A City Went Mad

The first three years of my college life, my parents lived in Vaihingen, Germany, a well-to do university-town and suburb of Stuttgart. I went there for Christmas and Summer breaks. I spent my days going into Stuttgart and exploring. It is a wonderful city, particularly the city center, with its long pedestrian thoroughfare, easy access to all kinds of shops, museums, and cafes. Stuttgart was almost entirely destroyed by Allied bombing; much of it is new. I suspect it gets left off of most tourists’ itinerary—Munich and Berlin are the big cities you visit in Germany. But Stuttgart is a good stop.

One vacation while I was there, Mikhail Gorbachev was coming to the university to speak. We lived perhaps a kilometer away. The university subway station was where I caught the train to the city, and so as I walked there, crowds were pouring out and you could hear the buzz of tens of thousands of people somewhere in the distance, gathering to hear Gorbachev. I went down the stairs, onto the train that would take me to Koenigstrasse.

I was disgusted. That Gorbachev now has some kind of rehabilitated status is bad enough, but that he could in 1990 draw a crowd of educated people in Germany (of all nations!) was revolting. Many perhaps do not care who Gorbachev is. But for some who do, and perhaps have held him in esteem, let me caution you.

I have jokingly said I was a cold warrior as a kid, but it’s true. I had my own copy of the Army Field Manual Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. I had a bag boy job in 8th grade and sent money to a fund that said it bought bullets and supplies for the mujahedin in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet invasion.

I hated the Berlin Wall, and was ashamed to live in times where such a thing existed. I thought it would never come down.

I learned Russian for the purpose of fighting the enemy.

Most of my feelings came because of book on my father’s bookshelf, a big multivolume book. Each volume was huge. Where they were on the shelf, the back cover was visible from the side of the shelves. A bearded man with kind, intense eyes looked out from the cover. He was (is) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The books now sit on my shelf: Gulag Archipelago, a stunning piece of literature that chronicled in personal, legal, and historical terms the string of soviet prison camps (thus the Archipelago image). Millions died and tens of millions were brutalized in the camps. They even had Gulags for children. In some ways, people already knew what he wrote, but maybe it was better not to know. Maybe by not saying anything we wouldn’t aggravate the Soviets. Blah blah blah. When there are concentration camps, the world is always silent. Even today, the Chinese run an even more brutal system than the Soviets—the laogai camps. How we pretend that they are civilized or that we should even talk with their leaders as if they are men is beyond me.

One of my distant cousins was an expert on the Czar’s secret police and he worked with the team of people at the Hoover Institute who worked with Solzhenitsyn when he came to this country in exile, so I had some knowledge of Solzhenitsyn as a person, not just a famous, distant writer. I have read Gulag Archipelago perhaps 4 times. I do it to remember what happened. I do it because it is a great book by the greatest writer of the twentieth century. And it may be that after all is said and done, Solzhenitsyn passes his countrymen, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in honor as the greatest writer, period.

I went to Berlin after the Fall of Communism. (I had been there in 83 --I think it was 83-- when you could not go to the East.) Of course, there was a lot of Soviet memorabilia. I picked up a so-called Officer’s Watch. Who knows if it was authentic. But it had a red star. Some years later, I had a moment of shame and threw the watch away, because that red star stands for death; the red star and the hammer and sickle are every bit as revolting and evil as a swastika. No one thinks twice about a t-shirt with the hammer and sickle—no thought for the millions of Ukrainians killed under that banner. Or Poles. Or Russians. In a sick way, we learned to tolerate the Soviets. Imagine if we had gotten familiar enough with Nazis to think it was not as serious as it was? But wait! We did—it was called the 1930s! And we did it again in Rwanda. Doing it in Darfur. And in a strange fit of blindness that cannot see that anti-Semitism will not go away, that some people want another holocaust, the world coddles Hezbollah and Iran.

In Woody Allen’s great movie, Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow’s character says some memorable lines: “It has been ages since I sat in front of the television, aimlessly flipping channels. I came across a documentary on Auschwitz. More gruesome film footage, and more puzzled intellectuals proclaiming their mystification as to how it could have happened. The reason they will never answer that question is because it is the wrong question. The real question is, ‘Given what humans are, why doesn’t it happen more often?’”

I was not going to listen to Gorbachev. I was not going to allow myself to be polluted. See, his reputation is that he brought down the Soviet Union, that he tried to move it to some rapprochement with West, to avoid conflict. He gets to say that because that was the unintended result. Glasnost, perestroika, these were more propaganda tools to help the Soviet Union survive. His goal was to strengthen the weakening position of the Soviet Union, particularly in relation to the United States and our growing parity with their military power in the 1980s.

Gorbachev was a KGB man (like the current Russian President, Putin. And beware—lying and killing is their business). As such, he knew about and was involved in all kinds of repressive activities against anyone who wrote, said, or thought anything that the Communist Party did not like. While the Gulags were gone, torture, and numerous other kinds of repression were alive and well under comrade Gorbachev. His posturing as some kind of hero or statesman was typical of the ways such minds work; one of their own kind said, “The people will believe a big lie more readily than a small one,”
And again, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

In the past few years, some great books about or by Solzhenitsyn have come out (or been republished). In his Invisible Allies, he writes about the people who helped him get his work out. Most of it was banned in the Soviet Union. So people would get a copy and type out a few more and pass them around. In a book filled with personalities, one chapter is devoted to a group of people—“The Estonians.” Many of you know of my love for Estonia and Estonians. Over and over again in the literature of the Gulag, the Estonians come across as truly unique as a nation. They were well-respected by fellow prisoners for the suffering of their tiny nation, for their devotion to their language and culture, and for their resistance to the overwhelming force of first the Nazis then the Soviets.

I was filled with great excitement when I read that Solzhenitsyn not only spent time there, but that he and some others also worked cranking out the first typed copies of his greatest novel, First Circle, at a farmhouse near Voru, Estonia. Voru is where First Church’s last trip to Estonia went.

What it is about the Estonians, to survive the Nazi invasion, to be the first to pull out of the Soviet Union, to be the only group of Methodists who survived Soviet Rule?

I think it is part of God’s delicious irony that I got to go to Estonia on a mission trip. I went to the places I thought I might only go if there was a war. Russian was useful in making friends for Christ. I couldn’t have planned it any better! Where my thoughts were war, the Lord’s were peace, a peace that shattered the spear and bow.

If you want a good read, check our Solzhenitsyn: Soul in Exile, a study of his Orthodox faith. Most striking is how much the Western intelligentsia turned their backs on him when he openly professed his faith. It was one thing to attack Stalin and his legacy; quite another to stand up for Jesus!