‘Finding God in the Gulag’ keeps alive the memory of those Christians who suffered under Soviet rule, even as it teaches us about ourselves.
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Living in Russia at the end of the 1990s, a handful of years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, was both an eye-opening and heady experience for a young Christian historian like me. The archives had opened in many places, yet archivists struggled to manage the flood of declassified documents along with the increasing number of nosy Western PhD students who wanted access to them.
As a Christian growing up in the latter part of the Cold War, I was intrigued by the idea that one could speak openly about religious faith and even worship publicly without fear of repercussion in the formerly closed society. Many of us had viewed the Soviet Union as intractable in its denial of economic and religious freedom to the millions of citizens living behind the Iron Curtain. Post-Soviet research has shown, however, that in many areas this denial was far from monolithic. In the 20th-century Soviet Union, as in every age and place, human agency and the human spirit survived and asserted themselves in some of the least likely places.
