Finding God in the Gulag
A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System
Description:... "Belief and Disbelief from the Great Terror to Stalin's Death Like over a million of her fellow Soviet subjects, the Muscovite actress Vera Shults was arrested during the Great Terror of 1937-38. The secret police interrogated her at Taganskaya Prison in southeast Moscow and ultimately sentenced her to five years of exile in Central Asia for being a "socially dangerous element." During her time at Taganskaya, Shults was deeply impressed by one of her cellmates, an older religious woman named Tatyana Pavlovna, whom she described as "radiating kindness" while patiently accepting her unjust imprisonment. While pondering the meaning of religion during this time of great trial, Shultz remarked in her memoir, "We all grew up as atheists, and so I have a hard time judging what role her faith played, but I think that Tatyana Pavlovna found solace in it." In the Gulag of the late 1930s to the early 1950s, solace was in short supply as the brutal system of incarceration and compulsory labor was rocked by the successive calamities of the Great Terror and World War II. The Great Terror, a horrific crime against humanity perpetrated by Stalin's regime, resulted in the execution, imprisonment, or exile of some 1.5 million people, many of them falsely convicted of conspiring against the Soviet Union. This was followed by the Second World War, a terrible war of attrition that ultimately caused over twenty million Soviet deaths. More Stalinist repression followed the war, and long sentences for minor infractions such as petty theft swelled the ranks of the incarcerated. For those imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, these successive waves of violence and repression brought chaos, overcrowding, suffering, and death to an already dangerous and desultory system. Thousands of religious leaders were among the millions of people sent to the camps from the beginning of the Great Terror in 1937 to Stalin's death in 1953, along with untold numbers of lay believers. In the crucible of these darkest years of the Soviet Gulag, maintaining belief was difficult. The Gulag prohibited religious worship, guards and nonreligious inmates mocked expressions of faith, and the matter of survival for many took precedence over all other concerns. Some believers ultimately lost their faith or were criticized by fellow inmates for selfish hypocrisy-preaching Christian charity while hoarding food, for example. Others hid their faith. Yet like the Orthodox clergy imprisoned at Solovki in the 1920s, many managed to hold to their beliefs and share them with others, finding camaraderie, patience, peace, and joy. Such inmates were examples of Christian love and service in the Gulag's bleak and brutal camps"--
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