The church behind the Iron Curtain
Christianity under Soviet communism
The Soviet state attempts, systematically and over seventy years, to eliminate Christianity from the largest territory on earth.
The methods evolve across the decades. In the early years: executions. Bishops shot, priests sent to the Gulag, churches dynamited or converted to warehouses and cinemas. In the Stalin years: the terror reaches into every institution, and the few churches allowed to function are supervised by the state and used for propaganda. In the later Soviet period: bureaucratic suffocation, surveillance, the slow grinding pressure of a system that limits education, employment, and social advancement for anyone identified as a believer.
The result, after seventy years, is a church that has been compressed rather than destroyed.
In Russia, perhaps ten to twenty million Christians practice their faith in the late Soviet period — fewer than before the Revolution, but more than the state has achieved in seventy years of pressure. In Poland, the Catholic church remains the center of national identity and the primary institution of resistance. In Romania and Hungary and East Germany and Czechoslovakia, underground networks of believers maintain Christian communities that the state cannot fully see.
When the Wall falls in 1989 and the Soviet empire collapses, the church is still there — battered, reduced, in some ways purified by the compression.
You cannot kill the church by killing its members. You can only relocate it.
“They can destroy our buildings. They cannot destroy our faith.”
— Russian believer under Soviet persecution, attributed, c. 20th century
“I also tell you, that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my assembly, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”
Seventy years. The most powerful state apparatus in human history, directed at the elimination of the Christian faith within its borders.
The church is still there.
Not unchanged — compressed, reduced, different in character from what it was. But there. Praying in kitchens. Passing Bibles from hand to hand. Baptizing children in rivers. Gathering in apartments with lookouts posted.
The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. This is not a triumphalist boast. It is a description of something that has been demonstrated, at enormous cost, across twenty centuries and every geography the church has inhabited.
It cannot be killed. You can only relocate it — drive it underground, into the kitchen, into the heart, where it keeps going.