He felt the miracle of God’s warm embrace in a frozen gulag
Perm 36 Gulag
By Mark Ellis
Alexander Ogorodnikov grew up in the former Soviet Union at a time when
the communist government wanted to rid society of all religious influences.
While his father was a loyal member of the Communist Party, his grandmother had
him secretly baptized.
“After the Revolution the Bolsheviks declared a war on Christianity,”
Alexander noted, in a talk he gave at Cambridge in 2012. “It all started when
Trotsky and Lunacharsky gave God the death sentence and decided that God should
be shot and executed.
“This was taken quite seriously and was not just a joke, they really
thought this should be done,” he added. “Their ultimate aim was to create a new
man, Homo Sovieticus – The Soviet Man.”
The persecution of believers was relentless. “A great many clergy,
priests, deacons, monks and nuns were killed by crucifixion, killing, shooting,
drowning an all sorts of terrible ways,” Alexander
recounted.
“One of the things the Bolsheviks would do at this time was to bury
people alive, priests, monks, nuns. Witnesses say that they could hear the
singing of hymns and prayers – so much so it looked as if the earth was alive,
it was moving and shifting simply from the amount of people buried
alive.”
There was a mindless fanaticism to their hatred of Christians. “These
were not just atheist, but anti-theist, God haters. This was their religion,
that is, ardent belief against God. They represented people who not only denied
the existence of God, but people who fanatically hated God and did everything
they could against him. This was their new religion – fervent hatred for
God.”
Although raised an atheist, as a college student at the University of the
Urals Alexander began to question the prevailing ideology of dialectical
materialism. The university expelled him for a “dissident way of thinking”
incompatible with the school.
Later he enrolled at the Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. In his
quest for truth, he became a Christian believer after he watched “The Gospel
According to Saint Matthew” by Passolini.
Alexander received his first communion at an Orthodox Church in Moscow
from a bishop visiting from London. After his religious faith was discovered, he
was once again dismissed from school.
Somehow, Alexander began to build a network with other young Christians
from the intelligentsia. He founded an underground group known as the “Christian
Seminar,” whose participants read the Bible and discussed theology and
faith.
Slowly, the authorities gathered evidence against the group. As the
leader of the seminar, Alexander was the first to be detained. Most of those
involved were arrested, put through show trials and deported to forced labor
camps known as gulags.
In 1976, at the age of 25, Alexander was sent to a psychiatric
institution — a hospital “for the criminally insane” — and he received
antipsychotic medication. The authorities viewed his Christian faith as a mental
disorder.
