The Lord's Candles In The Gulag : The Story of Irina Ratushinskaya and the Odessites.

Scholarly Research and Writing. Professor: Dr. Glen Blalock, Ph.D.

Joseph David Rhodes, M.A.

Stephen F. Austin State University (Nacogdoches, TX.)December 10, 1997

The Lord's Candles In The Gulag : The Story of Irina Ratushinskaya and the

Odessites.

The writer consecrated to such a mission risks the contumely of a rejecting world. The truth he tells differs from the world's accepted falsehoods. " The lonliness of doing right is oneof the mysteries of a Christian life " -- so wrote poet Marianne Moore just before her death. The writer and any other Christian must be willing to endure this loneliness. He must be willing,if necessary, to go with John Bunyan to Bedford Jail; to endure with Alan Paton the persecution of an inhumane government; to sacrifice with Boris Pasternak and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize; to persevere, again with Solzhenitsyn, in raising his voice against godless oppres-sion and religious compromise, even at the cost of banishment. (D. Bruce Lockerbie, The Liber-ating Word : Art and the Mystery of the Gospel. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1974, p. 125).

. . . Yet while he was evidently reluctant to commit himself fully to such apocalyptic speculation, he was deeply interested in it. This interest stemmed ultimately from his effortto comprehend and affirm the statement of Christ in the Gospel of John: " In the world youhave tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. " In this effort Dostoyev-sky looked for "signs" and "portents" that the darkness of the modern world would indeedbe overcome by the church idea. If he became too extreme in this, then this extremity must be attributed to the seriousness with which he approached the Revelation of John as an ex-planation of overcoming the world expressed in the Gospel of John [ Cf. Dostoyevsky's letter of Jan. 1, 1868 to his niece, Sofya Ivanova] ( Bruce K. Ward, Dostoyevsky's Critique Of The West, The Quest for the Earthly Paradise. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Univers-ity Press, 1986, p. 90).

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What a mixed bunch we are: a Catholic, a Pentecostal, several Orthodox, an unbeliever . . . later we were to be joined by a Baptist. Yet we were always deeply respectful of one anoth-er's convictions. And God did not turn His face away from our small patch of Mordovian soil ( Irina Ratushinskaya, Grey Is The Color of Hope. New York: Vintage International, 1989, p. 122).

The purpose of my talk tonight is to connect the idea of the Christian witness, especially that of contemporary Christians undergoing persecution for their faith in certain parts of the world, to that of the question of "Mimesis" in literature, the representation and participation in reality through memory. By the way of an analogy, in respect to Mimesis understood as "myth", the play of the imagination according to the cultural perception of the world, I want to make a counterproposal, i.e., that of a Christian Mimesis, which I now shall argue is the overcoming of mythic imagination.

*This is a paper which was submitted in a Graduate course while I was studying History and

working as a Graduate Assistant at Stephen F. Austin State University (Nacogdoches, Texas) from 1996-1998.That is, I shall argue that by certain Christian testimonies to " the concrete and empirical experience of suffering and God's grace (or presence),” the vivid witness to those who as saints (believers) actually have faced battles with the evil of persecution and oppression for the sake of their faith, there is an overcoming of "myth" and a genuine apodictic experience of reality. Let me warn the hearers ahead of time that in making this presuppositional move that I am cutting across many popular assumptions of both contemporary culture and philosophical theory. But, as a blend of Irish and Scotsmen, I have never lacked for brashness. Furthermore, as Christian believer, I must agree with the Apostle Paul, that the Gospel is a mighty power (Gk., dynamis ) of which no one need be ashamed (Romans 1:16.17; I Corinthians 1:18-31; Galatians 6:12-16, etc.).

A key contemporary example of the Gospel power at work, I think, I can indentify by some recent important case studies in Russia and Eastern Europe. These studies take seriously the matter of Christian prayers and the sacrifices made by many believers behind the former Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. Lest you think I am pulling a transcendental rabbit out of a historical hat, I would refer you the careful work of scholars like Michael Bordeuux, Lynn R. Eliason, Kent Hill, Geoffrey Hosking, Paul Marshall, and Barbara von der Heydt.1 Thousands of individuals have reported and hundreds of case studies have been made, and thus a vast archive of materials exists which provides historical and scientifically respectable confirmation for a religious revival and a spiritual perestroika among those nations and areas subjected to doctrinaire Marxism and atheism for nearly the last fifty years. Specifically, Barbara von der Heydt in doing her research for Candles Behind

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the Wall : Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution that Shattered Communism interviewed some 200 people from all the former Soviet Bloc nations, especially the Czeck Republic, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Russia, and Rumania. The result of her study was a body of solid confirmations that a new illumination through and about Christianity has been taking place in the 1980s and 1990s despite decades of secular humanist propaganda against such possibilities.2

One of the best reporters of whom I am aware on the situation of Russia vis-ˆ-vis Christianity is Lynn R. Eliason. In the Epilogue to his excellent study of this phenomena from 1987-1990 he made several interesting remarks:

. . . . Fortunately now the Cold War has ended, and with it the hate, hypocrisy,

mistrust, and paranoia generated by decades of misunderstanding. Having remov-

ed the blinders from our eyes and discovered that people everywhere are people ,

we lean that the Russians, too, have souls. To our shame, it took the leader of the

"Evil Empire" to impress this notion on us. . . . Soul to the Russians has a far broad-

er meaning and deeper implications than Americans derive from the word. It takes

in every uniquely Russian feature and spiritual attribute all the way from the single

individual to the people as a whole . . . Dostoyevsky once equated Russia's greatness

with the universality of her soul. In fact, he tied future world hopes to her ability to

bring unity through brotherly love.3

Recent events such as Millennial celebration of Russian Christianity which was observed by several Soviet cities in 1988, as well as certain significant contemporaneous presentations in art and literature drew attention to the theme of Russian's Christian "soul" which even attacks by militant Marxist atheism in the twentieth century has not obliterated. Again Eliason quotes the sentiment of Dostoyevsky who said that a person cannot live without worshiping something.3 While he and other students of contemporary Russian history recognize the inherent dangers of excessive reactions to communism (such as the militant and racist nationalism of individuals like Zhirinovsky), many critics of society and philosophical reviewers, both communist and noncommunists have taken for granted the constructive, healing role of spiritual faith. Reform-minded leaders and civic spirited politicians in many cases have recognized the need for worthy spiritual ideals and regeneration of the nation's soul. Yet from the standpoint of image and experiential commentary as distinct from either literary or philosophical theory, is his closing illustration:

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On the eve of Leningrad's fabled White Nights in June of 1990, I was sitting

with perhaps 1500 other people in the magnificient Smolny Cathedral await-ing a performance of Rachmaninov's Vespers Mass by the M.I. Glinka Choir. This concert signaled the beginning of an entire week of late-evening pro-grams devoted to sacred choral music. . . . The day had been cold and cloudy, no unlike many others I have

ex-perienced in that city on the Baltic. What light there was found its way through a generous array of windows on both sides of the nave and was

in-creased many times over through reflection against its solid white interior.Members of the choir, who were were dressed in red and black, provided a stark contrast to this sea of white. Fifty singers formed a living wall of iconsseparating the main body of the church from a more holy sanctuary. Like an-gelic images on iconstasis, they became windows to heaven. . . .

My journal describes the sounds emanating from this exalted choral group as having crossed the threshold of the divine. The more heavily in-toned lower notes (of a quality that only Russians can produce) carried into the arched cupola far above and returned as an echo to blend indescribeably with the softer high tones. Mortality and eternity merged. Like Prince Vlad-imir's emissaries in Byzantium's Hagia Sophia Cathedral, I felt myself trans-ported to higher realms. Even now I cannot fathom the feelings brought about by that unique spiritual experience. Toward the end of the perform-ance, the "white nights" sun broke through the clouds adding light to light. The fartherest thing from my mind was the familiar saying, " Poor Russia, so far from God . . . . " For here, as in numerous other circumstances, I found the Russians to be infinitely closer to their source than many of us would think possible . . . .4

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Another witness to the incredible soul of Russia is the half-Russian, half-Ukrainian author and Nobel- Prize winning dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His works such as One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward, The First Circle, August 1914, The Love Girl and the Innocent, The Candle in the Wind, and he Gulag Archipelago have been re- ceived not only as marvelous examples of twentieth-century realism and not just " Soviet realism "), but as eloquent testimony to the moral and spiritual dilemma of the former U.S.S.R. and her satellite Marxist powers. Since the main subject of our essay, Irina Ratu- shinskaya is many respects both a disciple of Solzhenitsyn and has shared in his Gulag perspective, we wish note some key points about his protest against both Marxist-Lenin-ism (i.e., Dialectical Materialism) and his plea in behalf of Christian art as witness to truth and life as gifts of God. Kathryn F. Feuer, for example, notes the agreement among critical reviewers that Solzhenitsyn is "unashamedly a moralist" and that he displays what Mary McCarthy has called " The Tolstoy Connection " as his talent for irony and literary protest in both small phrases and whole novel chapters " transforms polemic into high art."5 In the critical anthology which Feuer edited, we have several valuable perspectives on various substantive and technical aspects of Solzhenitsyn literary corpus. Here Feuer and three other reviewers are briefly cited in order to paint a clear- er picture of the tradition or style in which Ratushinskaya found her initial inspiration previous to her own life-experiences in the Soviet Gulag and the fiery trial of her own faith in God.

We began with another quotation from Feuer:

It was Mhajlo Mihajlov who first noted, from a comparison of Notes from

the House of the Dead with Ivan Denisovich, that both the mental and physical

torments of Soviet prisoners appeared worse than those of Tsarists prisoners.

The power of evil not only breaks a man's body, it also twists the heart and

shrivels the spirit. Occasionally, however, there is the rare individual whom

subjection to evil strenghtens and ennobles. From starvation and suffering,

Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn came, not to understand as an intellectual con-

cept, but to know that man's selfhood rests on something other than the mate-

rial conditions of life; persecuted by their own countrymen, in the person of

their governments, they emerged with an intensified love of country; depriv-

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ed of freedom and even of the right to be alone, they learned the reality of in-

ner freedom. Shorn of trust in the natural goodness of their fellow men, both

came out, nevertheless, with what Alexander Schmemann has called " a lucid,

seeing love. " This love, however, is like the calm eye of the hurricane: in

Dostoyevsky the surrounding storm taking the form of the rage to know, to

probe ideas to their ultimate meaning or absurdity; in Solzhenitsyn taking the

form of a rage to understand, to comprehend the past as it created and keeps

creating the present, and as part of this enterprise, a fervor to expose. Thus

we come full circle, for the aim of Solzhenitsyn's investigations like the aim

of Dostoyevksy's probing, is the moral redemption of Russia.6

Michael Aucouturier is a sophisticated and insightful French critic and he has in several articles and studies (including one in the Feuer collection) portrayed Solzhenitsyn as "a realist" whose works without necessarily operating on an explicit "symbolist" design (distinct from "formalism" also?), nevertheless "achieve the symbolic realm of all true art".7 Thus, he contends, that because Solzhenitsyn is a great artist his purpose is not to seek exactitude about places like the Mavrino Special Prison, the forced labor camps of Kolyma or Magadan, or even the cancer ward of a Tashkent hospital, although he certainly did use the naked truth of the facts to expose the tortuosities of the system so admired by the Marxist ideologues. Such an expose required geniune courage and talent, neither of which Solzhenitsyn lacks. But Aucouturier observes that Solzhenitsyn's grandeur, and his unpardonable crime as a writer in the official eyes, was to have made his camp experience the hallowed setting for reflection -critical and decisive reflection-upon Russia, today's world, and humanity.8 Perhaps without directly intending to do so, and even defending himself against the charge of intentional mimesis, Solzhenitsyn's characters like Ivan Denisovich and Matryona do become symbols of the suffering Russian people and his description of the cancer ward becomes by its own inner necessity an allegory of the spiritual sickness which gnaws at post-Stalin Soviet society. Aucouturier then accepts the suggestions of Albert Thibaudet that all true realism contains natural and implicit "symbolism" which means that Solzhenitsyn’s anecdotes are in the grand tradition of "epic" realism of Flaubert, de Maupassant, and Tolstoy. But the main point is that the force of Solzhenitsyn's symbols lies in an actuality, i.e., a real phenomenal world of common human experience, for which he cannot be held responsible. Aucouturier later gives this concrete example:

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We have noted above that in Cancer Ward Solzhenitsyn's narrative pro-

gression expanded into a poetic vision of the world in which this method found its fulfillment and its complete justification. Similarly, we see here how the technique of the semiindirect style issues forth in the creation of flesh and blood characters more complex and true to life than those of

the The First Circle and, above all, closer to us. One may illustrate this

double evolution through the character of Oleg Kostoglotov. Hardened by seven years of forced labor, contemplating life with a stubborn mistrust, but

nowready for softening and rebirth at the first breath of life and love,

Kostog-lotov embodies the revelation of the immanent meaning of life in that

mere beauty which is Solzhenitsyn's fundamental poetic intuition. With his

para-doxical mixture of mistrust and naivete, of roughness and gentleness,

ofwary astuteness and moral rigor, Kostoglotov is also the most living and successful of Solzhenitsyn's characters . . . .9

Yet another sagacious critic of Solzhenitsyn's art is Wolfgang Kasack, whose essay, " Epic and Dramatic Structure in Solzhenitsyn's Work" (in Feuer, pp. 34-46) is quite useful for understanding the particular ways in which the Russian novelist employs frameworks of time and space in his major novels to provide a realistic life-like context and yet indirectly contain symbolic markers. He follows too G. Luks' notice about Solzhenitsyn's careful functional use of detail, a special feature of his novelistic art, which underscores the necessary empirical objectivity that in the labor camps " every detail meant an alternative between preservation and downfall. " Thus, in the narrative of Ivan Denisovich the little piece of sawblade smuggled into the camp, or the last granule of of millet in the bowl of the zek's bowl verify, Luks contends, reveal that such details in the Gulag world, unlike in free society, are literally a matter of life and death.10 But beyond the correlation of not so insignficant details within the time structures, flashback episodes, and narratives within narratives, Kasack points out that it is the author's dramatic diversity, achieved by choosing very different figures for the narrative ( like Tolstoy's use of multiplied military events) which is significant. He states: " Every sphere in the material as in the moral world is drawn into the work. His desire is to attain truth through diversity. "11 It should be clear then that Solzhenitsyn's work is that of the openness and drama of real life, and so Kasack comments that " his prose can to some extent be understood as a reaction against socialist realism (that is, against the unrealistic idealization of reality in accordance with the

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patterns impoised by the CPSU) ", and " similarly the form of his plays reveals a reaction to Soviet drama of earlier periods. "12

Now we take our fourth and final evaluative example of Solzhenitsyn, the American journalist and popular historian, Robert Conquest. Conquest, incidentally, has written a book about the Stalinist Gulag himself, The Great Terror (New York and London: Macmillian, 1968). He lavishly praises Solzhenitsyn's modern three volume classic, The Gulag Archipelago as " a truly exceptional work: For in it literature transcends history without distorting it. " This is quite an important sentiment which we will shortly hope to show can be applied equally to the testimonial narrative of Irina Ratushinskaya. Conquest also makes the pertinent observation in his essay that George Medvedev, a neo-Marxist reviewer in the West and an ideological opponent of our hero, has conceded that the factual record provided by Solzhenitsyn' s indisputable.13

But then he lists three "heresies" which condemn Solzhenitsyn in the eyes of left-wing intellectuals and Western Marxists (for which he apparently applauds him!): (1) Solzhenitsyn's work rejects the thesis that the Gulag can be blamed all on Stalin and the "personality cult". He therefore “ breaks totally with the myth that has corrupted and deluded so many commentators on the Russian Revolution and the Soviet regime: the myth of a constructive and humane Lenin. "14 (2) His [=A.S.'] next heresy or "blasphemy" is his negative comparison of Leninist and Stalinist repression and terror with the Czarist regime of 1826-1908. " More- over, the czar's victims actually plotted against the state; their relatives were not also sentenced; the non-capital prisoners were not starved and sweated to death " [He also compares the process of de-Stalinization with de-Nazification in Western Germany]. (3) But the most important lesson for those in Western political culture especially is the evidence that they do not really understand the radical antihumanitarian nature of the Soviet Marxist system. Conquest acknowledges that Solzhenitsyn's writings have made the effort to imagine it not only possible, but easier. Thus, he is the most likely successor in the work already begun in the 1940's and early 1950's by Boris Pasternak.15

Now, we turn to the proper matter of our essay, the Story of Irina Ratushinskaya and the Odessites according to her book, Grey Is The Color of Hope (Translated by Alyona Kojevnikov. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1988). Immediately striking is her "Author's Note" : " Readers may wonder, quite justifiably, how much of this book is truth, and how much is fiction? The answer is that there is no fiction at all; I do not have enough imagination for it. " Now, probably Ratushinskaya is overly humble about her imagination, for she is a distinct and charming poet. However, with certain names deliberately masked to protect the unwary innocent friend or family member from reprisal by the KGB, one is surely inclined, I think, to give her testimony a fair and serious hearing. In the pages of her book (about 357 in all) she paints in miniature what Solzhenitsyn depicted on a larger scale in his

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Gulag Archipelago. The details of her arrest as she is picked up from her school in a black Volga, being taken home by friendly if generous-sounding KGB men, her transport via a Stolypin railway car to transit prison, her arrival at the " Small Zone " a few weeks later, the meticulous accounts of her fellow inmates - their relationships, hardships, struggles, and joys - her punishments in PKT and SHIZO, the two homes that she and the other women shared and nurtured within the camp, the interplay of faith, hope, and love among the core group of Christian women, the several hunger strikes and the various tortuous drills and punishments of the camp warders, and then the final chapters about her release and the closing of the "Small Zone" are startingly realistic and believable. That they are essentially true is confirmed by the subsequently confirmed facts.

Here is what we know about Mrs. Irina Ratushinskaya. She was born in Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, on March 4, 1954. After receiving a degree in physics in 1976, she taught at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute. However, she was arrested on September 17, 1982, for her dissident activities. She was charged with an old standard crime, noted long before by Solzhenitsyn: " anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda ". On March 3, after long weeks of rigorous interrogation and a mock trial, she was indicted, one day before her twenty-ninth birthday, and sentenced to seven year's hard labor in a "strict regime" labor camp with an additional five years' internal exile. The nature of crime was that she wrote a poem (which was dedicated to A. Sakharov) and made allusion to the evils of Marxist thought coercion.16

One of her poems, "Pencil Letter" was written while she was in the KGB Prison in Kiev in November 1982, awaiting trial. In April of 1983 she was sent to a labor camp at Barashevo in Mordovia, which is three hundred miles southeast of Moscow. For over three years she was held prisoner there in the special administrative unit called the "Small Zone", which was a special prison facility for women prisoners of conscience.

Surprisingly, in July of 1986, Irina was taken back to Kiev where she remained again in KGB detention for three months. Then, she was finally set free on October 9, 1986. This was on the eve of the Reykjevik Summit between Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. It is certain that because of the international pressure of Christian organizations like the Keston Institute and humanitarian groups like Amnesty International and the Red Cross, that Irina and other's releases occurred. Before leaving the Soviet Union in December of 1986, Irina wrote several other poems which described her life as a prisoner and her new freedom. She left Moscow for West. She is married to Igor Gerashchenko, a human rights activist. For a time during 1987-1988 they lived in the United States and Irina was a poet-in-residence at Northwestern University at Chicago. Later, after she had published two other books, they moved to London where they currently reside.

Grey Is The Color of Hope is a non-fictional documentary journal filled with a myriad of vivid pictures and stunning situations. One might begin with the example of a not atypical situation in the third chapter where Irina is riding through Moscow in a large truck with a canvas hood. One of her two

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young guards, discovering that she is "political" destined for "strict regime" offer her a chance at getting out of her sentence early by having "a quickie" with the one of her choice, since pregnant women are sometimes granted clemency. The story continues:

Luckily, I have enough sense to take no offense at their generosity. When

all is said and done, in their own way they honestly want to do me a good

turn. As tactfully as I can, I explain that while I think they are both fine specimens of manhood, I am a married woman, and faithful to my

husband. "Religious, are you ?" . . . . "Yes, I am." To them, this is a perfectly acceptable explanation, and the

subject is closed.No—then no. They are, in fact, immeasurably more sensitive than KGB

men , whose response would certainly have been: " Where's the husband who

will wait for you for seven years! " How many times I heard such remarks

during the seven months I spent under investigation!17

Ratushinskaya thereafter continues the theme of the essential humanity of the lads guarding her at this juncture, as she explains to them how her poetry was responsible for her journey to Lefortovo. They even offer her cigarettes, which she graciously accepts even though she does not smoke (since she knows she might later share them with a friend). After her one brief wash at the temporary prison, her head is swimming with faces of shaven heads and zeks, erstwhile fellow-travellers who may be thieves or possibly murderers. But in her musings, she begans to pity those "unfortunates" who like herself will have to live under vicious camp "laws" which mercilessly debase and exploit human beings and even the Gulag keepers themselves. Falling to sleep, she prays, " Oh, Lord, save my unfortunate people and have mercy upon them!"18

That Irina's prayers are sincere may be seen in the way that she comforts a dear old Babuska, Granny Tonia on the next leg of her journey. The poor woman has been sentenced to five years because she tried to bribe a KGB informer who had discovered that she made a little living selling medicinal moonshine to her neighbors. Now she would have to leave her little cottage and her cabbage garden to others, and probably die in prison. Irina meets other pathetic creatures accused of various crimes, some genuine and most trumphed up charges like her own and learns about her destination and the notoroius female Communist administrator, Valentina Tereshkova, who introduced the zek uniforms and identity tags. The prisoners accompanying Irina on her journey call her a "prize bitch."19 During this conversation about

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prisoner's uniforms and their total unsuitability to the harsh Gulag weather, Irina shares with her new acquaintances insights she which recalls from the handbook of Solzhenitsyn. Some of the younger guards also attentively and sympathetically listen.

In chapter six Irina finally arrives at the "Small Zone" after spending several days in a cold, filthy, and damp cell in the transit prison in Potma. As soon as she arrives at her final destination, her last "civvies" (civilian clothes) are confiscated except a pair of tights and a woolen kerchief. Thereafter, Lyuba, one of the warders, issues her the official zek wardrobe and escorts her to meet the resident "politicals" in their little dwelling inside the barbed wire surrounded by guard towers. She is thereupon promptly introduced to Tanya Osipova, Raya Rudenko, and Natasha Lazareva, the three younger women in the tiny house. Later she meets the more mature Tatyana Mikhilovna Velikannova, and she is then introduced to the history of the Zone and its heritage of courtesty, its family ways, and its fearless and superbly useful bright yellow cat, Nyurka, whom Natasha will call the "Mordovian Sentinel" for its ability to capture mice and rats. Irina also becomes well versed by her comrades in the work ethics of the Zone - the women make quality work gloves for those in the labor camps and farmers. She is also informed of the principles of hunger strikes for proper working conditions and for certain indispensable personal freedoms. During their introductions, the young officer Shishokin candidly admits that these small women in the political Zone are harder to bluff than two hundred in the criminal camps. Irina also learns about the horrible punishment routine in SHIZO, which the camp admistrators frequently use to attempt to brainwash the prisoners and force them to conform to Marxist/Soviet values.

Another question to which Irina is quickly introduced is matter of the identity tags and the group's common decision to not wear them. She is also briefed on the supervisor of the camp and the work "brigades", Senior Lieutenant Podust, who turns out to be, as we see later, something of sadomasochistic Nazi type of a Marxist, a blonde b----h. Having listened to the fair but passionate words of Tatyana Mikhailovna, Irina adopts their cause as her own, and on that day becomes another of Podust's mortal enemies. She is ready to do this, even though the authorities may cancel her scheduled visit with her husband, Igor. But refusing to be either bullied or blackmailed the women unite in the first of the many common causes over the next three years, and they prepare for the worst. . . .

During the next few chapters Irina learns the stories of her fellow women sufferers. She learns about Natasha, who is from Leningrad, and is serving sentence for producing a samizdat journal, Maria , devoted to feminist issues - arrested in 1982 for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". She also gets to know better Tanya Osipova, a wize at fixing the ancient black and white television set in the Zone and a sweet, sentimental lady who cries over Cyrano de Bergerac , yet who is strong enough to endure several hunger strikes to get her confiscated Bible back from the camp authorities. Then there is Irina's other new friend, the simple and hardworking Raya, who is the Zone's best

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cook, a marvelous seamstress and who lovingly cares for her tiny garden plot of herbs, carrots, and potatoes. Together they prepare to face SHIZO, the Gulag, the Marxist State, and many troubles as sisters and friends under God.

On pp. 51-55, Irina introduces the reader to Raya' horde of old padded jackets and the babushki's rags stored in the ramshackle "projection hut". In this episode we are introduced to the whole matter of Orthodox Christians, predominantly middle-aged to older women, who in suffering for their faith in Jesus and their loyalty to the deposed Patriarch Tikhon, became a virtual catacomb church in the U.S.S.R., and hundreds of thousands who became victims in the Soviet camps for refusing to work on the collective farms and use Soviet money or passports. Irina describes their situation:

From the point of view of the Soviet government the True Orthodox were,

naturally, malicious violators of internal passport regulations, parasites, and

worst of all, unregistered religious believers. It follows that they received sen-

tence after sentence. In the camps they refused to work, which meant spend-

ing more time in the internal camps. Yet some survived, and our babushki

were from their number. That is how they were referred to in the Zone —ba-

bushki--because by that time most of them were very old and ill. The other

zeks and the guards called them nuns. Later, by association, we came to be

known as nuns, too . . . . Even upon release, they would refuse to accept the

document attesting to the completion of their sentence. Off they would go, without a single

scrap of paper, heading for a new and certain arrest and sentence. From their

point of view, this was perfectly normal: were they not suffering for God? In

their eyes, it is we who act unnaturally: we submit to Satan and his minions --

the Soviet government--in order to escape persecution. And Satan, they

know, will never give up of his own accord-he will merely exploit any sign of

weak-ness to his greater gain, penetrate even deeper into your soul. That was

and

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is the reasoning of the True Orthodox. Some of them are still alive, living in

internal exile. Yet the exile sentences of some of our babushki have expired,

and they did not return to the Zone; so Satan was defeated, after all, forced

into retreat. Others of them are still to be found in some of the camps, with

calm, serene faces, ever ready to lay down their lives for the Lord; to what

greater honor can one aspire ?How many of them are there, International Red Cross? No

answer. They don't know, how could they ? How many of them are there,

AmnestyInternational ? Silence. They do not know either. How many of them are there, official Soviet Patriarch of All Russia, Pimen ? He, too, is silent.

May-be he really does not know: the True Orthodox are outside his

jurisdiction, so why worry about them? How many of them are there, the KGB of the

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Silence. They do know, but won't tell.20

Irina tells us of her tears and a lump in her throat as she mused on the powerful faith and the loving self-sacrifice of these "dear ones". She quips: " How much human warmth is stored up in these beggar-like witnesses to the ingenuity of our babushki ? There are concentration camps that have become memorial shrines--Auschwitz, Treblinka--but each tattered garment in that box had had a longer life than the period those camps existed. "21

In stark contrast to the sacrifical love and pacific faith of the elderly Christian ladies Irina Ratushinskya is the portrayal of the Small Zone commandant, Senior Lieutenant Podust, the "blonde fiend", called "IIse Koch" by the repatriots of the men's zone. Ratushinskaya hints that this woman's personality maybe be somewhat that of a sadomasochistic dominatrix (" I am certain that her sweetest and most unfulfillable dream would have been of the Small Zone collectively licking her boots " ).21 We are told at her delight in reveille, strip-searches, punishments, and such. It is also subtly suggested that she is behind the bad food (the minuscles portions of bread and meat) which is poor enough, but made worse by the excessive additions of salt which causes the prisoners, already starving or semi-starving to have distended bloating and gastrointestinal disorders. Other repressive measures besides virtually freezing the prisoners to death in SHIZO (where temperatures sometimes drop below 8*C and the pipes drip), are frequent "inspections", reduction of locker space (already quite tiny for all the zek's personals: books, clothers, letters, personals, etc.), and threats about production quotas.

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However, in contrast to the heartless and zealous bureacrat, who actually rarely frighten the spiritually centered and emotionally disciplined women of the Zone, there is the decent and reasonable, Vasili Petrovich, who supervises glove production. Whenever he can, he gives the poor women in the Zone permission to substitute for one another in delivering quotas and pleads in their behalf for proper tools and means to work (" Vasili Petrovich is always pleased with us, and will affirm that we have sewn up everything he gave us; he knows our limits and never tries to load us beyond our capacity ").22

During her early days in the Zone (the first few weeks) things become routine, the Zone women began to form their relationships and turn their tiny quarters into something like a home and a place of refuge within the heart of the Gulag. One symbol of this special peace and harmony were the meals taken in the tiny kitchen with joyful sharing of the duties of preparation and prayer. Another important thing which brought both bodily benefits and emotional satisfaction to the inmates was the tiny vegatable garden which Raya tended and watered, where the politicals grew carrots, asters, cucumbers, gladioli, dill, onions, potatoes and other little herbs. Their husbandry and maintenance of this tiny spot caused prisoners in other camps to envy them and psychologically upset their captors and tormentors. Besides all these simple things, the women shared little journal readings (from the scarce materials they were permitted to have through the camp kiosk) and reciting poetry and stories to each other during down times from official harassment and forced labor. When they can they have precious little tea breaks where they drink potions made from wild strawberry leaves, raspberry canes, nettles, etc. and musingly mock the KGB who are listening: " But we will keep laughing come what may; even on the darkest days, let the KGB listen and wonder about the laughter floating over their concealed microphones, the laughter of the Small Zone " (p. 79).

The main cast of the women in grey, the "politicals" is nearly complete, but in the days ahead, two new zeks, quite the opposite from one another, join the group through the decisions of the Soviet superiors. These new arrivals play an important role throughout most of the remainder of the narrative. First, there is Jadvyga Bieliauskiene, an older Lithuanian woman, who had been sentenced more than once by the Soviet State for her political connections (she had taken a marksmanship course as a schoolgirl), but primarily because she was a devout Catholic and had been involved in the "criminal activity" of instructing young people and children about God and operating an amateur religious theater. She had thus received a second sentence (eight years) beyond her first twenty-five, from which she had been released early. She was in poor health because of tuberculosis and treatment by camp antibiotics; though she needed a special diet, she was subject to the camp retinue of foods cooked in synthetic fat and hard labor. "Pani" Jadvyga, a straight thin woman, speaks fluent Lithuanian but only broken Russian. Much of her "spare" time in the Gulag is spent in prayer for her children (so that they will not lose their faith) and helping her sisters in the Small Zone by sewing elbow patchess and

15

useful garments for work. Irina describes her beautiful work and observes tenderly:

Her faith is the cornerstone of her existence, but she sets no store by de-nominational differences; there are many confessions, but God is one, after all, and it is to Him that we shall all come in the end. He who does not be-lieve now will find faith later, in God's good time. JaJadvyga is a woman of iron character, yet at the same time she takes such care of us that at times we feel almost ashamed; when it is all said and done, she is old enough to be a mother to most of us.23

But another sharp contrast in the situation follows as the reader is introduced to a person much the antithesis of Pani, Tatyana Vladimirova, who is obviously a product of the criminal camps and an inverterate liar as well as a narcotic addict. After the core group of the Zone have conversed with her a few hours, they unamiously conclude that their new "acquisition" with her contradictory tales of out-smarting the KGB and her secret anti-Soviet organization "out there" is probably psychiatrically unbalanced romantic liar, and not a political dissident. They also are convinced that she probably is not a "plant" by camp officials, though they are afraid she may easily turn informer or worse. Vladimirova indeed attempts to set the other women against one another by malicious gossip, but they confer and decide to wait, ignoring her for the time being. As the days pass, her hysterial threats and rude agressiveness move them to shun her and stay away from her spying.24

After this, during the next hundred pages or so of Ratushinskaya' prison journal, we are introduced to three new Zone inmates and several important transitional events in the total story. The first is Galya Barats, who husband Vasili were originally from Trans-Carpathia, but later were reckoned by the U.S.S.R politics as Ukrainian "politicals". They had orginially been members of the Communist party, and had even lived in Moscow. But they soon became involved in two heresies which the Party could not forgive or overlook: they found faith in God and joined the Pentecostal movement in the Soviet Union. This meant they lost all their status as citizens, and Galya arrived at the Zone only with her underclothes (the sisters, led by the saintly Pani Jadvyga soon made her clothers from the meager store of cloths in the house, however). Next we meet Edia Abrutiene, whose husband is Vytas, Lithuanians, who simply had wanted to emigrate and stirred up such a fuss about it that they were charged with "slandering" the Soviet system (article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. After Vytas had been imprisoned and released, Edita was arrested and sentenced to four years in the camps and two years of interal exile. Edita had been on hunger strikes and she absolutely refused to work at all in the Zone. This created a dilemma for the other women, who creatively

16

solved it by persuading her to work for them, as their "housekeeper". This does work for awhile. Yet, it is Edita, who does not share the core convictions and Christian faith of the other dissidents, who eventually breaks and joins with the demented and brainwashed Vladimirova in her attacks and denouncements of the causes of the original group. She in fact becomes the drug-primed stoolie of Podust and the KGB operatives in the Small Zone and the nearby camps. Yet at first, she is won over to sympathy with the women after Podust tells a vicious lie to the others about her being a carrier of syphilis. In this instance, the women rally around her and she stands with them (a cause celebre which among other things helps end Podust's camp career).

Important events take place in the Fall of 1983. First, during late August in one of Podust's contrived and desperate attempts to force the women to wear their numbered name tags, various warders and prisoners from other camps are brought in to destroy Raya's little herb and vegetable garden. Some of the women at last refuse to cooperate, and after the debacle the others lead by Irina and Tanya, replant it from their few hidden seeds and roots. They also write letters of protest to the Soviet Presidium, though they realize it will do little good. One of the most beautiful and moving passages in the book comes with Irin'a first scheduled meeing with her husband, Igor. One is especially impressed at the caring and loving gifts and services which the poor but loving women of the Small Zone provide for this special occasion. They diligently sew Irina a new grey skirt and a blue Ukrainian-style blouse, and Gayla set her hair and devises a superb coiffure. Although the meeting comes breathtakingly close to official cancellation, Irina is finally allowed a two hour visit with her husband and it is emotively enthralling and dynamic scene. They share vital information, even though the warden Masha is also present at the table to monitor conversation (the little dialogue abot Lech Walesa being marvelous). Their parting is painful and tearful, but not without hope.25

Immediately afterwards, however, the camp authorities, primed by the KGB, begins the first rounds of SHIZO punishments for Tatyana Osipova and Natasha Lazareva, while the rest of the Small Zone (excluding Pani Jadvyga, who is too weak, and Vladimirova, who despises everyone else). In this episode we learn about the first level of physical deprivations, the stomach pains and nausea, and emotional blackmail of the camp torturers. But we also have our first real glimpse at the fortitude and loyalty of the main Zone circle, which not only makes their reputation as determined "politicals" (which the other camps hear about). We see in such small details as Gayla's "fast" and Tatyana's sewing of a mopping towel for the floor out of old glove scraps, that now these women are a family and a sisterhood in both the cause of freedom and in Christian love.26

The authorities continue to harass and endevor to intimidate these dangerous elements, according to the "humane procedures" of Soviet law which includes not only SHIZO, but force-feeding and required re-education. A key turning point in the narrative (as well as in the actual events of Irina and her friends' real lives) came in late September or 1983 when Podust, the camp

17

doctor, the notorious Volkova, with the assistance of several camp guards, attempt to force feeding tubes down Raya Rudenko, Tatyana Velikovna, and Ratushinskaya. The object of this exericise was either to break the will of the weak hunger striker or else to inflict more pain on the bodies of the starving. In this instance, the women again turn the tables on their captors and tormentors by screaming out their names, phone numbers, and the situation to listeners within a crowed hospital. Fortunately, because the denizens of the Soviet State fear the exposure of their lies and their repressive deeds (other prisoners might pass the word on to sympathetic listeners on the outside, etc.), they back off. In the next chapter Irina wakes up with her partner in a psychiatric cell and realizes that she is still alive and has not been subjected to the routine forced ingestions.

The women take a stand on the scriptural promise of Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 and upon their respective releases from SHIZO and the hospital incarcerations begin a new series of spirited protests. But of key importance is their return to their "home" in the Zone barrack-house where they prepare for the departure of beloved (though unmusical) Tatyana Mikhailovna. In a typical scene after these trials, something that is repeated many times over the next three years, the women recover their strength, share their little bits of bread and herb soup, and enjoy the fellowship of those who have freedom in their mind and spirit: " In fact, there is not a great deal of difference between the times when we eat and our hunger strikes. Still, we'll manage. We are all overjoyed to be together again. Pani Jadvyga says grace, and we dip our spoons into Raya's soup " (p. 137). Thus, in the midst of deprivation and oppression, these few believing souls maintained their dignity and shared their spiritual riches.27 Ratushinskaya adds later in a witty sarcasm: " No doubt about it, Velikovna was a bad influence on me: all her advice ran counter to the Moral Code of the builders of communism . . . And I strove, strove and strove again to learn patience. There was plenty of time; those who had determined the years I had for learning had been generous with their terms " (p. 144).

At this juncture in the book, Ratushinskaya records that other letters of protests were sent out through "inside" and "outside" mail ( the official mail and the secretly issued samizdat ). We learn of their "Madrid" hunger strike (to coincide with the meeting of the signatores of the Helenski Human Rights Commission, etc.). We also begin to get new glimpses of Irina's growing confidence that God had not abandoned the suffering zeks altogether to their tormentors, but that a witness of their trials and of the faith that sustained many would be the later conscience of the nation (" Somewhere at the back of their uniformed-encased hearts there are stirrings of shame, and conscience, and compassion -- all those qualities which will be the salvation of my people one day. ")28 Though she is fearful of the future, knowing that the "disciplinary work" of the camp officials and the KGB will doubtless continue (and it does for nearly two hundred pages and twenty-five more chapters), that the little group in the Small Zone have " The touch of this hand " (p. 151),

18

the light and presence of Christ among his witnesses and those who know his love.

This fellowship of fidelity allow the little group of starving women to resist the various "reform" devices of their jailors, as the efforts to supply the camp kiosk with better food and toiletries which can be purchased by those on good behavior and not on hunger strikes. They mess up a later visit by the commission of the Central Administration of Corrective Labor Institutions (GUITU) when they point out the fraud and systematic deceit of the camp officials concerning such basic food staples as bread and butter, as well as vitally needed medicines, much to the chagrin of the KGB majors present and Lieutenant Podust. Yet, above the deprivations and physical abuses of the camp, the "politicals" in the Small Zone (in the spirit of Dostoyevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn), object chiefly to the shamless lying and moral hypocrisy of the State and its institutions which Tatyana and others simply call "The perpetual lies". Here is a good example of such hypocrisy:

But if the Party claims that there are no political prisoners in the USSR,

Shalin will still insist that we don't exist . . . . Is this nay less bizarre, than,

say, proclaiming " I am teapot, " or " There's a Martian in disguise among

us "? This sort of idiocy can drive an unprepared person to fury and loss of

self-conrol. Luckily, we were all ready for this even before our arrests: we

were prepared for it by the Soviet press, by the KGB, by the "political brief-

ings" in our places of work. We were tempered to this madness by the the en-

tire official style of life in our country. And we rose against it. How couldcould Penteostal Christian Galya have possibly remained a Communist

and at the same time carried carried out the Party's bidding to assert that

there is no God, whenever and whereever she was ordered ? Could Tatyana

Mik-hilovna have possibly read the mandatory "political information" at work

? Could Pani Jadvyga " wholeheartedly support the policies of the Party and the government " after being consigned to the camps as an adolescent

sim-ply because she happened to be Lithuanian? Yes, we got our sentences.

We know what the camps mean: cold, hunger, tyranny, separation from our

fam-

19

ilies. But instead of direct reprisals, we have encountered reprisals masquer-

ading under a "humane" mask. For instance, they asked us in SHIZO: " What

are you women complaining about ? This radiator is hot. " And to "prove" it,

the person who said these words calmly laid a hand against the ice-cold pipes: see, it's working perfectly! The temperature in the cell was 8* C,

but we could hardly pull out our hidden thermometer just to expose the lie . .

.29 During late October there were other important developments

which determine much of the remaining story of the inhabitants of the Zone. First, although Pani Jadvyga is finally admitted to the hospital, the camp doctors refuse to treat her for her condition (and feed her properly). She then resigns herself to death, and requests that her body be returned to her family in Lithuania where she can receive a Christian burial near the Catholic Church in her home town. The officials refuse her request, so this frail lady begins her "fast" in protest, and cannot be dissuaded even by appeals from the rest of the group. Tragically also, Edita learns that her husband and son had been refused their meeting and she herself begins an angry strike against the cruelty of State. The others hesitatingly join them in time. It is about this time too when the last major character in the narrative is introduced, Lidija Doronina, who the group called Pani Lida, a Latvian peasant, who had experienced three arrests and imprisonments in her life since 1925: once under Stalin in 1942, once in 1970 (being tried under the Article 183-1 of the Latvian republican Criminal Code), and finally in 1983 on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". She was a devout Latvian Catholic and had spent time in the infamous Vorkuta camp and elsewhere before arriving in the Mordovian Zone.30

After she and her husband had struggled to eek out a living and a tiny pension in the late 1970s, she was slandered again in the early 1980s. Disgusting with the Soviet system and the unethical brutality of communism, she actually renounced her citizenship in 1984 and demanded to be sent to Switzerland to live with relatives. She proved to be one of the most enduring and endearing of all of Irina's comrades in the Gulag. Ratushinskaya draws this picture of her:

That's just what she did do [refuse to wear the damnable identification tags]

later on, for that very reason and set everything out in writing. It was not wise

to fool around with Pani Lida: although she is incredibly kindhearted and ac-

comodiating, there is a limit beyond which it is better not to push her. After we

20

brought her up to date on the situation in the Zone and the impending strike,

she said she had no intention of working anyway. The state could be content

with the thirty-two rubles a month it was saving on her pension. She's reached

retirement age, so that's that. As for boycotting Podust, she will wait: " I have

to make up my own mind about her. Don't think I don't believe you, but I will

feel better myself when I've seen and heard her in action. Maybe she's not an

entirely lost soul ? "31

Just how lost of a soul Podust really is becomes clearer in the next few chapters of the book where we hear of Podust conspiracy with Major Pazizin, Colonel Shlepanov, and Major Shalin dragging a half-naked and ferverishly ill Natasha Lazareva though the snow and their later revision of the events (pp. 176-181). In this instance Irina, Raya, and the others write a letter appealing to world opinion and hope to send it out by way of special "outside" couriers. The letter and its contents do get out in 1985, which probably accounts for the pressure on the Soviet government led by Mikhail Gorbachev to release political dissidents and prisoners of conscience.32

The remainder of the book (the last twenty chapters, or pages 196-355, to be precise) is Irina's spendidly detailed and horrendously vivid memoirs of the group's last struggles against the camp administration and punishments of PKT and SHIZO (the very last trip in 1985, Irina believed to be her last trip, but she survived to tell the tale alas !). Following that we have already spoken - the major details of her transportation, subsequent release, and emigration to the West. What I should like to in the next few paragraphs is to simply outline some more examples, and in a few cases briefly quote some passages to substaniate my thesis of Ratushinskaya and company as witnesses, candles behind the Wall of Soviet oppression and ideological darkness of the Communist State (Cf. pp. 212-213 and her poem entitled " I sit on the floor ", written in SHIZO, December 16, 1983).

Examples of Candles In The Gulag:

1. Irina's Prayer in the Gulag (When Natasha was almost dying with ab-dominal inflammation and respiratory bronchitis), ch. 29: pp. 224-225. [Oral reading for presentation]. Motto: " Strange things happen when you have nothing to depend on except God's help." (p. 225)

2. The camp rejoicing over the death of Yuri Andropov, one of the worst of

21

KGB persecutors of dissidents and the sworn enemy of all Russian Christians (pp. 338-241). The arrival of Lagle Parek to the zone, a cheerful fair Estonian Christian whose grandmother made a apt comment on the Soviet decrees (" Lagle never forgot her grandmother''s smile, and pitying comment: ' They think that they are the master of eternity?' ").

3. The special Small Zone birthday party for Irina's thirtieth birthday : the

gifts, the poetry recitations, and the family "feast" of a biscuit cake and lemon tea. (pp. 243-247).

4. Irina's isolation in a "box cell" on March 15, 1984. There she writes, reads her Bible, and sews, glorying in her peace and praying for the others, espec-ially Edita and Tanya (pp. 253-255).

5. Though denied the basic decencies of life such as proper bathing conditions and feminine napkins, and subjected to strip-searches before groups of coarse leering KGB officers, Irina retained her decency and humanitarian values. Thus, she writes:

But in doing so, you must not, under any cirmcumstances, allow your- self to hate. Not because your tormentors have not earned it. But if you allow hatred to take root, it will flourish and spread during your years in the camps, driving out everything else, and ultimately corrode and warp your soul. You will no longer be yourself, your identity will be de- stroyed, all that will remain will be a hysterical, maddened and bedevil- led husk of the human being that once was. And this is what will come before God should such a creature die while still behind bars. And this is just what "they" want. So, when you look at any nut or bolt of that machine--whether he has red or blue pathches on his uniform--or you

try to think that maybe he has children who may grow up to be quite

22

different from him. Or you may find something amusing about him: laughter dissolves anger. Or you may feel sincerely sorry for him: no matter how grim your situation, would you swap places with him? Of course not ! You see . . . ? But if you can spot no spark of humanity in

him, no matter how hard you try, remind yourself that cockroaches are

exterminated without hatred, but rather with a feeling of revulsion. And "they" --armed, well-fed and belligerent--are like vermin in our big house, and sooner or later we shall be rid of them and live in

clean- liness. Is it not pathetic that they have designs on our immortal

souls? All this in sum brings about one marked change in your physical ap- pearance; by the end of your first year, you will have what are

known as "zek's eyes." This look in a zek's eyes is impossible to describe,

but once encountered, it is never forgotten. When you emerge, your

friends, embracing you, will exclaim: "You eyes! Your eyes have changed!"33

6. The Eleven of the Zone celebrate two Christmases and two Easters: Irina discourages a male camp admirer with amorous intentions (pp. 262-270). She explains that she is married and has religious convictions, and he accepts her defense.

7. Irina experiences conviction and shame for having lied to a camp com-mandant about her the reason for the cancellation of her husband Igor's visit (pp. 275-276). Later for her ten-day hunger strike in protest of the can-cellation, she is put down for two months of PKT after SHIZO.

8. December 10, 1984 [?]: All of the group of the Small Zone, except Olya, are sent to SHIZO. Later Olya's protests gets her send there as well. Here is, I think , the key passage, which justifies my analysis: We shall quote it at length:

23

The "highlight" of this particular SHIZO spell was the administra- tion's effort to stamp out religious singing. Galya and Pani Lida had al-

ready become a very accomplished duet at singing psalms and hymns,

and what better occupation can there in a SHIZO cell than to praise the

the Lord? The regime supervisors, who never objected to the most lewd to the most lewd ditties sung by the criminal prisoners,were terribly in- censed: " Stop that at once!" They stormed and threatened, but they had chosen the wrong targets for their wrath: Pani Lida and Galya were both perfectly prepared to accept punishment for singing psalms. Those of us not endowed with musical talent entered the fray: " What is it that you object to? The fact that they're singing, or that they're singing reli- gious songs? "

. . . It must have been the latter; had our friends started singing some popular rubbish, nobody would have said a word. But our administra-

tion could hardly admit to political prisoners that the objection was to

songs about God, and risk this fact being publicized by Western media

a week later. So they tried to wriggle out by claiming that prisoners are

not supposed to sing at all, unless they do so as part of an “approved”

independent amateur group activities " . . . .34

9. Later, most of the group were released on Christmans Eve, having wrap-

ped Olya in as much of the babushka underclothes as they could, for her

remaining days in the cold and damp of SHIZO. Then, back at Small Zone,

in their tiny cottage of warm and love, they celebrate an ecumenical Christ-

mas:

24

We gather around the table, and the words of the Lord's Prayer ring

out in Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian, and Ukrainian, although the Or- thodox Christmas is still to come. Pani Jadgyga divides up a Commu- nion wafer from Lithuania, so that there is a bit for everyone. This wafer, no thicker than a sheet of paper, was sent to her by relatives in an envelope. The censor let it through; either having no idea what

it was, or refrained from consfiscating it without a direct order to do so. " Silent night, holy night, " sing Galya and Pani Lida in two lan- guages. And, we despite our various creeds, never doubted for a moment that God was looking down upon us all at that moment. Then we pray for Olya, that she, too, might be eased in her solitude: that she would not be too cold, that she would not succumb to sad- ness . . . . On New Year's Eve we sang traditional carols called Kolyadki at which Olya (who had returned by that time) excelled. We also ob- served the ancient Slav ritual of " sowing, " as we chanted: " Sow, grow, rye and wheat, for happiness and health, for the New Year . . . .” We had no wheat, of course, so we used crumbs of bread . . . . We even had a small but real Christmas tree: Vasili Petrovich brought it for us when he delivered that last batch of gloves. We decorated this tree as best we could. (p. 307).

There is much more in Ratushinskaya's story we could relate, but here we shall stop. In her Epilogue she calls attention to the fact that while most of the prisoners in the Soviet Gulag wore black, the color of the “politicals” in the Small Zone was grey. Grey was the color of hope, I think, because of the persons inside the zek uniforms - Christians filled with light of Christ and Christmas hope in the bleak and dingy winter of late Soviet despair. Later, in the fall of 1989 A.D., many other Christians were singing and holding lighted candles at the Wall between East and West .35 It was a time of hope. Yet, there has been such hope for peace and love, ever since Mary and Joseph, finding shelter in a cave with beasts and a manger, wrapped rough grey rags around one special child, a child full of God's own light and love. Later, shepherds greeted that baby born in Bethlehem, even as they recalled the singing of angels under the starry December sky. Grey was the color of hope. Once again, gray is the color of hope, for God’s truth dwells in it. That Light yet shines! Even in our dark twentieth century, that Light still shines brightly!

Appendix A.: Review of Candles Behind The Wall .

25

Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution

by Barbara von der Heydt

Certainly one of the most profound events of human history was the collapse of the Soviet empire. To view it through the half-shut eyes of journalism is to see it as mere politics but on a grand scale, a top-down sort of affair that only the likes of Mikhael Gorbachev or (more plausibly) Ronald Reagan could have engineered. Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick put it aptly when she said "The most important event of 1989 was a non-event." As this book explains with fascinating stories of those who led the bloodless revolution, what really defeated the Evil Empire and liberated more than 400 million people was a mass awakening of moral conscience and a spirit of freedom that calmly and matter-of-factly rejected communism. This was the result, we learn, not of political machinations but of the faith of thousands of Christians, peaceful revolution-aries," who confronted evil with only their faith in the good and in the power of God to make it prevail. You will read in this book of heroes and martyrs with names journalism has not made familiar to us, but which were well known to the KGB, like Rudiger Knechtel, Alexander Ogorodnikov, and Fathers Gleb Yakunin and Dimitri Dudko. I cannot read these stories of astonishing personal bravery and sacrifice without being deeply moved; they have left me with a greater assurance of the power of moral truth and the Spirit of God. [Hardback, 266 pages].

1. Reviewer: Unknown ?

2. Source: http://www.viamall.com/rightbooks/0802837220.html

Endnotes:1Gorbachev, Glasnost, and the Gospel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), pp. 113-127, and passim ; also by M. Bourdeaux, The Politics of Religion in Russia and the

26

New States of Eurasia (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995); Perestroika of the Russian Soul: Religious Renaissance in the Soviet Union (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: Macfarland & Company, 1991, pp. 1-8; 119-125; The Puzzle of the Soviet Church, An Inside Look at Christianity and Glasnost (Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press in cooperation with the Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1989) and The Soviet Union On The Brink : An Inside Look at Christianity and Glasnost (Ibid. 1991). 2 SeeThe Awakening of the Soviet Union (Enlarged edition; Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Their Blood Cries Out: The WorldWide Tragedy of Modern Christians Who Are Dying for Their Faith (Dallas and London: Word, 1997); Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution that Shattered Communism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993), and "Corruption In Russia: No Democracy Without Morality " , Committe Brief, No. 13, June 15, 1995. U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 2Perestroika of the Russian Soul: Religious Renassiance in the Soviet Union , Op. Cit. , p. 137.3Possibly, the source of this thought is Dostoyevsky's remark that the Russian mission to the West was one of universality: " our destiny is universality, won not by the sword but by the strength of brotherhood and our fraternal aspiration to reunite mankind. " Russia is not to conquer the West, " but to `stand before' the West as as a light, to allow the God-man [Christ] to "shine forth in opposition to the ideas of the West ". It is evident from context that he was speaking of both denatured capitalism and Protestant/ Catholic Christianity which had lost the mystic unity with God and man he believed that Orthodoxy had preserved. Cf. his Letters of May 19 and August 16 , 1880 to K. Pobedonostev , Polynoye sobranie soch inenii v tridsati tomakh , p. 58, and The Idiot , p. 586 (IV, 7) cited in Bruce K. Ward, Dostoyevsky's Critique Of The West, Quest for the Earthly Paradise , p. 187. 4Perestroika of the Russian Soul: Religious Renassiance in the Soviet Union , p. 138. On Dostoyevsky's perceptive analysis of the tragedy of the human situation and its ground of hope in Christ, see the fine analyses such as George A. Panichas, The Burden of Vision: Dostoevsky's Spiritual Art (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1977), Introduction, pp. 9-22; Jessie Coulson, Dostoevsky, A Self-Portrait (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 198-231; Victor Terras, The Idiot: An Interpretation (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 1-8, 19-28, 72-84; and W.J. Leatherbarrow, Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamarzov in J.P. Stern, ed., Landmarks of World Literature [Series] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1-20. 5Ibid., pp. 138- 139. 6Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays . Edited by Kathryn B. Feuer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 1. See further, the Introduction, pp. 1-24. More recently, among the many studies of Solzhenitsyn's literary work and his philosophical theory as an author, we have the profound monograph by Vladislav Krasnov, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky: A Study of the Polyphonic Novel (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1980). For an overall appreciative and panoramic analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's moral philosophy and Christian worldview see Edward E. Ericson, Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (Chicago: Regenry Gateway, 1993) from which one can draw much insight. 7Ibid., p. 12.8Feuer, of course, notes some important differences between Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn. For example, while they both share the idea that Christianity is man's only hope and that beauty (truth in art) will redeem the world, Solzhenitsyn probably

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would not share the Slavophilic belief which some have attributed to Dostoyevsky, that Russia has a special messianic election by God. 9Ibid., p. 1, and pp. 25-33. In another place, Robert Louis Jackson persuasively argues that the story of "Matryona's Home" is a translation of a post-Gulag experience of Solzhenitsyn into a literary icon of Russian life in the contemporary world. See the article by Ragsdale listed in my thesis bibliography.10Ibid., p. 26. See his next two or three powerful paragraphs! 11Ibid., pp. 32-33. One can probably surmise at this point that I am not altogether happy with the traditional notions of "Mimesis" exemplifed in the work of Erich Auerbach (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans., W. Trask . Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1957) or in the essay by W.J.T. Mitchell, "Representation" in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd Edition; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 11-22. Though I begin there, as one must. I contend, with Solzhenitsyn and Ratushinskaya we either need to invent new terms and concepts, or else take at face-value the Biblical Greek notion of martyreia (John 21;24,25; Acts 1:8; 5:13-20; I Corinthians 15:1-10; II Peter 1:16-18; I John 1:1-4; Jude 1-4; Revelation 1:1-20; 21:1-3ff.; 22:8,9 ). 12Ibid. , p. 36. Cf. Luks' work , Solzhenitsyn (Neuwied and Berlin, 1970), p. 17. 13Ibid. , p. 41. He also observes that Solzhenitsyn endeavors to maintain as objective a stance as possible as an author and let the characters speak for themselves and the reader judge for himself, as Chekhov does in his dramatic work, p. 42.14Ibid., p. 45. We are inclined to think too that the 1965 production of Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago achieves a similar realism with profound philosophic import, as I have argued in one of my letters. 15Ibid., pp. 90-91. Cf. further pp. 91-95 where he lays out the detailed comparative and socio-political insights which Solzhenitsyn's Gulag provides for comparing Tsarist oppression of convicted traitors with the Soviet-Communist oppression of ideological enemies and their families, etc.16Ibid. , p. 93. 17Ibid., p. 95. Earlier, on p. 23 K. Feuer had asked this rhetorical question: " Can the obedient, lovable nature of the Russia Solzhenitsyn cherishes be reconciled with the love of freedom, with knowledge that survival is not worth any cost, the precepts through which he hopes Russia may recover her soul? Only history will tell; and some part of history will be shaped by what Solzhenitsyn has written, is writing now, and will write - the history not only of Russia but of us all. " Her words have virtually come true since 1989, and others like Kent Hill, Michael Schammel, and Eric Ericson, have been making a literary record of these real world facts. Now, we wish to turn to other witnesses for love and humanity, which we shall call Candles in the Gulag, Ratushinskaya and her circle. 18Besides the short poems contained in passing in Grey Is The Color of Hope , Irina Ratushinskaya's main body of pre-prison poetry and her prison compositions are found in her Pencil Letter, English translation by several translators (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). During her interment, she copied her poems in a near mircoscopic hand onto small strips of paper which were hidden and then smuggled out of the camp by trusted couriers. Cf. Grey Is The Color Of Hope , pp. 20-21. 19Ibid., p. 22. In chapter 9, we are introduced to Lieutenant Podust (contrasted with the zek "lawyer", Tanya Osipova), who is so totally overbearing and cruel that Irina can only disgustingly call her the "blonde fiend" and "Ilse Koch" because of her inhuman demands and inspection raids on the zek's lockers.

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20Ibid., pp.52- 53. In the remainer of this chapter (8), Irina discusses the eight Orthodox babushki who passed through the Small Zone, especially Granny Many and Granny Shura, their awe at creation, their meekness, yet sternness of principle, their forgiveness, and their holiness. But of the most practical impact in her situation were the special underwear and flannel footclothes which the babushki made of rags and which were now helping to preserve the health and life of the other female zeks even in Ratushinskaya's tour in the Zone (pp. 54-56).21Ibid., p. 55. She adds, " And our Zone existed even then, and the "bustiers" wrought by the babushki lay in their box, awaiting the next spell of SHIZO. " The benefits to cold and freezing prisoners in the camps at later time is immeasurable, as Ratushinskaya observes. Eventually, however, the camp authorities burnt all the non-regulation underwear!22Ibid., p. 62. 23Here we are summarizing pp. 63-71, an important transistional chapter. Ratushinskaya also remarks about the fairness and honorable character on Petrovich on p. 69. She notes that he is " the only member of the Barshevo camp personnel who really works " and that he " was always philosophical about our strikes - politicals are politicals, what can you do?". 24Ibid., pp. 81-85. "Pani" is a title of courtesy, like "Madam". Pani is a secret "nun" since religous orders are forbidden in the U.S.S.R. Her sentence was the result of Kuri Andropov's sweep against dissidents. Chapters 12-13, 85-95. Ratushinskaya comments dryly: " Vladimirova had chosen her own punishment, so it was up to her to bear it. Our aim was to ignore her tantrums and try to carry on as though she were not there. " 25A summary of pp. 96-113. 26Cf. the opening quotation at the top of the paper. Summary of chapter 16. pp. 114-122. Irina comments, "Semantics aside , though, the fact remains that Galya, like the rest of us, will depend only on water and prayer to sustain her until Natasha and Tanya are back " (p. 122). 27Another stunning example of the bonds of faith and love of these women come in the description of how Tanya and Natasha, on another trip to SHIZO on the "cucko", the transport train share the news about Irina with her family who happen to be on the same train and whom they immediately recoginze, pp. 138ff. The scene of Tatyana Mikhailovna's parting from the camp on "transportation" is equally moving, and on pp. 143-144, we begin to see the explicit revelation of how Tatyana, Raya, and Pani Jadvyga witness to their Christian faith in the way they say goodbye to their beloved compatriot. 28Ibid. p. 149. In this same context she speaks of the beautiful native Lithuanian poetry of Pani Jadyga who spoke of the Lord coming unseen as a guest among the women in the evening and her own poetic pieces which were later included in her published collection, Pencil Letter (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989).29Ibid. , p. 157. Ratushinskaya spends three chapters, i.e., 26-28 describing the horrible cold and virutally unbearable suffering of SHIZO, pp. 196-218. In chapter 28 Irina and Natasha nearly die in their second or third extended punishment tour in the winter of 1984. However, by 1985 various reporting agencies had made the Small Zone's intense sufferings a matter of public knowledge to the West. 30Cf. Irina's extended account of her story on pp, 165-170. 31Ibid., p. 171. 32Ibid., pp. 217-218. See comments above in note 29. 33Ibid., p. 261.

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34Ibid., pp. 305-306.35 It is is interesting to compare Irina Ratushinskaya's account of how the Christian ladies in the "Small Zone" practiced their faith with courage and joy to the account of Father Vaclav Maly of KOR in Czechoslavkia in 1978-1989 ( KOR is an acronym in Czech for " The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted ", which formed in 1978 to protest the arrest of Christians and political dissidents like Vaclav Havel). Father Maly was repeatedly put in prision, beaten, tortured, and mentally abused. However, he testifies to the power of faith over political and military force: " His salvation came with the realization that they did not have any ultimate power over him. They might have the power of might and force, he thought. But they lack real power, the power of truth. They're living within the lie, as Solzhenitsyn called it. What they call power--money, might, political gain--held no power over him at all. Though he was powerless in their eyes, he really was powerful. He actually began to feel pity for them. They didn't know what they were missing. " For the entire account of this story see Bud Bultmann, Revolution By Candlelight (Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1991), pp. 75-90.

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