by Rod Dreher
The Benda family model requires parents to exercise discernment. For example, the Bendas didn’t opt out of popular culture but rather chose intelligently which parts of it they wanted their children to absorb. To visit the Benda family home is not to step into a Spartan barracks but rather into a place filled with books and art and life. The Benda family judged that they could be open to the good things in the world around them because of the disciplined moral, intellectual, and spiritual lives they lived within the family.
And they acted with openness to the world. Václav Benda taught that the family does not exist for its own purpose but for the service of something beyond itself. When you pay a call on Kamila, you sit on chairs and sofas that are well worn from years of hosting guests invited to share in the joy of her clan’s Christian lives. True, they had to judge carefully who to let into their home and what to say around them, but there was no doubt in the minds of Václav and Kamila Benda that their role as Christians was not to draw the shutters and hide, as so many Czech Christians did, but to be of active service to the church and the world. For those who survive Václav—Kamila, her children, and grandchildren—it still is.
As we will learn in an upcoming chapter, small-group fellowship was critical to building effective Christian resistance to totalitarianism. A truth to which the Benda family, and other families that formed the consciences of other anti-communist dissidents, testify to is this: if you want to love and serve the church, the community, and the nation, you must first learn to love and serve your family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Religion, the Bedrock of Resistance
Not every anti-communist dissident was a Christian, and not every Christian living under communist totalitarianism resisted. But here’s an interesting thing: every single Christian I interviewed for this book, in every ex-communist country, conveyed a sense of deep inner peace—a peace that they credit to their faith, which gave them ground on which to stand firm.
They had every right to be permanently angry over what had been done to them, to their families, their churches, and their countries. If they were, it didn’t show. A former prisoner of conscience in Russia told me that Christians need to have “a golden dream—something to live for, a conception of hope. You can’t simply be against everything bad. You have to be for something good. Otherwise, you can get really dark and crazy.”
This is the core of what religion brings to anti-totalitarian resistance: a reason to die—which is to say, a reason to live with whatever suffering the regime throws at you, and not only to live, but to thrive.
This is not to say that Christianity’s only value is in its usefulness to anti-communists. Any contrary belief held with the passionate inwardness of religious faith could serve that purpose. To give the devil his due, the tsarist-era young Bolsheviks endured their miserable Siberian exile like champions because they held their principles with religious fervor. The important lesson to draw is that a creed one holds as statement not of one’s subjective feelings, but as a description of objective reality, is a priceless possession. It tells you how to discern truth from lies. And for those whose creed is Christianity, then in the face of ubiquitous hatred and cruelty, faith is evidence that the true Truth, the real Reality, is the eternal love of God.
The Spiritual Exercises of the Prisoner Krčméry
In totalitarian Czechoslovakia, Kolaković follower Silvester Krčméry (pronounced “kirch-MERRY”) emerged as one of the priest’s most important disciples and organizers. Years of Bible study, worship, and personal spiritual practice under the guidance of Father Kolaković prepared the young physician for a long prison term, which began with his arrest in 1951.
The basis for his resistance was the firm conviction that “there could not be anything more beautiful than to lay down my life for God.” When that thought came to Krčméry in the police sedan minutes after his arrest, he burst into laughter. His captors were not amused. But refusing self-pity, and teaching himself to receive whatever the interrogators did to him as an aid to his own salvation, saved Krčméry’s spiritual life.
Behind bars, and subject to all manner of torture and humiliation, Krčméry kept himself sane and hopeful through cultivating and practicing his faith in a disciplined way and by evangelizing others.
In his memoir, This Saved Us, Krčméry recalls that after repeated beatings, torture, and interrogations, he realized that the only way he would make it through the ordeal ahead was to rely entirely on faith, not reason. He says he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.”
In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety. Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations.
The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.1
His personal routine included memorizing passages from a New Testament a new prisoner had smuggled into the jail. The Scripture Krčméry had already learned before the persecution started turned out to be a powerful aid behind bars.
“Memorizing texts from the New Testament proved to be an excellent preparation for critical times and imprisonment,” he writes. “The most beautiful and important texts which mankind has from God contain a priceless treasure which ‘moth and decay cannot destroy, and thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6:19).”
Committing Scripture to memory formed a strong basis for prison life, the doctor found.
“Indeed, as one’s spiritual life intensifies, things become clearer and the essence of God is more easily understood,” he writes. “Sometimes one word, or a single sentence from Scripture, is enough to fill a person with a special light. An insight or new meaning is revealed and penetrates one’s inner being and remains there for weeks or months at a time.”2
Krčméry structured his days and weeks to pray the Catholic mass, and sometimes the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. He interceded for specific people and groups of people, including his captors. This was a way of ordering the oppressive expanse of time, especially during periods of solitary confinement. Krčméry and his fellow prisoners were astonished, repeatedly, that beatings and interrogations were easier to endure than seemingly ceaseless periods of waiting.
The prisoner did periods of deep, sustained meditation, in which he thought deeply about his own life and his own sins, and he embraced a spirit of repentance. At one point, Krčméry wondered if he was wasting his time and increasing his emotional and psychological burden by sticking to these daylong spiritual exercises.
“I attempted to live a few days entirely without a program, but it did not work,” he remembers. “When I thought that I would only vegetate for the whole day, and just rest, that is when there were the most crises.”
Along with other prisoners, Krčméry would sing hymns, and would pray litanies for everyday needs, including for a spirit of humility and willingness to endure all for the sake of Christ. This brotherhood was an integral part of the spirituality of Christian resistance. Father Kolaković had taught the Family the virtue of reaching across church lines to establish brotherhood with other Christians. Captivity and torture turned this into a practical reality.
“In prison, nobody recognized any confessional differences,” writes Krčméry.
This same principle echoes in the testimony of the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand and other former captives of the communists. It is not a false ecumenism that claims all religions are essentially the same. It is rather a mutual recognition that within the context of persecution, embracing Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shattered” becomes vital to spiritual survival.
Silvester Krčméry left prison in 1964. He spent the next twenty-five years continuing his work for the anti-communist resistance. Along with other veterans of the underground church, he was
a principal organizer of the 1988 Candle Demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. It was the first mass protest in Czechoslovakia in almost two decades, and served as a catalyst to the 1989 Velvet Revolution that restored freedom and democracy.
The Power of the Powerless Church
Patrick Parkinson is an Evangelical Christian and dean of one of Australia’s top law schools. He lived in Bratislava as a student in the early 1980s, and witnessed the spiritual power of the underground church firsthand. In a world of despair, these believers provided something rare and precious: real hope, the living out of which risked their lives and freedom.
“The church in those times offered people an alternative worldview,” Professor Parkinson tells me. “My young Catholic friends in the university, in particular, demonstrated great courage and faith. Their core instruction was to read the Bible every day and to pray every day at nine p.m. for the suffering church. They risked much to meet in small Bible study and prayer groups and security was very tight, but God protected them in wonderful ways.”
Nearly four decades later, Parkinson looks to the young Slovak Christians of his youth for hope in our own dark and difficult days. “There was a hunger for God when I was there, which I attributed in no small part to the enormous disillusionment with communism,” he says. “Disillusionment with materialism may take another couple of generations.”
When it comes, Christians who proclaimed with their words and deeds a real alternative to hedonistic materialism will be beacons guiding the lost and tempest-tossed.
Father Dmitry Dudko, who died in 2004, was a Russian Orthodox priest who, with astonishing courage, stood up to Soviet authorities for the sake of the Gospel. In the early 1970s, Father Dmitry became one of the best-known dissident Christians in the USSR. Before ordination, he spent eight years in the gulag for having written a poem critical of Stalin; a fellow seminarian turned him in. He was eventually made a priest, but remained under close KGB surveillance.
Stricken by grief over the spiritual desolation and resulting alcoholism ravaging the Soviet Union, Father Dmitry grew increasingly bold in his evangelism. He began giving bold sermons in his Moscow parish, homilies that brought Christian teaching to bear on real-life problems. Word spread that there was a priest unafraid to speak to the real suffering of the people. Crowds began coming to hear the prophetic cleric. When the institutional church, which was under KGB control, ordered Father Dmitry to stop using homilies to stir up congregations, he continued his talks at home.
In his 2014 book about Father Dmitry, The Last Man in Russia, journalist Oliver Bullough quotes an atheist saying that after hearing the priest preach, “the immorality of Soviet society, its inhumanity and corruption, its lack of a moral code or credible ideals, means that Christ’s teaching comes through to those who it reaches as a shining contrast. It stresses the value of the individual, of humanness, forgiveness, gentleness, love.”3
Another witness said that “when Father Dmitry answered our questions publicly, it was like a mouthful of water.” The priest stressed to his audiences that they needed to cultivate hope that tomorrow can be better, and that they must embrace the suffering and love them into healing. Bullough says that in 1973, when Father Dmitry’s talks became known all over Moscow, the priest drew atheists, intellectuals, Christians of all denominations, and even Jews and Marxists.
Why did they come? Because they lived in a total system that insisted that it had all the answers to life’s questions. But the people, they were completely miserable, and lost, and in pain. They knew it was all a lie, because they were living within that dark lie. They were drawn to people who looked like they were living in the light of truth.
Alexander Ogorodnikov was a celebrated Soviet youth leader who, having become disillusioned by communism, devoted his passion to serving the church by creating independent discussion groups. In our Moscow meeting, he tells me that at one of his seminars there appeared an elderly writer who sat listening to the young Christians—every single one of them had been atheists from good Soviet families—talking about the faith. The visitor said not a word.
“Finally he stood up and said that he was the son of a high official of the tsar. He said, ‘Brothers, you have no idea what you are doing. If just ten of you had been in Saint Petersburg in 1917, the Revolution would not have happened,’” recalls Ogorodnikov.
“That man had already been through the gulag,” he continues. “He felt welcome with us. We had a really, really brotherly atmosphere in the seminars. Those seminars were like a bonfire where people could come and warm up their frozen Orthodox hearts. This was the blood that flowed in our veins. This was our confession of faith.”
Viktor Popkov was one of the disillusioned young Soviets who had found his way into the tiny Christian movement of the time. I sit down with Popkov, an Orthodox Christian, in a kitchen in central Moscow. In the early 1970s, Popkov had no interest in faith. “I was just living in a swamp, trying to find just a little piece of dry land on which to stand,” he says.
Nothing was real about life under communism. The state’s control was total. What led Popkov to seek fellowship with Christians was reading The Stranger, the celebrated 1942 novel by Albert Camus, the French existentialist. Though Camus was an atheist, the novel compelled the young Russian living in an atheist state to look for Christ.
“The question stood before me: What is the point of living?” he tells me. “If Christ is real, what is that supposed to mean for me? That was my point of departure from Soviet life—and I know a lot of people who found similar points of departure.”
Slowly, Popkov felt himself drawn to church. The local Orthodox priest didn’t want to talk to him. If the government found out that he had been speaking to a potential convert, the priest could have been sacked. Popkov heard through the Moscow grapevine about groups of people coming together to talk about Christianity. Unfortunately, if he’d heard about it, the KGB usually had as well.
If you came to the meetings anyway, the KGB would pressure your parents and teachers to dissuade you from the faith, Popkov remembers. It was hard to deal with, “but at the same time, you gain experience of a different life. In this experience of faith and this encounter with Christ, you receive a new feeling, and you know that you would not go back to how you used to be for anything. You are willing to endure anything they throw at you.”
“You can’t really prepare for it,” he went on. “To have a living connection to Christ, it’s like falling in love. You suddenly feel something you haven’t felt before, and you’re ready to do something you’ve never done before.”
For Viktor Popkov, that meant enduring years of harassment from the secret police, culminating in a 1980 prison sentence.
“Maybe this will sound strong,” he says, “but the principles and the things that you confess, you need to be ready to die for them—and only then will you have the strength to resist. I don’t see any other way.”
This truth is what the Romanian Orthodox priest George Calciu proclaimed to the youth in Bucharest in one of his 1978 Lenten homilies—a sermon series that earned him a second stint in prison:
Go, young man, and tell this news to all. Let the light of your angelic face shine in the light of the Resurrection—for today the angel in you . . . has overcome the world in you. Tell those who until now have oppressed your divine soul: “I believe in the Resurrection,” and you will see them coil in fear, for your faith has overcome them. They will fret and shout to you in despair: “This earth is your paradise and your instincts are your heaven.”
Do not stop on your path, but go on, shining and pure, giving the light of that Resurrection on the first of Sabbaths to all. You, my friend, are the unique bearer of your deification in Jesus Christ, and with yourself you raise up the entire Romanian people to the height of its own resurrection. From death to life and from earth to heaven!4
Shortly after giving that sermon, the R
omanian dictatorship slapped Father George with a ten-year prison sentence. He served five, was given early release, and then he was expelled to the United States by the regime.
The Miracle of the Cigarettes
If you believe that God exists, then you must also believe that miracles are possible. Christians live by faith, but sometimes, God sends a message to remind us that he exists and has not abandoned us. Drinking tea in the lobby of a Moscow hotel, Alexander Ogorodnikov tells a story about an extremely improbable thing that happened to him upon entering a Soviet prison—something that signaled to him that God led him to that vault of human misery for a higher purpose.
“When they put me in the cell with the other inmates, I said, ‘Peace be with you!’” Ogorodnikov remembers. “One of the prisoners asked if I was a Christian. I said yes. He told me to prove it. Another inmate said, ‘We are the scum of the earth. We don’t even have cigarettes. If your God will give us cigarettes, we’ll all believe in him.’”
Ogorodnikov told his fellow prisoners that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and smoking fouls it. But, he continued, God loves you so much that I believe he would even give you cigarettes as a sign of his mercy. Ogorodnikov asked them all to stand and pray together for this. Everybody laughed, but they stood respectfully as he led them in prayer.
“That cell was very crowded, but it became very quiet,” he recalls. “We prayed for fifteen minutes, then I told them the prayer was over and they could sit down. At just that moment, the guards opened the cell door and threw a bunch of cigarettes into the cell.”
“That really happened?!” I ask, astonished.
