Finding God in the Gulag

In college, I borrowed a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s famous work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, from the BYU library, and read it.  This was remarkable on two counts.  First, this was not assigned reading for a class; it was of my own free will and choice.  Second, it was fascinating!  It was an engrossing story that pulled the reader in.  I could easily imagine myself right there alongside the title character freezing to death in a work brigade and dealing with the guards and fellow inmates in the barracks.  It brought to life the horrid conditions of Soviet labor camps, something that the world hasn’t entirely gotten away from yet.  It was something I found interesting enough to want to know more about.

Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System by Jeffrey S. Hardy (ISBN: 978-0-19-775167-1) is a book that gives readers a chance to know more about life in the Gulag.  Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s based-on-a-true-story novel, this book is an academic look at Christianity in the Soviet camps from the earliest days under Lenin to the dying days of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev with a little post-script about a few things in the post-Soviet times.  It catalogs both attempts by inmates to life and express their religions and attempts by the prison management to suppress religion.  It was interesting to note that efforts to extinguish religion in prisoners was not uniform in the Soviet Union.  It was more lax in some camps than in others.  There wasn’t always a central policy that camp managers could look to, so they did it their own way.  Sometimes that meant believers were beaten and spent time in solitary confinement.  Sometimes that meant a Christian guard did nothing when a prisoner prayed or sang a hymn or made an icon.  There was a short section on faith among thieves and other such common criminals, including a few paragraphs about the fascinating world of Russian prison tattoos.  The book also catalogs people losing their faith, which was unsurprising, and one that is not judged neither by the author nor by most prisoners who are cited in the book.  They tended to believe the camps were inhumane and that one should not be judged too harshly or even at all for what they did in the camps.  There was also a little proselyting that happened in the labor camps.  This was especially true of Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but Orthodox and Catholic priests also preached and even baptized people.  Toward the end of the Soviet regime, religion was sometimes encouraged because it generally had a good influence on prisoners and mediated their violent behavior.

The book was an interesting read and would be interesting to people interested in Russian or Soviet history or religion.  It only briefly discussed non-Christian religions, which are major players in Russia, but either weren’t the focus of the book or weren’t such a concern in the Gulag.  I did think the book was slightly disorganized and it felt like the narrative jumped around a lot, but I am not sure how I would’ve better organized it.  I thought the stories about people finding faith and maintaining faith despite great psychological and physical pressure were inspiring.  People sacrificed a lot to maintain their belief in God and to live it according to their conscience.  It’s worth looking to many of these people as examples of standing up for what’s right no matter the consequences.

   

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.