligation but the blessing of our own freedom from loneliness, suspicion, and defeat.
Discerning the criteria for comradeship is risky business when trusting the wrong person could land you in prison. Some, like Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, remained open to all, but most Christian dissidents learned to be extremely careful. Not only their safety but also the welfare of the entire church movement was at stake. These lines must be drawn according to particular circumstances. As Father Kolaković’s example teaches, Christians should educate themselves about the mechanics of running underground cells and networks while they are still free to do so.
Christians must act to build bonds of brotherhood not just with one another, across denominational and international lines, but also with people of goodwill belonging to other religions, and no religion at all. When their souls are rightly ordered, believers serve not only the good of the church, but are a means of God’s blessing to all people.
Leaders of small groups must be willing and able to carry out catechetical, ministerial, and organizational roles normally performed by institutional church leaders who may be unable to do so under the law, or are too compromised in other ways to serve their proper function.
Finally, small-group fellowship keeps morale high when the contempt and torment of the world lashes hard the backs of believers. The young Christians in Moscow in the 1970s remember their time together, worshipping and praying and building one another up, as the happiest of their lives. They bent under the weight of the Soviet state, but they did not break, because God was with them—and so were their brothers and sisters in Christ.
If love was the mortar that bound their fellowship, then shared suffering is what activated the bond and made it real. Suffering was the proof test. Love, as Paul tells us, endures all things. And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those—even Christians—who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think they love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him.
Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the great lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.
CHAPTER TEN
The Gift of Suffering
I am riding on a Budapest tram with a Hungarian friend in her early thirties. We are on our way to interview an older woman who endured real persecution in the communist era. As we bump along the city’s streets, my friend talks about how hard it is to be honest with friends her age about the struggles she faces as a wife and mother of young children.
Her difficulties are completely ordinary for a young woman learning how to be a mom and a wife—yet the prevailing attitude among her generation is that life’s difficulties are a threat to one’s well-being, and should be refused. Do she and her husband argue at times? Then she should leave him. Are her children annoying her? Then she should send them to day care. She worries that her friends don’t grasp that suffering is a normal part of life—even of part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind, and loving. She doesn’t want them to give her advice about how to escape her problems; she just wants them to help her live through them.
I tell my friend that this is the argument that John the Savage has with the World Controller near the end of Huxley’s Brave New World. The Savage, I explain to my friend, is an outcast in a world that sees suffering, even mere unhappiness, as intolerable oppression. He is fighting for his right to be unhappy—“and so,” I tell my friend, “are you.”
As we step off the tram and walk to our meeting, we talk about the irony of the social about-face that has overtaken postcommunist Hungary. The woman I am about to meet, like all the Christians I had been interviewing, allowed the suffering inflicted by the communist regime to deepen her love for God and for her fellow persecuted believers. Now, in liberty and relative prosperity, the children of the last communist generation have fallen to a more subtle, sophisticated tyranny: one that tells them that anything they find difficult is a form of oppression. For these millennials, unhappiness is slavery and freedom is liberation from the burden of unchosen obligations.
Though these decadent sentiments may be shocking because they have emerged in a postcommunist country, they are by no means limited to young Hungarians. A 2019 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found a distinct minority of young American adults believed that religion, patriotism, and having children are an important part of life, while nearly four out of five said “self-fulfillment” is key to the good life.1 Similarly, the sociologist of religion Christian Smith found in his study of that generation that most of them believe society is nothing more than “a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”
These are the people who would welcome the Pink Police State. This is the generation that would embrace soft totalitarianism. These are the young churchgoers who have little capacity to resist, because they have been taught that the good life is a life free from suffering. If they have been taught the faith at all, it has been a Christianity without tears.
Suffering As Testimony to the Truth
Though again, the totalitarianism we are facing today looks far more like Huxley’s than Orwell’s, both books teach a lesson about suffering and truth—and so do the survivors who felt the communist lash.
These lessons are important for us to take into our hearts. The days to come are going to force American Christians to confront personal suffering for the faith in ways most never have done before (African American Christians are the obvious exception). Besides, it cannot be emphasized s
trongly enough: the old totalitarianism conquered societies through fear of pain; the new one will conquer primarily through manipulating people’s love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.
We should not conflate being socially or professionally marginalized with prison camps and the executioner’s bullet—the latter of which were all too real for anti-communist dissidents. But know this too: if we latter-day believers are not able and willing to be faithful in the relatively small trials we face now, there is no reason to think we will have what it takes to endure serious persecution in the future.
“Without being willing to suffer, even die for Christ, it’s just hypocrisy. It’s just a search for comfort,” says Yuri Sipko, the Russian Baptist pastor. “When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the border between those who are serious about their faith and those who aren’t.”
When he thinks of the communist past, about Christians who were sent to prison camps and never returned, of those who were ridiculed in the world, who lost their jobs, who even in some cases had their children taken from them because of their faith, Sipko knows what gave them the strength to endure. Their ability to suffer all of this for the sake of Christ is what testified to the reality of their unseen God.
“You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie,” says the old pastor. “This is hard, but this is what reveals man as an image of God.”
Mária Komáromi teaches in a Catholic school in Budapest. She and her late husband, János, were religious dissidents under the communist regime, and bore many burdens to keep the faith alive.