On November 9, 2009, the world will observe the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which divided west Berlin from the rest of East Germany from 1961 to 1989.
What follows is a letter that I sent to all my friends in the spring of 1988, soon after returning from a trip to the Soviet Union and satellite countries, telling them about the great change that I saw firsthand in Russia, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania. -Nancy
Dear Friends,
Please excuse the “form letter” format. It would take me many, many hours and a case of writer’s cramp to write each of you separately about my recent trip to Russia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. It was very exciting, and I learned a lot that I would like to share with you.
As most of you know, I left the day after Christmas with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith, international peace group Jim and I have been members of for several years. The Fellowship is involved in many troubled areas of the world, training people in the techniques of active non-violence and facilitating projects that lead to person-to-person reconciliation.
My father joined me for this Journey of Reconciliation, which is a story unto itself, and we traveled with 26 others, from all regions of the country, some foreign countries, and all occupations. Some had been involved in the peace movement for 40-plus years; some had been to the Soviet Union many times before. But I think all of us were impressed by the evidence we saw of the famed glasnost and perestroika.
Glasnost means “bringing the hidden out into the open.” Perestroika is the “restructuring” of society. We visited an artificial intelligence expert and his wife and small son in their apartment in Leningrad, and I think he best summed up my impressions. He said the changes are very real. But changes are being made because Gorbachev’s goal is to revitalize socialism. At the moment, his objectives simply parallel the wishes of the average Eastern European. He is not a closet liberal. “Tomorrow, the objectives may change, and…” Sasha waved his hand, “no more glasnost.” I find Gorbachev’s efforts similar to Peter the Great’s strategy of building Leningrad on the Baltic in the early 1700s so Russia could reach out to the rest of the world. This time, the Soviet Union needs to reach out for hard currency and useful technologies and social models.
The internal changes are also practical. But they have a real impact on Sasha and Julia’s life. They are part of a loose network of Leningraders who are interested in “New Age” ideas. Their definition of that lumps together vegetarianism and polar swimming with books like “Megatrends” and “The Hundredth Monkey.” They look at the material as a creative challenge to their thinking. Many in the group have recently been able to buy books in their city never available before. Soviets can now see the film “Resurrection” or find “Dr. Zhivago,” both previously banned. The Voice of America is no longer jammed. Newspapers, notably The Moscow News and Pravda (which means “right way” or “truth”) are now printing stories unheard of in the past, like the embarrassing incident of the West German teenager landing his airplane on Red Square. Readers now can write letters to the editor different in opinion from articles. In the past, only letters of complaint about relatively minor aspects of life, like long food lines, were printed.
Most important to people like Sasha, members of dissident groups are not being harassed or arrested. A member of the Moscow Trust Group told us that no members had been arrested in 1987. New groups are springing up. One of the most interesting meetings we had was with an associate of Lech Walesa, the founder of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland. Solidarity is still officially banned in Poland, but the government does communicate, and negotiate, with Walesa’s relatively new group, Peace and Freedom.” After apologizing for his poor English, Jacek gave a speech that made me want to jump over shipyard walls, if there had been any in the hotel room. He said that nine members of his group had been arrested for declaring themselves conscientious objectors and refusing to serve in the Soviet army, the obligation of every Pole. Two years ago, he said, the minister of defense had outlined on national television the parameters of a program of alternative service for COs, and it sounds generous. Peace and Freedom wants to force the government to keep its promises, Jacek said. They believe alternative service and conscientious objection are human rights, and that recognition of human rights is the most important way to stop totalitarianism.
Another objective of Peace and Freedom is to see military service for all Poles reduced from three years. Jacek said he fears that after three years of military indoctrination, young Poles will be reduced to following any order, even one to fight against fellow Poles. This has happened three times since World War II. “A man who will follow any order is as dangerous as any rocket,” Jacek said solemnly. Some older Poles are opposed to CO status, because they are afraid too many young people will opt out of the army. They hope someday for “The POLISH army to drive out the Communist with a big stick,” said Jacek. “You know, metal on metal.” He brandished an imaginary sword, then clapped his hand to his head. “It is SOO med-YEH-val!” he cried. In reality, the most common reason for choosing CO status is nationalistic. Many Poles object to two sentences in the oath of service they sign that pledges allegiance to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet army.
Jacek expressed a common sentiment of most of the peace activists we met with when we said our goodbyes. Some of the group had peace buttons or banners they wanted to give him. He accepted them graciously, but chided us for too much symbolism and not enough substance in the peace movement in general. I think most of us had dozens of letters and calls to our congressional representatives in mind when we disagreed with him. I felt he underestimated the value of civil disobedience in a democracy. But we were both glad to establish ties with each other. My dad and I were in Amsterdam the day after meeting with Jacek. We picked up an International Herald Tribune, as it was impossible to obtain English-language papers “behind the Iron Curtain” as my father still phrases it. On the front page was a picture of Jacek standing between Lech Walesa and the West German minister of defense. A few days later, we read that the government had given in to Peace and Freedom’s demands and freed their nine members to alternative service, with a promise to offer the service to all COs. I felt I had personally witnessed a bit of history. I wondered if Poles were reading about it.
A Modern Day Saint: Father Jerzy Popielusko
We wanted to go to St. Stanislaus,’ Church in Warsaw, but our Intourist guide wasn’t sure it was safe. No promises, she said. We’d go close, but she would have to make a decision when we got there. She was worried about the possibility that we could be arrested if there were active protests, not to mention her own fate if she was caught bringing a group of Americans to such a place.
From a block away, we could see soldiers with automatic weapons were everywhere, but we couldn’t see any mobs of people or bobbing signs of a protest. She took a deep breath and went outside to go closer and find out what was going on.
A few moments later she came back, all smiles. The West German Defense Minister was on an official visit to Warsaw, and his governmental hosts had taken him to St. Stanislaus.’
St. Stanislaus’ Roman Catholic Church is like a defiant fortress in a drab residential section of the city. As we walked towards the church, we could see the Solidarity banners that were a continuous ribbon around the interior perimeter of the tall iron fence. St. Stanislaus’ was Fr. Jerzy Popielusko’s parish. He was a young, handsome priest, very popular with his parishioners. Behind the altar, and on large bulletin boards outside, were pictures of him holding a newly baptized baby, celebrating communion, preaching, one blown to poster size of him and his dog sitting in a canoe, fishing. Crowds of Poles circled the rosary of boulders and chains that surrounds his grave just beyond the door of the church. They threw flowers at the foot of the eternal flame, and studied the pictures.
Popielusko was an active supporter of Solidarity. He still supported it in 1984, long after the imposition of martial law and the banning of the movement in 1981, when his body was found in the River Vistula. His head had been thrown back, tied tightly to his feet. Three members of the Polish secret police were imprisoned for his death. They received stiff sentences.
Behind the altar were the offerings of folk artists from all over the world. Some had molded Fr. Popielusko’s bent body in kitchen clay and placed it on a cross. One drew his form, limp and dripping, in the arms of a scuba diver. The walls were ringed with memorial plaques from many countries. There was a great outcry worldwide after his death. His name is still a rallying cry everywhere. But for Poles, his death is still a fresh wound. They are still grieving. They are a family in mourning who look coolly at gawking Americans, who usually take their pictures, ask who he is, and leave.
One of the priests approached our group as we gathered outside in the churchyard for a short service of readings from his homilies, and Scripture. At first, I think he had been vaguely suspicious of who we were, and what we were doing. But after we explained ourselves, he asked if he might lead us in the Lord’s Prayer. Many Poles watched with curiosity and some disbelief as we prayed with the priest.
Then he gave us his blessing. Even after he left, and we kept reading in English, people pressed in. Most could not understand our explanations in English of who we were, or what we were about. Some people had red eyes from crying. I had seen some of them kneeling at the flame.
As we walked back to the bus, our Polish guide told us that one of the killers had recently been released, and that the other two had had their sentences greatly reduced.
The Churches
We didn’t attend a Roman Catholic service in Poland, but we did go to an early morning service at St. Raphael’s in Vilnius. Two in our group were American nuns, Sisters of Loretto. “Wow!” said Kathleen. “I knew it would be conservative, but that’s like Vatican II never happened!” Most of the liturgy was in Latin; the only time the priest faced the congregation was to read the homily in German. Several older people (they were the majority) had hand-written prayer books there were reading from. “They were all doing their own thing,” said P.J. “It reminded me a lot of my childhood.”
We arrived in Vilnius on “wedding day,” which is Saturday (you do it on Thursday the second or third time around). Bridal parties were milling around outside one of the cathedral chapels, some of them taking advantage of the tiny photography studio next door. After their turn, the wedding party would stream out of the church onto a waiting bus, ready to party all the way to the reception. The bride rides to the ceremony in the car of the matchmaker, who drives her over every bridge in town to symbolize the joining of two lives. Many families still use the traditional services of the matchmaker, our guide told us, and although couples can only tie the knot legally at the town hall, most couples still have a church wedding.
The Catholic Church in Lithuania is the most openly persecuted of any we visited in the Soviet Union. And as the story of the brides illustrated, that has not depressed interest in the church on iota. We visited with a sculptor and his family one evening at their farm house. Vladas and his family were sporadic churchgoers until about five years ago. Like many Lithuanians, they have rediscovered an important part of their culture. They showed us slides of Lithuania’s famous “hills of crosses,” acres of folk art, crosses of every description, made of every imaginable material, commemorating generations of baptism, marriages, and other significant events in the lives of families. Vladas also showed us slides of a sarcophagus he designed to hold the remains of a newly-canonized saint in a nearby village. He had pictures of the dedication ceremony.
The family’s parish priest was there also. He gratefully accepted several Lithuanian-language books we brought with us from the United States. No religious books are being printed in Lithuania. The hill of crosses near Vilnius was bulldozed by the government in 1962, and several nearby churches were bombed in the night. Several areas are without a church. But as church attendance has jumped dramatically, so has seminary attendance, up from 50 students five years ago to 137 today. And the government has promised that 12 new churches will open this year.
The father laughed at one of the books we presented him. “This one,” he said, pointing to the author’s name, “he thinks I am much too liberal.” The father is the chairman of the Lithuanian liturgical Commission, and favors reforms in the old liturgy. “But I am very pleased to be able to read his book.”
We were in Tallinn, Estonia, the first Sunday of January, the first Sunday that members of the newly merged Evangelical Lutheran Church in America were worshiping together in the United States. We were pleased to be able to worship at the Dome Cathedral, the largest church in Tallinn.
Estonia has deep historical ties with Scandinavia, and like those countries, Lutheranism was established as a state religion. And like Scandinavian countries, the Lutheran churches in Estonia are practically empty on most Sunday mornings. We worshiped with approximately 40 old women. There was not a single old man or young person there.
The assistant to the pastor, however, was a young man. After the service, he took us to the office to meet the pastor, who did not speak English, and on a tour of the church. The church, like every one in the Soviet Union, rents its building, its art, even its altar clothes and communion chalice, from the state. Rent money comes from parishioners’ donations, and in the case of this church, tourists who come to see it and hear its exceptional organ.
The church does not have building projects or a maintenance committee. Instead, the government is repainting the balcony. The church’s famous collection of wooden coats-of-arms of Estonian nobility sits facing the wall on its side in the back of the sanctuary. Peter said the workers had taken it down 15 days before and never returned with paint. He had no idea when they might be back.
He led us behind the altar and unlocked a door into a small room. Most of the stone floor was gone. A very old stone staircase was exposed in the middle of the room. We walked across planks to peer down into the dark. Peter said the church, begun in the 1200s, covered a crypt with about 500 burials. The government was excavating to learn more about mummification, which in Eastern Europe was perfected in Tallinn. Many church members, however, consider the dig to be harassment. The excavators were simply bringing up every body they found, carrying off a few for study, and leaving the rest. I noticed a wooden crate in the corner overflowing with discarded long bones, from arms and legs.
All over the Soviet Union, including Estonia, the denominations that are experiencing the greatest increases in membership are the Methodists and the Baptists. Several Pentecostal denominations are making their mark, as are the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Mormons. We visited the Baptist church in Moscow on a Wednesday evening. We asked a woman walking past us on the street for directions, and she turned on her heel and led us to the door. I thanked her, she shook my hand, and then, instead of turning to go out, she made her way through the worshipers crowding the hallway and went in to listen. She was either a believer, or a very curious Soviet.
An usher instantly recognized us as Americans, and brought us to the office of one of the administrators, who had met members of our delegation on a tour of the United States. He talked with us for a while, but the real reason for the visit to the office was to give the ushers time to chase four people sitting in the balcony out of their seats to make room for us. They stood though the rest of the three-and-a-half hour service, like many of their neighbors. There were easily 400 worshipers in the small church.
The service alternated between preaching and Scripture reading and music. There was no planned congregational participation. One of the elders would go to the pulpit and preach. Religious instruction outside the service or in the home is strictly forbidden, and enforced, so every church takes advantage of every teaching moment in the service. Many people followed along in their own Bibles during readings. Sometimes, during a lesson, voices would suddenly begin to rise, as people grew more ecstatic in their own prayers and responses. Most of the Protestant denominations’ services tend to resemble some kind of Pentecostal service rather than any Calvinist variety.
The choir presented about 20 different choral works, vocal solos and dramatic readings. They obviously practiced more than an hour on Sundays. The 50 members had to stand two-deep on the bleachers. Their director was young and energetic, as was the organist and many, many of the worshipers.
Two images from Russian Orthodoxy were familiar to me: onion domes and babushkas. Indeed, many of the Orthodox churches incorporated onion domes in their architecture. And every church has many old women, heads covered with scarves as tradition dictates, incessantly shuffling around the sanctuary, snuffing out or relighting the ubiquitous candles the church sells to justify believers’ donations.
Many of the worshipers at the Patriarch’s Cathedral in Moscow were old women. There would be old men, of course, except that there are very few men left in the Soviet Union over 60 years of age who survived the war.
But there were some young people there, bowing repeatedly under each icon, lighting candles, muttering prayers, taking communion, some under the watchful eye of a tutoring mother or aunt. The usual Orthodox service lasts about three hours, and there is very little structure. The choir and liturgist perform continually, but at the same time another priest may be serving communion, another may be reading from the Bible or preaching in another corner of the sanctuary. Worshipers typically move from icon to icon, each having a varied routine of prayer and candle lighting, some prostrating themselves on the floor before some icons. I think this individual form of worship, which is a deeply ingrained part of Russian culture, influences the style of Protestant worship I described more than the beliefs of Pentecostal movements.
We did not speak to anyone who was aware of individual believers who were being harassed. But we were very surprised when our official Russian Intourist guide accompanied us into the Orthodox church. Guides on previous journeys had always stayed on the bus, our leader told us. We were really surprised when Galya bought candles and took communion. “It’s no big deal,” she said, shrugging. “It’s not something I talk about with anyone.”
The Russian Orthodox Church has been at odds with the state since the revolution; the Church rooted for the tsar. But relations have become warmer lately, because the Church, unlike some Protestant denominations, is willing to accommodate itself to the government in order to exist. We visited Danilovsky Monastery, which was recently given back to the church, after being used as an orphanage by the tsars and the Marxists. “If someone would have told me ten years ago that Danilovsky would someday be given back to the church, I would have said they were completely mad,” a priest told our leader. But monks and nuns now live and work and the complex, and building materials for renovation and scaffolding are everywhere. The priest we talked to said the renovation was being bankrolled by believers donations; our Russian guide said the government was paying for all the work. But nonetheless, it has been, and is being, restored.
The father laughed when one of us asked him about the role of women at Danilovsky. He said the nuns mostly spend their days restoring tapestry and embroidering in gold. Women do attend the Church’s seminaries, but are not eligible for ordination. “The become choir directors or wives of the priests,” he said through a translator. Both grinned as we groaned.
We did not visit a synagogue. There are, depending on who you talk to, about 13 synagogues in the Soviet Union. Soviet Jewry is such a hot topic in the United States that we were eager to talk with Sasha and Julia about it. Both have Russian-Jewish backgrounds.
Both decided when they turned sixteen years of age to declare their nationality as Russian rather than Jewish on their passports. They are convinced they have gotten better jobs and housing because of their decisions. But when we pressed them with questions about the Jewish community and immigration, Sasha became irritated. “Look, why are you so interested in this question? You know, Jews, Germans and Armenians are the only ones who are even allowed to apply to immigrate. They are the only ones who have a chance to leave.”
He and Julia both gave up any chance of immigration when they chose their Russian heritage over the Jewish. They both say they are content with their lives and have no wish to immigrate. “This is our home,” Sasha said. But I found their remarks uncomfortably anti-Semitic, and we heard the same sentiments expressed by other Soviets.
The Great Patriotic War
The devastation of World War II is still painfully in evidence all over the Soviet Union. As we walked the streets of Tallinn with Peeter, he led us down some narrow allies where tourists rarely go. We opened some courtyard gates behind freshly-painted apartment buildings, and found absolute squalor, damage from the war still waiting for repair. Peeter told us that when the Soviets filmed a propaganda documentary about New York’s Harlem, they filmed it in a similar courtyard in Tallinn.
Unreparied damage and scaffolding was more in evidence in everyday life in Tallinn and Vilnius than in Moscow and Leningrad. Between escalating military expenditures and falling oil prices, the Soviet Union is strapped for cash to make repairs. Even national treasures are still undergoing renovation.
We visited one of Catherine the Great’s palaces in Pushkin, a small town outside of Leningrad. The Nazis used it as a headquarters. They chopped down every third tree on the grounds for fuel, and housed soldiers in the ornate rooms. When the Soviet army was approaching, the Nazis smashed every vase, ripped every painting, axed every piece of statuary – except one. While the Soviet soldiers surveyed the damage inside, one soldier found it curious that one small stature was left untouched. As he walked closer, he saw wires running underneath the base, wires attached to delayed action bombs. The Nazis had tried to ensure that the entire palace, and the Soviet soldiers within, would blow up a few hours after their departure. Restoration experts spent years sorting through the mounds of rubble, piecing back together china, regilding molding, reproducing what couldn’t be salvaged. People from the countryside brought pieces of gold or statuary they had taken from the palace to save it from the Nazis. Everywhere in the rococo style rooms, small, discolored portions of decorative molding testify to their efforts.
Most Americans who tour Leningrad pay a visit to Piskarevskye Cemetery, where one-half-million Leningraders who perished in the Nazi siege of Leningrad are buried. One million Leningraders died during the two-and-one-half years the Nazis surrounded the city. More than half, about 620,000, starved to death. At the entrance to the cemetery, there is a small museum that tells the story of the siege. In a case is a bite-size piece of bread, 45 grams, the daily ration of food for most Leningraders in 1942. There were pictures of Russians driving supply trucks across Lake Ladoga, trying to bring food to victims of the siege during the especially frigid winter of 1942.
One picture struck in particular. It was of a mother, walking up steps with a daughter on each arm, one about nine, the other about fourteen. Their bony knees and slim claves were exposed. The older daughter walked very erects, with a cane. She looked very dignified. Later, our city guide, Olga, told us that she had starved to death, but that the younger sister had survived, and lectures today to young people about what it was like to live through the siege.
Outside the museum is an eternal flame ringed with the flowers Leningraders bring in remembrance. One thousand feet straight ahead is a wall enclosing a statue symbolizing Mother Russia. To reach the wall, we walked past large, grassy mounds, one after the other. Each one is simply dated with the year, and covers approximately 6,000 bodies, many unidentified. Our group stood in a circle and had a simple prayer service, with reading, songs and poems.
It was so cold that my feet were numb in my wool socks and boots. My cheeks hurt. Many Russians gathered around, curious, surprised, for the most part, appreciative. Olga translated the poems inscribed on the wall, written by a woman who elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege to continue broadcasting on the radio. It ended with, “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.” Afterwards, we placed flowers and greenery and tufts of bread, and lit candles at the base of the statue, alongside offerings from Leningraders. Despite the cold, many were visiting the cemetery than day.
We said goodbye for good to Olga afterwards. Before she got of the tour bus near her office, she told us she appreciated our interest in Russian history and culture. Many members of her family died in the siege, and she had never seen a group of Americans standing in sub-zero weather at Piskarovskye, praying and reflecting, ready with memorials to her fallen family.
Too Much to Tell
We held a similar service at a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto in that city. It marks the site where the Jewish community was walled in and held prisoner by the Nazis, and then burned out and killed after an attempted uprising. The memorial is constructed of the materials Hitler had gathered to build a monument to his victory over Poland.
My father and I visited Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, and Karl Marx’s grave in London. We went to the Moscow Circus, and for a troika, or horse-drawn sleigh, ride through Gorky Park. We visited the famous Hermitage art museum in Leningrad, and the Kremlin and Red Square in Moscow. We had tea at a high school there, and befriended a preschool teacher in Tallinn who took me to her school and to the art institute where her sister studies, to see the avant-garde of Estonian art. Our group met a theater journalist, a group of university professors, and a couple of Americas who had emigrated to the Soviet Union to live.
In short, we did so much and saw so much and met so many fine people that it would me many, many more pages to tell you about it. I just detailed the events that struck me as having lasting value for you, or things that I didn’t know before I went, and that I supposed you didn’t know either.
Peace,
Nancy
